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John McGrath (1935 - 2002)Dateline: 3rd February, 2002Seven percent of the UK's population own 84% of its wealth: that's the meaning of the rather odd name of the theatre company formed by John McGrath in 1971, and he is probably best known as the funder and director of that company and, in particular, for The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973), a piece based upon the history of Scotland from the highland clearances to the growth of the off-shore oil industry. Cast in the form of a ceilidh and toured around many non-theatre spaces in Scotland, it was broadcast, making a huge national impact, on BBC television, thus bringing McGrath and his company to the notice of a large population outside of Scotland. Although McGrath is still best known for what he did with 7:84, this work was surrounded by a much longer career writing for television and film. He started his career at the Royal Court, but for most of the sixties he worked in TV. He wrote (and directed) many of the early episodes of the seminal police series Z Cars. It is hard nowadays - if you weren't there! - to imagine the impact of this series. Until then (it began in 1962) the police, as portrayed on TV, were either middle class or, if working class, nonetheless embodied middle class values and viewpoints. Dixon of Dock Green, for example, showed the police as avuncular, comforting figures who upheld society's values, always polite and deferential to their betters. Then came Z Cars. I vividly remember the effect the first couple of episodes had on me. Dixon of Dock Green was one of those series you watched across the tea table because it happened to be on at that time. I would never have made a special effort to watch but it did make easy tea-time viewing. Z Cars was something else! This was the first TV series I ever had to watch. It was gritty and showed policemen as real human beings, with human failings, but most especially, it had a social conscience: villains weren't just villains, comic book bad guys, but real people. They were bad, yes, and they had to be caught and dealt with by the law, but the sight of their lives and the circumstances which brought about their criminality exposed the failures of society as much as it did the crimes they committed. Heady fare for a nineteen year old with a deeply socialist background! Z Cars set the tone for his work for the rest of his life: to, in his own words "use a popular form and try and bang into it some reality." McGrath was a committed socialist all his life and argued in his book A Good Night Out (Popular Culture: Audience, Class and Form) that popular culture (and he uses the work "popular" in its proper meaning, "of the people") is just as valid as the predominant, essentially middle-class culture of the time he was writing (early seventies). He made use of this working-class culture to explain society to itself and reveal truths which many would have preferred to keep hidden. There was great outrage in some quarters at the portrayal of the police and, indeed, of criminals in Z Cars.
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