Line of Duty will return… and unmask the real H, reveals Adrian Dunbar

When Line of Duty unmasked bumbling detective Ian Buckells in its final episode, viewers were dismayed.

The nine-year wait to reveal the identity of “H”, the criminal mastermind operating a network of police corruption, ended with the unlikeliest of characters.

However, the star of the show, Adrian Dunbar, has announced that Buckells (played by Nigel Boyle) was not H after all. The search continues, he said, and the real villain will be revealed in a new instalment planned for next year.

“He’s not H. We just got the guy we could actually pin a charge on. We didn’t get H, we got Buckells, the patsy,” said Dunbar, who played anti-corruption boss Ted Hastings.

He told Radio Times that Chief Constable Philip Osborne (Owen Teale) was “probably” the guilty man, “unless there’s another twist and someone’s pulling his strings”.

Dunbar said: “There’s been talk about a movie or a four-parter or two [episodes of] 90 minutes. We’d love to do it again. I’m really hoping something might happen next year,” he said, adding that the show’s writer, Jed Mercurio, had devised “a couple of templates as to how things could go”.

The Line of Duty finale drew a record audience for a drama of 12.8 million but left fans so disappointed that the BBC was forced to defend the show, saying it had “deliberately aimed to wrongfoot viewers’ expectations”

Mercurio appeared to confirm afterwards that Buckells was H, saying: “Going into season six, we made the decision that we were going to reveal H, and then it was a case of, how do we make that the most surprising reveal?”

He said in another interview: “By going for this crossover between incompetence and corruption, rather than a criminal mastermind, it was a down ending. But it couldn’t be a predictable solution.”

Dunbar will return to television this month in Ridley, an ITV drama series in which he plays a retired detective who returns to the force as a consultant.