Fabian of the Yard (1954 - 1955)

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 plice 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.