Cagney and Lacey: a salute to TV's feminist icons Creatively, the show remains (lurid Eighties costumes notwithstanding) almost as fresh today as it was then. Its DNA is almost indistinguishable from ITV's recent hit Scott & Bailey - except that Mary Beth Lacey and Chris Cagney would look a bit odd toting revolvers on the streets of Manchester. Gless and Tyne Daly, who played Lacey, became role models for a whole generation of women (and, if I'm honest, for a few teenage gay boys too). They were great cops, but they were human: they were strong without being hard. One of the most powerful episodes came when Mary Beth simply burned out, and disappeared from work and family for several days. Other hard-hitting storylines - including Cagney's alcoholism - also earned the series" stripes. Today, female detectives - from Prime Suspect's Jane Tennison to Sarah Lund - are so common, so well-established, that it is hard to remember just how ground-breaking Cagney & Lacey was. Thirty-one years ago, American TV execs liked the bankable masculinity of Starsky & Hutch, or Magnum, PI. In those days, female characters simply didn't lead drama series. And when an American network show breaks new ground, it has to do so by the JCB-load, and it has to strike gold in the process. Cagney & Lacey wasn't the BBC's Juliet Bravo - it couldn't justify itself, if necessary, as a worthy bit of public service TV. It had to run for 22 episodes a year, and be a huge commercial success. Indeed CBS, the American network that showed Cagney & Lacey, famously cancelled the show twice in its early years - and both times, thanks to a viewer outcry, reinstated it. Its revolutionary heroines went on, of course, to lead a top 10 show on both sides of the Atlantic, and Cagney & Lacey won 14 Emmy awards. And, on the subject of statistics, the show produced over 120 episodes before finishing in 1988. Let's hope that BBC Two, with its schedule forever denuded by poverty, is simply forced to show all of them. Cagney & Lacey begins on Monday October 7 at 4.20pm on BBC Two