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Suprised to find he was only 70, he looked like he was in his 50s even back in the early 90s.

RIP Ben Roberts, great actor and Conway was a great character. Surprised he was only 70

Very surprising he was only 70 and equally as surprising that he's died. He played Conway well, and the double act he had with Peter Ellis' character was fantastic.

It's a shame we never got to hear him contribute to The Bill Podcast and give his insight to working on the programme.

Rest in peace.

Still a bit of a mindscrew that he was younger than Kevin Lloyd, Christopher Ellison, Eric Richard, Peter Ellis and Tony Scannell, and only a year older than Trudie Goodwin and three years older than John Salthouse- who practically looked like a kid when he was in the show (not that Galloway and Conway were in the show at the same time admittedly).

Still enjoying having watched the show from the start, only up to 1997 so far, so still have another 5 years of Conway left.

Just watching the 1997 Christmas episode where they put on a panto- one of the routines in the panto is them performing Leader of the Gang, which is unfortunately times as this would have gone out only a few weeks after Gary Glitter's arrest (but presuably filmed beforehand). Almost suprised that it wasn't cut out at the time.

James2001 post_id=31492 time= user_id=956 Wrote:Just watching the 1997 Christmas episode where they put on a panto- one of the routines in the panto is them performing Leader of the Gang, which is unfortunately times as this would have gone out only a few weeks after Gary Glitter's arrest (but presuably filmed beforehand). Almost suprised that it wasn't cut out at the time.

The Spice Girls performed the same track in Spiceworld The Movie which was released around the same time. The song remained in the movie but Glitter's cameo was cut.

I didn’t watch The Bill regularly but I always remember wondering as a kid if the two officers walking at the end on the end credits would make it off screen before the music finished.

The next time I saw it was the first live episode in 2003 and finding it funny as one of the actors struggled to get one of his lines out as he walked through a corridor at the police station with his colleague.

I'm well into 1998 on UKTV Play now, and most episodes after the revamp have pre-title teasers (something I don't think lasted particularly long- not sure if they even survived the move back to hour long episodes). The interesting thing is a few of them broke the show's cardinal rule of having everything from a police officer's point of view. One of them did end with Reg ringing the doorbell, but the scene leading up to it wasn't witnessed by him, so still isn't something that was normally be in the show. Must have been the only time in the show's run after the first series from 1984 (where there were a few scenes with no police present) where that was the case.

James2001 post_id=37171 time= user_id=956 Wrote:I'm well into 1998 on UKTV Play now, and most episodes after the revamp have pre-title teasers (something I don't think lasted particularly long- not sure if they even survived the move back to hour long episodes). The interesting thing is a few of them broke the show's cardinal rule of having everything from a police officer's point of view. One of them did end with Reg ringing the doorbell, but the scene leading up to it wasn't witnessed by him, so still isn't something that was normally be in the show. Must have been the only time in the show's run after the first series from 1984 (where there were a few scenes with no police present) where that was the case.

The recaps did continue into the 1998 hour long storylines, but only where they would arc across multiple episodes - see the Urgent Assistance storyline (where Tony Stamp runs over a pedestrian and kills him on his way to a call). The more peculiar ones I found were the pre-1998 recaps which would basically cut the titles out with clips of the programme after the police car being on screen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=velUEByoA6E


You are right about them starting to break the original ground rules set out by Michael Chapman though; it was around this time he left the programme.

Looks like Drama's going back to the 1998 return of hour long episodes on November 8th, shame they aren't giving the half hour episodes another try, though at least we've had them on UKTV play (albeit with not great picture quality) though most of them have been taken off now, and they're removing more at the start of every month.

Episode listings on Virgin Media totally borked. Looks like they're using the completely incorrect series/episode numbers that UKTV Play have assigned to the episodes- so it's listing today's episode as Series 17, Episode 37, which is what Deep End is on UKTV Play (Deep End is actually Series 14, Episode 89 in the episode listings Fremantle use), but Virgin are giving the description for "Still Crazy" from May 2001, which is the actual Series 17, episode 37. The same's happening for all the episodes over the coming days- listing episodes from 2001 rather than 1998.

Does look like they're using the new masters acquired for UKTV Play though (we've had fades where UKTV Play inserted adverts, but Drama aren't), which means we should actually be getting 1999-2007 episodes in 16:9 now, rather than the 4:3 crops we've had on all previous runs. On the original broadcasts, in early 1999 there was a period where it bounced around between 4:3 and 16:9 from episode to episode due to them being shown out of production order- presumably we'll see this on Drama if they show the episodes in airdate order.

James2001 post_id=52496 time= user_id=956 Wrote:Does look like they're using the new masters acquired for UKTV Play though (we've had fades where UKTV Play inserted adverts, but Drama aren't), which means we should actually be getting 1999-2007 episodes in 16:9 now, rather than the 4:3 crops we've had on all previous runs. On the original broadcasts, in early 1999 there was a period where it bounced around between 4:3 and 16:9 from episode to episode due to them being shown out of production order- presumably we'll see this on Drama if they show the episodes in airdate order.

It is quite interesting how the masters used for UKTV Play were broadcast by an Australian network about 9 years back but not seen in the UK. Some of the edits to the UKTV versions of the episodes (and even the DVD releases) really did remove a fair bit of context to some of the storylines.

An episode called Tinderbox, which aired in 1999, gave the back-story to the episode in the pre-title sequence and why a character was behaving in a certain way. This was inexplicably cut in the UKTV version.

One other strange thing about this era of The Bill was a clear rush to return to hour long episodes, which resulted in several episodes that were made as two half hour episodes slapped together with an abrupt change in story in the middle. Deep End was also intended as a three parter, but got combined into a single 90 minute story instead.

Still a shame Drama won't go back to the earlier episodes and gave up far too quickly back in 2017, the show was already past its peak by 1998 but that's as far as the repeats have ever gone back since 2004 (bar the brief 2017 run).I'd argue the original hour long episodes, and 89-91 were the peak eras, the first few months of the half hours were very iffy though, took a while for them to get the hang of the pacing. 89-91 haven't been shown in the UK since they were on UK Gold in the 90s. At least they put them on UKTV Play and I managed to see them while they were on there, though that did mean having to watch them in not brilliant picture quality full of interlacing artifacts, and the pre-1995 episodes have now been removed (and most of the 1995 ones will go at the start of December).

Quote:not brilliant picture quality full of interlacing artifacts,

Do they have poor quality masters then? That would explain why they haven't aired them, could they be considered not up to standard?

JAS84 post_id=52699 time= user_id=881 Wrote:

Quote:not brilliant picture quality full of interlacing artifacts,

Do they have poor quality masters then? That would explain why they haven't aired them, could they be considered not up to standard?

It's got to be something to do with the way they've transferred them, the Australian versions didn't suffer the same problem.

The series numbering has been borked for a long time though, I think its because UKTV's OD system limits episodes per series to 100, given the average is about 140 a year and each year being a series the count got skewed.