206 Dixon of Dock Green

First  watched  :  1975

I  only  caught  the  tail  end  of  this  Saturday  night  stalwart  which  had  been  running  since  1955. Few  TV  programmes  have  entered  the  public  psyche  as  deeply  as  this  one. Nearly  40  years  after  the  show  ended   people  still  know  exactly  what  you  mean  by  the  phrase  "Dixon  of  Dock  Green  policing"  after  the  impossibly  decent , approachable  copper  first  played  by  Jack  Warner  in  a  1950  Dirk  Bogarde  film  The  Blue  Lamp.

Dixon  was  actually  shot  dead  by  Bogarde's  character  in  the  film  so  if  you  like , Dixon  of  Dock  Green   started  out  as  a  fantasy  of  his  imagined  survival.  Hard  nosed  critics  would  say  it  never  stopped  being  one.

By  the  time  I  came  to  see  the  programme  it  had  become  ridiculous  despite  a  move  to  harder-edged  storylines. There  was  no  getting  around  the  fact  that  Warner  was  now  eighty  years  old.  Dixon  had  been  promoted  to  desk  sergeant  in  recognition  of  the  actor's  decreased  mobility  but  he  still  had  problems  moving  around  the  set  and , confined  to  the  station, he  was  often  peripheral  to  the  storyline. In  the  final  series  of  eight  episodes  in  1976,  he  had  retired  and  been  re-employed as  a  civilian  collator  of  intelligence  but  everyone, including  the  TV audience,  knew  the  game  was  up.

Warner  died  in  1981.