It was the mid-sixties, the start of a very special era on Merseyside:
Everton had won the Championship in 1963
The Meresybeat was taking the music world by storm
The Beatles had started their fabulous rise to world popularity and fame
And BBC tv had an immensely popular new cop-show called Z-Cars
The significance of Z-Cars is that it was set in an undefined area of Merseyside. The series was introduced in 1962 and was an instant hit. It was also a time when regional accents – previously so despised by the BBC establishment – where finally beginning to be heard more regularly on radio and television. Home Counties dominance of the media was being challenged be regional programmes like Z-Cars that were a bit more "cutting-edge" than the usual stuff on telly back then. Z-Cars was streets ahead of its nearest London rival – the cosy and comfortable Dixon of Dock Green... but that's another story.
Z-Cars was based in a fictitious district just outside Liverpool called "Newtown". The setting was one of the new overspill towns that were springing up around British cities after World War II to re-house people after the German blitz and move them out of city-centre Victorian slums.
Most people identified "Newtown" with Kirkby, then in Lancashire, now in Merseyside. The policemen had Lancashire police badges on their hats, not Liverpool ones. Many of the location scenes were actually filmed in Kirkby.
The catchy theme tune chosen by the BBC to herald the Z-Cars series was the music from an old Liverpool folksong called Johnny Todd. And one of the fans, who played PC Sweet on the front desk, was an Evertonian; one day he brought a few of the cast to watch the team. In recognition of that, the team came out on the field to the Z-Cars theme, it has stuck ever since.
It was all about another group of Boys in Blue. Whatever the reason, the theme was introduced midway through the 1963-64 season and became a clarion call for generations of Evertonians.
The original Z-Cars theme was a more sedate fluted version, which Everton first played. A more punchy version was recorded, aimed at the pop charts with some nice saxophone – it was a hit. Everton adopted the punchy version, as did the TV series. This is the version Everton still use today. A revamped version of the tune was also done in 1997 by the group Blueknowz and is available on Tape or CD from the Everton Megastore.
Former Everton Chairman, Peter Johnson, knows to his cost that the Z-Cars theme is an Everton tradition which cannot be trifled with. In the 1994-95 season, a new Everton theme tune was introduced (Fanfare for the Common Man), and the Z-Cars theme was actually dropped for a period. This brazen attempt to jazz things up by riding roughshod over the views of traditional fans was met with derision and condemnation. Within a few short weeks, the experiment was over, and the magical flute of the Z-Cars theme was re-introduced by Joe Royle when he re-joined the club as manager in November 1994.
In the good old days, the teams did not run out together, as they do now. The strains of Z-Cars echoing around the towering Goodison Stands would herald the arrival of Everton in those famous Royal Blue jerseys and white shorts, running out onto a pristine green Goodison turf... a special moment guaranteed to bring out the goose-bumps in every true-blue Evertonian.