Z

The illustrated alphabet Part 26: Z is for Z-CARS.

I grew up watching Z-Cars in black and white on a 405 line TV. It was peak time week night viewing for a few years in the 60s.  I have fond if rather blurry memories of it. To be honest there wasn't much else to watch at the time. Z-Cars was a British television drama series centred on the work of mobile uniformed police in the fictional town of Newtown, based on Kirkby, Lancashire. Produced by the BBC, it debuted in January 1962 and ran until September 1978. At the time it was a unique grimy piece of TV drama dealing with both criminal and domestic plot lines in a working class area of north west England. Over time it lost it's edge and a number of flabby spin off shows followed on based around some of the police characters portrayed in the original series of shows. The show was also a spring board for a number of well know British actor's early careers. Nobody talks about it much these days, like Coronation Street, the Beatles or the 'Stones it belongs in some strange bygone age when Britain wasn't quite as fucked up as it is today, (actually it was but we couldn't really see that very clearly at the time, now it's painfully obvious).

This isn't really how I imagined the illustrated alphabet would end but it's OK, it had to end one way or another after the 26 letters we're stuck with had been used up with their randomly allocated words. It's done now.

THE END