"Two pies? How d'ya get two pies...?"

"Two pies? How d'ya get two pies...?"

For Episode Six, we elected to cover the 'Z Cars' episode 'Friday Night' as the producer David E Rose (who was born in Swanage, not a million miles away from us) had recently passed away.
This story is from the first series and features at one point all of the four regulars (Brian Blessed, Jimmy Ellis, Jeremy Kemp and Joseph Brady). But the story mainly focuses on PCs Lynch and Steele and traffic WPC Jenny Stacey. 

'Friday Night' was written by Troy Kennedy Martin and balances both tragic and funny scenes, making it an interesting episode to watch.

There's the death of a young couple in a motorcycle crash, caused by a drunken driver played by Garfield Morgan who will go on to play Regan and Carter's boss in 'The Sweeney'.

This leads to a devastating scene when Lynch and Steele go to inform the young man's mother only to realise that the girl killed was her daughter and that she has lost both of her children.
They also pick up a drunken man and his friend in the car as the drunk (who had retired from his job that day) had smashed a window with his clock.

This leads to some of the comedy as he sits in the back of Z Victor 2, and you can clearly see Jimmy Ellis trying hard not to laugh at his singing and having to cover his mouth at one point. Bear in mind that the series was transmitted live and there was no room for the actors to start corpsing.

Another source of comedy is Grandpa Maddigan played by J.G. Devlin who interacts mostly with Sergeant Twentyman, the station sergeant. We love Twentyman, who is your typical down-to-earth Liverpudlian copper. 

Sadly, Leonard Williams who plays Twentyman died in November 1962, a few days after his 45th birthday. He was later replaced by the equally down to earth Sergeant Blackett, as played by Robert Keegan.

'Friday Night' also features a young William Gaunt as DC Maycock, who might possibly be the great-grandson of Bob Marriott from 'Sergeant Cork', or so we theorized.

If you've never seen 'Z Cars', there are a number of colour episodes currently out on DVD and you can find some of the black-and-white ones without too much searching... Ahem...

And if you'd like to read all about the series you can do no better than reading the excellent books by David Brunt, which are available from Lulu.

(By Lisa Parker)