Unlike later police series, Dixon focused less on crime and policing and more on the family like nature of the life in the station with Dixon, a warm,  paternal, and frequently moralizing presence, as the central focus. Crime was little more than petty larceny. However, as the 1960s and the early 1970s brought ever more realistic police series from both sides of the Atlantic to the British public, Dixon of Dock Green  would seem increasingly unreal, a rosy view of the police that seemed out of touch with the times. Yet the writer of the series maintained to the end of the program's time on air that the stories in the episodes were based on fact and that Dixon was an accurate reflection of what goes on in an ordinary police station. 

Police Constable (PC) George Dixon was played by veteran actor Jack Warner. The figures of both Dixon and Warner were already well known to the British public when the series was launched. Warner had first played the figure of Dixon in 1949 and the Ealing film The Blue Lamp. a warm, avuncular policeman, his death at the end of the film was at the hands of a young thug ( played by Dirk Bogarde) was memorably shocking and tragic. British playwright Ted Willis, who, with Jan Read, had written the screenplay for The Blue Lamp, subsequently revived the figure of Dixon for a stage play and then wrote a series of six television plays about the policeman. Thus, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) took little chance and spinning off the figure and the situation into a television series.

  If Dixon was well known to the public, Jack Warner was even better known. Born in London in 1900, Warner had been a comedian in radio and in his early film career. Starting in the early 1940s, he had broadened his range to include dramatic roles, becoming a warmly human character actor in the process. However, in addition to playing in films with dramatic themes, such as The Blue Lamp, Warner continued to play in comedies, such as the enormously successful Huggett family films made between 1948 and 1953.

In Dixon of Dock Green, Dixon was a “bobby” on the beat–an ordinary, lowest-ranking policeman on foot patrol. Within the inevitable heart of gold, Dixon was a widower raising an only daughter Mary ( Billie Whitelaw in the early episodes, later replaced by Jeanette Hutchinson). Other regular characters included Sergeant Flint ( Arthur Rigby), PC Andy Crawford (Peter Byrne) and Sergeant Grace Millard (Moira Mannon). From 1964, Dixon was a sergeant.

 The series was the creation of writer Ted Willis, who not only wrote the series over its 20 years on British television but also had a controlling hand in the production. Long-time producer of the series was Douglas Moodie, whose other television credits include The Inch Man and The Air Base. Dixon was produced at the BBC's London Television Studio at Lime Green. The show began on the BBC in 1955 and ran until 1976. all together, some 439 episodes were made, at first running 30 minutes and later 45 minutes. the early episodes were in black and white, well the later ones were in color.

 The BBC scheduled Dixon  in the prime family time slot of 6:30 p.m. on Saturday night. At the time it started on air in 1955, the drama schedule of the BBC was mostly restricted to television plays, so that Dixon of Dock Green  had little trouble in building and maintaining a large and very loyal audience. In 1961, for example, the series was voted the second most popular program on British television, with an estimated audience of 13.85 million. Even in 1965, after 3 years of the gritty and grimy procedural police work of Z Cars, the audience for Dixon still stood at 11.5 million. However, as the 1960s were on, ratings for Dixon  began to fall, and this factor, together with health questions about Warner, led the BBC to finally end the series in 1976.