Fabian of the Yard
| Fabian of the Yard | |
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Bruce Seton as Fabian
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| Genre | Police procedural |
| Written by | |
| Directed by |
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| Starring | |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Original language(s) | English |
| No. of series | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 36 |
| Production | |
| Producer(s) | John Larkin |
| Cinematography | Brendan J. Stafford |
| Running time | 30 minutes |
| Production company(s) | BBC |
| Release | |
| Original network | BBC Television |
| Original release | 13 November 1954 – 6 February 1956 |
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 name Fabian of Scotland Yard.
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.
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