My eyes lit up when I saw her – I’d dreamt of seeing her in the flesh since I first laid eyes on The Bridge ’s detective Saga Noren. Long, fashionably uncombed hair, ethereal beauty, flicking crumbs from her cinnamon bun off her ankle-grazing khaki military coat and leather trousers – this bewitching brunette was the ultimate Saganaut right down to her lace-up ankle boots.

Cast your minds back, if you will, to the year 2010, when the BBC was poised to launch a brand new detective on our screens. Dark and tousle-haired, his deductive powers would prove a constant source of amazement to his more grounded partner (and the viewing audience), while causing the local constabulary no small amount of irritation.

Sometimes, things coincide to throw a particular interesting light on an issue that needs raising. This week, for me, these things were the continued discussion in Europe (including the UK) about the sex attacks in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, an article on the hidden rise of violence against women and, the return of Tracey Ullman’s Show.

I expect many people complained this holiday season that there was very little to entice in the television schedules.

It was a quiet TV night and New Tricks (2003 – 2015) was coming to an end. In the Cold Case office, the three police detectives, brought out of retirement, and their younger boss were solving the case.

It’s 2015, and from Hollywood’s Black Mass (2015) to TV’s The Americans (FX, 2013-), Halt and Catch Fire (AMC, 2014-) and Show Me a Hero (HBO, 2015) – the 1980s as an era have become one of the hottest cultural sujets de jour.

In police drama, the protagonists’ surveillance and investigation of the fictional world, and their ability to enforce the law, depend on being able to move in and between places and spaces. A few years ago I wrote about ideas around seeing and knowing in relation to US police series, and working on the current AHRC-funded research project ‘Spaces of Television’ has got me thinking about space and movement in British police shows.