Martin Freeman on returning to The Responder: ‘This is who the police are: the good, the bad and the knackered’

His beat partner Rachel, played by Adelayo Adedayo, also finds herself dealing with the fall out of the first season when she was the victim of domestic abuse. This season here character is “totally isolated. She hasn’t got any help.” It’s a superb performance from Adedayo, who has previously appeared in ITV’s Timewasters and Some Girls on the BBC.

To prepare for the second season, Adelayo met the women who run Liverpool’s domestic abuse service. “I wanted to understand where someone would be,” she says. “I didn’t want to perpetuate any stereotypes or do anything dangerous because this is some people’s real lives.

“It was to really hear what it would be like if someone had done the main thing of physically walking away but then hasn’t got any help and hasn’t mentally left, and how PTSD can manifest in that situation.”

Coming back to the show, with such difficult themes, she said it’s important not to take the character home with you. “It’s not you, it’s not your reality, but there is something in your body that doesn’t understand it’s not real. So even though logically you know ‘I’m fine’ your body takes that on.”

Schumacher, the show’s creator, is a hugely affable Liverpudlian with close cropped hair and a beard similar to that of Freeman’s in the show. It’s hard to picture him as a responder now but he did the job for 13 years.

“I was looking for excitement, looking for adrenaline,” he says. “Somebody said to me, early on, ‘You get there when the blood is still wet.’ I loved that sense of charging into places where it was all going off.”

But he found out that too much adrenaline was not a good thing. “It damages you and that’s why I am the way I am. It pushed me to the edge and over it, I had a total nervous breakdown off the back of it. I wasn’t strong enough to do it for that long. Some people just handle it better.”

It was while he was having the breakdown that he decided to leave the force. “I always wanted to be a writer when I was a kid, but it took me 30 years of life to give me the tools to do it, and one of those tools was the breakdown. I’m a very different person to what I was then.”

The Responder was his first script – “I literally don’t have a clue what I’m doing. People think I’m being funny but I’m not” – and was filmed during the pandemic. “This time has been a totally different experience. It has felt so much more alive. It’s living and breathing.”

While the show is very dark, it’s also very funny. How did he find that tone? “It was just looking at life. I think life is darkly funny. When I was a cop, there was one thing you were guaranteed and that was you were going to have a laugh. It might be with a colleague, or a criminal or a bystander. You just knew it would happen. I don’t go looking for the humour in the show. Like, ‘Oh I need a punchline because it’s been a bit dark.’ The characters do it for you.”

Freeman says that Schumacher often talked about that humour on the job. “That gallows humour. They find a way to come back tomorrow otherwise you’d top yourself,” the actor says. “Some of it is awful, but there is a humour that means we’ve got to do this again and make it bearable.”

Though Schumacher also made clear the cost the job can have. Freeman agrees, “I’d find it pretty unbearable, yes.”

When I ask how playing the role has affected his view of the police, Freeman says, “It didn’t particularly change my opinion because I have the hope, for my own sanity, that most of them are decent people trying to do their best under very very difficult circumstances.

“Just to be realistic about it, take any group of people there will be this, that and the other. And to have people whose job it is go into situations that you and me don’t want to go into, guess what, sometimes it’s going to be messy. Sometimes the police comes under correct scrutiny because it should, and you’re held to a higher account because, sorry mate, you’ve got to be. But I have a great respect that some people want to do it. I’m glad they do.”

Adedayo says, “It made me think about how the fact it’s just not a job that anyone should take lightly. There’s so much thrown at you and you’re held to a much higher level of accountability and responsibility in the way you react to situations. Whether you overeact underreact. In just an hour you realise what a difficult job it is.”

While some police shows have been criticised for being ‘Copaganda’, overly glamourising the police, this is not one of them. “No it’s not like that,” says Freeman. “But it also isn’t anti-cop either, it’s just. ‘Well this is who they are. The good, the bad, the knackered. Mainly it’s the knackered.’”

The first series of the show was described as a state-of-the-nation piece in a review – that it showed something deeper about what was happening in British society. Schumacher says, “I was honoured but it wasn’t what I set out to do. I don’t want to be polemic so I just try and be truthful. I love those people. I am those people. In season one there’s a scene with Chris talking to Marco, that was me talking to me. That angry copper was me, and that scally in the back was me.”

He adds, “I never set out to write a cop show, it’s not a police show, it’s always been about people. Like the Sopranos isn’t a gangster show it’s about love and families and stuff.”

The Responder airs from Sunday night at 9pm on BBC One and on iPlayer