Arresting Development (Bill, The)

Name: stoffy

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Product:	Bill, The
Date:	03/12/03 (174 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: good characters, unintentional hilarity at actor selection

Disadvantages: ludicrous plotlines (although this is arguably an advantage!)

Steamy sex, devious conspiracies and professional misconduct. Still, enough about behind the scenes at ‘Call My Bluff’, this op’s all about ‘The Bill’, the bread and butter staple of the ITV diet that reached its 20th year a few weeks ago.

Subject of the original ‘soap or serial?’ conundrum, the ‘The Bill’ has surely had the biggest payroll of RADA’d up actors in the history of television, with scores of new characters introduced each week to take part in their own singular plots. As the years have evolved however, the emphasis has been much more on continuing themes rather than self-contained episodes, with the intertwined threads of the character’s lives making it difficult for anyone other than a hardcore fan to know exactly what is going on.

Set in a police station in a fictional London borough, its bi-weekly hour-long episodes are jam-packed with criminal misdemenours. And that’s just the constables…

The regular cast culls mean that the ratio of deaths amongst major characters are higher than ‘Brookside’ and ‘Emmerdale’ put together. The big fire at the police station a few years ago (caused by one of the officers, naturally) resulted in the death of many characters who had been deemed not interesting enough to continue in the show.

The strength of ‘The Bill’ is its great range of characters and complex relationships. Scouser Des Taviner and the geeky Reg Hollis have become best friends by default (to an almost homoerotic level). June Ackland, one of the original characters, has also managed to fit in a spot of carnal knowledge with most of the force at some point, and is also rumoured to be in an unintentional incest storyline over Christmas with Todd Carty (the actor who played Mark Fowler in ‘Eastenders’). And all before the 9pm watershed…

It’s inevitable that most of t
he officers will be arrested within about 3 months of walking through the doors of Sun Hill. Polly Page, one of the longer serving characters who had been on a break after a nervous breakdown, had barely enough time to put her uniform back on before she was incarcerated on a murder charge in euthanasia storyline.

Gina Gold, the hard-talking, no-nonsense officer is also an interesting creation, and is played by Roberta Taylor to perfection. Like so many others in the cast, she too is an ‘Enders veteran, and will be better known to many as the loathsome Irene.

However, arguably the best character in a smorgasbord of complicated individuals is the duplicitous Cathy Bradford (also a murderer, but not yet found out). With a backstabbing pedigree that would make the entire Tory backbench look like loyal Labradors, she seems to have ruined the lives of everybody she works with without managing to lose her job. There’s even a website dedicated to her (www.cathybradford.com – sparse, but very funny...).

As I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, ‘The Bill’ doesn’t really contain one iota of realism, although that’s hardly a unique characteristic in the soap world. As the months tick by, it gets more and more ludicrous with more sensational storylines. However, I think that often the tongue is firmly in the cheek of the actors, and the fact that so many “where have I seen him/her before?” people are on stage give it a hilarious parody edge to it.

Well known sit-commers Linda ‘Birds Of A Feather’ Robson, Jean ‘Bread’ Boht and Paul ‘Just Good Friends’ Nicholas have all popped up recently, although their respective guises of a murderer’s mother, a petty shoplifter and a male rape victim are somewhat hard to take seriously when you expect Dorian, Jimmy Boswell and Penny Warrender to appear making wisecracks at the front desk at any secon
d. Similarly, I continue to watch in vein to see Sheelagh Murphy (Bernie Nolan) break into a verse of ‘I’m In The Mood For Dancing’ when she’s arresting a drunkard.

However, despite its implausibility, the format and large cast of ‘The Bill’ allows it to be fast-paced and at times surprisingly gripping. The acting is of variable quality, although the core half-dozen or so characters are consistently good. I’m not sure whether it’ll make another 20 years, but it will certainly continue to be entertaining in the near future at any rate...

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