Page 10 - Once a copper 10 03 2020

Influences

I joined the West Midlands Police on Monday 14 April 1980
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but my dream of a police career began years earlier.

Among my earliest memories from childhood were the
theme tunes to classic police dramas on tv. ‘Dixon of Dock
Green’ launched in 1955 had been established on our
screens for five years before I was born and ran until 1976.
The show starred Jack Warner as PC then Sergeant George
Dixon, a likeable old beat bobby who always got his man.

Along came Z-Cars, a British
television drama series centred
on the work of mobile uniformed police in the
fictional town of Newtown, based on Kirkby,
Lancashire. Produced by the BBC, it debuted in
January 1962 and ran until September 1978,
featuring two detectives Barlow and Watts solving virtually every crime that
hit their desk.

In later years, The Sweeney portrayed
the CID as gun-toting, drunken
lecherous thugs. The show originally
aired on ITV between 2 January 1975
and 28 December 1978 in the 9-10pm
weekday (usually Monday) slot with
repeated showings at the same time
until the early 1980s. The daddy of all
cop shows, The Sweeney had the
swagger, it had the bad attitude and
it had the killer kipper ties to make it
one of the biggest TV shows of the 1970s.

Dennis Waterman and John Thaw became TV legends as the Flying Squad’s
Jack Regan and George Carter, capturing bad guys and getting the girls,
they were cool heroes for a generation of young men.
Z Cars might have offered viewers a glimpse of a darker edge, but The
Sweeney was the first cop show to really delve into the real methods of
policing that had little regard for the “system” or political correctness.

‘The Bill’ was a police television series, on ITV from October 1984 until August
2010. Although its memory is slightly tarnished by a weak later series, where
plotlines got increasingly daft and any sense of realism was left far behind,
that shouldn’t disguise the fact for several years The Bill provided high quality Page10
crime fighting thrills.