Troy Kennedy Martin (15 February 1932 – 15 September 2009) was a Scottish-born film and television screenwriter. He created the long-running BBC TV police series Z-Cars (1962–1978), and the award-winning 1985 anti-nuclear drama Edge of Darkness. He also wrote the screenplay for the original version of The Italian Job (1969). Biography Early life 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. 1960s 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. In 1962, Martin co-created the drama series Z-Cars. 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 first two series, the series ran until 1978, and he returned to write the final episode. In 1965, Martin scripted a television adaptation of Frederik Pohl's short story The Midas Plague, which was shown as an episode for the first series of Out of the Unknown, a science-fiction anthology series shown on BBC2. One of the more light-hearted stories of the otherwise dark and dramatic show, it is one of only 20 (and a half) episodes of the original 48 known to have survived destruction, and is available on DVD. 1970s 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). Sweeney 2 was the second cinematic spin-off from the television