The Blue Lamp The Blue Lamp The Blue Lamp is a 1950 British police drama, directed by Basil Dearden and starring Jack Warner as veteran PC Dixon, Jimmy Hanley as newcomer PC Mitchell, and Dirk Bogarde as hardened criminal Tom Riley. The title refers to the blue lamps that traditionally hung outside British police stations (and often still do). The film became the inspiration for the 1955–1976 TV series "Dixon of Dock Green", where Jack Warner continued to play PC Dixon until he was 80 years old (even though Dixon's murder is the central plot of the original film). The screenplay was written
The Blue Lamp actors were carried over into the TV series "Dixon of Dock Green", including the resurrected Dixon, still played by Warner. The series ran on BBC One for twenty-one years from 1955 to 1976, with Warner being over eighty by the time of its conclusion. In 1988, Arthur Ellis's satirical BBC Two play "The Black and Blue Lamp" had the film characters of Riley (Sean Chapman) PC "Taffy" Hughes (Karl Johnson) transported forwards in time into an episode of "The Filth", a gritty contemporary police television series, replacing their modern-day counterparts. "" by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill has one panel