‘I’m a copper not a welfare officer’: Emergent feminist thought in Hunters Walk and 1970s British police series

This article uses what was a very popular programme, Hunters Walk, to challenge dominant understandings of the British police series in the 1970s. Studies of British television drama often characterize this genre as being epitomized by The Sweeney throughout this decade; remembered for its use of film cameras on location to regularly depict action sequences in a somewhat escapist fashion. This article complicates such a dominant critical opinion by drawing attention to a popular series shot in the studio with video cameras and analysing its engagement with feminist concerns and representations of gender, a trait usually attributed to soap operas at that time.