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It's been a sad week with the loss of three cultural innovators in as many days.

First, snake-hipped dance god Patrick Swayze, then the man who invented the whole TV chef trend, Keith Floyd, and now the screen writer Troy Kennedy Martin.

The Glasgow-born writer created some of the most classic work on British television over the last few decades - everything from Z Cars to Edge of Darkness.

He was also known for his writing in cinema - in particular, his screenplay for the Italian Job.

And more recently Red Heat, which he co-wrote for Arnold Schwarzengger.

Z-Cars, which he wrote before he was even 30, revolutionised television in the 1960s with a gritty realism which hadn't been attempted before.

He claimed to have the idea of a police series set in patrol cars in the north of England while ill with mumps and listening to real police patrols on VHF radio.

Although he was one of a team of writers on the show, it was he who was credited with its creation, he held the copyright and he got paid a fee for every episode.

He also brought the series to an end in 1978, writing the final episode in which some of the best known characters returned.

In 1985, he wrote Edge of Darkness, a chilling thriller about a nuclear conspiracy in which Bob Peck played a policeman investigating his daughter's murder.

Again, he broke new ground by demanding to be able to write up to the wire, allowing him to include contemporary references and avoid any interference from his paymasters.

It's a way of writing current screenwriters can only dream of and for Kennedy Martin, it was also a short-lived period of freedom.

I spoke to him a few times on the phone, usually about an obituary for one of his many screenwriting friends and colleagues.

Among them John McGrath, who worked with him in the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ script editors department in the 1960s.

He was always charming and helpful, with an encylopaedic knowledge of British television.

And a writer of his calibre - and a Scot to boot - would have been equally dismayed at the demise of another great Scottish literary institution.

Chambers, who've been publishing their dictionaries in Edinburgh since 1819, will now close their offices in the capital with the loss of 27 jobs.

The dictionary - famous among Scrabble players for including a wider spread of eclectic words than some other dictionaries, will still be published but only in London.

The use of online spell checks has been blamed for the downturn in business.

While the telephone directories and piles of back issues of newspapers may no longer clutter your average newsroom, I'm one of a handful of Luddites who still likes to keep a dictionary, a thesaurus and a few good grammar books to hand.

Too bad there are fewer and fewer of us around.