The Bill

I have been unable to find a thread relating to the Bill so im just using this to ask a question.
Why is the Episode on tonight, wednesday advertised on the ITV website as Episode 348, should this figure not be in the thousands? If so when was Ep 1?

347 episodes ago

Actually, just done a bit of hunting on the official website and the first episode was apparently on 28th Feb,2002 - 3 and a half years ago!

See here: Webpage Title

I'm assuming that must be either when they first started counting, or when the Bill switched to hour episodes. I recall there being half hour episodes before then.

Cheers for that.
But why was the counter reset at zero for that one?

A complete relaunch?

it was because they dropped the individual episode titles that were used before that point

That makes sense.

Actually, what happend was The Bill became serialised. So it wasnt just that they dropped the titles, the drama now became a serial so that some storylines built up over a peiod of weeks, and in one case (original petrol bomb) months.

They decided that because it was serialised, it would make more sense to number each episode.

Though starting at one seems to be a bit of an ego trip by someone as if all other episodes didn't matter

A decision taken by Mr Paul Marquess and not a popular one by most long term fans of the show.

Well, I don't think its the actors (but well done for adlibing!).