Speaking of long takes — around the millenium as it's beginning its ratings "growth hacking", see if you can spot the episode where they filmed it live-to-air. I bet you won't notice it until much later, because they don't tell you IN the show at all.

If you're unaware of it, you'll just wonder why 50% of the actors are having a good day and 50% of them are a bit off today. Ha!

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That's what I came for, even if I stayed for learning the formal language (from phonetic alphabet to police jargon) and learning informal language (from rhyming slang to hanging out for the show's catchphrases like "Aww — cheers, Pol!")

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But The Bill at its best was the opposite of that Cinema False-Verité. In fact, what first got me noticing it in the early 1990s were the SUPER long takes they'd just record, on and on and on they'd go, incredibly impressive … as if the camera was just invisible in the real world.

And shouldn't it always be that way? That's what I loved about this show the most, and it's what I came for …

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The tragedy there is that The Bill was more about "realism" than NYPD Blue ever was, with fluid video and 100% location shooting, and zero incidental music. The final season didn't just introduce incidental "mood" music, but ditched the theme tune totally. Nuts.

And cut the cast in half. But in hindsight I'm impressed they previously managed to put out 50 or 100 hours a year.

Some of it, real quali'ty!

It wasn't always a soap, and it still did episode counts a drama can't do now.

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The title sequence changed yet again and, I wasn't paying attention but, it looked like the show had righted the ship by the mid-late 2000s

Then right near the end, 2009-2010, the bottom really fell out, as it became a total American clone when it finally went HD. The HD itself wasn't a problem, but the American trend of the "film look" seeped across all telly, PLUS the habit of shaking the camera for no reason — just because NYPD Blue made everyone think this is how you do "realism"

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… but the only high-budget moment I remember fondly was when the baddies got away in a helicopter on the estate. After that I basically gave up on the show.

I'll see if the second time around I agree with my old self. The fan consensus is that once the episodes started getting numbers not names, it went downhill, but then went back to names and the writer called Marquess moved on (he even got death threats, the poor bugger … wrong man for the job that's all).

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There's also some spinoff series around this time, so you can see how big things got, but nothing really stuck.

After that in the early 2000s there's some torturous psychiatric stuff, on both sides of the thin blue line … and it starts to feel like filler. You'll miss the way they packed a whole "episode" which now takes an hour, back in 1992-1995 they fit just as much in 30 mins.

There's a few more high-budget moments in the early 2000s — if I give you 3 guesses you'll guess …

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