A Thin Blue Line: British Cops, on the Large and Small Screen

Susan Sydney-Smith

Abstract

While many generic forms are employed as vehicles for the export of national identity, British police dramatizations are more deeply implicated in the project of showing the nation to the nation. The article first looks at how the symbiotic relationship between these aims and the large is negotiated through the figure of George Dixon which arises in the Ealing film, The Blue Lamp (1950), only tearaway (played by Dirk Bogarde). Miraculously resurrected five years later, he became the first ordinary policeman and eponymous hero of Dixon of Dock Green (1955-1976), the first British television police series to remain solid in the popular imagination. However, the transaction from film to television was not quite so straightforward as this summary account implies, involving more complex negotiations between the large and small screen. As a result, although cinema was an important instigator of the police genre, there is only a limited film cycle of British police films in existence. By contrast, television has been subjected to a plethora of output, representing every kind of policing practice, yet whose early ancestry can be seen in today’s popular series, The Bill (1984-2000).