Cops chopped: Telly 'tecs are falling thick and fast.
Last week The Bill was axed after 27 years as a favourite telly ’tec show. TV chiefs said the show was a victim of changing tastes.
The Sunhill cops will be hanging up their handcuffs later this year and ITV director of television Peter Fincham said: “Times change, and so do the tastes of our audience.
“Thanks to a superb production team, it's been one of the great institutions of television drama.”
But theirs won’t be the only truncheons handed in to the props department, as British television has suffered its most dramatic series of fatal assaults on that great viewing sensation, the cop drama.
DI Jack Frost and his Denton colleagues are hoping they’ll be able to collect their pensions as the series gasps its last… after 18 years.
The final two doses of A Touch of Frost will hit our screens next week, but the fate of the fictional detective is still a mystery.
THERE’S BEEN A MURDER
- Killer blow for Bill
- The end of the road for Jack
- Reel passion of police shrink
- Alive and well but the body count rises
However, two endings have been filmed and which ever one isn’t screened on TV will be immediately available on the STV player.
Jack – played by David Jason – may have reached a natural end, as the oldest copper on the payrole, but for some the end is a little more brutal.
The Retro sleuths of Ashes to Ashes are facing the bullet after the third and final series which hits the screens in April.
It’s been Blue Murder for DCI Janine Lewis and DI Richard Mayne after five series of clearing up crime in Manchester.
Star Caroline Quentin confirmed the show’s demise and said it was “a big disappointment”.
Other notable gumshoe corpse has been Wire in the Blood, based on the books by Val MacDiarmid.
It starred Robson Green as a psychologist who helped plods solve gristly crimes committed by Bradfield’s disproportionately high number of serial killers.
All round it’s been something of a bloodbath.
