We’ve been looking through the GGR archives recently and came across a piece of TV gold, a UNIC mini spider crane playing detective on the UK’s longest running police drama, The Bill.

The mini crane’s starring moment on the ITV drama was filmed back in 2005 after the show’s producers spotted GGR’s cranes in an issue of Construction News magazine. They chose to use the UNIC URW-506 spider crane model for filming as it was compact enough to reach the canal-side location but had sufficient boom length to create a dramatic camera shot.

Click here to watch the clip.

It was less “the long arm of the law”, more “the long boom of the law” in this episode where the UNIC URW-506 helped recover a chest containing the long-lost remains of a serial killer’s victim from a canal. In real life our UNIC cranes are always being used for lifting jobs on the country’s waterways, like when GGR lifted this car from a canal in Manchester.

This isn’t the only time that GGR’s UNIC mini cranes and glass lifters have stolen the show on the small screen, read more about our cameo appearances on Grand Designs, Restoration Man, How Britain Worked and The Apprentice.

GGR have lent a helping hand to the boys in blue in the past when a pair of GGR’s operators took on a contract lift job for the Metropolitan Police. Using a UNIC URW-095 mini spider crane they installed 16 bomb blast proof secure windows to a new 40 cell custodial centre in Croydon.

Our Oscar 600 robot is due to be serving some time behind bars in the near future, as it proved it could lift, tilt and rotate these heavy prison doors. Watch this Youtube clip of the Oscar in action.