Dixon of Dock Green - Overview

Overview

Beginning in 1955 and finally ending in 1976, Dixon of Dock Green was a popular series although its hominess would later become a benchmark to measure the "realism" of police series such as Z-Cars and The Bill. The series was set in a police station in the East End of London and concerned uniformed police engaged with routine tasks and low-level crime. The ordinary, everyday nature of the people and the setting was emphasised in early episodes by the British music-hall song "Maybe It's Because I'm a Londoner" with its sentimental evocations of a cosy community, being used as the series theme song. It was composed by Hubert Gregg, but this was replaced with an instrumental theme composed by Jeff Darnell later released as a single under the name "An Ordinary Copper". Unlike later police series, Dixon focused less on crime and policing and more on the family-like nature of life in the station (and at home) with Dixon, a warm, paternal and frequently moralising presence, being the central focus where crime was little more than petty larceny. Dixon lived in a small mid-terraced house on a busy road. He liked a drink, as did his police friends.

However, as the 1960s and the early 1970s brought more realistic police series from both sides of the Atlantic to the British public, Dixon of Dock Green seemed increasingly unrealistic, a rosy view of the police that grew out of touch with the times. Yet the writer of the series always maintained to the end of the programme's time that stories were based on fact, and that Dixon was an accurate reflection of what goes on in an ordinary police station. One exception was the 1956 episode The Rotten Apple where PC Tom Carr (Paul Eddington) was found to have been burgling houses while on his beat. In one of the few times that Dixon is seen to lose his temper, he furiously declares there to be nothing worse than "a bent copper", and forces Carr to take off the uniform jacket he is "not fit to wear"; only once Carr has done this does Dixon arrest him.

The police station featured in the opening titles was the old Ealing police station, located at number 5 High Street, just north of Ealing Green.