TV has come a long way since the days when Z-Cars was a revelation - David Behrens
English is a still living language, though you wouldn’t know it from the rubbish uttered by some people. By way of evidence, this is the season for dictionaries to nominate new words that have stumbled into common usage over the last year and I can think of one that covers them all: unnecessary.
‘Parasocial’, for instance, is defined as a connection someone feels with a famous person they have never met. A ‘tradwife’, meanwhile, is a woman who lives by old-fashioned gender roles. This used to be considered normal behaviour; now it’s a stigma, apparently.
My nomination for the list is not a new word but an updated meaning for an old one. Copulation, I propose, should refer to the populating of TV schedules with police shows. Wikipedia lists no fewer than 131 such series during the current decade, not including those imported from the US and Scandinavia. There’s more crime on TV some weeks than in Leeds Magistrates’ Court.
It’s not a new phenomenon, of course. As long as there has been television there have been TV coppers and the more channels we have, the more crimes there are. But this Christmas brings an opportunity to revisit the Ground Zero of the genre, the show to which all current series owe some form of debt.
Z-Cars wasn’t the first police procedural drama: George Dixon had been plodding around Dock Green for seven years by the time it made its debut in the first week of 1962. But it was the first British series to depict criminals and police officers – and sometimes only a fine line separated them – with realism, not idealism. The earliest Z-Cars episodes are tame by today’s standards but at the time they were a revelation, and not a welcome one, about life as it was lived in the back streets.
They were written by Troy Kennedy Martin, whose brother Ian would later create The Sweeney on ITV, making the Kennedy Martins the country’s most prolific crime brotherhood after the Kray twins.
Decades have passed since the first series of Z-Cars was last seen but the nostalgia channel Talking Pictures TV has acquired the surviving episodes and is screening them weekly, in their original order. Watching the first few, I was struck by the similarity with one of the best of the current crop. Blue Lights is set in Ulster, not on Merseyside as was Z-Cars, but it adheres to basically the same format: squads of radio patrols trying to dispense social good and law enforcement in equal measure.
But, oh, how the landscape has changed in the intervening years. A glance at the Christmas TV schedules from the week before Z-Cars was launched reveals a Britain unrecognisable from the one we know today. BBC TV’s first offering on Christmas morning was a programme of hymns called Good Christian Men Rejoice, which sounds more like an injunction than an invitation. Men who were not Christian, and presumably Christians who were not men, were not encouraged to rejoice, it seemed.
A performance of Handel’s Messiah preceded the Queen’s fifth televised Christmas message and the highlight of the evening was The Black and White Minstrel Show, an entertainment in which caricatured black people were impersonated by white performers as if it were the most natural thing in the world – in much the same way as the current fashion for men impersonating caricature women.
ITV in the North also began Christmas Day with religion: High Mass followed by carols from Durham Cathedral. In the afternoon, Chipperfield’s Circus had a cage full of live leopards and Mr Pastry emptying buckets of water over Charlie Cairoli from a pair of stepladders.
Boxing Day saw ITV’s sports review of the year (Danny Blanchflower had captained Spurs to the first league and FA Cup double since 1897) and a Christmas party hosted by Muriel Young and Bert Weedon, two names for those of us of a certain age to conjure with.
The oddest entry in that week’s TV Times is for a Welsh language programme billed as “a word game for married couples”, raising the intriguing question of which words single people in Wales were not allowed to know about.
No-one could have foreseen it but culture was approaching a watershed. One year later the first Beatles record was in the charts and the Sixties revolution had begun. By the end of the decade expectations had changed so completely that Z-Cars was collecting its police pension.
With each new generation comes another revolution, and those of us once at the vanguard of change are left scratching our heads in a world of parasocialite tradwives. What does it all mean? Who cares; open a bottle of Warninks Advocaat and pretend it’s 1962 again.