The Bill was broadcast on ITV under the title "Woodentop" on 16 August 1983. "Woodentop" starred Mark Wingett as PC Jim Carver and Trudie Goodwin as WPC June Ackland of London's Metropolitan Police, both attached to the fictional Sun Hill police station. Although originally only intended as a one-off, "Woodentop" impressed ITV to the extent that a full series was commissioned, first broadcast on 16 October 1984 with one post-watershed episode per week, featuring an hour-long, separate storyline for each episode of the first three series. The first episode of the full series was "Funny Ol' Business – Cops & Robbers". With
BBC television drama is to say, good television entertainment." The overwhelming majority of BBC television drama produced during the 1930s consisted of adaptations of stage plays, but there were exceptions. These included the first multi-episodic drama serial, "Ann and Harold", a five-part story about a married couple which began showing on 12 July 1938. There was also "Telecrime", a series of ten- and twenty-minute plays which presented various crimes, with the viewers given enough clues to be able to solve themselves using the evidence shown on screen and the specially-written drama "Condemned To Be Shot" (1939). As with almost all programmes of the