2,998 words

British television in the 1970s punched way above its weight in an arena dominated by America. While the US ruled the mass entertainment market, Britain held the prestige drama niche in the palm of her hand. Britain sold more finished programs than formats, whereas the reverse is now the case, and received industry awards at a disproportionately high rate. Its actors had mostly been trained at venerable thespian institutions such as RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts), and were as comfortable with Shakespeare as they were with a situation comedy. Series such as Upstairs, Downstairs, which dealt with life in an aristocratic Edwardian household, and The Forsyte Saga, a small-screen adaptation of John Galsworthy’s wonderful dynastic novels, were exported worldwide. Viewers in far-off lands could have a taste of an England long gone, and the industry blossomed from the revenue. There was another series which made good at the time, but it wasn’t a historical drama. It was a member of what one of its main characters might have called “the awkward squad.” It was The Sweeney.

The British police had been well represented in TV drama when The Sweeney arrived on the small screen in 1975, but it was all rather tame. The bobby in Dixon of Dock Green was a character as familiar to Brits as Dr. Who or James Bond. He was a smartly dressed, old-fashioned police constable, nothing like today’s mostly overweight paramilitaries, and he kept Dock Green safe for the law-abiding and troublesome for those who broke that law. “Evening all,” he would say while giving a salute at the start of each program. Then there was Z-Cars, which had more psychological depth and dealt with a police station in “Newtown.” This is quite amusing as propaganda, looking back. The government of the day were building “new towns” such as Milton Keynes and Crawley, and Z Cars seemed to carry the message that “Newtown” would be well policed. But violence in these programs was very rare, and apart from the odd bent copper for the sake of a plotline, the police were portrayed as morally unambiguous, good, honest men working to keep their fellow citizens safe from crime. Then The Sweeney arrived and kicked the door in.

The title of the program comes from Cockney rhyming slang, a co-axial version of English used by criminals to talk among themselves without being “earwigged” (overheard) by any “narks,” or “grasses” (police informers), or even actual “Old Bill” (the police). “Sweeney” comes from Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street of the Victorian “penny dreadfuls,” and its meaning is “Flying Squad.” The Sweeney were set up as an elite division. Their officers came in when things either got complex or ugly. They were a sort of CIA to the FBI, in terms of their relationship with the rest of the police force. They enforced the rules. And, if The Sweeney is anything to go by, they often bent them.

The program centers on two Sweeney coppers, both hard men, hard drinkers, and hard to work out. Jack Regan is a Detective Superintendent, and George Carter is his “skipper,” or number two. Regan is played by the much-missed John Thaw, himself trained at RADA, as were John Hurt and Ian McKellen at the same time. Thaw went on to great success as Inspector Morse, an affable sleuth who couldn’t be further from the pugnacious, Scotch-drinking Jack Regan. Carter is played by Dennis Waterman, who had a rather different route through the world of television acting. Trained at the Corona Academy, which prepared children for work in film and television, Waterman came through the system not via the stage, but via the screen. This was quite a radical shift for British acting, although Waterman was one of many whose acting careers would be prepared for in rather different ways than had been the norm. Waterman’s first role of note was in 1968’s British cult classic, Up the Junction. After The Sweeney, Waterman would go on to even greater success in Minder, in which he plays a bodyguard and, well, minder to a seedy London “businessman,” played by the great George Cole. Waterman never played anyone but himself, like Michael Caine, and you would never have seen him as Hamlet or in a drawing-room scene in Edwardian England. He just plays, as Londoners say, a diamond geezer who’s a bit tasty with his knuckles.

You can order The Best of Trevor Lynch here

American readers of my generation might like a bit of transatlantic context in televisual terms. At the same time that The Sweeney ran in the UK for a surprisingly short run of 53 episodes between 1975 and 1978, the following cop shows ran in the US: Kojak, Starsky & Hutch, Hawaii Five-O, and The Streets of San Francisco. The latter, with Karl Malden, I am not really familiar with, but we all watched the first three. Telly Savalas made baldness fashionable as Kojak, with his lollipops and stubborn analysis. Jack Lord raced around Hawaii, keeping the peace among the worst Hawaiian shirts known to mankind. The vaguely camp relationship between Starsky and Hutch didn’t stop the housewives of Britain making pin-ups of Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul, who even had a briefly successful pop career. But there was no grit there. Even the low-life looked okay and pretty tastefully dressed. What The Sweeney had was grit.

Self-contained and stand-alone, each episode can really be watched out of context. The 1974 pilot, Regan, is on YouTube, and all the series are on dailymotion. You can dive in anywhere because there is no one over-arching grand narrative to The Sweeney. There are sub-plots, of course, but they never dominate. This is an existential series in the sense of always being in the now. This is not Smiley’s People, say, where past and present are commingled. The only important thing to remember when watching this show is that what is important is what is happening right now. And something will be, and there is a fair chance it will be violent.

There hadn’t really been violence at the visceral level of The Sweeney before, and although it looks tame in the age of John Wick and Jack Reacher, it has to be put into context. England just was not a violent country in 1975. It just wasn’t. I know. I was there. Now that it very much is a violent country, it is informative to look back and see what was shocking in a rather more innocent age. Regan, Carter, and the rest of the Sweeney didn’t just punch villains, they hit them over the head with axe-handles and scaffolding bars. The kill count was high for mid-seventies TV, and there was more than one complaint from the likes of Mary Whitehouse. Mrs. Whitehouse was something of a comic character, a self-appointed moral watchdog who complained that Tom & Jerry was too violent. She didn’t take to Regan and Carter’s antics. Also, the show was seen as morally lax. Regan and Carter are forever hopping in and out of the beds of strippers and barmaids. Women come in two categories: birds and slags. Then there is the constant drinking. This was before product placement hit the UK, but a Scottish distillery missed out on the chance to clean up, if their bottles had featured in The Sweeney. The only time I recall Regan and Carter not drinking scotch was when they arrive home after an all-night stakeout. It is breakfast time, so Regan and Carter take it easy and split a bottle of vodka.

Regan and Carter inhabit a moral sewer of villainy, and have to be aware of the famous Nietzschean precaution that “When fighting with monsters” “one must look to it that one does not become a monster oneself.” The original series, written by Iain Kennedy Martin, was based on the experiences of a real Flying Squad detective, someone who really had fought the monsters, and this grassroots research is what gives The Sweeney its authenticity. In the real world, the British police force was undergoing something of a clean-out. Tired of corruption in the force, the new chief was Sir Robert Mark, and he was forthright about the state of the British police, observing wryly that, “A good police force is one that catches more criminals than it employs.” But perhaps Sir Robert lacked experience on the ground, because policing was not so neat and clean-cut in its nature. As one actual Sweeney detective explains:

That’s how you got your informants, in the pubs and clubs. You met faces in friendly pubs, or you went into the unfriendly pubs and tuned up the villains a bit. People knew who you were, and there was a healthy respect. In certain pubs, I’ve experienced this myself, you’d walk in and the villains would be at one end of the bar and we’d be up the other. And every now and then we’d pass a drink over. It was just a mark of respect.

In the 1974 pilot for The Sweeney, simply called Regan, John Thaw’s first line qualifies for iconic status. I know movie lines don’t really resemble Russian religious paintings, but “iconic” is one of those words where nothing else will do. Everyone knows the big-hitters: “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!” “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” “Are you talkin’ to me?” Well, in the world of British 1970s one-liners, Thaw delivers one that is up there with Michael Caine’s “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!” (You need to have seen The Italian Job—not the Stallone remake—to get that). Thaw and his colleagues bust into an apartment and find a villain in bed with a blonde. The bad guy goes for his “shooter,” but Regan is much too quick for him. He looks down with utter contempt at the man and says; “Get your trousers on. You’re nicked.” Next day that line went viral in playgrounds across the country.

Another novel aspect of The Sweeney is the fallibility of the main characters. In the first few minutes of Regan, the detective is humiliated. No one would have pushed Kojak around the way Jack Regan is spoken to by a doctor while visiting the hospital to see a fallen comrade. Immediate weakness; that is a brave way to introduce a tough guy. When we first see George Carter, he is losing a boxing match. Again, no super-hero entrances here, just flawed men doing a hard job they can’t walk away from. This is a major backbone to the brilliance of this show, and it has my favorite theme; morally questionable men doing good things.

You can buy Return of the Son of Trevor Lynch’s CENSORED Guide to the Movies here

The internal tension is set up straight away in Regan. His boss is Frank Haskins, superbly played by Garfield Morgan, one of many character actors in which England was once so rich. Dour doesn’t even begin to describe Haskins, and he is one of those men for whom everything becomes a psychological game. Regan is the pragmatist, and Haskins enjoys putting him through his paces. “There’s a meeting at six o’clock in the Squad Room. Be there,” Haskins tells Jack. “I think they might clip your wings.” Haskins produces the closest thing he ever gets to a smile, and we now know all we need to know about Jack Regan. He is a maverick, and they are yesterday’s news. “There are going to be some changes around here, Jack.” What we are watching is a fictional recreation of the handing over of the London Metropolitan Police from real, tough coppers to managers, systems men, quota drawers and technocrats. The Sweeney is partly an elegy for British policing. Regan spits out that the police will soon be run by “committee members.” Little did anyone know at the time that it would soon be run by diversity officers.

The dialogue is superb in The Sweeney. There are no long speeches or monologues. Everything is straight to the point and shorn of ornamentation. It’s also a great pleasure to hear dialogue from before the era of “political correctness.” There are mild racial slurs which would today cause the wokerati to have fits, and the language was quite ripe. Regan is asking a colleague about another officer. The man says he is a bit of an oddball, a bit eccentric. “Lives with his granny,” he tells Regan. “Oh yeah” the detective replies. “Is he a poof?” When Regan meets his wife’s new boyfriend, who is German, he simply observes to the man; “I don’t like Krauts.” Again, this was absolutely standard for the time.

The Sweeney was shot on 16mm, which accounts for its unique look, and the sound is vibrant and pumped-up. There are a lot of car chases, a lot of squealing rubber, in fact a lot of Foley sounds in general. Foley sounds are sound effects added on after shooting. Most punches you hear whacking into someone’s jaw are Foley. Speaking of audio, The Sweeney produced another piece of effortless cool familiar to anyone who has seen the series; the theme tune. It’s a racing piece in 2/4 time with a pulsing bass and quite thuggish sax, and it became one of the most famous TV themes in British History. Treat yourself. It was a mark of respect for The Sweeney when the masterful and popular band Squeeze included the following verse in their hit single, Cool For Cats:

The Sweeney’s doing 90
‘Cos they’ve got nowhere to go.
They got a gang of villains in a shed up at Heathrow.

One line in the song could have been used by the great misogynist himself, Jack Regan: “Funny how the Mrs. always looks the bleedin’ same.” The Sweeney was one of those programs that gets that special British seal of approval; “Much-loved”. Regan and Carter were household names.

The character of George Carter may well have got his name due to the huge influence of the gangster classic, Get Carter, starring Michael Caine, on the Sweeney writing team, who were also impressed by Gene Hackman in The French Connection. Regan’s character was a problem in pre-production, and smuggling The Sweeney through the censorial perimeter gate wasn’t easy:

Ian’s evocation of a cynical, seedy, booze-sodden, financially embarrassed, soon-to-be-divorced seventies cop was so consummate that it initially caused problems at Euston Films. Regan’s anti-liberal, sometimes unashamedly Right-wing attitudes weren’t exactly the usual stuff associated with the heroes of midweek TV drama.

And scriptwriter Martin’s approach to his characters was not standard for a drama:

I read Vladimir Propp’s The Morphology of the Folk Tale, which lays out the kind of problems the hero in a folk story encounters… The hero begins by being given an impossible task, then he makes a wrong decision… There are lots of phases. At the end, the hero is wounded and there is a ‘noble scar.’

Propp’s book aims to find the essence of the Russian folk-tale, and it is agreeable to see that storytelling is something which has an essence, even in a cop show in 1970s London. And it is also refreshing (even if I have to look back in time to do it) to see characters who are complex without being loaded down with ideological baggage. Regan doesn’t do ideology, he does villains.

Regan is a man with no empathy whatsoever. He just doesn’t do sentiment. In one episode, Carter’s wife is killed by a hit-and-run driver. When Regan pats George on the shoulder, it is a unique moment in the series. A small snippet of dialogue encapsulates Regan. He asks George if he has a cigarette, or a “fag” (another word Americans have to take care with). George looks in his pack and replies that he’s only got one. “I only want one” Regan growls back. Peter Hitchens, the venerable British journalist who made the journey from youthful Trotskyite to curmudgeonly conservative, points out that modern drama tends to have a lot of cigarette smoking in it, to remind the viewer that they are in the past. In The Sweeney, everyone smokes all the time.

Should you happen to be a fan of The Sweeney, I recommend Pat Gilbert’s book on the history and making of the show. Superbly titled Shut it!, a phrase Regan often uses, it is rich in detail and also contains a potted history of the Flying Squad, from 1915 and the “Mobile Patrol Experiment” taking to the streets of London in their two cars (both Wolseleys, this was long before the police started driving German cars). Gilbert also profiles Jack Regan with disarming simplicity:

A heroic central character whose dedication to fighting crime was so complete it had ruined his home life, turned him into a heavy drinker and brutalized him to the extent that he’d become almost as ruthless and conniving as the villains he was conniving to catch.

Fighting with monsters indeed.

The Sweeney was an exceptional series whose like will undoubtedly never be seen again. At the time it was made, writes Gilbert, there was a fear of Left-wing subversion inside the BBC, and propaganda was not going to be allowed. What on earth they would have made of today’s BBC one can only guess:

The establishment’s growing concern that the BBC’s drama department was harbouring Marxist radicals in black turtle-neck jumpers meant that all scripts had to be OK’d by an MI5 officer.

The Sweeney was produced by men who understood how to dramatize reality. Members of the actual Flying Squad were avid fans of the show, even if it did paint them in an often unflattering light. More than all those things, it was that magic formula; great television. Is there any of that made anymore, or is it all Marxist slop? From what I have seen of the BBC’s recent efforts, all I would say to them is what Jack Regan would have said; “On yer bike!”