Fabian Of The Yard (BBC, 1954-56)

The largely forgotten grandparent of all TV cop shows, Fabian Of The Yard showcased the work of Detective Inspector Robert Fabian. It was innovative in that the storylines were based on the work of a real-life police officer, and it aimed to give an insight into what the real day-to-day work of a London police detective was like.

The tone of it owed something to the hard-boiled interior monologue style of American detective fiction – the screenplays had more than a whiff of Raymond Chandler, albeit delivered in cut-glass period BBC accents – while its evocation of the big city and its landmarks meant that much of it looked like a tourism promotion film.

Played in the drama by Bruce Seton, the real Fabian would appear at the end of each episode to speak a piece to camera. This was a rather unwieldy format that was reworked much more successfully in a series that began in roughly the same period, but long outlived Fabian.

Dixon Of Dock Green (BBC, 1955-76)

Until the advent of The Bill (see below), Dixon Of Dock Green was by far the longest-running uniformed police series on television. It arose as a spin-off from a feature film, The Blue Lamp, released in the cinema in 1949. The title character, George Dixon (Jack Warner), was an ordinary police constable, rather than a high-ranking officer, and the crimes he investigates and the villains he apprehends are of the humdrum variety. Each episode was bookended with addresses to camera by Dixon. His cheery “Evening all!” with which the programme commenced quickly became a national catchphrase, while the final piece drew out the moral of the foregoing story for those who might have missed it.

Conceived, like the death of Grace Archer on the popular radio show - read more about The Archers here - as a spoiler to wean potential viewers away from the soon-to-be-launched new commercial channel, ITV, Dixon aimed to break new ground. It brought a level of intimate humanity to the time-worn battle of good and evil represented in crime fiction. The policeman was portrayed as more than just a solver of crimes and apprehender of miscreants; he was a kind of social worker, counsellor and friend of the victim of crime.

So powerful was the appeal of this homely version of London policing that the series survived well into the era of cynical, leather-jacketed police detectives, with their propensity for casual violence. Nobody much minded PC (later Sergeant) Dixon’s strikingly advanced age – Warner was in his eighties when the series was finally laid to rest – and perhaps its most telling resonance was that, when the actor who played him died in 1981, the fictional Dixon’s coffin was borne by real-life serving Met officers.

Z Cars (BBC, 1962-78)

Covering roughly the same period as Dixon, Z Cars represented the other view of policing. Set amid the undemolished pre-war housing and grim council estates of some unidentified northern town, it depicted a world of both casual and serious crime, of disillusioned coppers and their sometimes incompetent superiors, and a moral universe in which, quite often, to subvert the old adage, crime was seen to pay. This was revolutionary in TV terms, as was the script editors’ readiness to let certain cases fizzle out inconclusively, as in real life.

Where Dixon was the proverbial bobby who might give the odd street urchin a harmless clip round the ear for unwarranted cheek, thus steering him neatly away from a life of crime, the officers in Z Cars were urban rozzers, themselves often half-implicated in the kinds of lifestyles – domestic violence, compulsive gambling – against which they were supposed to be protecting society. It was the first police series to arouse the wrath of real-life senior police officers.

As it progressed through its second decade, the show succumbed to the editorial temptation common to many a police series, in that it started being rather more about the personal issues of the characters themselves than it was about the world of policing. This was a tendency that would be turned to productive use in later shows, but when Z Cars was finally pulled from the schedules, there was a feeling that it had become almost as soft-hearted in its approach as Dixon Of Dock Green, which it outlived by a mere two years.

Z Cars spawned three spin-off series: Softly Softly (BBC, 1966-70), Softly Softly Task Force (1970-76) and Barlow At Large (1971-73), all featuring the popular senior detectives Barlow (Stratford Johns) and Watt (Frank Windsor).

The Sweeney (ITV, 1975-78)

ITV’s first heavyweight police series rewrote the book. It took the grittier aspects of the early Z Cars, and garishly magnified them, featuring at its core a pair of officers, Jack Regan (John Thaw) and George Carter (Dennis Waterman), who didn’t think twice before letting their fists fly when confronted with society’s suspected evil-doers. The scripts crackled with street-smart slang and edgy wit, and the quality of the acting took hard-nosed realism to a whole new level.

Some of the inspiration for the moral orientation of the characters came from the genre of ultra-violent cop films that was emerging from Hollywood in the 1970s, transposed to the mean streets of west London. The setting might be some notional Acton, but in their heads, Regan and Carter might well have been making the streets of South Central Los Angeles safe for ordinary folk – the kind they cheerfully despised – to go about their law-abiding business unmolested.

Juliet Bravo (BBC, 1980-85)

As the 1980s dawned, a new focus came into police dramas. However innovative each individual series may have been, the central characters were always white males. The 1980s saw the arrival of black (Wolcott, ITV, 1981) and Chinese (The Chinese Detective, BBC, 1982-83) police officers. Women too suddenly found themselves thrust centre stage in the nation’s fictional cop-shops.

ITV’s The Gentle Touch (1980-84) introduced the nation to DI Maggie Forbes (Jill Gascoine), but it was Juliet Bravo that really caught viewers’ attention. With its shamelessly emotive plots, and its mingling of the domestic and the professional, Juliet Bravo revolved around a senior woman police inspector arriving to head up an all-male police station in a fictional northern town. Sexist attitudes and blinkered prejudice were the bread-and-butter of the scripts, as we saw first Inspector Jean d’Arblay (Stephanie Turner) and then Inspector Kate Longton (Anna Carteret) battling to overcome them.


Between The Lines (BBC, 1992-94)
In the 1990s, police drama sailed even closer to the wind. Between The Lines was set in the internal complaints division of a London police station, where allegations of corruption against the force were investigated. Its central character was DS Tony Clark (Neil Pearson). Although the mixture of plotlines may have sounded familiar enough (obstructive superiors and a troubled private life played strong parts), the series was genuinely innovative. It bravely reflected growing public concern over a number of high-profile police corruption cases that had made the real-life news.


The Cops (BBC, 1998-2001)
No show aroused more indignation among senior police spokespeople than The Cops, which, during its three-year run, antagonised the top brass for its portrayals of uniformed officers who engaged in personal vendettas, had abusive sex lives and might well come on shift having been up all night taking cocaine in nightclubs. There would be no Met pallbearers at a Cops funeral.

The action had swung northwest again, to the fictional community of Stanton, with filming techniques borrowed from cutting-edge reality TV. Hand-held cameras jerkily recorded the action in fly-on-the-wall documentary style, while the acting was of a uniformly high standard, often seeming to be the product of improvisation.


The Bill (ITV, 1984- )
Undoubtedly the most successful police series ever, The Bill began life during the height of the Margaret Thatcher era, and is still going strong, having now overtaken Dixon Of Dock Green as the longest-running TV police drama. It has already been commissioned to run until at least 2010.

Set in the imaginary Sun Hill district of east London, The Bill has lasted as a result of its ability to keep pace with the latest trends, both in policing and in programme-making. It has changed formats from hour-long, self-contained weekly episodes to twice-weekly, serial half-hours and hours on the soap model, and has featured many strong plots over the years. Among its more recent innovations are PCs Craig Gilmore and Gemma Osborne, respectively television’s first regular gay and lesbian police officers.

Starting as a pilot show called Woodentop in 1983, the show celebrated its 20th anniversary with a live episode in October 2003. In spring 2006, a dramatic storyline saw six of the principal characters killed off, and ushered in a new era of this flagship series. Not the least aspect of its enduring appeal is the varied nature of the storylines, which mix the activities of uniformed patrol officers with the plain-clothes work of the CID.