The only change I agreed with was moving the time slot. The various footie matches being screened on a Wednesday evening meant that the poor Bill often got shunted around the schedule, so moving it to a time slot that was unlikely to be subject to change was a good idea in my opinion.
Like many folk I don't much like change so I watched the new Bill with an open mind, telling myself not to be determined to dislike it simply because things had changed. I told myself to give it a chance as sometimes change can be good. Like many other viewers I have watched The Bill for a long, long time. Must see telly every week for me. So I have watched several of the new episodes now and feel that I can now decide if the changes are good or not.
For me this has turned into a case of something that wasn't broken being "fixed". All the things I liked about it and that I thought made it brilliant have gone it seems to me:-
(1) A police drama that was distinctly British - one of the things I think Brit TV does brilliantly is characterisation and through that drama plots which are distinctly character led. This new format to me seems heavily plot driven and hence very Americanised for me. It no longer seems to matter if a particular cop would or would not behave in a given way or why they might break or bend the rules. Getting the job done is all that matters, so even when one cop is clearly unhappy with another cop being every bit as bad to a witness as the local drug dealer has already been, or whatever, it seems to go unchallenged;
(2) Calling it a police drama is now a complete misnomer. It is now a detective drama and nothing more. One of the things I really loved about The Bill was that we got to see all different kinds of police work that goes into protecting and helping the public as well as solving crime. Being about police work across the board this often opened the door for dramas around the introduction of new real life policies and how that affected policing e.g. the introduction of Community Support Officers, frequent glimpses to some of the more mundane work that has to be done (endless paperwork, trawling through CCTV etc.) and some of the community work, such as in schools. Those doors it seems to me will be shut if only solving crime and hence detective work is what we are given:
(3) I assume a good police station in real life relies on all of it's officers and staff, not just the detectives but if you watched The Bill you would think that only CID run things - we see the odd uniform with their one liners (two if they're lucky), and in great brevity now we see the wonderful Eddie and the fab Jack Meadows. To say that they have been sidelined would be an understatement! And where are the other uniformed officers? I am missing Tony Stamp in particular - he's almost invisible, but I would have thought him a key character!
(4) The warmth and humour that pervaded The Bill has gone completely. I think there has been an attempt to make a more gritty (possibly American style - sigh) drama and for me it just doesn't work. Mainly, because of what we have lost in the process - the wealth of characters and their individual depth, the warmth and camaraderie, the humour (essential I would have thought to survive some of the grim stuff they have to deal with). What we get now is plot, plot, plot driven by CID, useless music (I use the term music very loosely) and camera angles that just don't work. The other reason it doesn't work as a grittier, atmospheric, plot driven detective piece is because I already watch loads of that kind of drama elsewhere! Yes, I watch detective dramas, I watch legal dramas, I watch dramas which include police officers on a regular basis e.g. Heartbeat, but top of my list was The Bill, because it was a broad based, warm, funny, character led drama that wrote rich stroy lines for both its cops and its villains and whilst being fictional I felt gave us the closest representation of police work in Britain in all it's glory, gory, humour and tedium; and
(5) The single biggest crime of all I have saved until last - the signature tune. Not only did they get rid of one of the best and most recognised signature tunes ever they replaced it with something that isn't even a tune!
An indication of how my attitude has changed towards one of my most cherished TV dramas is the fact that I now rarely watch The Bill when it is transmitted. Now I record it and watch it whenever, so already it has stopped being must see telly for me. Pretty soon I suspect I will even stop recording it and just watch old episodes on the multichannels.
I rarely contribute to forums, but feel so strongly about this that I did decide to contribute to this one.