Troy Kennedy Martin
| Troy Kennedy Martin | |
|---|---|
| Born |
15 February 1932 Rothesay, Isle of Bute, Scotland |
| Died | 15 September 2009 (aged 77) Ditchling, East Sussex |
Troy Kennedy Martin (15 February 1932 – 15 September 2009) was a Scottish-born film and television screenwriter best known for creating the long-running BBC TV police series Z-Cars, and for the award-winning 1985 anti-nuclear drama Edge of Darkness. His best-known work for the cinema was the screenplay for the original version of The Italian Job.
He was born in Rothesay, Isle of Bute, and educated at Finchley Catholic Grammar School and Trinity College, Dublin. He had a younger brother Ian, who is also a television writer best known for creating The Sweeney.
He began writing for BBC Television in 1958, beginning with the play Incident at Echo Six, and he wrote four further plays for the BBC over the following three years, before in 1961 creating his first series, Storyboard, a six-part anthology series that consisted both of original scripts and adaptations. The same year, he wrote the police drama The Interrogator.
He wrote an important manifesto about new television drama in 1964, calling for a more mobile style of camera work and less emphasis on dialogue.
It was the genre of crime and policing that gave rise to his next and probably most famous television work, the drama series Z-Cars, which he co-created in 1962. Set in "Newtown", based on Kirkby near Liverpool, Z-Cars was revolutionary in that it depicted a hard-edged, grittier and much more realistic vision of the police force than had been seen on British television – as a result, it was initially very unpopular with the real police. Although he left the programme after the two series, the series ran until 1978, and he returned to write the final episode.
Over the following decade he contributed to various television programmes, and made his first foray into feature films when he wrote The Italian Job, which was released in 1969 and starred Noël Coward and Michael Caine. The following year he wrote Kelly's Heroes, and he scripted two more films during the 1970s – The Jerusalem File (1971) and Sweeney 2 (1978).
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