Broadcast from the 17th to 31st October 2000, this was a run of five consecutive episodes telling a single extended narrative that could have been the final end of The Bill, since it is a truly climactic storyline that brings to an end plotlines that had been literally years in the making, as well as containing the final apperances of serveral main characters.
DS Claire Stanton had been getting increasingly close to exposing the corruption of Don Beech, and now in desperation he turns to DS John Boulton, trying to get him to join Beech in corruption so that together they can cover up his involvement in taking bribes from and doing favours for a drug smuggler. After Boulton turns out to be a lot more incorruptible than Beech anticipated, they have a fight in which Boulton is accidentally killed - making him the first regular to depart over the course of this story.
The subsequent murder investigation starts to unravel Beech's years of double-dealing. Two parallel plotlines ensue - in the first Stanton hunts for Beech as he tries to get out of the country under a false identity, after double-crossing his drug-dealing mates to steal their money to help him live abroad (they were, of course, trying to double-cross him at the same time). This is exceptionally well plotted, as intricate as the best TV dramas, and is carried by actor Billy Murray's charisma that sees you rooting for Beech even as his list of despicable crimes mounts up.
The second is the internal investigation of the rest of the CID team, led by guest actor Paul Joe Mark McGann, to see if any of them were also corrupt. This ensures that the regulars are excluded from the other plot since they are all locked down in the Sun Hill station, and we get to see how each of them reacts (there is a notable exception in that Bob Cryer is absent from these episodes, and his presence is much missed when we see how the uniformed PCs and sergeants react to events). Nobody else is guilty, but the fact that Beech got away with it for so long means that they want to get rid of those who should have known better, so DS Daly and DI Chris Deakin get transferred.
Brownlow's nemesis Borough Commander Guy Mannion - a panto baddy who has wandered into The Bill by mistaik - finally has his chance and demands Brownlow's resignation for letting this happen under his nose - let's not forget that Brownlow has been the Chief Superintendent of Sun Hill, and therefore the boss of The Bill, since the very first season. This would therefore be the end of an era for this reason if no other.
But the story of The Bill is in many ways the story of PACE (i.e. the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984) which came in around the time of The Bill's first season, in the wake of the police corruption scandals that we know by proxy from all the violent policemannys of sketch shows and drama serials of the 1970s and '80s. With tighter recording of procedures, taped interviews, legal rights for suspects, etc. the police suddenly had to try a lot harder to catch and obtain convictions against criminals, thanks to the actions of their corrupt brethren before them.
Gradually some officers learned how to W-word around these restrictions and where and when they could cut corners, and over the course of The Bill through the '80s and '90s we saw this happen in basically real time. From old-school coppers such as Ted Roach who resented these new ways to the likes of young Jim Carver (not so young by 2000) who lived their whole careers with PACE as the status quo, and finally to the likes of Don Beech and Sgt Boyden who knew exactly how to manipulate the system to their advantage. The crucial difference between Beech and Boyden was that Boyden only bent the rules to make his job a bit easier and to keep the Act from proving too much of a hindrance to getting the right result - so-called 'noble cause corruption.'
Beech started off that way too, but then he found he was on a slippery slope. First he bent the rules to help out some mates. Then he bent them to get himself out of a fix or two. Then it was to make himself a bit of extra money. Then the criminals he helped out wanted him to help them again - and how could he say no? Then he was having to break the rules just to cover up his previous rule-breaking, and so on.
In the real world, by the late 1990s the police were once again having trouble with corruption (assuming that it ever really went away, which I somehow doubt, mew) and this led to the formation of an undercover 'Ghost Squad' which spied on the police from the inside. DS Claire Stanton is revealed (to viewers long before any of her colleagues) to be such a mole planted inside Sun Hill CID over a year before this story (Stanton had been a regular since September 1999), and who is ultimately responsible for outing Beech, but at the cost of dealing enormous collateral damage to the rest of the Sun Hill team - not merely the loss of seven regular characters (including Stanton herself) in the space of five episodes, but also the loss of trust between CID oficers, between the uniformed and CID teams, between the frontline officers and senior management, between Sun Hill and other stations, and - it is implied - further loss of trust from the public... though that can't have been high to begin with given the number of scandals in Sun Hill since Richard Handford took over as producer at the start of 1998.
That brings me to the biggest weakness of this story, which is that in an earlier era of The Bill it would have been nothing short of astonishing. The seeds for Beech's gradual corruption and eventual downfall were planted over two years before (the turning point being his taking bribes from a gangster played by Leslie "Dirty Den" Grantham, in episodes broadcast in March '98), and this amount of setup and payoff should have been outstanding.
But by the year 2000 it was barely visible above the noise (to mix my metaphors) because in the Handford era, every other new regular was dodgy or bent in some way - such as PC Eddie Santini, who started off gaslighting and bullying his female colleagues before escalating to murdering a woman - and every other story saw regulars at each other's throats over their love lives (the Garfield/Quinnan/Nurse Jenny love triangle being one such unwelcome arc across much of 1999), being held hostage at gunpoint, knocked out and kidnapped, stabbed followed by a race against time for their colleagues to save their lives, or being framed for committing the crimes they were supposed to be investigating.
In such an environment of outrageous sensationalism, this storyline loses a lot of its power. It is sensational because it has earned it through careful setup over a long period of time, not just because it is yet another station fire or bomb exploding, killing off a few regulars to grab some headlines and the cover of a TV listings magazine. The unique position of The Bill as an ongoing police drama means it has the chance to examine the subsequent implications of the events and the meaningful consequences to the characters, but this is lessened by the production team's need to move on to a new story the next week. And the way that the real-world issue of police corruption and internal investigations, and the eternal dilemma of quis custodiet ipsos custodes, has been brilliantly conveyed in a stunning piece of TV drama is lost in a landscape where every week's storyline has to top the one before it... which inevitably results in only diminishing returns.
In conclusion - there was no way back for The Bill after this. If it had ended here it could have gone out on a high note. These five episodes are amazing, but they are surrounded by rubbish.
