Jed Mercurio teases new details about upcoming fifth series of Line of Duty

The hunt is on for Balaclava Man as Line of Duty edges closer to returning to our screens.

The BBC released a teasing trailer today for the gripping police corruption drama, starring Scot Martin Compston, with the series due to air later this year.

And in a recent interview, creator Jed Mercurio revealed that the brave officers of AC-12 will be taking on a new kind of threat.

We're doing this to the letter, fellas. #LineOfDuty is back v-e-r-y s-o-o-n. pic.twitter.com/FDO9L18by7

— BBC One (@BBCOne) February 19, 2019

Filming for the latest series, with a sixth already commissioned, finished at the end of last year.

While an official date is yet to be announced, the new episodes are expected to be on BBC One this spring.

Line Of Duty series 5 on BBC1, not long now. https://t.co/VNGDRbktlQ pic.twitter.com/vbd7SVS6mc

— martin compston (@martin_compston) February 19, 2019

In December, Compston said that he expected his character, DS Arnott, to be back in action in April.

“I think round about April probably,” he said on ITV’s Lorraine. “We just finish it and then we hand over to the BBC scheduling gods, but I think April has sort of been the time that they normally put it on.”

Not too many further details have been announced for the series, other than the addition of Stephen Graham playing Balaclava Man.

Stephen Graham joins the cast in series five

The end of season four saw the lead investigators of AC-12 realise that they’d only scratched the surface with the corrupt cops they’d investigated.

Suspicion even fell on Superintendent Ted Hastings, played by Adrian Dunbar. Could he be the mysterious ringleader known only as ‘H’?

Speaking to Pilot TV magazine, show creator Jed Mercurio said the fifth series would take a slightly different direction to its predecessors, focusing on an organised crime group rather than one corrupt officer.

He said: “We’ve had these shadowy figures, ‘the Balaclava Men’, who are part of an organised crime group and have featured on and off all through the previous four seasons. But we’ve never really gone behind the mask and identified them as proper characters and found out about them.

“That was something that we felt was overdue and so in this season, rather than the customary approach, which is we present a police officer who is involved in a case, and that for whatever reasons there are allegations of corruption which AC-12 investigate, we are looking at this organised crime group who clearly, it’s been established in the past, function to a certain extent through relationships with corrupt police officers.

“So, rather than looking at the corrupt police offers this time, we’re looking at the other side of the coin, which is the [organised crime group].”