Good evening all.

Talking Pictures TV have recently started a re-run of the surviving episodes of Dixon of Dock Green. Sadly, even at the rate of one a week that won’t take them that long (432 episodes were broadcast during 1955 and 1976, only 32 still exist).

Given that so much is missing, it’s hard to get a feel for how the series developed during the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s. Five consecutive episodes from the second series which aired in 1956 (Postman’s Knock, The Rotten Apple, The Roaring Boy, Pound of Flesh, Father In Law) are the earliest survivors and then we jump to 1960 (The Hot Seat) with another five B&W episodes remaining between 1963 and 1967 before arriving at the first colour episode still in the archives (Wasteland).

Although more colour episodes than black and white ones do survive, the picture is grim for the early 1970’s. Only three episodes from series 17-19 (1970 – 1972) are still around, and it’s clearly no coincidence that they were all-film productions (money could be saved by wiping and reusing videotapes, but that couldn’t happen with film – hence the reason why they fell through the wiping net).

Indeed, it’s not until the final two series (21 and 22, 1975 – 76) that things begin to pick up. A good chunk of series 21 still exists, and all of series 22 has been retained.

So what are the earliest (1956) episodes like? The telerecordings are a little crude (but then you need to remember that this was still a developing art – only three years earlier the process was deemed to be so unsatisfactory that the final four episodes of The Quatermass Experiment weren’t telerecorded at all).

If you can overlook the slightly murky picture quality, there’s still plenty of interest – for example a young Paul Eddington guesting in The Rotten Apple (11th August 1956) with an equally young Kenneth Cope appearing in the next episode –  The Roaring Boy (18th August 1956). Eddington is that rarest of things in the Dixon universe (a rotten copper) while Cope plays a gun-toting tearaway who holds George hostage. Cope has more than a hint of Dirk Bogarde about him, so it’s hard not to be reminded about how things went for PC Dixon in The Blue Lamp. Luckily for Dixon this time, he’s an indispensable part of the television series, so was able to walk away unscathed.

TPTV have said that all surviving episodes will air. I’ll keep an eye out to see if Molenzicht is one of them (it was left off the DVD release for unspecified rights reasons). I only have a rather washed-out colour copy in my collection, so it would be nice to see a better quality version (although if truth be told, it’s a bit of a dull tale that not even Maurice Roëves can lift).

Elsewhere on this blog are reviews of all the other colour episodes, written when the DVDs came out. My feelings at the time (which I’m happy to still stand by) is that they show the series was far stronger than its low reputation would have you believe.

The arrival of The Sweeney was seen by many as the final nail in Dixon’s coffin. And yet the tv schedules were surely big enough for the both of them. Not least because they were serving very different audiences – Dixon was an early evening programme, The Sweeney was firmly post-watershed.

And it’s always struck me as rather ironic that Ian Kennedy Martin (creator of The Sweeney) would later devise Juliet Bravo (a series that, like Dixon of Dock Green, eschewed car chases and shooters – instead concentrating on low key, character-driven drama). Juliet Bravo ran for six series, which suggests that the audience for the type of policing George Dixon served up for over twenty years was still there well into the 1980’s.