'The Bill' / 'SOKO Leipzig' Crossover.

ArmaniJeanss

The Bill -> ITV cop drama celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.
The program went through a horrible phase between 2003 and 2006 when Paul Marquess (producer of Brookside at the height of its outrageous phase) brought his unique brand of soap opera sensationalism to the program and nearly destroyed it (or saved it depending on your view of love quadrangles and mother/son incest storylines).

Its new prodcuer has culled the cast of its young hunks and hunkesses, and upped the amount of actual police work/investigating going on, turning into back into something like what it was in the mid90s (though sadly not yet approaching the quality of the Beech/Boulton/Burnside years).

SOKO Leipzig -> A German TV cop show of which I know basically nothing.

Anyway this Wednesday and Thursday there a 2part episode set in London and Leipzig which is a joint collabaration between the two programs (as I understand its a genuine joint production crossover which I don't think has been attempted before by 2 shows from different countries) so might be worth a look-in.
Its the first ep of The Bill to be filmed in HiDef as well.
Heres a preview.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltNFJ7delcw


By the way this guy Len Collin http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0172016/ who wrote some of the best Bill eps of the late 1990s is back on the writing team (and is a boardsie with about 2000 posts(mainly on the poker forum admittedly)).

humanji

Sounds cool. I'll have to check it out.

mike65

I quit the Bill when it became overwhelmed by domestic issues/office romances, maybe with this story its time to dip back in. Don Beech was the buisness, a (un)worthy sucessor to Burnside.

Mike

Cool_CM

Class, forgot that was happening, I love SOKO Leipzig, not as good as Tatort though...

RadioCity

What did you make of it if you saw it?

I think it was a great idea as a once off, but wasn't really all that exciting with what was going to be a predictable outcome anyway.

Worthy of note as a funny moment was Jack Meadows introducing the German officer, Hajo Trautzchke (roughly pronounced Trout-Ske-yah) as "Trotsky" before being corrected!

ArmaniJeanss

Just watched it now. I thought it was good, nothing spectacular.

Fairly large budget by The Bill standards and it showed on screen, with some nicely done setpieces in Piccadily Circus and Leipzig train station. And a decent car chase through central Leipzig.

Interaction between the two police forces was good.

The kidnap story was itself fairly mundane, and the Stasi blokes

surrender to Terry and handover of gun at the end

very unconvincing.

Would be interested to know if German TV shows the exact same version - we never saw just two of their officers discussing the case but there was a lot of scenes with just two of the Sun Hill officers on screen.