The BBC television series Dixon Of Dock Green was adapted from an low-budget 1949 UK crime film called The Blue Lamp. The TV series was written by Ted Willis and ran from 1955 to 1976. Like the original film, it starred Jack Warner in the role of George Dixon.
As Susan Sydney-Smith writes on ScreenOnline: “Warner portrayed Dixon as the archetypal British bobby, tackling ordinary, everyday, rather than serious crime. He patrolled a world in which victims of petty theft and larceny were treated to a nice cup of tea and a ‘talk’; viewers were addressed at the beginning of each episode with his best remembered phrase, ‘Evenin’ all’, and wished farewell in homilies to camera concerning the episode just gone.”
“The fact that Warner was near retirement age in 1955 added to the sense that this series was about nostalgia rather than real life. For the next 21 years, despite the arrival of (more realistic police dramas such as) Z Cars in 1962, Dixon of Dock Green attracted audiences of over 14 million in its heyday. By the time Warner finally retired in 1976, he was over 80 years old… At his funeral in 1981 officers from paddington Green Police Station carried his coffin.”
The earliest episodes of the series apparently had a whistled version of “Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner” but it was quickly replaced by its own iconic tune composed by Jeff Darnell and performed by the Canadian harmonica star Tommy Reilly.
Given the show’s popularity at the time, this theme music was surprisingly hard to find online. There’s a God-awful ‘modernised’ version on YouTube dating from 1970s episodes of the programme. Worse still, Warner murdered the tune with a later cash-in single called “An Ordinary Copper” – which featured George Warner’s own toe-curling homespun lyrics.
But here’s a downloadable version of the original short TV version of the theme used in the show’s heyday:
Previous TV Themes Of The Week:
– Steptoe & Son
– Maigret
– That Was The Week That Was
– Z Cars
Police beat unarmed protesters in Cairo, January 2011
Police beat unarmed protesters in Los Angeles, November 2011
Late for work I cycled to the station yesterday instead of walking. Clean forgot about it on the way home, leaving bike & cycle helmet exposed overnight – secured by only a flimsy cable and combination lock. Hurried back early next morning with a mounting sense of foreboding.
Every month or two at the station you see expensive cycle frames that have been stripped or vandalised, still held against the green metal stands by some industrial strength D-Lock. Occasionally all that’s left from these episodes is the D-lock itself, rusting quietly around the foot of the stand, years afterwards.
Anyhow, my shabby old machine was still intact – nobody had even slashed or let down the tyres. But some Good Samaritan had left a Metropolitan Police cycle security leaflet – perhaps in a mild gesture of reproach.
West End Central police station in Savile Row. In the late 60s some of the guys who turned up at the Priory had been habitutués of The Dilly – either as rent boys – or as purveyors and consumers of hash, acid, methedrine and heroin. Or both. In any case any teenager regularly loitering around Picadilly Circus was pretty much certain to end up sooner or later at West End Central. My friends reserved a particular fear and loathing for the building and its officers. Once inside you were utterly at their mercy which – by their account – was in short supply.
Read a sobering piece today by Jake Wallis Simons on the slow recovery of iconic gay socialite Philip Sallon after a savage, unprovoked attack in Piccadilly Circus that could easily have cost him his life…
As Jake says, a general rise in intolerance means that any man perceived to be gay – and unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – may be at serious risk on the streets of central London. Back in the 70s queerbashing was a routine hazard of metropolitan gay life.
But as Jake says in his piece: “Although homophobic crime overall dropped by 3% in London last year, in the West End it increased by 20.9%. This is symbolised, perhaps, by the fatal homophobic attack on Ian Baynham in 2009.”
At least – compared to the 70s – the Met seems to be taking anti-gay hate crime a lot more seriously. They also seem to be committing a lot less of it themselves.
