THE BILL

The Bill....
Scheduling information - I recently watched the two episodes of "The Little Girl Lost" on ITV 1 on Wednesday 7 Jan 09 and Thursday 8 Jan 09 at 8pm.
Brief summary of the storyline - DI Samantha Nixon is leading the Little Girl Lost investigation: Seven-month-old baby Charlotte went missing in the night from her family home. The parents, Clare and Tom Wainwright, weren’t there at the time; Anna Georgiou was a former suspect in the suspicious death of baby Charlotte. Anna was also guilty of leaving Charlotte alone in the house for around an hour in the middle of the night.

Anna admitted during questioning that she found baby Charlotte dead upon her return from the party. Her boyfriend Simon helped make it seem the house had been broken into and robbed. Clare became the prime suspect following her daughter's suspicious death – however she had gone missing. It was realized Clare was probably suffering from post-natal depression.

Target Audience - I think that THE BILL police drama is mostly aimed at teenagers and adults who are interested in crime investigations and how police solves each investigation.

The ways in which this representation is conveyed - it is set in a police station where we could see how each cap tries to solve and investigate each issue, by showing how they discuss and investigate together as a team.
This tells the audience that the police tries to prevent any crime happening and dealing with all investigations and helping people in a way, in order to be successful, the police need to appeal to the audience and are therefore represented in a stereotypical way that the audience can identify with, this includes how police are represented by police cars, uniform, atmosphere and the work place.

Binary oppositions - There are some examples of binary oppositions that have been used in the episodes that I have seen such as good/bad, helpful/aggressive,

Intended overall message is that police work together as a team to try and solve people's issues and investigate them to find out the solution for each issue.