TELEVISION “Z CARS” A PROGRAMME OF REMARKABLE ACHIEVEMENTS

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30953, 8 January 1966, Page 12

TELEVISION “Z CARS” A PROGRAMME OF REMARKABLE ACHIEVEMENTS

IBu

T. C. WORSLEY

in rhe “Financial Timex”)

(Reprinted bp arrangement)

The demise of “Z Cars” (in Britain) at the end of 1965 is an occasion for reminding ourselves of some of the achievements of that remarkable programme—one of the most creative, I suggest, that television has thrown up. It was the product of a creative team, and its creators have especially emphasised and have been especially proud of its success in breaking through the fictional formulae which had previously been television s approach to social institutions, and finding a semi-documentary form which yet managed to preserve the dramatic tensions. By sending its writers and directors up to work closely with an actual police force on the job, the “Z Cars” team injected a shot of realism into the policier form which raised it far above anything of the kind attempted in the medium.

This was indeed a most interesting development whose lessons are still to be learned by other creators of series. How considerable it was can be gauged if we compare it with some of the other policier series on television. “Maigret.” for instance, should have, ideally, anticipated it in this development, for its original creator, Simenon, had himself anticipated its realistic approach to crime and the solving of crimes. But however successful the “Maigret” series when it was first shown seemed in recapturing this realistic atmosphere, the repeat of it, after “Z Cars” had been running for some time, showed it up as badly wanting in just this element. “No Hiding Place,” I.T.V.’s nearest equivalent to “Z Cars,” though its actual stories have improved lately, does not really attempt to move outside a purely fictional formula, and a somewhat restricting one at that, for it always pains me to see so subtle an actor as Raymond Francis so limited by the chances of his scripts.

Two Police Forces But the most interesting comparison is between “Z Cars” and “Dixon of Dock Green” since both of them have in common the setting of a police station with its resident sergeant, policemen and C.I.D. officers. Yet they are worlds apart. The “Dixon” series is also expertly done. Like “Z Cars” it does not romanticise crime: and, as in “Z Cars,” the crimes which form the different stories each week are designed to be subsidiary to—that is illustrative of—the way the police force works. The difference lies in the degree of truth with which the two police forces are observed. The members of the Force in the Dixon series belong to a world that never was on land or sea. They belong very exactly, I believe, to that charming world of makebelieve that used to be serialised in the religious weeklies

of our youth when the world was divided into the very very good and the very very bad: and the good were always rewarded and the bad duly punished. Moral fairy stories in modern dress, they peddle comfortable lies (in the Platonic sense) to those who long to be assured that all is for the best in this best of possible worlds. Mrs Mary Whitehouse and her crew have doubtless given the programme their imprimatur, for she and her sisters believe, like Plato at his worst, that good lies are better for people (other people anyhow) than disagreeable truths.

A View Challenged It was just this view of the very purpose of fiction that “Z Cars," at its beginning, challenged. And it will be remembered that it was thought by the Mrs Whitehouses of this world that its more realistic view of real policemen as human beings capable of bad tempers and ulcers would in the current phrase “damage the image of the Police Force.” The opposite turned out to be true. No one could believe in goodygoody Dixon; he was just a comfortable lie: and he was never therefore an image of anything except of sentimental wish-fulfilment. On the other hand, it was all too easy to believe in Barlow, who was the product of shrewd observation, and recognisably of this world. And just because they could be believed in the Newtown police force really did become the “image” of a real police force; and it was seen, in the early days of the series at least, to be not such a bad one after all, not in spite of but positively because of the human failings of its members. How “realistic” a study of a police force at work it in fact was is another matter yet: and one which I am fortunately not in a position to gauge, never yet having been at the receiving end of it. What I think is true is that at its start it injected into our view of this particular institution about as much reality (to adapt T. S. Eliot's phrase) as people could then better (artistically and morbetter (artistically and moally) to have stopped earlier —to have stopped at the point, for instance, where developments such as those explored in Colin Maclnnes’s “Mr Love and Justice” were still possibilities round the corner, even if we could not yet bear enough reality to have them actually shown. Instead of which, as it did continue, it had inevitably to cosify somewhat. In fact, more than a year before it closed, it had reached the end of its possibilities for the development of its resident characters. And, in my view, even more important than its new realism was this question of character development which established the series as a serious television form. It established itself as this by imposing on us, characters real enough and in themselves interesting enough to keep us on tenterhooks—week by week as they developed—not so much about what was going to happen as about how these people were going to be-

have. They were still—in those early days—unpredictable, and that was the special interests of their humanness. Outwitting Transience

The single play in television cannot—as 1 have argued before, and I feel more and more confident that it is true—by the very ephemerality of its nature, impose itself on us in this way. But I am not, by any means, singing the swan-song of the single play. By far the most assured and complete piece of television we saw last year—in which writer, director, actors, cameras and set-designer all combined to realise a whole work of art—was Harold Pinter’s “The Tea Party": and a much less perfected, but in its own way, lyrically exciting experiment, “Up the Junction,” equally justified the single play as a form: and perhaps a few others. But they pass so quickly into the limbo, these single transient hours. The series is precisely a means of outwitting this transience.

All the specifically television characters are characters from a series (except the very few from the serials): some of them, too many of them, perhaps, are not much more—certainly not enough more—than stereotypes. Drs. Finlay and Cameron, Kildare and Gillespie, the Defenders, Father and Son. These may be, or may have become, trivialised. But that does not mean that the form must be trivial. Any form in any medium has been trivialised in its time. The fact is that television needs the repetition that a series provides, just as a play needs the continuous run that the theatre provides, if it is to imprint itself on our imaginations.

A Damaging Heresy Many of the more creative talents in television resent this idea and try vainly to command this tide back. And I see why; for the idea of it runs counter to one of the cherished illusions of all artists today, the illusion that total freedom is a necessary condition of their work. This is a damaging heresy which sooner or later we will all have to abandon. The series at its best—when, that is, it is providing something as original as “Z Cars,” “Steptoe and Son” were—offers the writer a platform for his talents that he would be merely insolent to despise. At least two young writers, Troy Kennedy Martin and John McGrath, themselves associated with the beginnings of “Z Cars,” perceived this and tried, even if not wholly successfully, to extend and develop the form along lines which others might well consider in their “Diary of a Young Man.” My hope for 1966 is that some of the team who created “Z Cars” under Mr Elwyn Jones are now working under him on other projects equally exciting. If they are, and they succeed, we shall remember them long after we have forgotten even “The Tea Party” or “Up the Junction,” much less those brave but foolhardy attempts to capture the Meaning of the Universe in an hour and a half’s formfree symbolism.