You know you’re getting old when the stars of The Bill look young
T HEY say you know you’re getting old when you notice that the policemen are getting younger.
My ex- Evening Standard crime correspondent colleague John ‘Shakin’ Stevens — no relation to former Met Commissioner John ‘Captain Beaujolais’ Stevens, do keep up — confessed that he began to feel his age when the
Chief Constables started to look young. In my case, it was when half the coppers at a retired CID officers’ dinner I was addressing seemed to be younger than me. Another guest at that dinner was Graham Cole, who played PC Tony Stamp in the classic ITV police drama, The Bill.
Graham was one of six actors who reunited this week to publicise the imminent re-run of the show from the very beginning on UK Drama. The series ran for 2,400 episodes from 1984 until 2010.
That’s when I knew for certain I was getting old. I can remember attending the tenth anniversary party of The Bill at Madame Tussauds in London.
The other actors at this week’s photoshoot included Mark Wingett and Trudie Goodwin — who both appeared in the original pilot edition, Woodentop, shown in 1983 — and Eric Richard, who starred as desk sergeant Bob Cryer for 20 years.
They all looked pretty good on it, too. Graham Cole, 65, is greying and thinning on top (aren’t we all?), but retains his boyish charm. Mark Wingett, 56, has the advantage that he’s always looked 56, even when he first appeared as rookie PC Jim Carver, aged 23, in the pilot. Trudie Goodwin, also 65, who played WPC (later Sergeant) June Ackland, is fabulous as ever.
Incredibly, Eric Richard, who turned up in the new Dunkirk film this summer, is 77, though he could pass for 20 years younger. Maybe he’s rehearsing for his next role in The Picture Of Dorian Gray.
I was a huge fan of The Bill, especially in the early days.
CAST
members were regular guests on my various radio and TV shows back in the Nineties. Trudie once told me she had lost count of the number of times she’d had to say the line: ‘Why don’t I make us all a nice cup of tea?’
The late Jack Tinker, muchmissed theatre critic of this parish, considered The Bill, along with his beloved Coronation Street, one of the finest pieces of ensemble acting on television.
Not to underestimate the writing, but it was the actors who made the show, creating credible characters the audience cared about.
There were so many outstanding performances, it’s unfair to pick favourites. But I must mention the shambling DC Tosh Lines, played by the late Kevin Lloyd. Kev was the older brother of my friend and colleague Terry Lloyd, the fearless ITN reporter who was killed by so-called friendly fire in Iraq.
I’d followed Kev’s career for years. When I worked with Terry for a provincial news agency in the early Seventies, we shared a house and used to drive home at lunchtime to watch Kev play an usher in Crown Court.
The Bill pulled off the trick of combining the cosy reassurance of Dixon Of Dock Green with the harder edge of The Sweeney — especially detectives such as Billy Murray’s Don Beech and Christopher Ellison’s DCI Burnside.
No disrespect to the younger members of the cast who turned out this week — Lisa Maxwell, 53, and Chris Simmons, 42 (who was excellent in the Small Faces’ musical, All Or Nothing). But by the time they’d established themselves as stalwarts of the show, the best days of The Bill had passed. The series was never well-treated by the schedulers, shunted from one time-slot to another, bumped up from half-an-hour to an hour.
I lost track of The Bill in the early 2000s.
It’s probably no coincidence that I parted company with the programme around the time the scripts started trying to keep up with developments in the real world, incorporating fashionable social ‘isshoos’ in every episode — racism, gay sex in the locker room, etc, without which no modern drama can even dream of being commissioned.
It became less of: ‘ Put your trousers on, chummy, you’re nicked!’ and more: ‘ Put your trousers on, Constable, Bob Cryer’s coming down the corridor!’
This got me wondering what The Bill would be like today if it had to reflect modern policing practice.
Well, for a start, it’s debatable whether Sun Hill would still be open. Police stations have been closing relentlessly over the past 20-odd years.
The number of nicks open to the public has halved from an already low base since 2010.
In the past five years alone, the Met has sold off 24 of them for £1 billion. Sun Hill would be worth more as luxury flats.
The original opening credits featured two pairs of feet pounding the pavement. That’s how long ago it was. When did you last see two proper coppers on the beat?
I know the police don’t bother investigating burglaries, shoplifting or criminal damage any more — staples of the early Bill episodes. But these days they wouldn’t even be allowed to chase muggers on mopeds, on the orders of elf’n’safety.
PC Tony Stamp, if he hadn’t retired on a full pension at 48, would be based in a Starbucks coffee shop on the Jasmine Allen estate. His main job would be to turn a blind eye to drug- dealing and make sure he was filmed dancing with buxom members of the ‘community’ at the Sun Hill Carnival every August Bank Holiday.
They don’t even have WPCs any more (sexist) so June Ackland would have to be re-written, probably as a lesbian diversity officer.
If anyone submitted a script in which a female copper uttered the line: ‘Why don’t I make us all a nice cup of tea?’, they’d be drummed out of the Brownies and never work in television again.
EVEN
ten years ago, no one writing for The Bill could have invented a ‘ police transgender rights champion’ who thinks his/her (or should that be ‘their’?) job is to become embroiled in a row about what kind of signs Marks & Spencer is allowed to put on the doors of its in-store customer toilets.
Since when did that become a police priority? But that’s exactly what happened in Sussex a couple of days ago.
And can you imagine an episode of The Bill which featured PC Reg Hollis commandeering a police helicopter so he could film friends from a local swingers’ club having open air sex on Wimbledon Common? Precisely.
Yet this week, Sheffield Crown Court heard a ‘ swinging and sexobsessed’ member of South Yorkshire’s air support team used a police helicopter to make a video of a couple having sex on their patio — another story I don’t know whether to file under Mind How You Go or You Couldn’t Make It Up.
Still, when the re-runs of The Bill start next week, I’ll be watching, along with millions of others harking back to a gentler, saner Britain.
It’ll be fun to see the young June Ackland, Tony Stamp and Jim Carver on our screens again.
Even if it does make me feel terribly ancient.