Some days it flops you lower than whale shit. It told stories with humor and pathos and sometimes slammed you with a surprising depth that could move you to tears. Hill Street Blues was an important step in the evolution of the cop show. And even Charles Haid switching from playing Sgt Yanov to Andy Renko, TV’s version of Roscoe Rules. The concentration on frontline cops, mainly in uniform. The location being a single police division. Place was packed with off-duty coppers who were a few beers into their own personal choir practice.Ĭast photo of Hill Street Blues: fighting crime and telling dirty jokes go hand in handI don’t know if the movie version inspired Stephen Bochco but the similarities to TV’s Hill Street Blues are plain to see. I remember seeing it at the ABC Cinema in Leeds for a special late night police screening. I’ve been misquoting that elephant line for years, somehow getting it in my head that it was “Balls like a buffalo,” which kind of rolls off the tongue better, I think. And my favorite, Roscoe Rules, the borderline psycho, who, at the scene of a traffic accident, hides a decapitated head behind his back until some rubbernecker asks, “Anyone hurt bad?” To which he replies, “Yeah, this one got banged up a bit,” and holds the head out. “Sucky fucky, ten bucks.” Or maybe it was five. Then there’s Harold Bloomguard, the rookie on loan to Vice who can’t quite remember the requirements of the law as laid down by his Vice Squad sergeant. There’s Spermwhale Whalen, the veteran who catches Lieutenant “Hardass” Grimsley with a prostitute on duty, bursting in after hearing the prearranged “balls like an elephant” signal. It chronicles the insanities of everyday police work and the strange characters that make up each tour of duty only half of them crooks and vagabonds, the rest being fellow cops. The Choirboys is the perfect example of the frontline cop story. I include frontline detectives in that, since they’re the ones knocking on doors and arresting criminals while their bosses face the press or make tactical decisions, but I’m mainly talking about uniform patrol cops. Men in suits who sit behind a desk while proper coppers do the work. Not those swaggering Detective Inspectors, or Chief Inspectors, or Superintendents, or whatever rank they happen to be given in crime fiction these days. That, plus the fact that it shines a light on the real police, uniformed cops who hold the frontline in the fight against crime. Words to live by if you happen to be well endowed, but more importantly an example of the superb dialogue that makes Joseph Wambaugh’s novel, The Choirboys, such a treat. You got balls like an elephant and a whang like an ox.”

The choirboys book