Occasionally, a debate in the snug or a confidential chat with a regular can lead to another post, as is the case with this one. When Gildas recently expressed an interest in writing a piece on US police dramas of the 1970s, I recalled a post last year by Moor Larkin which did just that. Gildas took a look and decided to write eloquently on the un-glamorous world of the downbeat British spy of the same era, ‘Callan’. This then left a vacancy for a look back at the way in which British TV portrayed the police in the 70s, and I guess it’s left to me to fill it.
I’m qualified to do so not because I have a photographic memory of programmes that aired during my formative years (though sometimes I worry this is indeed the case); in our house, it was almost always the American incarnation of the cop show that was watched, anyway. No, I’m in a position to pen a piece on the subject because I own all the available DVDs of the neglected trio produced by the Beeb in the first half of the 70s – ‘Dixon of Dock Green’, ‘Z-Cars’ and ‘Softy Softly: Task Force’. All three had a long run and all three stretched back to the B&W era that the brave new world of BBC1 Colour left behind at the end of 1969 – even though the majority of viewers were still watching in monochrome.
The granddaddy of them all, ‘Dixon of Dock Green’, ran from 1955-1976, twenty-one years with the same leading man, the legendary Jack Warner, who was into his 80s when the series eventually finished. ‘Z-Cars’ debuted in 1962, one of the first key new-look television dramas of the 60s, perceived as being gritty and more realistic than anything that had gone before in the genre; after a brief break in the mid-60s, it returned as a twice-weekly police soap and finally ended in a fifty-minute format in 1978. ‘Softly Softly’ had begun as a ‘Z-Cars’ spinoff in 1966 and was relaunched as a colour series from 1969, with the ‘Task Force’ tag added. It also ended in 1976, the same year Sgt Dixon finally hung-up his truncheon.
When these series were released on DVD, I purchased them out of curiosity, for unlike the cop show that is always evoked when British police dramas of the 1970s are discussed – ‘The Sweeney’ – none of them have experienced the regular repeat runs that Regan & Carter have enjoyed over the past thirty-five years. Whenever referenced in a clips programme, the footage shown tends to be from the black & white years, poor quality 405-line telecine recordings with wobbly sets and cameras occasionally making a brief cameo in the corner of the screen. The DVDs are drawn from the colour eras of the three shows and look a good deal more professional as a consequence. Anyway, the point is I came to them with a fresh pair of eyes, possessing only a distant memory of the trio, with ‘Dixon’ being the one I recalled the best, even if the memory was limited to Jack Warner’s pre-credits ‘Evenin’ all’ introduction.
Of the three, ‘Dixon’ has the most unjust reputation, routinely called ‘cosy’ by those who never saw it because it was short on car-chases and shoot-outs – in effect, closer to the more humdrum nature of policing as it was in the early 70s than a turbo-charged action/adventure series. The scripts therefore rely more on character development and have an intimate domestic feel reminiscent of ‘Play for Today’, something that makes you care about both the regular cast and the guest artists who only appear the once. Viewing the surviving colour episodes on DVD, ‘Dixon’ comes across as a very human drama dealing with the little people who don’t stage audacious blags with sawn-off shooters. More often than not, it focuses on life’s failures and does so with great humanity and sympathy. There’s a strain of melancholy running through the series that’s reflected both in the ageing, past-retirement lead actor and the derelict, partially demolished docklands locations. It’s as though we’re watching a world pass away before our eyes.
‘Dixon’ was set in a fictitious district of London’s East End, whereas ‘Z-Cars’ was set in a fictitious district of Merseyside called Newtown. Although Newtown was intended to reflect the early 60s boom in social housing, creating fresh urban sprawls that needed policing, the colour era of the series features location filming in Victorian streets of decomposing terraced homes not unlike those seen in ‘Dixon’. The ensemble cast is larger than its older BBC brother, with James Ellis as avuncular Ulsterman Sgt Bert Lynch the nearest Newtown Police had to a Dixon figure. The uniformed constables generally resemble England squad members who never got a game at the 1970 World Cup Finals, whereas the CID department still contains a few old-school ‘Jacks’ in tatty hats and grubby raincoats; amongst the younger DCs is none other than Geoffrey Hayes, who was to shortly quit the force to share a house with a bear, a pink hippo and a non-specific animal called Zippy.
The limited budgets these studio-based BBC cop shows had in comparison to a filmed drama like ‘The Sweeney’ or its Thames precursor, ‘Special Branch’, invariably leads to greater emphasis on the characters, who often have the opportunity to exhibit their acting skills in extended scenes that would be cut to within an inch of their lives today, showing again that TV drama of the 70s was largely informed by theatre, whereas today cinema is the main influence. Also, all three of the series under discussion were aired before the 9.00 watershed, so the prospect of ‘Sweeney’ or ‘Professionals’-type violence is another absentee that left more space for dialogue and depth of character.
The original detective duo of ‘Z-Cars’ in the early 60s, Barlow and Watt, left Newtown and set up in another fictitious town, Wyvern, heading the regional crime squad when ‘Softly Softly’ was launched in 1966. Stratford Johns as DCS Charlie Barlow was once seen as the copper’s copper, the intimidating bruiser instantly recognised by the real thing as the closest a fictional portrayal had yet to achieve. John Watt, played by Frank Windsor, was his less incendiary sidekick. At the end of the 60s, the series received a shot in the arm by posting Barlow and Watts to yet one more imagined town, Thamesford, where they led the Task Force of the rejuvenated title. Whist some of this series’ stories are very much of the time – skinhead football hooligans, industrial disputes etc. – others are depressingly prescient, such as child neglect and the smuggling of illegal immigrants.
The BBC therefore began the 1970s with three successful and popular primetime police productions, all of which surprisingly stand up to inspection forty years on, at a time when the BBC doesn’t have a single continuing drama set in a police station (nor, come to that, does ITV). Perhaps the fact that the Beeb had a permanent Hollywood studio-sized base in the shape of Television Centre and a production-line system in place that trained writers, directors and actors enabled it to maintain the level of quality within the trio of shows, much as Granada managed with ‘Coronation Street’ at the same time. TV drama has changed considerably since then. All the money is now poured into the big-budget four or six-part ‘star vehicle’ series featuring a small pool of household name actors, always claiming the 9.00 slot in order for sex and violence to be included. By contrast, pre-watershed is left to dramas that bear a closer relation to Aussie daytime soaps both in terms of writing and acting.
One only has to watch a couple of episodes of the three programmes I’ve covered to realise yet again how today’s viewers are being sold short; but perhaps the broadcasters are merely reflecting today’s invisible police force where most crimes are concerned. Coming soon – ‘Softly Softly: Paedo Squad’?
© Petunia Winegum