Martin Compston

Martin Compston plays Steve Arnott on Line of Duty, the AC-12 copper in Jed Mercurio’s gladiatorial interview rooms: bent coppers, Hastings catchphrases, institutional rot that keeps climbing. British procedural paranoia as national event, scaled all the way to finale mania. Compston is the short-fuse professionalism — dialogue-heavy thriller craft, the anti-corruption unit as sport, a man who treats a table as a weapon. Not a car chase. A question.

Martin Compston works Line of Duty as Steve Arnott on BBC from 2012–2021. The desk's first stop is s01e01. A Disastrous Affair opens Mercurio's gladiatorial AC-12 interviews: bent coppers, institutional rot, British procedural paranoia. That hour teaches the stance; later codes only prove it held. Compston on Line of Duty remains catalog craft on BBC from 2012–2021.

Steve Arnott is the reason a rewatch still finds Compston in the cut. Rank is a press kit. Rewatchers who arrive late can land on s06e07 and still catch the stance. The last hour is finale-mania television — Hastings catchphrases, national-event interviews, the rot still climbing. s02e01 is the later check. Season two restarts the interview room: dialogue as blood sport, the institution still the suspect. Compston holds.

Appointment television as an interrogation. Arnott photographs as the loyal blade and plays as the cost of the unit. On TV Flash Compston is 2010s catalog steel: the Steve who made a police serial feel like a verbal fight, then left the rot looking like it still had a copper willing to sit in the chair.