I’d wager that most people with a familiarity with Z Cars (1962-1978) lore know already why Alan Plater’s second episode for the BBC’s long-running police drama series is legendary. First shown on Wednesday 2 October 1963, and then repeated on 5 January 1964, ‘A Quiet Night’ is infamous for grinding the usual pacing of the then 45-minute programme to an unusual halt. Plater’s episode – only the second of the eighteen he wrote for the show between 1962 and 1965 – dared to show the familiar Newtown coppers battling the tedium of an unusually serene night on patrol, and in some cases their own nagging consciences, rather than facing the usual challenge from multiple wrong-doers.
Plater himself stoked the mythology, sometimes speaking of the subversive ambition of ‘A Quiet Night’ in the same breath as another of his Z Cars screenplays, where he took the opposite path, and frenetically crammed in multiple plot-lines in a fashion that anticipated Hill Street Blues two decades later.
Although ‘A Quiet Night’ doesn’t exist in the archives, there are ways of getting hold of a script. For example, the Plater collection at the Hull History Centre has a camera script that I’ve not seen, but this episode was also included in a collection of Z Cars scripts published by 1968 by Longman, alongside three other examples by Ronald Eyre, Keith Dewhurst and John Hopkins. Edited by Michael Marland, the book is evidently aimed at teachers for use in the classroom, as it includes questions for discussion and some explanation of technical terms as might be typically found in TV scripts.
I can only speculate on the editor’s decision to select these four episodes as case-studies, although it’s odd that there are no examples by certain scriptwriters deemed to be key ones in the show’s initial 1962-1965 incarnation: namely Troy Kennedy Martin (the show’s creator), Elwyn Jones and Allan Prior. In an introduction to the collection, Ronald Eyre (one of the writers included within) is rather scathing about how the initial power of the series quickly diminished, as ‘there were fewer scripts that offered any sort of comment on law and society and more that told a simple tale of crime and detection. The series became safe as it became stale’ (p.5). This may possibly have been written even before Z Cars was revived in a more soapy format in 1967 (it limped on until 1978 while its various spin-offs came and went).
The inclusion of ‘A Quiet Night’ in this published collection may perhaps have played a small part in its canonisation as ‘elevated’ genre writing, but its appearance as the first example in the book also gestures towards its typicality, as a way of encapsulating the ethos and world of the series to readers/students less familiar with it.
I can only guess at how close this version of ‘A Quiet Night’ was to what original viewers first saw in 1963, particularly given that it went out live. But it’s what we have to work with. And when I read it through for the first time, I was a little surprised.
‘A Quiet Night’ describes exactly that, giving space for the regular characters to banter, tell dubious in-jokes, mull over things, and talk about how it’s a quiet night. But the legend of the show as being one where nothing happens proves to be not entirely the case. There seems to be a popular memory of ‘A Quiet Night’ as – to cite just one example I’ve found online – ‘simply two people talking on a night shift with no action’. But things do happen, albeit rather slowly. And another claim that I’ve heard is that the action is entirely ‘crime free’, which would surely have been a maverick move for a popular police drama. But again, it’s not entirely the case.
So what does happen? Among the initial longueurs and mundane conversations there is talk of certain well-known burglars being potentially on the loose, which gives an edge to the unexplained sequences of a man mooching through the streets. It’s enough to unnerve a local councillor who calls the police, but it transpires that he is merely wandering the streets following an argument with his wife. A second strand concerns a pathetic drunkard picked up from a pub and then deposited home; similarly, viewers would likely expect something to develop out of this mundane scenario, and indeed it does. For it emerges that this character has fallen into a slough of depression following an injury that is preventing him working and pursuing his darts expertise. A nosey parker prone to wasting police time now has good reason to inform them about the mysterious smell of gas coming from this person's apartment, where it turns out he has finally killed himself.
Domestic incidents, burglars off-screen, death by suicide – it’s clearly more than ‘two people talking on a night shift with no action’. There’s also an emphasis upon troubled conscience, with Fancy Smith (Brian Blessed) all jittery about having bumped a car on duty, and Lynch (James Ellis) regretful that he had not taken up an invite to have a cup of tea with the troubled man who thereafter killed himself.
But another surprising aspect of ‘A Quiet Night’ is what the published script suggests about the editing pace of the episode. It’s a crude measurement, but I counted a total of 128 scene-changes, which is significantly higher than the other three Z Cars episodes included in the 1968 book collection (which have 54, 83 and 90 respectively). It’s a similar story if we count the number of named characters in the cast list. ‘A Quiet Night’ has nineteen, whereas the others have fourteen, eighteen and twenty. So: hardly the lean, stripped-down drama of legend.
In his book on The Beiderbecke Affair, William Gallagher rightly observes that the episode transcends simple cop-show plotting because ‘the death wasn’t murder, there isn’t a crime, no-one is or ever will be arrested’. Thus what Plater did was ‘hide the plot where he would say it belongs: underneath all the character work’.
That’s all well and good, but there’s still a part of me disappointed that ‘A Quiet Night’ didn’t actually conform to the way it has been apparently (mis)remembered in some quarters: as a couple of fellas having a chat for an hour in their patrol car. I don’t know about you, but I reckon I would have happily watched that.
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