The Bill was essentially a cultural fountain from which a beautiful rainbow-haze of socio-introspection emerged, inspiring such famed derivatives as Cop Land, The Departed, The Godfather 3, and most recently of course, The Wire.<br /><br />With multi-faceted characters and story lines that have been described as '4-dimensional Shakespeare', The Bill grabbed you by the collars from episode one and just would not let you go.<br /><br />The show covered, anticipated, and even occasionally caused all the major global events between 1984 and 2010. The most famously prescient moment being episode 19 of series 5, which aired on the eve of the second Gulf War. Detective Jim Carver's misguided - and ultimately career ending - drugs raid on Craig 'Fun Boy' Richardson's flat in the Jasmine Allen Estate in early 2003, was widely viewed as a predictive allegory for the coalition's failure to find weapons of mass destruction following the invasion of Iraq several months later.<br /><br />However, it was the work the Bill did to try and highlight some of the lesser-known problems experienced by police officers that won it the most praise. This was sympathetic drama covering such sensitive areas as helmet-phobia, under-uniform cross-dressing, in-van homosexuality, lost truncheons, casual drunken bestiality (regretted), siren aversion syndrome (SAS), groin chaffing caused by chasing suspects while wearing an overly starched uniform and many, many more issues that still trouble, disturb, haunt and excite officers to this day.<br /><br />The last word should go to one of The Bill's most famous fans, Nelson Mandela: "it is no exaggeration to say that I would not have made it through the dark void of loneliness that summed up my last years of incarceration on Robben Island if it wasn't for the heart-warming, casual buffoonery of Reg Hollis."