The Bill: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|''"Sierra One from Sierra Oscar"''...}}
Britain's longest running police drama (1983 pilot called "Woodentop", then a regular series which ran from 1984 until 2010), ''The Bill'' told the story of A-Relief, one of the regular shifts in the divisional police station of Sun Hill, located in the fictional borough of Canley, East London. The series followed both uniform and plain clothes officers -- though the storylines were usually skewed more towards the uniform branch -- as they investigated crimes around "the manor". These crimes could be anything from high-end drug deals and gun running, right down to petty shoplifting, or relatively minor domestic squabbles between
Originally a [[Police Procedural]] whose strict aim was to show the dull minutiae of policing, its modus operandi was not unlike that of ''[[Hill Street Blues]]''. The use of [[Leave the Camera Running|long single camera takes]], shooting the series on raw videotape rather than glossy film, and the ubiquitous use of [[Steadicam]] gave viewers a genuine insight into what it must be like to work inside a real police station. The series became widely seen as a [[Crime-Time Soap]] as the years went on, however, especially after Paul Marquess took over as Executive Producer in 2002. Marquess left the series in 2005, after which the show moved considerably back towards being a [[Police Procedural]].
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=== Frequent tropes seen in ''[[The Bill]]'' include: ===
* [[Absentee Actor]]: A side-effect of having [[Loads and Loads of Characters]]. Sometimes a character who you'd expect to be seeing all the time could go missing for dozens of episodes at a time before turning up again.
* {{spoiler|[[And the Adventure Continues...|And The Beat Continues:]] It ends this way, following Smithy and Callum as they leave the station, passing (amongst the rest of the cast either leaving for the day or staying late at Sun Hill) Jo Masters and Leon Taylor being called to some trouble and other officers bringing some arrested drunks into the station
* [[Armed Blag]]
* [[Artifact Title]]: 'The Old Bill' was a common slang term for the police, especially during the 1970s and 1980s. But its not heard so much anymore.
▲* {{spoiler|[[And the Adventure Continues...|And The Beat Continues:]] It ends this way, following Smithy and Callum as they leave the station, passing (amongst the rest of the cast either leaving for the day or staying late at Sun Hill) Jo Masters and Leon Taylor being called to some trouble and other officers bringing some arrested drunks into the station.}}
* [[Boot Camp Episode]]: several times, mostly involving one or two of the regular characters going back to Hendon academy for further training (an advanced driving course, a firearms refresher course, a crowd control course, etc etc).
* [[The Bridge]]: The various incarnations of Sun Hill's Computer Aided Dispatch/Integrated Borough Operations room serve the same function as this trope, complete with an equivalent to [[The Captain]] (the duty Sergeant), as well as various [[Bridge Bunnies]] (of either gender) using headsets to answer emergency calls and to direct the officers who are out and about on the beat to go to the scene of a crime. [[Bottle Episode|One episode from the early 1990s even took place entirely within the confides of the C.A.D. room]], with all the "action" taking place entirely off-screen (or only heard over the radio system). It was much better than it sounds.
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* [[Downer Ending]]: A particular trope that the series used to be fond of back when it started. The key thing was to show that the police ''don't'' always win, and more often than not an episode would end with two officers drowning their sorrows in the local pub, after a case they've been working on has gone belly-up. Later seasons still kept downer endings in play for certain storylines, but usually opted for slightly more uplifting [[Bittersweet Ending|bittersweet endings]] instead.
* [[Embarrassing Middle Name]]: Emma Winifred Keane, Reginald Percival Hollis
* [[Fair Cop]]: A good portion of the cast, but especially Louisa Lytton, who was about 18 and looked closer to 15. Somewhat ironically, one of things which was originally lauded about the series by the critics was that it didn't cast "good looking actors" as the cops.▼
* [[Fake Defector]]
* [[Faking the Dead]]
▲* [[Fair Cop]]: A good portion of the cast, but especially Louisa Lytton, who was about 18 and looked closer to 15. Somewhat ironically, one of things which was originally lauded about the series by the critics was that it didn't cast "good looking actors" as the cops.
* [[Flash Back]]: generally averted until the 2009 retool.
* [[Football Hooligans]]: Most recently in the episode "Great Power".
* [[Geographic Flexibility]]: It's not unknown for two scenes showing the area car racing through the streets to be filmed in two entirely different locations, miles from each other, but edited together in a way which clearly implies them as being right next to each other.▼
* [[Genre Shift]]
▲* [[Geographic Flexibility]]: It's not unknown for two scenes showing the area car racing through the streets to be filmed in two entirely different locations, miles from each other, but edited together in a way which clearly implies them as being right next to each other.
* [[Ghost Extras]]: A particularly conspicuous offender (see trope page).
* [[Girls Behind Bars]]: More than one occasion.
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* [[Scary Minority Suspect]]
* [[Serial Killer]]: And serial rapists.
* [[Spoiler]]▼
* [[Shown Their Work]]: A lot of the earlier episodes are particularly realistic about the day-to-day minutiae of police work. One episode in particular (featuring little-remembered DS Alistair Greig interrogating a local hard case) was so accurate about technique that it was used to teach police cadets how to question suspects effectively.
* [[Spin-Off]]: The short-lived ''Burnside'', and the slightly-longer-lived ''MIT: Murder Investigation Team''. Whether ''Beech Is Back'' counts as a spinoff or as a slightly differently packaged set of regular episodes is up for debate.
* [[Spiritual Successor]]: The series was very much a spiritual successor of ''[[The Sweeney]]'' (it shared common production personel with it in the early days). And of ''Z Cars'' and ''Dixon of Dock Green'', to a lesser extent.
▲* [[Spoiler]]
* [[Television Geography]]
** Play spot the Southwark street with this show. Or, if you know [[National Rail]], spot the out-of-place train. Or, a scene clearly filmed south of the Thames.
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