London

‘Evenin’ all.’

Thus the voice of PC, later Sergeant, George Dixon, welcomed us, each week from the mid-’50s on, to Dock Green police station and another story about the everyday travails of ordinary coppers out on the beat. Six-thirty on a Saturday evening, peak-time family viewing, nothing too chancy, nothing extreme: this was a world of small-time thieves and petty villains, set in a hearts-of-gold East End where the Krays could never have existed and community spirit had survived intact since the Blitz. Looking back now, it’s a little hard to believe it was ever taken seriously.

And yet people did.

I did. Feature continues

At its height, in the early ’60s, there were close on 14 million viewers for ‘Dixon of Dock Green’, a programme that was seen as giving an authentic picture of police work, as well as a slice of London life. And at the centre was the paternalistic figure of Dixon, who would end each episode much as it began, with a homily addressed to camera that assured us we were in safe hands and all was right with the world.

Ah, happy days!

It would take the far more radical, Liverpool-based ‘Z Cars’, and, a decade later, ‘The Sweeney’, to render Dock Green redundant, and finally – though not until the mid-’70s – force Dixon into retirement, by which time, incredibly, the actor playing him, Jack Warner, was over 80 years of age.

Born in 1896 in Bromley-by-Bow, Jack Warner began his working life in variety, where he specialised in comic monologues, before becoming a movie actor with a flair for playing no-nonsense working-class salt-of-the-earth types: the bus driver father of the Huggett family, who epitomised a make-do-and-mend, smiling-through-the-tears postwar Cockney spirit in four films and a long-running radio series, and PC George Dixon in his first incarnation, Basil Dearden’s ‘The Blue Lamp’.