From Dixon to Morse - a history of coppers on the box

There had been police shows from America – Jack Webb in Dragnet defined the 1950s with staccato catchphrases like, “We just want the facts, ma’am” – before Britain invented an enduring one of its own.

Dixon of Dock Green was a Saturday night staple on the BBC from 1955 – five years after its hero had been shot dead in the feature film, The Blue Lamp. Both were the work of the prolific writer Lord Ted Willis, and the resurrected Sgt George Dixon’s familiar “Evening all” was one of the most evocative and reassuring voices of his day.

But time was running out for his brand of clipping offenders around the ear and sending them home with a stiff word, and at the beginning of the next decade, Z-Cars embraced the era of policing by radio controlled panda vehicles. It ran for 16 years and spawned as sequels Softly Softly and Task Force.

Meanwhile, ITV – after years of the toothbrush-moustached Superintendent Lockhart of Scotland Yard – reinvented the genre once again with The Sweeney, which for the first time made it sometimes hard to tell the good guys from the bad. Its creator, Ian Kennedy Martin, was the brother of the writer who had invented Z-Cars a decade earlier.

The 1980s brought Juliet Bravo, The Gentle Touch, The Bill and the more cerebral Inspector Morse, but nostalgia for the era of the bobby on the beat had never gone away, and the biggest hit of the 1990s was Heartbeat, set in the rural Yorkshire of 30 years before.

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