On the Beat

Norman Pitkin wants to be a policeman like his father and fails the height requirement, along with most of the others. One day he digs out his father's old uniform, puts it on and walks the beat. What follows is chaos on a scale only Pitkin could manage, and at some point it runs into actual criminals. This is one of the most watched of Norman Wisdom's sixties comedies. His character never changes: small, incompetent, taken seriously by nobody and refusing to stop. Robert Asher shot it in black and white and it runs almost entirely on physical comedy. It played on British television for generations, and Wisdom had an enormous following abroad as well, in some genuinely unexpected countries.