The Bill, season one

I always think of The Bill as a quintessentially 1990s series, but it began here with a 1983 pilot followed up by a first full season of 11 episodes in 1984.

The pilot, called Woodentop, and the first few episodes focused on the character of probationary (rookie) PC Carver, played by Mark Wingett, as our POV character, but it soon opened up into a fully ensemble cast series. That said, if there is one breakout character from the first season it is surely Superstar DI Roy Galloway, as played by John Salthouse, though he was played by Robert Pugh in the pilot - a recasting which was by far the most distinctive change between pilot and series due to how much of a dominating presence Salthouse would be in the show's early years.

Galloway comes across a maverick detective who doesn't play by the rules, the sort who could easily have been the lead character if this was a stereotypical detective series. But that's not The Bill, so Galloway also has an additional layer whereby he has a competitive nature that pits his "superstars" in the detective branch against the uniformed "woodentops," yet is prepared to set this rivalry aside when it is the right thing to do.

This means Galloway's most interesting dynamic relating to the other police characters is with Sgt Bob Cryer (Eric Richard), where we quickly see the deep friendship and mutual respect underneath their jokes and jibes at each other. Sgt Cryer is, of course, an institution of The Bill even without Galloway (outlasting the DI in the show by many years) as one of its most familiar faces throughout its '90s heyday and all the way until 2001.

Other long-running regulars introduced in these earliest episodes include PC Reg Hollis (Jeff Stewart), WPC Ackland (Trudie Goodwin), DS Ted Roach (Tony Scannell) and even Chief Superintendent Brownlow (Peter Ellis), who began his trademark complaining about overtime as early as the end of this season.

Brownlow is not the only one to appear fully-formed, with Sgt Cryer and Reg Hollis fitting into their assigned roles in life from the start, while other characters are yet to settle into the positions they would occupy into and through the 1990s era - Ackland is not yet a Sgt, and Carver is yet to become a DC and form his iconic partnership with Tosh Lines.

Though we are still a good way from his becoming a regular, there's a memorable one-off appearance for a certain DS Burnside (Christopher Ellison), who fills an antagonistic role as a detective from a different jurisdiction from our regulars of Sun Hill. Burnside isn 't quite the character he would later become, but Ellison makes the most of his limited screen time to make an impression - presumably on the makers of the show as much as the viewers.

On the subject of guest actors, we see it is as early as this first season that The Bill began its long trend of featuring before-they-were-famous actors, here with Sean Bean in a minor role as a gang member involved in an armed robbery. He's not even the main gang member, with fewer lines and screen time than his partner.

The theme tune is an element that is not quite there yet. It's recognisably "The Bill" but not the arrangement we know and love from the later years - this version has a funky middle section, perhaps a consequence of needing a longer end credits sequence for a longer episode duration.

While the series would later find a home in the prime time, pre-watershed slot of 8pm, these early episodes went out post-watershed, and as a result were allowed to contain real swearing, plus some nudity and graphic violence, including that of a dead body seen in the pilot.

The tone of the show varies episode to episode, from the grim and gritty (such as the episode Clutching at Straws with a plot inclusing a "child molestor"/"nonce," as well as domestic abuse and suicide) to those bordering on outright comedic - my favourite of the season is Burning the Books, which contains elements of farce as Galloway pursues a truckload of illegal pornography, unaware that it is parked outside the Sun Hill police station virtually under his nose - a lot of the humour arises from the fact that viewers are made aware of this early on, so that we can appreciate the dramatic irony. As well as a tightly-written script, this episode also features Brian "Travis" Croucher as a used car dealer, and James "Herod Agrippa" Faulkner as a "bent brief" (corrupt solicitor), the first of many whom the real criminals of The Bill always manage to have on standby.

This episode, along with several others in the season, was directed by the show's first director, Peter Cregeen. He would later go on to become Head of Series at the BBC, where he would cancel Doctor Who in 1989, after its 26th season, thus succeeding where Jonathan Powell and Michael "is a cunt" Grade had failed before him. Ironically The Bill would also be cancelled after running for 26 years.