Cops on TV: Let's Be Careful Out There! Quiz

Answer: Hamish Macbeth

Hamish Macbeth (Carlyle) is happy to have left pressured police work in Glasgow, and quite prepared to collude with a little harmless law breaking if it avoids a successful crime detection rate that gets him promoted out of Lochdubh. Three series of 'Hamish Macbeth' were filmed around the real villages of Plockton and Kyle of Lochalsh on the northwest coast of Scotland, and broadcast between 1995-1997. Policing challenges Hamish faced included a suspicion of cheating at the annual shinty match, being ordered to close down a local pirate radio station, and investigating the possibility that there were aliens in Lochalsh!

Answer: Ironside

Raymond Burr played Chief of Detectives Robert T. Ironside in this series that ran from 1967-1975. Appointed as a special consultant by the police commissioner after he was shot, Ironside and his team conducted a lot of their case discussions while driving round San Francisco in the back of a van adapted for Ironside's wheelchair. Barbara Anderson provided the touch of compassion and glamour to the team as Officer Eve Whitfield, replaced halfway through the eight-season run by Officer Fran Belding (Elizabeth Baur) after Anderson left due to a contract dispute.

Answer: Dempsey and Makepeace

New York police lieutenant James Dempsey is forced to hotfoot it out of town until things quiet down, after he exposes high level police corruption, and he ends up seconded to an armed undercover unit in the London Metropolitan Police. He and his partner, the English upper class Lady Harriet (Sergeant) Makepeace, have a love-hate relationship based on the contrast between his American gun-toting brashness and her English Rose sophistication.

The series ran from 1984-1986 on ITV, and the love obviously won over the hate as Brandon (previously married to Lindsay Wagner) and Barber married in real life in 1989.

Answer: Sergeant Phil Esterhaus

Oh, that was my favourite show - right from the wearied, but cool and humane Captain Frank Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti), to the tormented souls of Esterhaus and Fay Furillo (Barbara Bosson), and the gorgeous Joyce Davenport played by Veronica Hamel! Michael Conrad acted the role of Sgt. Esterhaus during the first four seasons of the NBC show which aired from 1981-1987, and the show never fully recovered from his departure when he died from cancer in 1983.

Answer: Cracker

Robbie Coltrane (more recently known for his role as Hagrid in the 'Harry Potter' films) played foul-mouthed psychologist 'Fitz' Fitzgerald in the gritty Manchester-based drama that ran over three series from 1993-1995 (with two 'specials' in 1996 and 2006). The drama was distinctive because the identity of the criminal was often known at the outset, with the focus being on the psychology of the crime and the offender rather than a whodunnit, and because it was generally as concerned with the unhealthy psychological behaviours of the police, and Fitz himself, as it was with the criminal.

Answer: Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye

The drama was loosely based on the real Sue Thomas, a deaf woman who began work as part of an FBI undercover surveillance unit in Washington D.C. after her ability to lip read became known. Originally screened between 2002-2005, the series starred Deanne Bray, herself deaf from birth and able to sign and lip read. A 'hearing dog' is trained to identify important sounds - such as a fire alarm, telephone, doorbell - and notify its deaf handler.

Answer: 1947 Triumph Roadster and 1960 Mark II Jaguar

'Bergerac', starring John Nettles, was set on the Channel island of Jersey and was screened from 1981-1991, while John Thaw played 'Inspector Morse' from 1987-2000.

Despite the glamour of their screen cars, neither actor liked driving them - the 'Bergerac' Triumph Roadster was temperamental and often had to be pushed into position on the film set, while John Thaw described his Mark II Jaguar as "a beggar to drive". Among the other options given, the Aston Martin DB5 is best known as the James Bond car, the Peel Trident was a three-wheeler, the Ford Anglia 105E was used in Yorkshire TV's police drama 'Heartbeat', and the NSU Prinz 4 was once a commercial rival to the modest Austin Mini.

Answer: NYPD Blue

The Steve Bochco series which screened from 1993-2005 focused originally around super-cool Detective John Kelly (David Caruso, later of 'CSI: Miami'). However, after his uniformed cop lover Janice Licalsi killed the mob boss who had ordered her to kill Kelly, and Kelly helped to shield her, he was transferred out of the 15th precinct - and the series, though still excellent, was never the same. Detective Bobby Simone (Jimmy Smits) and Detective Sergeant Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) became the principal co-stars after Caruso's departure. Greg Medavoy (played by Gordon Clapp) was a big-hearted but rather bumbling detective who was the butt of many of the squad room jokes. The series aroused considerable protests in its early years because of the level of nudity, sex and alleged profanity it contained.

(Thanks to softball44 for pointing out that there really was a 15th precinct in Manhattan in the past, until it ceased to exist in a reorganisation.)

Answer: Rowan Atkinson

'The Thin Blue Line' ran for two series (1995-1996) on BBC, and focused on the rivalry between the uniformed police and plainclothes detectives in the fictional town of Gasforth. Atkinson was typically and brilliantly outrageous as Inspector Fowler, who spent as much time trying to deflect the scheming plans of his partner, Sergeant Patricia Dawkins, to marry him and have a child, as he did trying to get one over Detective Inspector Grim's plainclothes cops.

The doomed attempts of effete and camp Constable Goody to win the affections of sexy Asian police constable Maggie Habib provided one of the other recurrent themes of this farcical comedy show.

Answer: McCloud

The idea for 'McCloud', of a cowboy cop in the city, was taken from the 1968 Clint Eastwood film 'Coogan's Bluff' ('McCloud' creator, Herman Miller, also co-wrote the screenplay for Eastwood's film). Dennis Weaver played the starring role in which the recurrent theme was of a charming, and apparently naïve, southwestern cowboy amid the hardbitten and cynical reality of New York policing. Inevitably, however, Marshall Sam McCloud got his man - frequently apprehending him at full tilt on horseback through New York. "There ya go!"