Group - The Bill

The Bill is a British television police procedural made by Talkback Thames, and named after a slang term for the police. It was first broadcast on 16 August 1983 as a pilot episode, and as a regular series from 16 October 1984. As of July 2009[update], The Bill is taped in HD and broadcast on the majority of the ITV network, as well as being shown on ITV HD and ITV3. Episodes from 2001 and 2008 are broadcast daily on Alibi and Watch respectively. The series originally started as a one-off drama for ITV, entitled Woodentop. The pilot show starred Mark Wingett as Police Constable Jim Carver and Trudie Goodwin as Woman Police Constable June Ackland, with the two character of June Ackland mentoring Jim Carver on his first day "on the beat" and attatched to Sun Hill police station. It was originally devised by Geoff McQueen, and impressed ITV to the point where they decided to make a series out of it. Starting as one post-watershed episode per week, featuring hour long separate storylines for the first three seasons and in 1988 it was increased to three half hour episodes per week. In 1998 it returned to hour-long episodes, now twice-weekly. The Bill became more serialised. When Paul Marquess took over as Executive Producer in 2002, it was revamped as a soap with many veteran characters written out. The show focused more on officers' private lives (often at the expense of their work) and became reliant on sensationalist and over-the-top storylines, with officers both killing and being killed with an alarming regularity. The years 2002 to 2005 saw the highest death toll of police officers in the show's history. When Johnathan Young took over as executive producer in 2005, the more sensational storylines were dropped and the show returned to stand-alone episodes with more focus on crime and policing. As a result, 2006 was the first year since 2001 that did not involve the death of a regular character in the series. The Bill is now filmed and broadcast in HD and has returned to its original post-watershed format of one hour-long episode per week, with its iconic theme tune replaced and the addition of incidental music to the show. On 5 July 2009, the News Of The World reported that The Bill was to be axed in Scotland. The reason given for this is that it is going to cost STV £30,000 an episode to screen - a price they think is too expensive. The final episode of The Bill shown on STV was "Conviction: Judgement Day" and it was aired on 23 July 2009 at 8pm.