TV Nostalgia: Dixon of Dock Green (1955-76)

By Roz Laws

THINK of the archetypal bobby on the beat, and odds are you'll think of PC George Dixon.

Played by veteran actor Jack Warner, Dixon of Dock Green enjoyed a remarkable career and was still to be found behind the desk at the station long after he really should have retired.

In fact, his longevity was even more of a miracle than it appeared. He'd already been dead once.

Dixon first appeared in a 1950 Ealing Studios film, The Blue Lamp, in which he was shot and killed by criminal Tom Riley (played by Dirk Bogarde, no less). But it was decided to resurrect him for a TV series.

And what a series! Dixon started out as the bobby with a heart of gold, a wise widower raising an only daughter, Mary (played first by Billie Whitelaw and later by Jeanette Hutchinson).

After the death of his son in the war, the gentle copper took a paternal interest in young detective Andy Crawford (Peter Byrne), who would go on to marry 23-year-old Mary.

Initially subtitled "Some Stories of a London Policeman", each episode started with Dixon saluting the camera and saying: "Good evening all", changed to just "Evening all" in the 1970s.

Episodes finished with a few words from Dixon on the evils of crime, before wishing viewers "Goodnight, all". At the end of a series, he would tell the audience he was "going on holiday for a few weeks" so that they wouldn't worry about not seeing him around.

It was the most popular police procedural of its day but as the 1970s brought more realistic cop series from both sides of the Atlantic to the British public, Dixon of Dock Green seemed increasingly out of touch with the times.

Writer Ted Willis always maintained that all the stories were based on fact, and that Dixon was an accurate reflection of what goes on in an ordinary police station.

But 1956 episode The Rotten Apple was an exception. PC Tom Carr (Paul Eddington) was found to have been burgling houses while on his beat - and it was one of the few times that Dixon was seen to lose his temper.

He furiously declared that there was nothing worse than "a bent copper", forced Carr to take off the uniform jacket he was "not fit to wear", and then promptly arrested him.

He moved up through the ranks, of course, becoming desk sergeant. But by the final years of the series Warner was getting elderly and looking increasingly implausible even in a desk job.

The actor had increasing difficulty moving about, helped slightly by a treatment involving bee stings, and in the final series, when Warner was 80, Dixon was retired and re-employed as a civilian collator.

At its peak Dixon of Dock Green pulled in close on 14 million viewers and even when it had to go up against the gritter, more realistic Z-Cars, gentle George still attracted more than 11 million fans.

It was briefly revived in 2005 as a radio drama with David Calder as George Dixon, David Tennant as Andy Crawford, and Charlie Brooks as Mary Dixon, and did well enough to warrant a second series.

And here's a final fascinating fact. The Blue Lamp movie was produced by Michael Balcon, a former pupil of George Dixon School in Birmingham, and that's how Britain's most famous bobby got his name!