Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - Next Time Won't You Play With Me?

Z-Cars - "Happy Families" March 18, 1964

I'll Get the the meat of the episode in a moment, but first I have to tackle a question. And before I can do that, I have to tackle a different question.

Why do Americans say "zee" and Brits say "zed?"

Good question.

It turns out that long ago, as written English was being put into rules, the letter "Z" was one of the last ones to be recognised as a separate letter. The prevailing theory seems to be that the symbols were invented to correspond to the sound, and the actual names of the symbols came later. For "Z" there seems to have once been three popular possibilities: "zee," "zed" and "izzard."

"Izzard" seems to have gone out of fashion entirely. (Fans of Harry Stephen Keeler will recognise it - he likes to use the phrase "A to Izzard" most likely due to the oddness and the obscurity of it.) (I also like to think that there's an alternate universe somewhere where there's a cross-dressing stand-up comedian named Eddie Zed.)

So anyway, we're left with "zee" and "zed." It seems that for a while "zed" was the favorite on both sides of the Atlantic until American schoolchildren were given the dubious gift of the "ABC" song ("Now I know my ABC's/Next time won't you play with me?"). You see, "zed" doesn't fit the rhyme scheme and "zee" does.


The next thing to clear up:

What the heck is a Z-Car?

Good Question.

An interesting subset of the study of car design is the design of cars that are preferred by people in positions of authority. Frequently one variety of car becomes the default symbol of upper government and law enforcement. Examples of this are the American Crown Victoria, the Soviet Volga and in the UK, the Ford Zephyr. (The luxury variant of the Zephyr was the Zodiac - I infer that the Zodiac was used for the higher ranks, in the same way that the Crown Vics have a police standard (The "P7" or "Interceptor") and officials use the civilian (luxury) model.)

Now, to business.

Z-Cars ran for sixteen years and clocked in at 667 episodes. It seems to have been one of those things that (if half the episodes hadn't been destroyed) one could just watch episode after episode spotting actors that were better known from somewhere else.

So, as an example, here we can see Brian Blessed starting out as one of the series regulars, before he grew a beard and started doing that thing where he opens his mouth really wide and goes "arrrrrgh" for no apparent reason.

I've already hit two shows that promised on their debut that they would be more gritty and realistic (and by extension, truthy). Here we have the granddaddy of the phenomenon (at least on UK television.

The nature of this episode's grit? Looks like a kid has come into a handful of naughty pics, and his mother has decided that now that the child has looked at, well, whatever he's supposed to have looked at, his brain is fried, he is now a criminal, call the police and lock him up for the good of society.



I suspect that this particular episode was trotted out for a recent repeat because it was more of a curio, than an example of the show at its best.