The British serial The Bill holds a special position within the television police genre, not only because of its longevity in Britain and Australia but also due to its ability to adapt to the changing demands of industry and audience. Since its inception The Bill has continually renegotiated the boundaries of the television police genre through innovative production techniques, characterisation and the creation of an active fandom. First broadcast in Britain in 1984 as an example of the police procedural category of the television police genre, it was hailed by critics and audience for its authenticity and gritty realism. Twenty years and some 2,000 episodes later, The Bill incorporates numerous elements of the soap opera genre in a deliberate production strategy to attract more viewers. The emphasis is no longer on ‘realistic’ police work but rather on personal relationships and morally questionable behaviour within a specific police community. Traditional generic conventions of law and order have given way to chaos, importantly featuring a focus on the private, rather than the public, lives of the protagonists. This reshaping of generic boundaries emerged in 1997 and became particularly apparent from 2001 onward. The Bill is not the only police series to incorporate soap opera elements; it is, however, the most prominent police series to challenge conventions by transforming from realism to soap opera. Other examples of police drama that incorporate soap opera elements — such as NYPD Blue, Between the Lines and Blue Heelers — have done so from early episodes.

The Bill has a particularly strong fan base that has taken to the electronic highway with skill and enthusiasm and, in so doing, underlines certain differences between Australian and British fans of The Bill. Before investigating the fandom of The Bill, a few definitions and parameters are required. Contemporary definitions of fans and fandom in relation to music, literature, film and television emphasise a shared interest rather than an individual one. For the purposes of this article, fans are defined as regarded as audience members or followers of a television series or serial who possess, or have access to, encyclopaedic knowledge of their chosen passion, whether it be a television series in general or a television character in particular.

In recent years a number of theorists have examined the concept of fandom. It is most frequently utilised in relation to science fiction/fantasy programs such as Star Trek (1966 – the present) (with the occasional brief foray into the action adventure genre) or in relation to soap operas such as Dallas (1978–1991) and Eastenders (1985 – the present). This is not surprising, given that science fiction/fantasy fans are traditionally seen as deviant — strange people who attend conventions, write fan fiction and dress as their favourite science fiction/fantasy characters. Soap opera fans, too, are often marginalised as powerless women who lack access to resources in patriarchal society. However, Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, a definitive text, rejects stereotypical representations of fans as sad and unfulfilled misfits unable to contribute to society.1 Journalist Sue Williams reports that television fans:

are the ones who rush home to catch not only their favourite TV show, but also to re-watch the re-runs and pore over tapes they’ve seen dozens of times. They’re the ones who like to talk about the characters and plots, then trawl the Internet for the latest news of both. 2

Such fans, as close readers and historian-archivists, are able to cite obscure facts or provide transmission dates (with credits and storylines) of almost-forgotten episodes. They are able to provide a list of the first episodes and a complete cast list.

It is worth making the point here that although the commercial success of a television series is measured in terms of audience ratings, such measurement does not equate to classic or cult television. In earlier decades, television series were able to survive a slow start and to gather fans over time, as was evidenced by Cagney and Lacey in the 1980s, when fans orchestrated successful ‘bring back our favourite show’ campaigns. However, in recent years immediate commercial considerations have become of primary importance in the continued production of a series. In Britain a series such as The Bill is in danger of cancellation if audience ratings drop to five million, which contrasts with Australia where a television program is considered successful if it achieves audience ratings of one million.3

To date, no theorist has produced an in-depth study of fandom specifically in relation to the television police genre. This may be because television police genre fans are harder to classify than science fiction/fantasy or soap opera fans because the boundaries and conventions of the genre and its subcategories are constantly transforming and therefore appeal to many audiences. Television police genre fans, including fans of The Bill, do not usually attend conventions. They do not dress as their favourite characters — at least, not in public. They cannot be dismissed as disempowered women. In fact, in the 1980s theorists such as Annette Kuhn4 and John Fiske5 classified the television police genre as a masculine genre due to its goal-oriented narrative structure, and for some years industry sources regarded the primary audience as one dominated by male viewers. Emphasising this assumption, the Guardian quoted Paul Marquess, the executive producer of The Bill from 2001 to the present, as stating: ‘If you look at The Bill's core demographic, it is white men over 50. And guess who it was being written, produced and directed by? White men over 50’.6 My research, based in some measure on participant-observation engagement with new media forums relating to The Bill, in fact indicates that many participants who claim female gender watch The Bill on a regular basis in both its pre-1997 guise as a police drama and its post- 1997 guise as a drama/soap opera hybrid. Data is unavailable as to whether these viewers watch other examples of the television police genre, although anecdotal evidence from internet discussion forums indicates that many females find American producer Dick Wolf’s Law & Order too confronting and his Dragnet too boring.

Fans of The Bill do not constitute an amorphous mass. They comprise a number of communities, with each community showing cultural variables distinctive to Australia, Britain and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand. To date, little attention has been paid to such national differences in fan communities, particularly when — as in the case of The Bill — those communities are drawn from western postindustrial countries. This article will demonstrate that differences between Australian and British fans of The Bill are distinct and readily apparent when one studies publications and websites produced by those fans.

From its inception, fans of The Bill embraced media technology in various forms. From 1984 in Britain and 1986 in Australia, many structured their social lives around transmissions of The Bill, staying home on relevant nights to watch and record the program on videocassette. Many also bought commercially released videocassettes of episodes of The Bill. Videorecording, combined with transmission on free-to-air and cable channels in the UK and in Australia, enabled fans to move freely in the temporality of the series in order to access favourite characters and specific episodes. In Australia the popularity of The Bill encouraged cable channel UKTV to run marathon ‘Billfests’ over the weekends of Easter 2002, Easter 2003 and Easter 2004. The Bill was often shown on multiple channels at the same time, collapsing its narrative teleology. For example, in September 2003 the Australian ABC showed episodes transmitted a few days before on UKGold in the UK, synchronically with UKTV repeating episodes in Australia that were less than six months behind repeats also shown on the ABC which, in turn, were approximately two years behind original Australian transmissions and three years behind the original UK transmissions. Here fans could exercise their freedom from linear time constraints and watch the police drama form of The Bill (which privileges discourses of professionalism and crimefighting) simultaneously with the police soap opera form of the same series (which privileges discourses of personal life and relationships).

Fans of The Bill have always been passionate and knowledgeable about the series. They use hardcopy or electronic channels of communication with equal facility. In the early 1990s they communicated through hardcopy fanzines and newsletters. Within a decade the internet became the preferred method of communication because it enabled fans to share and expand their knowledge of the series and to create virtual communities that could potentially transcend geographic national boundaries. These virtual communities act as clearinghouses for historical information, fan fiction and as sites of retrospectives in the longevity and institutionalisation of The Bill. They enable Australian fans to organise gettogethers (usually in Sydney or Melbourne) and British fans to organise trips to the Merton studios of The Bill. These sites are particularly interesting, as issues of fandom relating to the contemporary television police genre — unlike those relating to the genres of science fiction/fantasy and soap opera — are not well documented by either fans or academics. Also, many of these sites are ephemeral and the information they contain could, if left unarchived, be lost forever. For fans of The Bill, their capacity to store and distribute information is particularly useful due to the sheer numbers of characters and the complexities of character interaction and characterisation in the series.

The first Australian hardcopy fanzine devoted to the series was not published until 1992. Fanzines in Britain appeared at approximately the same time, six years after the series first went to air, despite the fact that The Bill had been transmitted there since 1984. The Australian fanzine Serious Police Work (SPW) was created by an Australian public servant and had a lifespan of twelve issues, ending in 1996. Editions varied from 24 to 48 pages, and contained character information, news clippings, fan fiction and letters from fans. Following publicity in the Sydney media, more than 1,200 fans requested copies of the first issue. The fanzine was discontinued, despite offers to turn it into a professional publication, when the editor’s workload threatened to become overwhelming. The same editor was also responsible for the SPW newsletter, first published in 1994. By 2003 this publication was available on an irregular basis, with issue thirty-three appearing in the summer of 2002–2003. These publications focus heavily on production and narrative issues, whereas British publications and fan activity tend to focus on The Bill and its characters less critically. Hardcopy British publications include Sierra Oscar, ‘the only Bill letterzine’, which focused on items about the personal lives of the actors. At least twenty-two issues of eighteen A4 photocopied pages were available. This appears to be qualified more by age variables than by gender variables. In such publications, British fans are more likely to enthuse about characters’ physical attributes with remarks such as ‘Dave Quinnan is a spunk!’ and ‘Loxton rocks my boat’. British fans of DC Rod Skase (‘The Skase Cadets’, founded November 1998) thought so highly of their favourite character that they named a star after him.

Fans of The Bill subscribe to a number of interactive websites dedicated to the series in general or to specific characters, which appear and disappear on a regular basis. Two of the major interactive sites pre mid-2004 were an Australian-based email discussion list (TheBillatSunHill@yahoogroups.com), which began 4 July 2000 and had 105 members by September 2003, and the now-defunct billfans.net forum (http://www.billfans.net), which began September 2002 and boasted 2,476 registered members when it closed on 19 June 2004. The billfans.net site, which incorporated a number of discussion forums and facilities, was run by a British computer programmer. These two communication channels were not mutually exclusive. In fact, a number of Australian fans were members of both groups, although the same did not apply to British fans.

Much of the discussion on billfans.net was devoted to analysis of episode content, characterisation and speculation concerning the motives of Paul Marquess (executive producer) in relation to plotlines. The prominent themes and issues addressed during 2002–3 were the fans’ reactions to changes in production techniques and characterisation, and self-reflexive debates on the composition of The Bill-related fandom. Research in relation to the billfans.net forums indicates that fans of The Bill accepted their inability to influence the production team, but were still committed enough to the show to create in-depth analyses of the series and to sustain a lively virtual community. However, during 2003, the emphasis on soap opera elements raised some doubt among fans as to how much longer The Bill could last. Levels of optimism rose in April 2003 when the appointment of Carson Black (previously series producer of the BBC1 drama Doctors) as executive producer was announced. Black insisted that he wanted to return to the traditional values of The Bill by downplaying personal relationships and focusing on officers’ professional lives. Less than six months later he left the show, citing ‘creative differences’ as the reason for his departure. Marquess, despite having been promoted to head of drama at Thames Television, resumed his former role as executive producer of The Bill. Fans in Australia and in Britain were not impressed.

Both hardcopy and electronic sites have been used for the production and dissemination of fan fiction (fanfic), stories written by fans using characters and situations from a television series, movie or book as the basis for original fiction. Jenkins notes that fan writing builds on the interpretive practices of fandom by taking the collective meta-text as the base from which to generate a wide range of media-related stories. Such stories may be based on a non-physical relationship (gen), on a romantic/sexual heterosexual relationship (het) or on a romantic/sexual homosexual relationship (slash).7 Although some gender-based research relating to fan fiction writers has been carried out,8 there appears to be no structured research into identifying and collating data on cultural differences among such writers. This is further complicated by electronic communication channels, which make it particularly difficult to ascertain the gender or nationality of a fanfic writer.

The earliest gen fan fiction relative to The Bill appeared in hardcopy format in Australia and in Britain in the early 1990s. An undated Australian fiction, written by Cathy Goodwin, echoed the ethos of The Bill at that time by focusing exclusively on police work. Other examples of undated Australian work include ‘Hole in One’, ‘Any Place Any Time’ and ‘MTA’. In Britain at about the same time, J Urquhart published The Bill Sun Hill and Xmas At Sun Hill, two short-story fanzines.9 The earliest het fan fiction relative to The Bill is unarchived. However, since the ethos of The Bill pre-1997 (as noted in relation to gen fan fiction) was on professional life and not on romantic/sexual liaisons, it is reasonable to expect one of two consequences. Either there would be numerous het stories in an attempt to satisfy fan’s longing for conventional romantic narratives or there would be few, if any, het stories, reflecting the ethos of the show at the time. My research indicates the latter explanation. Post-1997 the data changes slightly. Het stories appear with increasing frequency, although the most focus is on the doomed onscreen lovers John Boulton (murdered by corrupt colleague Don Beech) and Claire Stanton.

Slash fiction featuring characters from The Bill also appears with increasing frequency post-1997. Some examples use characters who are overtly represented as gay, such as Craig Gilmore, Luke Ashton and Juliette Becker, while others, like ‘Sue’s’ ‘Blue Movie’ and authorised (by Sue) sequel ‘Dark Blue Reflections’ by ‘Tavlan’ focus on characters who are unquestionably heterosexual, such as Inspectors Andrew Monroe and Jack Meadows.10 There is a sense of exuberance in many of these stories that celebrates equality and strong mutual attraction. This slash fiction is as much about trust and sensuality as it is about sexual behaviour and the reconfiguring of sexuality. The fact that fans of the series have appropriated The Bill’s routine of everyday life to create same-sex couplings is perhaps a testament to the strength of the series and the diversity of its audience.

Face-to-face interaction between actors and fans is, unsurprisingly, dictated by geographical considerations. Despite the fact that the Thames Talkback Studio, where The Bill is filmed, is closed to outsiders, small groups of British fans sometimes cluster at a respectful distance from the studio door, waiting for actors to appear. Invariably, both fans and actors are polite and friendly. Actors pose for photos and occasionally oblige by speaking via mobile phones to absent fans. Gettogethers of Australian fans are usually organised to coincide with publicity visits of actors, as in April 2003 when UKTV promoted a luncheon with Graham Cole (PC Tony Stamp) and Huw Higginson (PC George Garfield) at the Marriott Resort, Surfers Paradise. Fans came from as far away as Townsville (1,180 km to the north) and Melbourne (1,344 km to the south). Fans, between meal courses, met the actors and participated in a charity auction.

A month after billfans.net closed down, a former member and longtime fan of The Bill highlighted differences between Australian and British fans when he wrote on an unrelated OpenDiary site:

I often found a lot of the Aussie posts to be more lively, more analytical, more in depth than the UK posts which were often awash with comments on how fit the lead actors were … I also wanted to talk about storylines and narrative structure and characterisation and consistency of plot and … there didn’t seem to be that many UK posters who did.11

To further understand the differences between Australian and British fans I posted the question: ‘Are Aust fans different from UK fans?’ on billfans.net on 25 June 2004 and on ‘The Bill at Sun Hill’ email discussion group on the same day. This question particularly referenced the transmission of the live episode (Ep162, UK transmission 30 October, 2003) created to commemorate twenty years of production.

Participants at both sites were asked the following:

Given that the live episode in Australia didn’t reflect the ratings surge of the UK, does anyone have any thoughts on whether Aust fans of The Bill are different — and, if so, in what way — to UK fans? I mean in terms of looking at The Bill — do UK fans concentrate more on issues of ‘hot totty’, looks, likes and dislikes re certain actors? Do Aussies concentrate more on issues of production? Has the face of Aussie and UK fandom changed over the years?

Responses from the email discussion included suggestions that the Australian audience is comprised mainly of older viewers who watch out of habit. One Australian fan pointed out that because it is shown on the ABC, The Bill got less promotion than the programs aired on commercial channels. He also suggested that Australians played more sport than their British counterparts and therefore did not watch as much television, and that, when they did, they expected it to be ‘good’.12 Bobby from New Zealand agreed, arguing that Antipodean fans, having grown up with The Bill, saw it as ‘good’ British drama.13 Another fan wrote:

I’ll admit that as an Australian the various accents on The Bill are sexy and exotic … I do find a lot of the men attractive … it’s a guilty pleasure but sometimes that’s what TV is about.14

One respondent, ‘Tapdog’, surmised that the Australian tendency to be more laconic and cynical than other nationalities, combined with a larrikin approach to life, influenced Australian fandom.15 Australian ‘Outta Westie’ rounded off the discussion by saying:

I think the viewer demographics between ITV UK and ABC Oz are quite different … I suspect the majority of the Oz viewers of The Bill, as with the evening ABC shows in general, are over 40 … in general Aussies tend to take TV shows less seriously than … in the UK and Aussies don’t tend to get ‘involved’ in quite the same way.16

Two of the highlights of the live episode of The Bill were the fatal stabbing of DC Juliet Becker and the fall from a rooftop by PC Gary Best. Transmitted via two broadcast units at the studio, the episode incorporated 104 technical crewmembers in six production teams and used twenty-two cameras, whereas normal episodes use twenty-four technical crewmembers, one production team and one camera. Fan responses were generally positive. Executive producer Marquess was reportedly very pleased with British rating figures, which averaged 9.9 million (peaking at 10.4 million during the final 15 minutes) and a 40 per cent audience share.

This episode inspired in British fans a level of discussion rarely seen in relation to a single episode. There were 336 British responses on the UK episodes forum of billfans.net from 30 October to 2 November 2003. Even the BBC TV and Radio website devoted six pages to fan response. However, it is not the number of responses that are startling, in relation to differentiating between British and Australian fans — one would expect a certain difference given the relative sizes of the online communities concerned. Rather, it is the reactions themselves that are illuminating.

In general, British fans were impressed with the live episode. There were a few complaints about the ‘naff’ acting, but the majority of fan responses were enthusiastic. One British fan wrote:

Well I think I need a liedown after all that! Brilliant stunt at the end (that was actually Ciaran [actor] doing that you know — I hope that isn’t real blood coming out of his mouth) … all in all, brilliant work from everyone involved, very well done and not too much soap — nice fireworks at the end too!17

Other comments posted included ‘I loved the bits with Mickey and Sam’, ‘that was edge of the seat drama’, ‘only noticed a couple of things that could be classed as bloopers … am in mourning for the divine Juliet and will wear black whenever I get on a motorbike’, ‘all praise must go to Rae Baker who put in her best performance yet, there aren’t many actresses who can play a dead body so well … the episode was 100% flawless’, ‘It was much better that the average episode … It certainly put Corrie [Coronation Street] to shame’, ‘ I thought there was a minor cock up with Eva’s car — looks like it was cued late’, ‘the death of Juliet being in sync with the actuall [sic] time was great … It feels a bit sad but I actually got a bit excited when I saw Jim reading The Mirror. I was reading that paper today’. A number of fans said they intended to rewatch the broadcast, either simply because they enjoyed the episode or to focus on scenes highlighted by other fans. Less than three hours after the initial post the webmaster notified posters that the thread had reached 400k in size. He locked the thread and directed responses to a second thread.18

The live episode was transmitted in Australia on 19 June 2004. Even after allowing for the fact that the billfans.net site closed down in the middle of the episode transmission, Australian reaction was muted (a number of Australian regulars had, in any case, migrated to billfans.com and posted their reactions there). Thirty responses were logged on within three days, after which time Australian online fans seemed to lose interest in the live episode. Part of this may be due to the fact that the episode was not ‘live’ in the sense that it was being produced and viewed simultaneously. As one viewer remarked:

Sorry, BUT if that was LIVE … where were the camera people, where were the sound people and the producer etc. That wasn’t live one iota. I reckon that Channel 2 made a stuff up and decided that they wouldn’t show the live show as it was live in the UK but wouldn’t be live in OZ. It was a great episode, don’t get me wrong. It was good to see Madford being told the ‘RACK OFF’ and Jim and June in hospital. I would like to ask you, how someone could last as long with a knife stuck in their heart and blood pouring out of themselves. Lets see what happens on Tuesday night, BUT I am sorry that wasn’t LIVE.19

Most of the Australian discussion focused on whether DC Juliet Becker was stabbed in the heart or the stomach and what the correct medical procedure and life expectancy resulting from such a wound would be. A fan with thirteen years of experience in cardiac theatres was able to answer both questions ‘factually’.

This brief foray into the fan cultures of Australian and British viewers of The Bill highlights certain differences between the two groups, observable through a variety of communication channels over an extended period of time. Primarily, these appear to concern the level of analysis and the degree of physical and emotional characterisation present. Australian fans are more likely to comment on production issues, narrative structure and verisimilitude, preferring a ‘serious’ attitude to their police soap. British fans, on the other hand , are more likely to comment on body type, hair and dress, thus producing a greater focus on the actors as ‘celebrities’, a reflection of a more general trend in British fan discourses. Although the fandom of The Bill now communicates predominately through the potentially globalising medium of the internet, cultural differences between nations (even those with histories as intertwined as Australia and Britain) still remain apparent.

Notes

1 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Routledge, New York, 1992.
2 Sue Williams, ‘Television square eyes’, Sun Herald, 28 September 1997. Accessed 16 June 1993. http://www24.brinkster.com/shchronicle.
3 S Jackson and K Murphy, ‘Crime the cure for reality’, Australian, 19 February 2004, p 15.
4 Annette Kuhn, ‘Women’s genres’, Screen, vol 25, no1, Jan–Feb 1984, pp18–28.
5 John Fiske, Television Culture, Routledge, London, 1987.
6 G McLean, ‘From corner shop to cop shop’, Guardian, 18 February 2002. Accessed 19 February 2002. http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,7558,651855,00.html.
7 Jenkins, op. cit., p 156.
8 See Camille Bacon-Smith, ‘Spok among the women’, New York Times Book Review, 16 November 1986, p 1; Camille Bacon-Smith, University of Pennsylvania Press Press, Philadelphia, 1992; Constance Penley, NASSA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America, Verso, London, 1997.
9 John Tipper, private correspondence, 18 February 2004.
10 ‘Sue’, ‘Blue Movie’, http://www.brit/.co.uk/sue/blue.htm, not dated; ‘Talan’, ‘Dark Blue Reflections’, 1995. Accessed 28 August 2003. http://www.brit/.co.uk/fiction/talan/dvr.htm
11 dear_gertrudeperkins, ‘Funny ol’ business, cops and robbers’. Accessed 15 July 2004.
http://www.opendiary.com/entryview.asp?authorcode=B254636&entry=10727&mode=date.
12 ‘Matt’, http://www.billfans.com, 25 June 2004.
13 ‘Bobby’, http://www.billfans.com, 25 June 2004.
14 ‘Bill Angel’, http://www.billfans.com, 25 June 2004.
15 ‘Tapdog’, http://www.billfans.com, 26 June 2004
16 ‘Outta Westie’, http://www.billfans.com, 26 June 2004.
17 ‘Dodgy Don’, http://www.billfans.net,30 October 2003.
18 Various, http://www.billfans.net, 30 October 2003.
19 Guest, http://www.billfans.com, 20 June 2004.


Originally published in Backburning: Journal of Australian Studies no 84, Helen Addison-Smith, An Nguyen and Denise Tallis (eds), Perth, API Network, 2005.