This summer, a quarter of a century after it first aired, BBC Four re-ran the first series of an unjustly forgotten British cop show. The Cops rarely makes the lists of best ever policiers, yet it’s as groundbreaking as The Sweeney, Prime Suspect, Between the Lines and Line of Duty.

Perhaps the lack of recognition is down to the absence of star names or its focus on uniformed officers – the PC Plods of the force, rather than maverick detectives. Shot in cinema-vérité style, The Cops is a warts-and-all portrayal of policing in the fictional Greater Manchester town of Stanton. The criminals, ground down by poverty, are a motley bunch, by turns violent and pathetic; the police behave little better, often worse.

Dramas are frequently labelled “raw” and “uncompromising”, but The Cops is the real deal. The first episode begins with PC Mel Draper (Katy Cavanagh) snorting speed in a nightclub toilet before jumping in a cab to start her shift, eyeballs on stalks – just like the TV viewers who were instantly hooked on the BBC Two series.

Some of Draper’s colleagues are guided by community policing principles; others are cynical, hard bastards. Old-school constable Roy Bramwell (John Henshaw) is one of the latter. Disgusted by the “scrotes” on the Skeetsmoor estate he is charged with policing, he rages: “Look at them, breeding like rabbits. I’m sick of them all, the dirty, lying, thieving scumbags.”

The Cops was made by World Productions, with the indie’s founder and legendary TV producer Tony Garnett overseeing the show. Garnett had made his name in the 1960s producing the social-realist classics Cathy Come Home and Kes; at World, he had executive-produced the superlative police corruption series Between the Lines and zeitgeist legal drama This Life.

In an interview with Bafta in 2000, Garnett revealed the thinking behind the show: “I knew that if I went to a broadcaster and said, ‘Can I do a series set on the Skeetsmoor estate?’… then I might be shown the door. But if I said, ‘Could I do a cop show?’ I might be given the money.

“So this was a cop show but also not a cop show. It was a way of exploring experiences in this country.”

Garnett wanted to move beyond the cliches of the police procedural genre and make a show about uniformed officers: “That straitjacket of detective stories in which the narrative is predictable because you start with a crime and a dead body and the story is about who did it…. I thought that, if we did a show about uniforms, we could get away from that and find the human beings behind the ranks.”

The Cops was created and written by Jimmy Gardner, Robert Jones and Anita Pandolfo. Before his untimely death in 2010, Gardner recalled the meticulous research that went into the series: “We spent three weeks in Blackburn, shadowing the police. We had access all areas. What really struck us was the futility of it. Most of the villains were just hopeless.”

The Cops struck a chord with audiences and critics – series 1, which aired in autumn 1998, won a Bafta for best drama series. Irked by its portrayals of police brutality, Greater Manchester Police withdrew its cooperation for the second series. Yet The Cops continued in its same uncompromising vein for a further two series, picking up an RTS award and a second Bafta, both for best drama series.

With the recent success of the excellent Blue Lights and The Responder, uniformed officers are now all the rage on British police shows. The Cops got there first … and maybe helped us get to know the British bobby a bit better.

The Cops is on BBC iPlayer.