Fabian of the Yard


Fabian of the Yard is a British police procedural television series based on the real-life memoirs of Scotland Yard detective Robert Fabian, made by the BBC and broadcast between November 1954 and February 1956. It is considered the earliest police procedural to be made for British TV, sharing many points of commonality with the U.S. series Dragnet which had gone on air in 1951.
There were 36 episodes in total, of 30 minutes each. The first 30 were broadcast consecutively on Saturday evenings between 13 November 1954 and 22 June 1955, with the exceptions of Christmas Day and New Year's Day which happened to fall on a Saturday. For unknown reasons, the final six episodes were held back, and were later broadcast intermittently between November 1955 and February 1956. The series was later broadcast in the U.S. under the titles Fabian of Scotland Yard or Patrol Car.

Synopsis

Apart from Bruce Seton, who played the eponymous Fabian in every episode, the series had relatively few recurring characters in comparison with later British police series. Only Robert Raglan as Detective Sergeant Wyatt was in any way a regular, appearing in 15 episodes. No other cast member featured in more than six episodes, as the particular skills of their character were called on to assist in a case germane to their speciality, such as the laboratory expert, the psychiatrist, the pathologist or the graphologist. There were guest appearances from well-known actors such as Kathleen Byron, Elspet Gray, Kieron Moore and Michael Craig, but for the most part the cast consisted of relative unknowns.
Fabian of the Yard was one of the earliest BBC series to be shot on film, with each episode featuring voiceover narration from Seton. Each case was a dramatisation of a genuine crime which had taken place in the London area between the 1920s and the early 1950s, usually, although not invariably, a murder. Many of the cases featured had made national headlines in their day, such as "Little Girl", based on the murder of an East London schoolgirl which had shocked the country in 1939. Each episode finished with an epilogue in which a shot of Seton at his desk dissolved into a shot of the real-life Fabian at the same desk, who then explained to viewers what had happened to the real criminal from the case they had just been watching.

Episodes

  1. "The Extra Bullet"
  2. "The Unwanted Man"
  3. "The Skeleton in the Closet"
  4. "Bombs in Piccadilly"
  5. "Death on the Portsmouth Road"
  6. "The Actress and the Kidnap Plot"
  7. "Against the Evidence"
  8. "Murder in Soho"
  9. "Bride of the Fires"
  10. "The Troubled Wife"
  11. "Nell Gwynn's Tear"
  12. "The Vanishing Cat"
  13. "Written in the Dust"
  14. "The Purple Mouse"
  15. "The King's Hat"
  16. "Little Girl"
  17. "The Coward"
  18. "The Lost Boy"
  19. "The Executioner"
  20. "The Poison Machine"
  21. "The Golden Peacock"
  22. "The Lover's Knot"
  23. "The Man from Blackpool"
  24. "Robbery in the Museum"
  25. "The Deadly Pocket Handkerchief"
  26. "The Hand of Terror"
  27. "Pin-Point Signature"
  28. "The Innocent Victims"
  29. "The Jade Blade"
  30. "April Fool"
  31. "No Alibi"
  32. "Escort to Death"
  33. "The Sixth Dagger"
  34. "The Ribbon Trap"
  35. "Cocktail Girl"
  36. "The Masterpiece"

    Film

Three early episodes - Death on the Portsmouth Road, The Actress and the Kidnap Plot, and Bombs in Piccadilly - were put together and released to cinemas as a portmanteau feature in early 1955, reflecting the fact that this was still a time when a majority of the British population did not have a home television.