Information AboutSilent Witness |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT SILENT WITNESS | |
| bbc television dramas | |
| crime television series | |
| edgar award winning works | |
''Silent Witness'' is a long-running British Television thriller series made by the BBC 's in-house Drama Serials production department, and screened on the BBC One channel. First broadcast in 1996 , it is still running as of 2007 with an eleventh series that started broadcasting on 28 August 2007 . The drama itself gets very good viewing figures, as on the tenth series (2006), it normally attracted around six million viewers in the UK (from MediaGuardian.co.uk's overnight report). BARB later revealed the final figures, proving the drama's higher successes as they received around seven million viewers each episode. In the United States , the show airs during "Mystery Monday" on BBC America . The programme originally followed the activities of a female Pathologist , Dr Sam Ryan (who was promoted to Professor part way through the series), played by Amanda Burton . However, Ryan's character departed early in the eighth series in 2004. There had been a succession of regular supporting characters, changing almost every series, but Dr Leo Dalton ( William Gaminara ) and Dr Harry Cunningham ( Tom Ward ), who were introduced in the sixth series in 2002, remained in the series and continued as lead characters following Ryan's departure, with Dalton replacing her as professor. A new character, Dr Nikki Alexander ( Emilia Fox ), was introduced to the team in the eighth series in 2004. She began as a Palaeontologist , not a pathologist, and was originally enlisted by the team to help analyse bones. Alexander was later represented as having the necessary qualifications to fill the vacancy for a pathologist left by Professor Ryan, although she was initially stated to have a PhD in anthropology and not a medical qualification. She has, however, since been represented as medically-qualified. Some early series were set in Cambridge , but it relocated to London after Dr Ryan had a serious brush with the authorities. The programme is typically made up of a series of two-part stories, usually with six to eight episodes per series. 2006 saw five two-part stories, making ten episodes in total. The series is often criticised for apparently showing the pathologist actively investigating the crime. This characteristic of ''pathologist as urban hero'' follows on earlier similar series such as ''''. The theme music for Silent Witness is a song called "Silencium" by John Harle. In 1998, writer John Milne received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers Of America for the Series 2 episode "Blood, Sweat, and Tears". PARODIES The approach of the show, portraying pathologist as having an active role in the crime investigation as parodied by British comedic duo French And Saunders as "Witless Silence". '' Dead Ringers '' also parodied ''Silent Witness'', with Sam Ryan as an overconfident pathologist who makes incredibly specific guesses about the body; for example, "Just by looking I can tell that this was a man, aged 35-37, called John, having an affair with his secretary", only to be proved wrong by one of her assistants ("no, that's an onion bagel I got for your lunch"). She then refuses to accept her mistake claiming, "Wrong? Oh, I'm never wrong. I'm forensics professor Sam Ryan, Ph.D.". EPISODES
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