You may think this channel is scraping the barrel a bit in the archive drama slot (and Creamguide scraping the barrel billing it), but you could certainly argue that this is one of the most successful dramas in the history of the BBC, having run for 27 years. That’s longer than Z Cars, Dixon of Dock Green, The Bill, the original run of Doctor Who and many other dramas, and unlike many of those shows that felt like complete anachronisms when they ended, Silent Witness is still going strong, surviving several cast changes and continuing to pull in big audiences for BBC1, the kind of reliable warhorse a broadcaster can’t get enough of. So it deserves a bit of credit, which it gets here with original star Amanda Burton reflecting on its genesis and continued success. Inevitably pretty much everyone in Equity has done a turn in the show over the years so they could have picked most episodes to find someone before they were famous, eventually opting for a story from 1997 with a tyro Idris Elba.
