Z-Cars: Waste
Z-Cars was a long-running (1962 to 1978) and hugely popular police procedural series which hasn’t appeared on this blog or its predecessor before. I do actually have one of its DVD releases, but frankly I don’t tend to get on very well with police shows like this one and thus didn’t feel the ability to blog about it. Its title is either from a common nickname for police cars, or there is a very involved explanation that it was based on the way letters were used for police divisions in the area of Lancashire around Barrow-in-Furness. The series is set in the fictional town of Newtown, based on Kirkby near Liverpool.
This episode is chiefly famous as being Lewis Collins’s first television work. The police call on Mr and Mrs Cunningham as part of their enquiries into Clive Parsons, an escaped prisoner, since they are known associates of him. During the course of their visit to the house, it comes out that the Cunninghams have been hiding their son (played by Collins) in the loft of their house because they think that he has committed a murder. It turns out that he has not committed this murder in fact, and there is a twist in the plot right at the end, but I’m going to keep that to myself.
I’m going to be frank here and say that there are plot holes in this one that you could drive a Z-Car through. The main problem in my opinion is that it’s difficult to get the Cunninghams’ characters right and the episode fails to. On the one hand they are supposed to be naive enough to be friends with a violent criminal and on the other hand they are supposed to be cunning enough to hide their son thinking that he has committed a crime. I suspect that the intended effect is to make the audience run straight into this contradiction and start arguing at home. Probably the twist in the plot is intended to make viewers conclude that the Cunninghams are far more cunning than naive and that they’ve pulled the wool over the police’s eyes.
Unfortunately the Cunninghams are both shaking with the jitters, especially Mrs Cunningham, and it just makes the police more suspicious that at least something criminal is going on in the house than they were to start off with. From everything we see of the Cunninghams, nobody would think they could possibly pull off harbouring an actual criminal: they don’t understand how anything works, have made an incredible mistake and the whole scenario isn’t credible.
There is also a problem with the police. The 1970s were a high point of terrible policing and I’m not a lawyer, but I’m absolutely certain that if you ever end up in court and it comes out that the police have been going through your kitchen and even your loft without your permission or a warrant, as they do in this episode, any trial would be derailed very quickly if you have a decent barrister. One of the officer knocks out the son as he attacks him, which would be defended as reasonable force, but neither officer has any idea of how they’re going to describe this to the station on the radio. They even question the entire family together about the supposed crime instead of taking them to the station. The police are even less capable of policing than the Cunninghams are of criminaling.
Finally I’m not very happy with the collection of regional accents going on here. This was made right here in Birmingham so has no excuse to be influenced by the common London-centric attitude of British television that everything north of Watford is ‘the north’ and features flat caps and whippets. Lewis Collins’s accent is more Liverpool than all the others, and while of course it’s quite common for children to have a different accent from their parents, his accent is different from everyone else’s and it grates.
Nonetheless it’s interesting as a drama and particularly as Collins’s first television work. He comes across as quite simple, with not a hint of the attitude he has in The Professionals. He was about 28 when it was made, but manages to look much younger, helped by the way they’ve dressed him in a jumper that is too short and keeps showing his midriff. His act is actually the best bit of this drama. What his character has spent his time hidden in the attic doing, is artwork which his father has been selling. Most of the painting is frankly rather disturbing, so he comes across as a strange mixture of simple and yet possibly slightly disturbed. I’m prepared to let the problem that he had problems at school but has just been allowed to vanish into his parents’ attic pass, because in comparison to some of the other things going on in this show that is at least vaguely possible.
Finally there’s a wonderful contemporary televisiual detail in this show, which is that advertisements weren’t allowed but shows still used real world props such as food containers. This resulted in brand and shop names being taped over on props so that you couldn’t read them but the packaging still being clearly recognisable. When the police go through Mrs Cunningham’s cupboard we clearly see tins of Heinz soup with the name taped over and Oxo stock cubes with just the final O taped over so that it just says Ox on the box. Perhaps the best known example of this was on Blue Peter where even commonly used brand names like Sellotape were replaced with the words ‘sticky back plastic’ and the word Kelloggs taped out on cereal boxes.
Even though I have savaged this episode to the extent that I actually feel a bit guilty, it’s still worth watching as an interesting drama and frankly it’s worth watching for Lewis Collins in an unusual role for him.
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