List of The Bill characters (Q–Z)

This is a list of characters from the police drama The Bill ordered alphabetically by character surname. For a full list of characters ordered by rank, see list of The Bill characters. The characters are all police officers or civilian staff at the fictional Sun Hill police station in London.

Q

Dave Quinnan

PC Dave Quinnan, like many of his colleagues, had not decided to join the police force immediately but had instead trained as an electrician and had worked on oil rigs in Aberdeen. His family is quite large and he is a good friend but he did not join the police to be a good samaritan. Instead he decided that someone had to keep the peace and hold authority and thought that it might as well be him. Dave then joined the police force, but only arrives at Sun Hill one year later. He chooses to defy regulations by continuing to put his electrical skills to work for some extra money but he eventually worries that this will be discovered. Dave initially judges people on first appearances but soon learns to be more cautious. He is a good friend, especially to PCs Tony Stamp and Steve Loxton and is consistently backed by Sergeant Bob Cryer when his methods are seen to be somewhat unconventional. When he was stabbed by a gang of youths on the Jasmine Allen estate he subsequently suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. After an affair with PC Polly Page and a marriage breakdown, Dave left Sun Hill, transferring to SO10.

Christopher Skase

Christopher Charles Skase (18 September 1948 – 5 August 2001) was an Australian businessman who later became one of his country's most wanted fugitives, after his business empire crashed spectacularly and he fled to Majorca, Spain.

Early life

Skase was born into a wealthy Melbourne family. His father was Charles Skase, 1948 winner of the Melbourne Herald-Sun Aria Competition, and prominent radio 3DB (now Mix 101.1) on-air personality, including his role as star of the live-to-air radio programme, The Happy Gang in the 1950s.

He was educated at Malvern and Caulfield Grammar Schools.

Career

He began his career as a stockbroker, but soon became a finance journalist instead, working at The Sun News-Pictorial. In 1975 he purchased Qintex, a small Tasmanian company.

Skase slowly developed Qintex and, over several years, turned it into one of Australia's larger corporations. By the late 1980s, the Qintex group was worth A$1.5 billion. Skase owned five resorts as well as interests in the Seven television network and the Brisbane Bears football club. On the eve of the 1990 economic recession, his two "Mirage" resorts in Queensland were among the largest in the country and one of them, the Sheraton Mirage Port Douglas Resort, played a key role in putting the formerly small town of Port Douglas on the international tourist map.

Rod

Rod, Ród, Rőd, Rød, Röd, ROD, or R.O.D. may refer to:

Devices

Media

Rod (optics)

"Rods" (sometimes known as "skyfish", "air rods", or "solar entities") is a term used in cryptozoology, ufology, and outdoor photography to refer to elongated artifacts in the form of light-rods produced by cameras. Videos of rod-shaped objects moving quickly through the air were claimed by some ufologists and cryptozoologists to be alien life forms, "extradimensional" creatures, or very small UFOs. Subsequent experiments showed that these rods appear in film because of an optical illusion/collusion (especially in interlaced video recording), and are typically traces of a flying insect's wingbeats.

Optical analysis

Various paranormal interpretations appeared in the popular culture, and one of the more outspoken proponents of rods as alien life forms is Jose Escamilla, who claims to have been the first to film them on March 19, 1994 at Roswell, New Mexico, while attempting to film a UFO. Since then, Escamilla has made additional videos and embarked on lecture tours to promote his claims.

Rod cell

Rod cells, or rods, are photoreceptor cells in the retina of the eye that can function in less intense light than the other type of visual photoreceptor, cone cells. Rods are concentrated at the outer edges of the retina and are used in peripheral vision. On average, there are approximately 90 million rod cells in the human retina. More sensitive than cone cells, rod cells are almost entirely responsible for night vision. However, because they have only one type of light-sensitive pigment, rather than the three types that human cone cells have, rods have little, if any, role in color vision (which is why colors are much less apparent in darkness).

Structure

Rods are a little longer and leaner than cones but have the same structural basis. The opsin or pigment is on the outer side, lying on the Retinal pigment epithelium, completing the cell's homeostasis. This epithelium end contains many stacked disks. Rods have a high area for visual pigment and thus substantial efficiency of light absorption.