UR TV CAST

“In terms of a mainstream police series, I don’t think there were any at the BBC.” In his view, the fields had lain fallow for too long and the time was right for a return to some of the traditional formats – “men jumping out of vans” in the industry shorthand. “There had been an awful lot of police shows at ITV, but there was nothing here really,” he says. Far from believing that there were too many police dramas, Nick Elliott, head of drama series at the BBC, was sure there were too few when he first arrived, charged with recapturing the mainstream audience for the corporation. Carlton’s The Thieftakers, a recent pilot for a new Flying Squad series, actually concluded with the words “You’re nicked”, a cheeky homage to the clich that had come to sum up the shortcomings of its famous predecessor There is a mood of considered nostalgia at the BBC as well.

Dixon of Dock Green, the very epitome of consolatory police drama, actually overlapped for a time with The Sweeney, a conjunction that now seems unthinkable.The signs are that the pendulum is swinging back again, to a simpler, far less agonised style. Z-Cars shocked its first viewers by the grittiness of its characterisation – its policemen drank, got things wrong, even beat their wives – but, for all its transforming realism, Z-Cars did not rule out a return to the reassuring innocence of Heartbeat, a Nineties show with a Sixties setting and mentality to match. It might be tempting to see the social history of post-war Britain reflected in the growing cynicism of police drama, in its rough progression from ingenuous admiration to suspicion and cynicism, but the chronology is never quite so obliging or one-directional. It is clearly true that we have come a long way from Fabian of Scotland Yard (first broadcast in 1954) to get to the sardonic ambiguities of Between the Lines but, in truth, it is a journey that has been made before. As the yield from one style of police drama begins to fall away, writers and directors move on to plough a different field.

A period dominated by thick- ear, wheel-squealing dramas such as The Sweeney (almost immediately imitated by the BBC’s Target) will be followed by a fashion for oddball detectives, for loners and outsiders. There are very few new ideas – just the dependable amnesia of the audience and the dependable satisfactions of the old genres.It is risky to draw large conclusions from these swirls of fashion. Because if you look closely at the history of crime fiction on television, it soon becomes clear that the best metaphor for the way new programmes are introduced to the schedules is crop rotation, a calculated husbandry of the audience’s capacity to get excited. And the Victorian policeman idea first made it to the screen in 1963, when ATV transmitted Sergeant Cork, starring John Barrie.It does not actually matter that they have been on before – indeed, it may even be an advantage. Call me.At which point the more experienced commissioning editor might point out that every one of these programmes has already been broadcast. The youthful John Thaw appeared in Redcap in 1965, though ABC’s budgets meant that Germany and Borneo had to be re-created in the studio. A year later Edward Judd turned up in Intrigue, an unsuccessful 12-part series about a detective working for industrial clients.