Passages

[flyonthewall2983]

Patrick Swazye

[jbeall]

Patrick Swazye

Terrible news, and at only 57. A family friend died of pancreatic cancer a few months ago, and it is not a pleasant way to go. RIP the Swayze.

[dx23]

He was battling this cancer for almost 2 years now. Really sad all the pain he went through.

[knives]

At least he won't be feeling pain anymore. Only Brain cancer is worse really. Seemed like a nice fellow.

[bigP]

He was battling this cancer for almost 2 years now. Really sad all the pain he went through.

My dad died of pancreatic cancer in July, only surviving 6 months after it was diagnosed; so it shows just how much of a fighter Patrick Swayze was. A sad loss of a very iconic figure.

[foliagecop]

Sad indeed. Loved his turn in Donnie Darko.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Frank Coghlan Jr.

[bigP]

Keith Floyd

EDIT: Full Obituary from the BBC.

[bigP]

Boxer Darren Sutherland

[Sloper]

Sad quote from the end of the Keith Floyd obit:

But many bridges had been burned. He fell out spectacularly with David Pritchard and was bitter, both about his treatment by the BBC and his own legacy.

"We don't cook any more, we just watch TV programmes about cookery," he told one interviewer.

"Nobody takes cookery seriously now, it's just cheap entertainment. I'm totally to blame. I started it all and now I'm going to go down in history for having started a series of culinary game shows.

"It makes me terribly sad."

I remember him from my childhood as this genial, likeable, comic figure who was always a little bit drunk - but happy drunk. He certainly had way more class than the Nigellas and Jamies and Gordons.

[thirtyframesasecond]

There was a documentary (by Keith Allen) on C4 just last night. He looked terrible. Couldn't believe he was 65. He looked 20 years+ older.

[Perkins Cobb]

The great Zakes Mokae.

[colinr0380]

Sad indeed. Loved his turn in Donnie Darko.

Agreed. He was surprisingly good and it was nice to see Swayze (and Katherine Ross) in interesting roles in that film as flawed mentors. If we factor in Noah Wyle and Drew Barrymore playing teachers as well it all added up to an interesting feeling of the adult characters seeming slightly inappropriate (or miscast) in their roles and working outside of their comfort zones, which worked perfectly for the film.

Perhaps it would be appropriate to go all the way back to Swayze's first film role with the trailer for Skatetown, USA!

The great Zakes Mokae.

Darn. I suppose it says more about my interests though that I remember Zakes Mokae most fondly for his roles in Waterworld (he is the mayor of the first floating town Costner visits who locks him up, but sadly allows him to escape and continue the film!) and Body Parts, the 90s sort of-Mad Love remake with a pre-Lawnmower Man Jeff Fahey getting transplants from a killer after his accident and finding them (after amusing basketball improving scenes and being unable to stop kicking people in the backside with his transplanted leg) forcing him to bump off various witnesses to their previous owner's crimes. Of course it all leads inevitably to the surgeon who performed the operation, performed by a crazed Lindsay Duncan(!) with an American accent! What is is about horror films having great British actresses in small roles playing callous, clumsy or maniacal doctors? Jenny Agutter in a cameo in Darkman, and of course Emma Thompson destroying the world in I Am Legend spring to mind! Anyway Mokae plays the investigating policeman in that film. (Apropos of nothing, the last time that film was scheduled to play on the BBC was the week of Princess Diana’s accident. Given that the film opens with a major car crash sequence it was inevitably pulled from the schedule).

Perhaps his finest role though was again as a haunted policeman driving through Namibia playing tapes of whale songs in Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil (the film is about broken and suicidal people being drawn to and preyed on by a shapeshifting demon). I can’t find a particularly good official trailer for the film online so here’s a representative video.

[HarryLong]

Frank Coghlan Jr.

Billy Batson. I had no idea he was even still around ...

[foliagecop]

Perhaps his finest role though was again as a haunted policeman driving through Namibia playing tapes of whale songs in Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil (the film is about broken and suicidal people being drawn to and preyed on by a shapeshifting demon). I can’t find a particularly good official trailer for the film online so here’s a representative video.

I agree. I thought he was superb in Dust Devil. I always saw him as a very natural actor, never given to histrionics or OTT perfs. Which made his character in DD all the more sympathetic, given the nature of the film.

Zakes Mokae. The sane, bastard father of Luis Guzman.

[Perkins Cobb]

Troy Kennedy Martin, author of the brilliant The Italian Job.

[Perkins Cobb]

Oh, and Roberta Hill, one of the "stars" of the documentary Cinemania, died in July, but nobody much noticed until last week. Also a brief blurb in the new Anthology Film Archives calendar.

Now I feel mildly guilty for wishing she would "just hurry up and die already" during a screening of the two-hour-and-forty-minute Forest of the Hanged through which she coughed loudly and continuously last year.

[MichaelB]

Troy Kennedy Martin, author of the brilliant The Italian Job.

...though much, much more important as one of the most influential writers in British television history. If he'd only written Z Cars, The Sweeney and Edge of Darkness, his place in the pantheon would be rock-solid.

Here's the Screenonline biography - the attached filmography shows that his first love was the small screen.

[ellipsis7]

Great man - liked him a lot, gave me great help - rest in peace...

[dad1153]

Henry Gibson.

From Altman ensembles to loony Landis misfits, the man was a gift that kept on giving. This is perhaps the best thing he ever did: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Occg29DsI7k. =D>

[tojoed]

If he'd only written Z Cars, The Sweeney and Edge of Darkness, his place in the pantheon would be rock-solid.

The Sweeney was written by his brother Ian Kennedy-Martin, I think, but otherwise I agree.

And Henry Gibson, what a sad day. Dr Verringer in The Long Goodbye, Haven Hamilton in Nashviille. For these alone, he'll never be forgotten.

[MichaelB]

If he'd only written Z Cars, The Sweeney and Edge of Darkness, his place in the pantheon would be rock-solid.

The Sweeney was written by his brother Ian Kennedy-Martin, I think, but otherwise I agree.

Ian Kennedy Martin wrote the 1974 pilot, Regan, but aside from his recurring credit as series creator, he didn't actually write any individual series episodes himself - whereas Troy wrote half a dozen.

[souvenir]

I was just marveling at Henry Gibson's Twitter the other day so his death is a bit surprising.

[ellipsis7]

The Times obit for TKM is first out of the traps...

Troy Kennedy Martin was responsible in large part for two pieces of television which have become classics. In the early 1960s he had a central role in the creation of Z-Cars, which challenged the traditionally cosy notion of the police series, while in the 1980s his nuclear thriller, Edge of Darkness, was a nightmarish warning about the dangers of ecological disaster.

He wrote much else for television and made regular forays into the cinema, most successfully with his screenplay for The Italian Job.

He enjoyed a full career but it was one that rarely moved in a straight path, partly because he was reluctant to compromise a forthright approach to his craft but also from choice, as when he left Z-Cars only a few months into its run.

After the critical and popular success of Edge of Darkness he should have had the television world at his feet but the rest of his career was something of an anti-climax. He became disenchanted with television’s growing surrender to accountants and did not help himself by leaving projects unfinished. He also had tax problems which forced him to accept inferior assignments. But his best work places him among the finest writers for the medium.

Francis Troy Kennedy Martin was born into a Catholic family and named Troy after a Father Troy who had been a friend of his Glaswegian Irish father. His mother, a teacher, died when he was 15, leaving his father, who had been out of work, to bring up four children. The family moved south, where Troy attended Finchley Catholic Grammar School, and to Ireland as Troy won a place at Trinity College Dublin to read history.

He spent his National Service as a subaltern with the Gordon Highlanders in Cyprus, as part of a peacekeeping force in that divided island. He drew on this experience in his first television play, Incident at Echo Six (1958), which was set in Cyprus and followed a platoon of young conscripts under fire. It was transmitted by the BBC in December 1958.

At this time he also wrote a novel, Beat on a Damask Drum, which was set in Indochina in 1954 during the loss of Dien Bien Phu, which signalled the end of French colonial rule. Favourable reviews, including one from Graham Greene, caused Kennedy Martin to wonder whether going into television was a downward step.

But Incident at Echo Six was well received by viewers and critics and on the strength of it Kennedy Martin was offered a job with the BBC script editors’ department. Here he found himself in the company of an extraordinarly talented group, including John Hopkins, John McGrath, Kenith Trodd and Tony Garnett, who, like him, were to make a distinguished mark on BBC drama.

As a script editor Kennedy Martin did little more than hold other writers’ hands and he learnt far more about his craft from doing adaptations of novels and stories by Greene, Somerset Maugham and Raymond Chandler. He regarded it as ideal training for while he had to stay true to the spirit of the original there was scope for seeing what would work in the television medium.

The credit for thinking up the idea for Z-Cars, a police series set in the north and based on patrol cars, is disputed. Elwyn Jones, from the BBC drama department, had already worked with the police in Lancashire and was keen to set a fictional series there. Kennedy Martin claimed to have had the idea while recovering from mumps and listening to police patrols on VHF radio.

Whatever the origins of the project, Kennedy Martin did more than anyone else to develop it and give it shape. He visited Lancashire more than once, went out with the police and observed the often difficult relations between the force and the community, particularly in working-class areas. The Z-Cars format was his, he held the copyright and he was paid a fee for every episode.

He wrote the first episode, which went out in January 1962, when he was not yet 30. It immediately signalled a new departure for police TV series, introducing a degree of realism never before seen. The police were seen as fallible, smoking and gambling while on duty and being violent towards their wives, He wrote several more of the early scripts and supervised others. But while the series was critcially acclaimed, and drew large audiences, Kennedy Martin soon became disillusioned and left. He felt that Z-Cars had moved away from his original intention of using the police as a device to explore people’s lives.

In 1964 he delivered a forceful attack on naturalism in television drama in the magazine Encore and argued for a different mode. He tried to put this into effect in Diary of a Young Man, which he wrote with another Z-Cars pioneer, John McGrath. The six-part series followed two young northerners to “swinging London”, and used voiceover commentary and still pictures to break the naturalistic mould. It was a bold, but flawed, experiment which had little lasting influence.

By this time Kennedy Martin was going through one of his periodic financial crises, and when his brother, Ian Kennedy Martin, offered him work on Weavers Green, an ITV soap opera about country vets, he was glad to have the money. But he invented the pseudonym Tony Marsh to hide what might have looked like a comedown after Z-Cars and Diary of a Young Man.

In 1967 Kennedy Martin moved into the cinema to write the screenplay for The Italian Job, an enjoyable bullion heist comedy, with Michael Caine as the criminal mastermind and a climax of a Mini Cooper chase through the streets of Turin. After this promising start, his next film, Kelly’s Heroes, was a disappointingly conventional action adventure starring Clint Eastwood.

In 1970 he returned to television, making an excursion into situation comedy with If It Moves, File It, an ITV series starring John Bird and Dudley Foster as filing clerks in Whitehall. Unusually it had no audience and therefore no laughter track. He was probably happier contributing episodes to The Sweeney, which had been created by his brother, Ian, and revolutionised the television police series as Z-Cars had done in the 1960s.

By the mid-1970s his personal life was in disarray with the acrimonious collapse of his marriage. In addition, despite his high earnings from television and films, he was being pursued for arrears on income tax and VAT and forced to exchange a large London house for a two-room flat. In 1978 Z-Cars finally came to the end of its run, and Kennedy Martin wrote the final episode, in which he brought back several of the original characters.

In 1983 came his five-part television adaptation of Angus Wilson’s novel The Old Men at the Zoo, starring Marius Goring and Andrew Cruikshank, and Reilly — Ace of Spies, set in the early part of the 20th century and based on the exploits of the Russian-born British agent, Sidney Reilly, played by Sam Neill.

But neither of these admirable projects had the impact of Edge of Darkness (1985), a dense, enigmatic thriller which started with a policeman (played by Bob Peck) trying to track down his daughter’s killer but went into the murkier waters of a conspiracy to convert nuclear waste into plutonium. The six-part serial, which also had a charismatic performance from Joe Don Baker as a CIA agent, was first transmitted on BBC2 and immediately repeated on BBC1.

It turned out to be Kennedy Martin’s last personal project. He was given the freedom to write up to the last minute, thereby keeping the narrative fresh and avoiding interference from above, an indulgence that few other writers would enjoy again as television entered a multichannel and ratings-chasing environment.

He continued to be busy but only a fraction of what he wrote after Edge of Darkness made it to the screen, a sad waste of an unusual talent. Intriguingly, one of the casualties, dating from the late Eighties, was a drama about global warming.

In 1988 he co-wrote Red Heat, an action thriller starring Arnold Schwarzengger, but it was routine stuff. There followed the frustration of abandoned projects until Hostile Waters (1997). Made for the US cable channel HBO, it dramatised a real incident from 1986 when US and Russian submarines, both nuclear-powered and carrying ballistic missiles, collided off Bermuda.

Due to political sensitivity in the US the script went through ten versions. Screened on the BBC, it was Kennedy Martin’s first work to appear on British television since Edge of Darkness 12 years before. In 1999 he adapted Andy McNab’s bestseller, Bravo Two Zero, with Sean Bean leading an SAS mission during the Gulf War. He had just finished scripting an ambitious six-part TV work on global warming called Broken Light for HBO, based on the writings of James Lovelock.

Kennedy Martin’s marriage in 1967 to Diana Aubrey, an actress, was dissolved. They had a son and a daughter.


Troy Kennedy Martin, TV and film scriptwriter, was born on February 15, 1932. He died of liver cancer on September 15, 2009, aged 77

[jbeall]

Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary fame.

My parents dragged me to see them in concert several times when I was a kid; I absolutely love their music. I lose it listening to "Puff the Magic Dragon" even when nobody's died; it'd be too painful to bear now.