Happy 60th, Z Cars! The vintage series is still gripping, says Sara Wheeler. It depicts a lost, dark world of capital punishment and smoking, boozing cops
The Z Cars crew. Left to right: Detective Sergeant John Watt (Frank Windsor), Detective Chief Inspector Charlie Barlow (Stratford Johns), PC Bert Lynch (James Ellis), PC Bob Steele (Jeremy Kemp)
PICTORIAL PRESS LTD / ALAMY
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f my childhood had a theme tune, it was Johnny Todd. Don’t know it? Yes, you do. It was the Z Cars music. The BBC detective series first beamed into our cold living rooms 60 years ago, on 2nd January 1962. Within two months, it drew in 14 million viewers. It went on to run for 801 episodes over 12 series. Glasgow-born screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin conceived Z Cars while in bed with mumps. To stave off boredom, he listened to local police messages on his transistor. Why not, he thought, bring police to life on the small screen? Why not depict bobbies as real, flawed human beings, like us? Police presence on TV was at the time limited to the cosy Dixon of Dock Green, which had been running for seven years when Z Cars revved up. In the title role, at the start of every show, avuncular Jack Warner looked straight at the camera and greeted viewers, saying, ‘Evening, all.’ We thought he was talking to us. To heighten the realism, Kennedy Martin set the series in Lancashire. TV drama seldom depicted the north. The fictional Newtown was based on Kirkby, now in Merseyside, around estates that
24 The Oldie January 2022
had replaced Victorian slums and blitzed housing. Whaling ships put in at nearby Seaport, and consequences of the sailors’ ‘fighting beer’ became a series regular. Z Cars folk were working class. In the first episode, Detective Chief Inspector Charlie Barlow (Stratford Johns) and sidekick Detective Sergeant John Watt (Frank Windsor) set up a motorised unit. ‘If we had crime patrols [in cars] like other divisions,’ Barlow reckons, ‘Reginald Farrow [a murdered colleague] would be alive today.’ In the fourth minute, this line sets out the premise of the next 800 episodes. Not everyone approved. On the front desk, tetchy Sergeant Percy Twentyman ridiculed the plan to ‘take the best men off the beat and put them in those fancy cars’. After that, storylines revolved around pairs of officers patrolling in the cars. They bet on horses, drank beer and chased women. The dapper Brian Blessed (‘’e ought to be in Rome’) makes his first appearance as PC ‘Fancy’ Smith, gyrating nimbly in a dockland dance-hall doorway and leering at a girl who says she is 15. (Sadly, Bernard Holley, who played PC Newcombe, died in November, aged 81.) No wonder the Police
Federation made an official complaint. The programmes were too true to life. The series took its name from the radio call signs given to Lancashire police divisions. A Division was based in Ulverston; B Division in Lancaster. The TV series took the fictional call signs Z-Victor 1 and Z-Victor 2. The Ford Zephyr was the standard traffic-patrol car in Lancashire – the Z stood for Zulu, not Zephyr. The cars on set were primrose yellow at first, as the colour showed up better than black-and-white. For the first three years, programmes went out live – among the last British dramas to do so. When a gloop of fried egg slithered out of PC Bert Lynch’s mouth mid-sentence in the Steeles’ living room as pinny-wearing Janey Steele (Dorothy White) put coal on the fire, it did so in front of 14 million viewers quietly consuming their own tea. There could be as many as 15 sets an episode, with actors racing between them. Men sat in half-cars with a street projected onto a screen behind them. I was just one when Z Cars began, and left home the year it ended. When I watched some episodes recently on YouTube, I was amazed, after the
