FOUR STARS

4/5

YOU do not get wild police chases or Die Hard-esque shootouts, but you do get a group of our local coppers tucking into their McFlurrys after a job well done.

The Nick takes viewers for an intimate behind the scenes look at Brighton’s biggest police station in John Street as the camera crew follow a cast of the city’s bobbies and detectives on their daily rounds.

We follow the police as they tackle drug dealers, hunt a rapist and even just check a wallet into the lost property store.

A big problem with most of these fly on the wall cop shows is they try far too hard to glamorise what it means to be a modern copper.

It is very hard to try and make British police cool - the Ford Focus Panda cars, their tall Victorian helmets, and ‘ello, ello, ello’ reputation do them no favours.

And you're never going to be able to make our police look as sleek and cool as Idris Elba’s hardnosed detective John Luther, so you probably shouldn't try.

So in an era of reality TV which seems to try and be anything but reality, what makes The Nick stand out is it truly does feel ‘real’ – a warts and all look at the cops walking the beat in our city.

The team behind the show do not try to embellish the life of Brighton’s police – it is as it is, the work is often slow, tedious and has to be meticulously planned out to a tee.

We get to see everything from start to finish – as officers use Google Maps to plan their raid on a property and then the constables have to sift through an unflushed toilet as they search for drugs.

They spend their evenings battling and bantering with drunks and revellers – including a man who insists he has ‘no idea’ why he has white powder up his nose.

Every one of the true to life ‘characters’ we get to meet along the way feels genuine and even lend themselves to a few laughs.

We get to see Chief Superintendent Nev Kemp simply saying “we are never going to solve all crime because it is difficult stuff” to Gemma Holley, one of the detective constables, who said before a raid “it does make you feel nervous because they are dangerous people”.

The cheerful Michelle Palmer Harris gleefully sorts through a pile of soft toys in a drug dealer's flat hoping for the big Hollywood moment of finding a slab of cocaine inside a teddy bear.

The message hammered home is the police are people too, not Judge Dredd style bringers of the law.

It is also a pleasure to see Brighton look its best on the screen as we get plenty of glorious shots of the seafront basking in the sun with mods putting along on their scooters with the director obviously going for the Quadrophenia vibe.

The episode’s big climax is not the police launching a daring swoop to snare their man, instead the dangerous rapist hands himself in so police will stop “harassing” his mother - that kind of sums it all up.