Discuss the appeal of TV police drama with particular reference to The Bill and In Deep.

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Discuss the appeal of TV police drama with particular reference to The Bill and In Deep

‘The Bill’, shown on ITV1 at around 8.00, and ‘In Deep’ shown on BBC1 at around 9.00, and after the news, are both police dramas. Therefore, they both are targeted to police drama fans. However, there are differences between two.

In ‘The Bill’, there are lots of different codes and conventions found in typical police dramas. For example, there is a police station, panda cars, uniformed and plain clothed police, who carry out everyday tasks, such as dealing with burglary, assault, and racial abuse.

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In ‘In Deep’, there are also lots of codes and conventions of police drama, but they are different to that found in ‘The Bill’. For example, the policemen are plain clothed undercover policemen, there is a secret operation, cover stories, involvement in drugs, and 24 hour surveillance on a potential ‘bad guy’, which gives the program more of a gangster police drama feel about it.

In ‘The Bill’, the narrative structure is very different to that in ‘In Deep’. It has very quick scene changes, and lots of intertwining storylines, very like a soap opera, in that there ...

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