Samuel's Blog

The Sunday Share: The Bill on YouTube legitimately

February 23rd, 2025 at 07:38pm

As many of you would know, I am a fan of The Bill, although I suppose seeing as it has been fifteen years since it finished production in 2010, some people reading this might not know what I’m talking about so a brief explanation is in order.

The Bill was a long-running British police procedural drama which started out as a one-off program called Woodentop in 1983, and became an ongoing series in 1984 which then aired continuously until 2010. Originally airing as an hour-long program post-watershed (the time in the evening on British television where more adult-themed programs are permitted) it switched to being a half-hour program pre-watershed which is a format it held for most of the 1990s, often airing three times per week and producing in excess of 150 episodes per year. Later on it went back to being a one hour program but remained pre-watershed. At the height of production, over 100 hour-long episodes were being produced each year. Towards the end of its run the number of episodes was reduced significantly as was the size of the regular cast and the show moved back to a post-watershed timeslot in an effort to reinvigorate the ratings with grittier storylines, but the audience reaction to the changes was poor and the show was eventually ended.

2,425 episodes were produced in total and the show went through many changes over the years, both in line with changes to policing methods in Britain, and production style. Originally very little was ever seen of the private lives of the officers, but these became more frequent over the years. Poor ratings in the early 2000s led to ITV bringing in a new executive producer Paul Marquess to dramatically overhaul the show, making the lives of the officers a more central focus, introducing much more sensationalised storylines, bringing in a larger supporting cast of people related to police work in some way and recurring criminals, and serialising the format which meant that often many storylines were ongoing for many episodes, rather than the old format where most storylines were wrapped up within a single episode. Ratings surged and a whole new audience came in, although reaction to the changes among the existing audience could be described as mixed at best. After Paul Marquess left, new executive producer Jonathan Young slowly returned the format to something resembling the period immediately before Marquess, and the results of slowly declining audience were predictable. Young’s final change to make a gritter version of The Bill, while probably an improvement on the product he had been producing, felt too much like a spin-off show and lost a lot of audience early on. While that version improved as it went on, the audience didn’t recover.

I happen to be quite a fan of the Paul Marquess era. Among fans of The Bill this is probably not the most favoured era, and I admit at times the show did become quite silly in just how many police officers turned into psychotic serial killers, but if I put those excesses to one side, there was a certain realism to the fact that crimes were often not solved in a single day and seemingly innocuous minor events from one episode could turn out to be key information in a case a few episodes down the line. Having recurring characters from other parts of the police force and among the criminal fraternity also lent credibility to the events as, in reality, police often use resources outside their station and deal with a lot of the same criminals over and over and over. I’m a fan of the intricate writing and the effort which went into tying storylines together and slowly weaving a storyline through months worth of episodes. The attention to detail in this was remarkable and it’s something I appreciate greatly.

The first half of the 90s in the half hour format is also a time I am a particular fan of. From Burnside and the move to the new station set through the wholesale changes to the senior ranks and station budgets of the Metropolitan Police being reflected on screen, and the way The Bill seemed to really capture the tough economic times which Britain went through. You can almost feel a nation in recession when you watch The Bill from that time.

The Bill has a strange history with YouTube. While the show was still on the air prior to 2010, people were uploading their VHS recordings of The Bill from around the turn of the century and just beyond. The picture quality was awful, but watchable. These videos would eventually get taken down and then reuploaded by someone else. This game of whack-a-mole continued intermittently until eventually the rights holders decided to start releasing The Bill on DVD and swiftly had pretty much all of The Bill removed from YouTube.

Some years later episodes started to appear on YouTube again. Some were VHS recordings, and some were copies off the DVDs. These would often disappear fairly quickly. They all disappeared when a new round of DVD releases of The Bill occurred.

In the last few years a website turned up which had copies of just about every episode ever released on DVD. These copies had interlacing issues but were otherwise decent. Around the time this website disappeared, pretty much every episode of The Bill was uploaded on a couple YouTube channels, again being copies off the DVDs. Recently these started to disappear, not entirely but many of them which made following a storyline through a season quite difficult as random important episodes just wouldn’t be there. The reason for this most recent disappearance has recently become clear.

An official channel for The Bill has turned up, with a couple episodes being uploaded each day starting from the beginning. They’re currently part way through season six and could be there a for a few years uploading episodes if they keep going at this rate.

I have most of the seasons of The Bill on DVD (just a few gaps to fill) but it’s still nice to have them on YouTube. My only gripe with these episodes on YouTube is that they have cut off almost all of the iconic opening titles, and also cut off the end credits. I do wonder how they’re going to handle this in later years when the opening titles were not at the start of the show but after the first scene.

At the time of writing this, the latest episode to be uploaded is Season 6 episode 30 “Big Fish, Little Fish”. By this stage plans to move to the new station set, which remained the station set until the end of the series, were well underway and were being explained on-screen by “renovations” of the old station set. It’s almost amusing that they expected anyone to think it was possible to renovate the old station to make it look anything like the new station. Part of this transition was the first and often-forgetten station fire in episode 41, with the new station debuting in episode 44. People often think the fire in 2002, which Paul Marquess used to make drastic cast changes and brighten up the set, was the first, but it wasn’t. Two more fires followed after that with another explosion a few years later (again under Paul Marquess, for another renovation) and a small fire during a hostage situation in Jonathan Young’s reign.

So, here is the most recent episode to appear on The Bill’s official YouTube channel, Season 6 episode 30 “Big Fish, Little Fish” which just happens to be a great example of The Bill at this period in time, featuring D.I. Burnside running around doing Burnside things, and plenty of June, Tony, Tosh and Jim doing much of the legwork, while the management ranks put their two cents worth in at the edges.

Samuel

Entry Filed under: The Sunday Share

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