The Bill (series 1) Mark Wingett and Robert Pugh all appeared in “Welcome Home”. <onlyinclude></onlyinclude> The Bill (series 1) The first series of "The Bill", a British television drama, consisted of eleven episodes, broadcast between 16 October 1984 and 22 January 1985. Whilst "Woodentop" used a traditional three-wall set built at Thames Television's studios at Teddington, for the series, Sun Hill Police Station was created by converting the premises of a two-storey former cigarette packing company on the corner of Artichoke Hill and Pennington Street, in Wapping, East London. The police station was significantly smaller than subsequent versions, with almost-all of the interior offices
BBC television drama oversaw the rise of more populist continuing drama series, however, encouraged by the ratings-chasing strategy of the then Controller of BBC1, his friend Michael Grade. It was during Powell's tenure that the BBC launched the twice-weekly soap opera "EastEnders" (1985–present) and the medical drama "Casualty" (1986–present), both of which remain linchpins of the BBC One schedule today and the highest-rated drama productions on BBC television. Indeed, "EastEnders" achieved phenomenal success in its early years, its Christmas Day 1986 episode earning a massive 30.15 million viewers, the highest British television audience of the 1980s.Aside from these continuing dramas, based in one