The tone was probably set by Sergeant George Dixon (Jack Warner), who appeared in a BBC evergreen series "Dixon of Dock Green". It wasn't George Dixon's first outing - he was a character in the black and white classic movie "The Blue Lamp", in which he was shot dead by a very young Dirk Bogarde. Through the miracle of television, he was returned to life, and started each episode with a cheery 'Evenin' all', before embarking on a highly moral and uplifting tale for our edification. Since, by this time, George was already a senior citizen, there was little chance of him engaging in anything more strenuous than a trip to the kitchen to put the kettle on. (By the end of the series' enormously long run, Jack Warner was so old they had to prop him up behind a desk and pretend he was some kind of intelligence officer, collating information about crimes.) The show reflected most people's view of the police in the fifties. The series became marginally more action packed as, but more realistic shows, such as the BBC's own "Z-Cars", made it seem very tame.
Around the same time, there were a flood of police shows which generally featured a brilliant detective who spent most of his time making uniformed officers seem like dullards. For instance, Fabian of the Yard (Scotland Yard, that is, of course) featured Patrick Barr in the title role, in semi-fictional recreations f real life crimes that had been investigated by Scotland Yard. If you believed the series, Interpol spent most of their time waiting for him to solve their crimes for them.
"Z-Cars' claimed to based much more on the real lives of British police officers. The show's title came from the Ford Zephyr cars which were driven in the series (in 60s Britain, they were the epitome of chic). The series was devised by writer Troy Kennedy Martin, who went on to work on some of Britain's best loved cop series including The Sweeney, and on the classic Michael Caine movie "The Italian Job". He was ill in bed and whiled away the time listening to police radio messages. He found real life police operations were significantly different to dear old 'Dixon of Dock Green". 'Z-Cars' ran for nearly 700 episodes, through into the mid-seventies by which time it was eclipsed by a show which took British cop shows to a new level of reality - 'The Sweeney'.
