Z-Cars: Day Trip Review

I continue in this trip through this legendary show as we move back into colour with the episode Day Trip that also includes an appearance with Elizabeth Sladen before she was in Doctor Who which does make this episode some interesting viewing. This episode deals with a known thief who tries to fool the police that she has mended her ways but she hasn't and of course, gets caught again in the end, but it's not as simple as that as there is more to this as we find out during the course of this episode...

The episode starts off in a routine manner seeing PC Quilley (Played by Douglas Fielding) back on the job after the events of a previous episode called "Breakage" (I did a review of that a while back.) and PC "Geordie" Skinner (Once again played by Ian Cullen), both are under the supervision of Detective Sergeant Haggar (Played by John Collins). From the start there is a sense of Skinner not liking Haggar that much which I'm guessing part of it is because Haggar always calls Skinner "Geordie" due to where he is from (The accent is a give away), Skinner doesn't seem that pleased to see Haggar when he hints that he may be back in Newtown for good.

During the course of the episode, Haggar is keeping an eye on Dilly Watson (Played by Hilary Tindall) who is know to him as a thief and she's come to Newtown to do some more theft, it's interesting to see that these two have got some history in that Haggar is doing some good in trying to keep her out of trouble but ultimately fails at the end. Dilly does have a friend called Rose played by the ever brilliant Elizabeth Sladen (Sounding like a proper Scouser too!) who seems fed up of her situation in that nothing exciting happens in Newtown, so they go around looking for stuff to steal and they don't go unnoticed.

Another thing that is surprising was that Dilly used to go stealing with an old associate called Fang (Played by Carolyn Jones) who is now a traffic warden on the straight and narrow, but she doesn't forgive herself for what she has done which makes the character have an extra dimension so she doesn't feel like a last minute addition. Looking back at the character of Haggar, to me it feels as if he was partially an inspiration for the character of Gene Hunt from Life On Mars and Ashes to Ashes and I do say partially because the way Haggar addresses people is similar in the way Gene Hunt does if you lose some of the more offensive words he likes to say.

This story is good to watch not just from the fine performances of the cast (Which I would say for pretty much every episode of Z-Cars I've seen) but for the fact that there is more depth to the guest characters than I expected, especially from the traffic warden which can make you think if anybody from the law might have been involved in trouble in the past.