A FAIR COP

Chris Hallam investigates the BBC's own groundbreaking, female-led police series

- By Chris Hallam

Let us begin with a short quiz: who played the title role in the popular police drama Juliet Bravo?

Any ideas? Fans of the show will, of course, have recognised immediately that this is a trick question. For while two actresses (one after the other) took the lead role in the series during the first half of the 1980s, there was never a character called Juliet Bravo. The title, in fact, referred to the police inspector’s radio call sign. “J-B”, which translates as “Juliet Bravo” on the Nato phonetic alphabet. This fact was rarely referenced in the TV series.

Making its television debut on BBC One on 30 August 1980, Juliet Bravo was – following LWT’s The Gentle Touch four months earlier – the second series to feature a senior, female police officer. Set in the fictional Lancashire town of Hartley, Juliet Bravo was, to start with, based around the character of Inspector Jean Darblay played by Stephanie Turner.

Hartley had been decimated by the closure of the mills and Jean’s own husband (Tom, played by David Hargreaves) had been made redundant. Jean’s promotion to Inspector, was at the time, though certainly not unprecedented, undeniably novel both on TV and in society in general.

“Yours is a very important appointment, Jean,” a superior officer told Darblay in the opening episode. “Very few women are running a town like this. There are quite a few around who’d be pleased to see you fail. In any way.” The 1970s had seen an important expansion in the role played by women police officers. “I'm sure most policewomen feel, as she does, that they have to be twice as good as a chap to get ahead in the force,” Stephanie Turner observed.