LOST!!! Z-Cars – 1968

Unfortunately, Wikipedia lists the entire 1968 year of this show as lost. Here’s their explanation:

“The original series was one of the last British television dramas screened live regularly — already rare by the time the programme began in 1962. It was felt that this helped immediacy and pace, and episodes were live as late as 1965, despite cameras appearing in shot. Most were videotaped for repeat, but the BBC regularly wiped tapes after programmes exceeded their usefulness, agreements with unions meaning they could only be shown a limited number of times. The space needed to store large videotapes, as well as the expense when they could be re-used, were factors.”

Anyway, here’s what they say the premise of the show was:
“Z-Cars (pronounced "Zed Cars", sometimes written as Z Cars) is a British television drama series centred on the work of mobile uniformed police in the fictional town of Newtown, based on Kirkby in the outskirts of Liverpool in Lancashire. Produced by the BBC and screened on BBC Television (renamed BBC1 in 1964), it debuted in January 1962 and ran for 16 years until September 1978.”

That’s about all I know! So, unless there’s a Robin fan from way back who happened to somehow film a copy of this show and send it to me (yeah, right!) or Robin himself is secretly reading this and has a copy of his own he could let me borrow (a double “yeah, right!”) I’m going to give up on ever trying to find a copy of it. But you know, we can comfort ourselves with the probability that it was a really small part, being so early in his career and all – he doesn’t even mention it in his book!