Z-Cars

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For other meanings, see Zed-car.

Z Cars
Opening title logo
Format	Police procedural
Created by	Troy Kennedy Martin Allan Prior
Starring	James Ellis Brian Blessed Stratford Johns Frank Windsor Jeremy Kemp Joseph Brady Colin Welland
Country of origin	UK
No. of episodes	667
Production
Running time	25 minutes & 45 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	BBC
Original run	January 2, 1962 – September 20, 1978
External links
IMDb profile

Z-Cars (sometimes written as Z Cars) was a British television drama series centred on the work of regular beat police officers in the fictional town of Newtown, based on Kirkby in the outskirts of Liverpool, in the north-west of England. Produced by the BBC and screened on BBC1, it debuted in January 1962 and ran for 16 years until September 1978. Owing to an administrative quirk, for the first few years of its existence it was produced by the BBC's documentary department rather than the drama department.

The programme was created by writers Troy Kennedy Martin and Allan Prior with producer Elwyn Jones, and was a deliberate attempt to create a more realistic portrayal of modern policing than had been seen on British television before. This was a conscious antidote to the BBC's established police drama, Dixon of Dock Green, which portrayed a very 'safe' and 'cosy' image of a stereotypical 'British bobby'. The main writers included John Hopkins (who also became script editor) and Alan Plater. The writing team created a 'kitchen sink realism' style of scripting unknown on British television at that time. The Z-Cars theme tune was arranged by Fritz Spiegl from the traditional folk song Johnny Todd. At home matches the Liverpool based football team, Everton, play the theme as the players enter the field of play.

In a 2000 poll of industry professionals to find the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century conducted by the British Film Institute, Z-Cars was voted into 63rd place. It was also included in an alphabetical list of the forty greatest TV shows published in Radio Times magazine in August 2003.

1 Plot
2 Episodes
3 Lost Episodes
4 After Z Cars
5 Cast
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Plot

Contrary to popular belief the term does not come from the model name of the cars used: Ford Zephyrs and Ford Zodiacs. In fact the Zodiac was never used by UK police services, being essentially an upscale fancy-badged Zephyr.^{[citation needed]} These saloons were fast for their time, place, and cost. The Zephyr was for some years the standard road patrol, ie traffic car (not the same as 'crime car') used by Lancashire and many other Police Services. The term comes from the call signs allocated by the then Lancashire Constabulary and consisting of the Divisional letter in NATO/ICAO phonetic alphabet. In Lancashire in those days police divisions were lettered from the north to the south of the county thus A Division (DHQ Ulverston) was the detached part of the county around Barrow in Furness (since 1977 part of Cumbria), B was Lancaster and so on, letters further into the alphabet were in the south of the county around the Manchester and Liverpool conurbations. Crime cars were manned by uniformed personnel but had a focus on crime rather than traffic or general police duties. eg The two crime cars in P, Stretford Division to the west of Manchester were designated Z-Papa1 and Z-Papa2; There was no V Division and the TV series took the non-existent callsigns Z-Victor 1 and Z-Victor 2 for the storyline.

The stories the series depicted would frequently revolve around the activities of the pairs of officers patrolling that particular week. Riding on the crest of a wave of changing social attitudes and a changing television era, the social realism of Z-Cars, coupled with the interesting police storylines, garnered huge popularity for the programme, although it was initially somewhat less popular with the real-life police force who disliked the sometimes unsympathetic characterisation of officers. Being set outside of London in the North of England also helped give it a distinctly regional flavour, something rarely seen on British television at the time, when most BBC dramas were made and set in the south.

The one character to stay present throughout the entire run of Z-Cars was Bert Lynch, played by James Ellis (though John Phillips as Det. Chief Supt. Robins would reappear sporadically during the show's run - by the end of the series he had become Chief Constable!). Other major characters in the early days of the programme were Stratford Johns (Inspector Barlow), Frank Windsor (Det.Sgt Watt), Robert Keegan (Sgt Blackitt), Joseph Brady (PC 'Jock' Weir) and Brian Blessed ('Fancy' Smith). Blessed went on to become a popular film actor also, appearing in films such as Flash Gordon (1980), Henry V (1989), Hamlet (1996) and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999). Also appearing in 1960s episodes as David Graham was Colin Welland, who went on to become a scriptwriter, winning an Academy Award for Chariots of Fire in 1981, upon receipt of which he delivered the famous "the British are coming!" speech. Other well known British actors who played regular roles in the early years of the series included John Thaw and Leonard Rossiter.

[edit] Episodes

Z-Cars ran for 667 episodes in total. The original run came to an end in 1965; The characters of Barlow, Watt and Blackitt were spun-off into a new series Softly, Softly. Z Cars, however, was revived in March 1967 with only James Ellis and Joseph Brady returning from the original show. The revival was produced by the serials department of the BBC in a twice-weekly soap opera format of 25-minute long episodes. It ran continuously until April 1971 (in colour from early 1970) then returned to a regular season pattern of 50-minute episodes for its final years.

[edit] Lost Episodes

As with many British television programmes of the era, Z-Cars is incomplete in the archives. 1962-5 is reasonably well represented in the archives, though with big gaps in the run. With the 1967 revival, material becomes more patchy. 1967, 1969 and 1970 each have small numbers of surviving episodes. The individual years 1968 and 1971, when the series was being shown almost every week, have no surviving episodes at all. Nevertheless, by luck, around half of the total number of episodes survive.

The original series was one of the very last British television dramas to be screened live regularly — already a rare practice by the time the programme began in 1962. It was felt that this helped the immediacy and pace of the programme, and episodes were being transmitted live as late as 1965, despite occasional "bloopers" such as cameras appearing in shot while moving around the set. Most were videotaped for repeat transmission, but the BBC regularly wiped tapes after the programmes were thought to have exceeded their usefulness, as agreements with various unions meant that they could only be shown a limited number of times. The amount of space needed to store the large videotapes of the time, as well as the expense of them when they could be re-used more cheaply, were also factors.

However most episodes were 'telerecorded'. This was a fairly primitive (by today's standards) way of preserving a transmission by filming it (to 16mm film) from a specially-adapted monitor screen. Telerecordings could also be used for repeat broadcasts, and, more importantly, for overseas sales. Although foreign buyers were supposed either to return, destroy or forward these telerecordings, many were just archived and have slowly filtered back to the BBC over the years.

One telerecording of an early episode was returned to writer Allan Prior in the 1980s by an engineer who had taken it home to preserve it because his children had always enjoyed the programme so much and he could not bring himself to destroy it. Other early episodes have been returned to the archives by foreign broadcasters from countries such as Cyprus and the search for lost episodes of sister BBC program Doctor Who has also occasionally turned up lost Z-Cars episodes (according to the documentary Doctor Who: The Missing Years, included on the BBC Video DVD release Doctor Who: Lost in Time). Two episodes were returned in 2004 after turning up in a private collection. Unfortunately, colour episodes from the early 1970s are less likely to be recovered, as they were never telerecorded for export.

A list of lost & surviving episodes can be found on the missing episodes web-site.

[edit] After Z Cars

The spin-off, Softly, Softly focused on the activities of the regional crime squad, and ran until 1969, when it was again revised and became Softly, Softly: Taskforce, running in this form until 1976. The character of Barlow (Stratford Johns) was one of the best-known figures in British television in the 60s and 70s, and was given several seasons of his own "solo" series, Barlow at Large (later just Barlow) between 1971-5. He also joined forces with Watt (Frank Windsor) to re-investigate the Jack the Ripper murders for a 6-part series in 1973. This led to another spin-off series, Second Verdict in which Barlow and Watt looked into other unsolved cases and unsafe convictions from the past.

Frank Windsor made one final appearance as Watt in the last episode of Z Cars, 'Pressure', in September 1978, with Robins (John Phillips), the Detective Chief Superintendent from the original series who had risen to become chief constable. A number of other actors from the early days of the series also made guest appearances, but not as their original characters.