For years The Bill was plain, solid, meat and potatoes fare. Now it has gone upmarket, and is trying oh-so-hard to be oh-so-sophisticated. In place of meat and potatoes, which you could depend on week after week, we now have a disastrous foray into ponced-up frippery, with fancy, inedible decorations filling out the broad white plate where we should expect to find some actual food.

It's not working.

Now it seems nobody can hold a camera steady for longer than three seconds. And they can hardly film an interior shot without having to frame it with some out-of-focus object, an effect that SOMEBODY seems to think is essential to telling a compelling story of modern day policing.

And the music. God, how PRETENTIOUS is the music?

Much of the time the "music" doesn't even have the balls to be music. It's just some kind of low, orchestral sound effect, like a clumsy subliminal. And it grates on your nerves... And when it steps up a gear and actually comes out of the closet, the effect is intrusive and often just laughable.

Oh, dear... the whole show is trying much, much too hard to be cool.

The scripts, the direction, the music, and the ac-TORS are now all so self-serious and overly earnest that the whole show is so OBVIOUSLY straining for credibility. It is now a glaring instance of aping one's betters; that is, if one considers the current crop of American shake-and-bake crime shows worthy of the term.

I remember one or two particular episodes, some years ago now, when there was a very brief flirtation with the desperately shaky-cam style, and it was quickly discarded. This whole current forsaken experiment needs to be flushed away down the pan.

No self-respecting old school copper would be seen dead in this kind of drivel.

Would they, Frank?