TROY KENNEDY-MARTIN. Born 1932. Creator of long-running TV police series Z Cars, though only remained with it for three months, and of The Sweeney among other series; has also worked in Hollywood. British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award, 1983.

TELEVISION SERIES

1962-65 Z Cars
1964     Diary of a Young Man (with John McGrath)
1975     The Sweeney
1983     Reilly--Ace of Spies
1983     The Old Men at the Zoo
1985     Edge of Darkness
1986     The Fourth Floor

PUBLICATIONS

"Natsw Go Home: First Statement of a New Television Drama." Encore (London), 1964.

Edge of Darkness. London: Faber, 199.

Troy Kennedy Martin began his career as a television screenwriter in 1958 and quickly emerged as a leading member of a group of writers, directors and producers at the BBC who were pushing the limits of British television drama. As well as writing episodes of crime series, literary adaptations, and original miniseries, Kennedy-Martin became an outspoken proponent of a new approach to television drama that would exploit what he saw as the specific properties of the medium.

His first major chance to test these ideas came with the BBC police series Z Cars, which proved enormously popular and ran from 1962 to 1965. The series was acclaimed for the fast pace and gritty realism with which it depicted a Lancashire police force coping with the problems of a modern housing estate. Its view of the police offered a sharp contrast with the homespun philosophy of PC Dixon in the BBC's Dixon of Dock Green, which had been extremely popular with family audiences since its debut in 1955. Kennedy-Martin wrote the first episode of Z Cars, and six more during the initial season, but did not return for the later seasons because he felt the series had lost its critical edge.

In 1964 he published an article in the theater magazine Encore in which he argued forcefully for a "New Television Drama." Through its attack on "naturalism," this article set the terms for a lively, if sometimes confusing, debate on realism in television drama which persists into the present. Kennedy-Martin advocated using the camera to do more than just show talking heads, freeing the dramatic structure from the limits of real time, and creating more complex relations between sound and image. In particular, he wanted to exploit what he called "the total objectivity of the television camera" which gave the medium a built-in Brechtian critical dimension that worked against subjective identification with characters.

From Kennedy-Martin's point-of-view, the value of Z Cars lay in its respect for reality: its refusal to idealize the police and its attempt to reveal the underlying social causes that led to crime. Yet, because the style remained "naturalistic," Kennedy Martin felt that it was soon compromised by the generic and institutional constraints that encourage identification with the police and the demonization of the criminal.

Despite his disappointment with Z Cars, Kennedy-Martin continued to write within popular crime and action genres, notably for Thames Television's police series The Sweeney (1975-78). He also wrote screenplays for several action films, with the same sense of frustration that his critical intentions were subverted in the production process.

Some of the formal innovations which Kennedy-Martin called for in his manifesto were incorporated into Diary of a Young Man, a six-part serial broadcast by the BBC in 1964, written by Kennedy-Martin and John McGrath and directed by Ken Loach. Other writers, notably David Mercer and Dennis Potter, also explored the possibilities of a non-naturalistic television drama. Yet it was not until the 1980s that Kennedy-Martin was able to produce work that fulfilled both his critical and formalist goals. First came a fairly free adaptation of Angus Wilson's The Old Men at the Zoo as a five-part serial, broadcast by the BBC in 1983, a powerful and disturbing science-fiction parable about a political order whose logic leads to the destruction of Britain in a nuclear war.

Fears of nuclear power and government bureaucracy also drove Kennedy-Martin's major achievement, Edge of Darkness, a political thriller broadcast in six parts on BBC2 in late 1985 and promptly repeated in three parts on consecutive nights on BBC1. This serial combined the "naturalistic" tradition of British television drama on social issues with a popular thriller format and elements of fantasy and myth. A police inspector, investigating the murder of his daughter, discovers that she belonged to an anti-nuclear organization that had uncovered an illegal nuclear experiment backed by the government. The break with naturalism occurs when the murdered woman simply appears beside her father and starts a conversation with him, linking his investigation to the fusion of myth and science in the ecological movement to which she had belonged.

The popularity of political thrillers on British television after 1985 confirmed the significance of Edge of Darkness as a key work of the decade. Although Kennedy Martin advocated the development of short dramatic forms, not unlike the music videos which emerged in the 1980s, he has made a major contribution to British television drama in the developments of the long forms of series and serials.

-Jim Leach