Z-Cars: Eleanor Rigby Slept Here Review

It's been a while since my last Z-Cars review and I was originally going to finish off a retrospective on the show but after a lot of thinking and some positive feedback from one of the main cast members, I have decided to do a few more reviews. I hope you continue to enjoy reading them as I write them.

What first caught me was the title of the episode itself, as someone who does like the Beatles I thought it was interesting, at first I thought it was the name of a character in the episode and that the series is set outside Liverpool you can connect them, but the character in question is actually called Helen Carter (Played by Anna Cropper) but I think it's because she lives alone is where the link to the title is since Eleanor Rigby in the Beatles song lived alone. The situation is that Helen is becoming more terrified by a stalker who is continuously outside her flat door until the Police arrive.

PC Lynch (Played by James Ellis) arrives on the scene, as the story progresses you do notice some sort of relationship between him and Helen as they find similar interests and with that he borrows a book from her, one might expect this relationship to continue but sadly it doesn't, in a way this is what this story is about: relationships, because the stalker actually admires her but he is going the wrong way into showing his affection by hanging outside her flat whereas with Lynch, he shows some affection with her but in the end in his case it's about doing his job and also when Helen talked about the last time she went to court which didn't end well, that also influenced his decision.

Out on patrol in Zed Victor One is PC Skinner and a quiet PC Newcombe (Played by Ian Cullen and Bernard Holley respectively), they both take more of a back seat in this story with Newcombe suffering from a case of tooth ache and Skinner jokingly suggesting some pliers as a solution (At least I think he is?), they do have some involvement by checking up on Lynch at the scene of the incident but nothing substantial sadly as these two characters are pretty interesting and it's a shame they were not used that much in this story.

This story is certainly an interesting one with a sense of a Hitchcock thriller to it that also includes lighter (If quieter) moments from Bernard Holley and Ian Cullen which evens the tone of the story, the cast in general are also on top form which makes this even better.