Hill Street Blues

For the first couple of days this week I was stuck on the sofa feeling sorry for myself with a bit of a temperatue and a heavy cold, trawling through the cable channels I came across Hill Street Blues and managed to watch a couple of episodes and it was really good, just wish I had known about this before. You will have to excuse the fact that I do not know any of the actors names except for Victoria Hamill who plays the public prosecutor and also she goes out with the head of police for the precinct by the name of Furrillo. Hill Street Blues is a gritty American cop programme where although there are cases to be solved it is more about the many characters who ...

Just how much violence and mayhem can 'Saint' - er, I mean 'Captain' - Frank Furillo take? For a start there's his ex-wife. Furillo is Hill Street's besieged precinct captain. He's a middle manager quietly and methodically dealing with a motley collection of rapes, burglaries and gang murders. Suddenly there's Faye, descending on his office each day like some screeching harpy. Frank! - the washing machine's broken down and my tights have run! - what am I going to do!!! Seriously, watching the re-runs of HSB on Grandad Plus reminded me of just how innovative and entertaining the prog was. You've got to hand it to ...

Hill Street Blues was, like St. Elsewhere, from the now-defunct MTM stable, MTM being Mary Tyler Moore who acted as figurehead for this production house. Again, like ST, it broke new ground by getting away from the rather aseptic view of life in hospitals/police precincts as envisaged in Dr. Kildare or (even) Starsky and Hutch (which was just a daft series about boy racers!). I was totally addicted to Hill Street from the start. It was one of the most densely populated series ever, I reckon, there were a dozen or more characters all given prominence. What is odd is that when C4 ran a series of repeats of the early episodes in the middle of the night last ...