The Sweeney season 3 (1976)

The Sweeney returned for a third season in late 1976. The series has revolutionised the British cop show and was now at the peak of its popularity and about to spawn two feature films. It blended action, toughness and humour in a way that has never since been quite equalled. It can be brutal and it can be dark but it never quite crosses the line into nihilism. Things go wrong, cases go unsolved, people get hurt, but there’s no point in wallowing in self-pity over it. When things do go wrong Regan and Carter get drunk and then the next day they’re back on the job because life goes on and the job still has to be done. And there’s still plenty of booze to be drunk and plenty of skirt to chase so why complain?

The Sweeney’s brutally realistic approach to the police shocked many people the time but audiences found it to be invigorating. Detective Inspector Jack Regan and Detective Sergeant George Carter were cops who seemed believable. They weren’t wholly admirable people but then if you’re a Boy Scout you’re not going to last very long in the Flying Squad, a squad tasked with investigating serious robberies (which generally meant violent robberies) and other crimes of violence. The criminals they deal with are usually pretty vicious.

The Flying Squad was at this time being rocked by corruption scandals and police corruption is a recurring theme. If you want to catch big-time criminals you have to spend a lot of time with those same criminals. You have to drink with them. You have to get to know them. You have to get to know which ones are prepared to act as informers. The people you have to use as informers can be serious low-lifes and thugs. It’s the only way to get the job done but the possibility of being corrupted is ever-present. This kind of honesty was also pretty startling at the time, but again audiences liked it because the series was honest about it.

In the world of The Sweeney there are good cops and bad cops. The bad cops are worse than the criminals, but fortunately there are good cops as well. Regan and Carter are good cops. They bend the rules, sometimes they bend them a great deal, sometimes their methods are questionable, but fundamentally they’re honest. And they get the job done. If they have to bend a few rules and break a few heads, well that’s the way it is.

The Sweeney steadfastly refuses to idealise the police but it certainly isn’t anti-police. It just accepts reality. As Graham Greene once put it, human nature isn’t black and white, it’s black and grey.

The Sweeney also manages to be incredibly stylish without being glamorous. The world of The Sweeney is seedy and sometimes sleazy, and often grimy. The people that Regan and Carter deal with can be heroic, they can be cowardly, they can be petty and vindictive, they can be kind and generous, they can be winners and they can be losers. But they all have an intensity and an immediacy to them. They feel like real people. The fact that this series is not afraid to make characters larger-than-life or absurd or eccentric makes those characters seem more believable. People really can be pretty strange. The situations can be bizarre but real life can be bizarre. This is life on the streets, for good or bad.

The fact that the series was shot almost entirely on location gives it a vibrancy that is a million miles away from the artificial world of the traditional shot-in-the-studio shot-on-video feel of previous British TV cop shows. The pursuit of realism can be a dead end if it’s done the wrong way, but The Sweeney does it the right way.

Episode Guide

Selected Target starts the season in style. Colly Kibber, a big time villain just released from prison, is believed to be planning a big job. A very big job. First he has some some business to attend to with his former cell-mate, Titus Oates. He thinks Oates informed on him. Kibber then gives his wife her marching orders. He has a replacement for her already lined up. Or rather, two replacements, both call girls. Scotland Yard has a mammoth surveillance operation in place to foil Kibber’s plans and this is what worries Regan. He doesn’t like such mammoth operations. He’s not exactly a team player. Which story has all the trademarks of this series - plenty of violence, a bit of sleaze, crisp dialogue and a script that combines deviousness with cynicism. Excellent episode.

In from the Cold involves not just cold-blooded criminals, but very cold criminals (you’ll have to watch this one to know what I mean). Regan spots a villain named Billy Medhurst in a fish and chip shop. Medhurst was involved in a robbery a couple of years earlier in which a policeman was shot and crippled. Now he’s got Medhurst in custody but can he keep him under lock and key? And what is Medhurst’s shady lawyer up to? Not to mention Billy’s wife. It all hinges on steaks. A lot of them. A typical episode but a very good one with the usual mix of humour and violence.

Visiting Fireman throws pretty much everything at Jack Regan. It starts with a known villain being arrested for a robbery but the villain has an alibi and it’s Regan who supplies the alibi. Which causes Jack all sorts of problems, with maybe even his career being on the line. Then Turkish policeman Captain Shebbeq arrives and wants Regan’s help on an investigation he’s conducting into long-distance lorry hijackings in Turkey. Regan and Shebbeq are old mates so you won't be surprised to hear that Shebbeq’s main interests in life are football, booze and birds. There’s a lot more to the truck hijackings than meets the eye, things that ordinary policeman shouldn’t get mixed up in. They could get killed or they could see their career go down the gurgler. This episode really does have everything. It even has Regan and Carter doing a song-and-dance routine. There’s also Helga, the very cute German barmaid at the Turkish Club. This episode is totally over-the-top but enjoyably so.

Tomorrow Man deals with cyber-crime, 1976-style. The Flying Squad think computer whizz-kid Tony Gray (John Hurt), just out of prison after serving a sentence for manslaughter after killing a woman in a traffic accident, is up to something big. They have no idea what it is since they don’t know anything about computers. Regan however finds a charming young lady named Dr Smart (yes really) from the Home Office who does understand such things. Gray’s plan is a good one and he always seems to be a step ahead of Regan and Carter who are meanwhile busily engaged in trying to figure out how to get Dr Smart into bed.

In Taste of Fear a couple of army deserters commit a particularly violent robbery. Catching them should be easy but it isn’t and DI Regan has another problem - a new sergeant on the Flying Squad, named Hargreaves. Regan has serious doubts that the man can be relied on, but he can’t be quite certain whether he’s going to have to get rid of him or not. If he does it will be the end of Hargreaves’ career. Sometimes Jack Regan hates his job.

Bad Apple presents the Squad with an unpleasant case, investigating possible corruption in a divisional CID. Regan goes undercover at the Blue Parrot club which disbelieved top be making payoffs. Haskins and Carter sift through the paperwork, looking for anomalies in prosecutions that could be pointers to the culprits. A good episode.

May helped Regan keep his sanity when his wife left him so he owes her and now May’s son has got himself into a spot of bother with the law. An elderly moneylender has been badly beaten and a witness puts young Davey at the spot and the police find five hundred quid hidden beneath the seat of his motorcycle. And then Davey does a runner so now he’s really in trouble and May wants Jack to get him out of it. It turns out that Davey has managed to get himself into some truly spectacular trouble and not just with the law. A very good episode.

In Sweet Smell of Succession when gang boss Joe Castle goes to his eternal reward there’s a fine collection of villains ready to take over his firm, but they’re all too greedy to coöperate and the wild card is Castle’s son Steven (Hywel Bennett). Steven seems too soft to survive in such a world but what he lacks in muscle he makes up for in low cunning. Joe Castle’s mistress Arleen (Sue Lloyd) is another wild card. She has what could be the key to Steven’s scheme. Another very good episode.

In Down to You, Brother a middle-aged retired villain has a message for Regan, but what exactly is the message? It appears to be related to a big job that was pulled six years earlier but Regan starts to suspect that the message was something quite different. One thing coppers and villains have in common is that their careers play havoc with their personal lives. Especially when a daughter is involved. A clever little story.

In Pay Off George Carter gets involved with a woman named Shirley. Shirley’s feller Eddie disappeared a year earlier and she thinks he’s dead. She persuades George to look into it.  Eddie was a very small-time villain but he may have been involved in an armed robbery which turned into an embarrassing fiasco for the Flying Squad. George’s emotional involvement causes a lot of problems for both himself and the Squad. You really don’t have much chance of having a personal life when you’re on the Squad, a lesson George is about to learn. Another very good episode.

Cowboys are riding the range in Loving Arms. Well, not cowboys, but cowboy guns. Six-shooters, just like in the Old West. They’re not real, but they can shoot and they’re more dangerous than real guns. Regan stumbles across the case when a shopkeeper, an old soldier, swears blind that the Colt .45 he was held up with was real. And sooner or later someone is likely to get killed. It’s the sort of slightly offbeat story that made this series so appealing. Good stuff.

Lady Luck is the name of the episode and Jack thinks that that fickle lady has decided to smile on him. He gets some very good information from an unexpected source - an attractive middle-class housewife. Marcia Edmunds in her forties but well preserved and rather attractive which is just as well since she doesn’t want to be paid in money for the information. She wants to be paid in sex. There are two problems however. Had Jack known who she was he would have declined her kind offer. And the information hinges on an unbreakable alibi that Jack will have to break. The alibi angle is handled very well as is the very awkward situation that Jack is faced with. Much of it depends on how long it would take for Marcia’s souffle to rise. An excellent episode.

On the Run is a manhunt story which really ramps up the violence level. And the politically incorrectness level as well. A violent psychopath named Cook is sprung from custody by  his former cell-mate Pindar. Pindar is shacked up with his Rich ageing boyfriend who is besotted with him. As the net closes on Cook he becomes increasingly murderous. A violent story that keeps getting more violent but still a fine episode with which to close the third season.

Final Thoughts

This series was riding high in 1976 and it’s easy to see why. The third season has all the ingredients that made The Sweeney the most memorable cop show of its era (and possibly the best British cop show ever). The series then took a break while the two spin-off movies, the not-so-great Sweeney! and the much better Sweeney 2) were shot before returning for the fourth and final season in 1978.

The third season of The Sweeney is highly recommended.

Regan and the Deal of the Century (The Sweeney novel)

Like so many TV series of its era The Sweeney spawned a series of TV tie-in novels. Regan and the Deal of the Century was the third of The Sweeney novels and was written by Ian Kennedy Martin, the creator of the TV series. Nine novels were published, three of them by Kennedy Martin, and they were original stories rather than novelisations of TV episodes.

So the first surprise is just how different it is to the series. The series was very much a buddy series, with Detective Inspector Jack Regan of Scotland Yard’s elite Flying Squad and his sergeant George Carter being the buddies. There is some slight tension between the two men. Regan doesn’t just bend the rules. He beats them senseless and then puts the boot in. Carter isn’t always happy about this, and he lets Regan know. Despite this the two men are firm friends. Carter is scarcely even mentioned in this novel, but when he is mentioned it’s obvious that Regan doesn’t like him all that much. The novel appeared in 1976. The series aired between 1974 and 1978. It would be fascinating to know if the novel represents Kennedy Martin’s original concept for the series, and whether that concept involved a much tighter focus on Regan, or whether Kennedy Martin simply decided to try something slightly different with his three spin-off novels.

The second surprise is that the novel takes place almost entirely in the south of France. Taking Regan out of his familiar London milieu changes the tone dramatically.

This is essentially a political thriller rather than a cop story, but since Regan is a cop to his boot-heels he naturally tries to approach it as a police case. His job is to catch villains. That’s pretty much what gives the novel its flavour - Regan is very much a fish out of water in the world of international intrigue.

The novel starts with the assassination of an Arab oil sheikh in London, to which Regan just happens to be an almost-witness (he saw the killer leaving the building and is the only man who can identify that killer). This is obviously a job for Britain’s secret police, Special Branch. So why has Regan been assigned to the case? Whatever the reason Regan is not happy about it.

Regan finds himself working with a Bahreini cop named Hijaz. He doesn’t entirely trust Hijaz, but Regan is also more than half convinced that everything Special Branch has told him is a pack of lies as well.

It appears that the assassin’s next target will be another oil sheikh, a man named Almadi.

This brings Regan into intimate contact with Almadi’s entourage, specifically Almadi’s girls. Almadi likes to be surrounded by beautiful women. Beautiful is perhaps not an adequate word. These girls are technically prostitutes but they are so stingy gorgeous that it takes Regan’s breath away and they are very very high class and very very expensive. For the price of one night with such a girl you could buy yourself a very decent car. Not a used car. A new one. If fact a night with one of these girls would cost Jack Regan most of a year’s salary. Naturally Jack falls for one of the girls, an exquisite English rose named Jo. It’s not just lust (as it usually is for Jack with women). He thinks she’s the most perfect female who ever walked the Earth. But she belongs to Sheikh Almadi. Which doesn’t stop her from hopping into Jack’s bed. This is likely to get Jack into a world of hurt.

As for the case, Regan is more and inclined to think that there’s a whole lot more going on here that he hasn’t been told about. There’s the matter of the deal with the French government. What the deal might involve he has absolutely no idea.

This is pretty much the Jack Regan of the TV series, but maybe even more pessimistic and more cynical and definitely more given to depression. He drinks too much. But he drinks too much in the TV series as well. He chases women he shouldn’t chase. He argues with his superiors and clashes with just about everybody. He doesn’t have any actual dislike of Arabs, or of the French. Jack just doesn’t have the knack of keeping his mouth shut and following orders and coöperating with other place officers. The one mystery is perhaps Jo’s attraction to him. This is a girl who has billionaires eating out of her hand. Maybe she just has a thing for alcoholic self-pitying broken-down policemen with no future. Maybe they just drive her wild with desire.

Reagan is very much an anti-hero but despite his egregious character flaws we can’t help liking him, even if we sometimes despise him just a little as well and even if we’re often horrified by him. He does his best as a cop, and usually gets results. As a man he does his best also, with much less successful results. But he is what he is, and he doesn’t know any other way to live. He doesn’t really know how to do anything but be a cop so it’s lucky he’s a good one.

There’s some politics in this novel but the political aspects are not always quite what you’re expecting. It won’t do to jump to conclusions about who the bad guys are. And in this world it’s questionable whether there are any good guys.

It’s perhaps a little disappointing that Regan's fascinatingly ambivalent relationships with both Carter and with his immediate superior DCI Haskins, which are highlights of the series, play no part in the novel. But Regan’s very uneasy relationships with authority in general certainly do play a major rôle.

Apart from the very distinctive character of Regan the novel doesn’t bear much resemblance to the TV series but it’s a decent political thriller. Regan and the Deal of the Century is worth a look and it is interesting for fans of the series to see Jack Regan in an unfamiliar environment. Recommended.

Sweeney 2 (1978) - the movie

The Sweeney, possibly the best television cop show ever made, spawned two spin-off movies and both of them are slightly odd. The first of them was Sweeney! and it really bore very little resemblance to the TV series, being pretty much a generic 70s political/action thriller. Sweeney 2, which followed in 1978, is closer to the feel of the series but it has a script that loses its way badly at times.

Which is surprising, since the scriptwriter was Troy Kennedy-Martin who had a pretty good track record in both film and television (and whose brother Ian had created The Sweeney TV series).

While the first film tried to deal with political intrigue Sweeney 2 very sensibly sticks to the kind of subject matter that made the TV series so successful. Regan (John Thaw) and Carter (Dennis Waterman) are on the trail of a gang of blaggers (bank robbers). The gang has a couple of very distinctive and very puzzling trademarks. They always steal almost precisely the same amount of money, equivalent to US$100,000. Any money over and above that amount they leave behind in the getaway car. And one of the blaggers carries a sawn-off shotgun, but it’s not just any sawn-off shotgun, it’s a gold-plated Purdey (the Rolls-Royce of shotguns) worth a small fortune. What kind of person would saw the barrels off such a work of art?

The gang’s methods are particularly ruthless. It’s not that they go around shooting innocent bystanders or anything like that. But they have such an overwhelming determination not to be caught that they take suicidal risks, like driving straight into police cars at a road-block. And if a member of the gang is injured in a robbery they leave him behind, but they first make sure he’s dead (a shotgun blast to the head makes this a certainty).

These are obviously not your usual run of villains. They’re disciplined as well as organised and they appear to be operating to some kind of master plan.

Regan’s old boss Jupp (Denholm Elliott), the former chief of the Flying Squad, is now serving a lengthy term of imprisonment for corruption but he does have an important clue to offer Regan. The clue takes Regan and Carter to Malta. That’s where these blaggers actually live. They have a compound there, which is a kind of hippie commune if you can imagine a hippie commune run on paramilitary lines. This is where the weaknesses in the script start to become apparent. The blaggers claim to have abandoned England because they believe England is finished but we’re never really told exactly what the gang’s motivations are. Are they left-wing political extremists or right-wing political extremists? Are they a kind of religious cult? Are they part of the counter-culture or are they fleeing from the counter-culture? One assumes that Troy Kennedy-Martin had some vaguely coherent idea in mind but it seems to have gotten lost in the final script.

It’s a pity since the basic idea of bank robbers with plans to build their own society is definitely potentially interesting.

Another major problem with the screenplay is the bomb sub-plot. This comes out of nowhere, it goes nowhere, it has no connection with the rest of the movie, it makes no sense and it serves no purpose. It’s unnecessary padding and it’s a problem since this is already a movie with a few pacing problems.

Like the first movie Sweeney 2 tries to take advantage of the less restrictive censorship film censorship environment and as in the first film this backfires. Sweeney 2 has much more graphic violence than the TV series and the extra violence adds nothing of value, there’s some outrageously gratuitous nudity that is totally unnecessary, and worst of all there’s a much more pronounced atmosphere of sleaze. Regan and Carter in the TV series are a long way from being Boy Scouts but in this movie they’re drunken lecherous louts. The sleaze is pushed much too far and the characters become mere caricatures.

The supporting cast is interesting, with Denholm Elliott as the corrupt former Flying Squad commander and Nigel Hawthorne as his replacement Dilke. And yes, Dilke does come across as being remarkably like Sir Humphrey Appleby!

There’s some location shooting in Malta which looks nice enough. Although the Malta scenes give us some hints as to the motivations of the villains one can’t help wondering if the expense of sending a film crew there was really justified.

Sweeney 2 is a movie that definitely has its problems. It has its strengths as well. Even if the ideas aren’t fully developed the screenplay does at least try to give us something more than just another series of bank robberies. And it does set up the very violent climax in such a way that it makes sense rather than just being a bloodbath for the sake of having a bloodbath. There are lots of intriguing little touches that aren’t always fully explained but that makes them more intriguing, an example being the woman (whose link to the blaggers is rather peripheral) with the Hitler obsession. Apart from overdoing the sleaze this movie captures the feel of the TV series far more successfully than the first film. There are some fine action scenes.

The Region 4 DVD offers no extras but the transfer is pretty good.

With all its flaws Sweeney 2 is rather entertaining and it’s definitely an improvement on the first movie. Worth seeing if you’re a fan of the series.

Sweeney! (1977), the movie

It was a fairly common practice in the 70s for successful British TV series to spawn a feature film spin-off. In the case of The Sweeney there were two spin-off movies. Sweeney! was the first and was released in 1977.

Detective Inspector Jack Regan (John Thaw) and Detective Sergeant George Carter (Dennis Waterman) are hardcase coppers with Scotland Yard’s elite Flying Squad. This time they’re involved in an unusual case involving the potential for international intrigue. This is the sort of thing that would normally be dealt with by Special Branch but the script gets around this difficulty by having Regan get involved in an indirect way, doing a favour for a particularly useful informant named Ronnie Brent.

Ronnie’s girlfriend has just died. A verdict of suicide was brought in at the inquest but Ronnie is adamant that Janice would never have killed herself. He asks Regan to look into the case in an informal sort of way.

The case proves to involve corruption at the highest levels, with high-class call girls used as bait, and organised by people to whom mass murder is just routine stuff, just another day at the office.

Ranald Graham’s screenplay is in fact a little overblown. One gets the impression that this movie is trying to be a conspiracy theory political thriller of the sort that enjoyed some popularity in the 70s. It’s not the kind of story one associates with The Sweeney and Im not sure it was a terribly good idea. It’s the kind of story that needs a very big-budget approach. It also has a slightly transatlantic flavour to it which is odd since one of the reasons for The Sweeney’s success was its thoroughly British feel.

The advantage of the feature film format over television is usually obvious - bigger budgets, the opportunity to do more ambitious action scenes, better image quality. In other words a cinematic look. This doesn’t really apply to The Sweeney though. The series was shot on a fairly generous budget, on 35mm film and entirely on location, and with fairly ambitious action scenes, so it already looked cinematic. The movie looks pretty much like the TV series.

This may be the reason for the political thriller plot - if the film was going to end up looking like an extended episode of the TV series then the grandiose plot would provide the necessary cinematic feel.

It might be unfair to say that The Sweeney TV series was an exercise in style over substance. It was a very well-written series. At the same time it has to be said that style was a very important ingredient. That style sharply distinguished it from previous British TV cop shows. It was not just a matter of visual style. It was the whole atmosphere, the mix of seediness, mild sleaze and violence, the approach taken by the two lead actors. Unfortunately a lot of that is lost in the movie. That’s partly due to the plot which casts Jack Regan as the maverick cop who gets suspended and then has to operate as a lone wolf, which means we miss out on a lot of the everyday interaction between Regan and other officers which was such an essential part of the series.

Sweeney! also takes advantage of the opportunity offered in a movie to increase the level of violence and the level of bad language and to add some entirely gratuitous nudity. This actually turns out not to be an advantage after all - it makes the movie seem a bit too much like just another generic action thriller.

The Region 4 DVD release offers both spin-off movies on two discs. The anamorphic transfer for Sweeney! is pretty good. The lack of extras is a problem - viewers unfamiliar with the TV series would doubtless have appreciated a bit of background on the characters and on what was one of the most iconic TV series of all time.

It’s not that this is a bad movie. It’s just that fans of the television series are likely to be disappointed that it bears very little resemblance thematically or stylistically to the series, which is a problem since one assumes that the target audience for the movie would have been, primarily, fans of the TV series. Sweeney! is a 70s paranoia thriller. If you like that sort of thing it’s OK but pretty routine and the plot is rather silly at times.

Sweeney! is definitely a bit of a misfire.

The Sweeney, season 2 (1975)

Season two of The Sweeney first went to air in late 1975 and easily maintained the first season’s reputation as the most exciting police drama TV series of the decade.

There’s not much to be said about this series that hasn’t already been said so I’ll just touch on a few less obvious aspects. While John Thaw and Dennis Waterman get most of the attention (and they are superb) the contribution of the third regular cast member Garfield Morgan, who plays DCI Frank Haskins, should not be underestimated. It’s a good example of the way the series tries to avoid being too obvious. Haskins should be the type of copper that Regan despises. Haskins is clearly upper-class, he’s a stickler for the rules and he’s always got one eye on his pension. But even though Haskins is a policeman of a radically different type to the rules-bending working-class risk-taking Jack Regan, Haskins is still in his own way a good copper. And that’s what matters to Regan. On the other hand Regan does have his doubts as to whether Haskins has the mental toughness for the job. So while the obvious move would have been to set up an antagonistic relationship between these two men what we actually get is more complicated and more uneasy, with Regan regarding Haskins with an odd mixture of respect tinged with contempt.

At the same time the differences in approach are profound, and not just a matter of differing personalities. Regan believes in coming down hard on criminals and never giving them an inch because he understands that anything less will be seen by the criminals as weakness, with disastrous consequences. Haskins is by nature a conciliator, a compromiser. This tends to make for a successful career but whether it’s the right approach for a policeman is debatable. These differences in approach will come to a head in spectacular fashion late in season two.

The Regan-Carter relationship is also somewhat complex. There would have been two obvious ways to play this, either as a buddy movie-style equal partnership or as a junior officer learning the ropes from an old hand. But neither of those options really describes this particular relationship. George Carter is a sergeant in the Flying Squad which means he has at least a few years’ service behind him - he’s no wet-behind-the-ears youngster straight out of Police College. He doesn’t need Jack Regan to teach him his job. On the other hand it’s not quite an equal relationship - Regan is Carter’s senior officer and Carter has to go along with Regan’s methods even though in many cases he thinks they’re reckless and even potentially irresponsible. The two men are definitely close friends but it’s  a complex relationship. And that’s the kind of cop show The Sweeney is. The relationships between characters are complicated grown-up relationships, just as the situations they face on the job are complicated and messy.

The secret to The Sweeney’s success is that it manages to be a grown-up cop series that is still enormous fun. The serious, gritty, brutally realistic and morally complex side is balanced by healthy doses of humour and even playfulness and it’s all done with breathtaking energy and style.

The Sweeney seems as fresh today as it seemed in 1975. In fact in some ways more fresh. It’s notorious lack of political correctness means that it has an honesty that you just don’t get in television today.

Chalk and Cheese is the story of a mismatched pair of young hoodlums, one lower-class and one decidedly upper-class. Both need money, although for very different reasons. Armed robbery seems to be an easy answer to their problem, but armed robbery that is a bit more imaginative than robbing banks. George Carter has a personal stake in this case which becomes a race against time since sooner or later one of these robberies will inevitably end with someone getting shot.

In Faces a gang of armed robbers have pulled three big jobs in two days, a rather surprising circumstance since villains generally lie low after a big job. In fact these are a bit more than just armed robbers and it appears that the Security Service (MI5) have some interest in this case. Which makes things nicely complicated for DI Regan.

Supersnout is one of those episodes that is played at least partly for comedy. Regan’s boss Chief Inspector Haskins is out of the country and DCI Quirk has taken over temporarily. Quirk is a bit of a Colonel Blimp type and his best years are behind him but he still dreams of breaking one big case that will gain him promotion, and a bigger pension. Quirk’s objective at the moment is to catch the infamous Post Office Gang. Quirk has an informant, and Jack Regan has an informant as well, and Jack starts to suspect that maybe the two informants are one and the same man.

Meanwhile Quirk has devised a very elaborate plan to catch the Post Office Gang in the act. It all turns into a comedy of errors although there’s a serious and even slightly sad side to it as well.

In Big Brother a young suspect collapses while being questioned by Regan and is rushed to hospital. Given Regan’s reputation for being a bit free with his fists it’s not surprising that just about everyone suspects that he gave the lad a beating. The really bad news is that the young man is the kid brother of Phil Deacon, a very big time criminal with a reputation for being a very hard case indeed. Phil Deacon is the sort of guy who’s quite capable of having someone murdered, especially if he thinks that someone has beaten up his kid brother.

Hit and Run involves a woman who has been conned by her boyfriend into a diamond smuggling racket. She wants out but she knows too much. A case of mistaken identity has consequences for George Carter.

In Trap two very nasty hoodlums just out of prison have concocted an elaborate plan to frame Regan for corruption. Regan should immediately report the matter to his superior but of course he doesn’t - he has to do it his way. This episode certainly shows journalists in a very bad light, not that that’s hard to do. A good tough two-fisted episode.

The Golden Fleece is another partly tongue-in-cheek episode with two flash Australians carrying out a series of remarkably successful armed robberies, while DCI Haskins has major problems after a phony corruption allegation. The corruption sub-plot is played straight while the sub-plot with the two Aussie wild colonial boys is played mostly for humour. Oddly enough it all works and it’s a fine episode although it has to be said the Australian accents of Patrick Mower are absolutely excruciating.

In Poppy an armed robber who’s been hiding out on the Continent returns to Britain to reclaim the loot from his last robbery. He has plans to do a deal with the bank from whom the money was stolen. Lots of double-crosses follow. An excellent episode.

In Stay Lucky Eh? a couple of young tearaways pull off a safe-cracking job only to be relieved of the loot at gunpoint. They’re going to have some explaining to do to Mr Kirby, who financed their safe-cracking activities, and Mr Kirby is going to be very anxious to have a word with this gunman. Another excellent episode.

Trojan Bus is Jack Regan’s worst nightmare come to life - those Australian super-criminals Colin and Ray are back in town. This time they’ve taken an interest in the world of art. As usual they’re aiming high - nothing less than stealing a Goya. Their plan is typically outrageous - first they will steal a double-decker bus, then the Goya. Regan has become totally obsessed with these terrors from Down Under. This is a wildly exuberant and wonderfully entertaining episode, with some obvious nods to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

In I Want the Man Regan knows there’s a big job, a very big job, about to be pulled. He doesn’t know who the main players are or what the job actually is, and his informant has disappeared. All he has is Frankie Little, and although Frankie is willing to co-operate he doesn’t know the details either. A fine gritty episode enlivened by strong performances by Roy Kinnear as Frankie and Russell Hunter as the hapless informant Popeye.

In Thou Shalt Not Kill a bank robbery becomes a hostage drama. This is an incredibly tense episode. A tough decision will have to be made - do the police negotiate with hostage-takers or not? Needless to say Regan believes the answer is no. A superb episode.

The Country Boy of the episode so titled is young Detective Sergeant David Keel from Bristol who is temporarily attached to the Flying Squad to help out with his specialised knowledge of alarm systems and telecommunications. Regan distrusts Keel immediately - Keel is too educated, too cultured, too arty, too upper middle class and most of all he is a technical specialist, something of which Jack strongly disapproves.

Cop shows really don’t get any better than The Sweeney and the second season is as good as the first season (which I reviewed here a couple of years ago). Very highly recommended.

The Sweeney, season 1 (1975)

In 1971 Britain’s Thames Television set up a production company called Euston Films. The idea was that the company would pioneer a new style of British police action TV series. They would abandon completely the traditional shot-on-videotape style of British TV. They would be shot entirely on film, with lots of location shooting and a fast-paced, hard-hitting approach. For their first production in 1973 they revived Special Branch which had originally aired for two seasons in 1969-1970. The new version of Special Branch (which bore no resemblance to its earlier incarnation) was reasonably successful. Euston really hit pay dirt with their next attempt, The Sweeney, which ran for four seasons from 1975 to 1978.

The Sweeney was like no previous British cop show. It was much tougher, much more violent, much more action-oriented, much grittier and it moved a whole lot faster. The end result was one of the greatest cop shows of all time.

The pilot episode, entitled Regan, was made as part of the Armchair Cinema series and introduced viewers to Detective-Inspector Jack Regan (John Thaw). Regan was in the grand tradition of the maverick cop who breaks all the rules but gets results. The pilot was successful and the series got the go-ahead.

Apart from its revolutionary style the series also owed much of its success to the performance of John Thaw. Thaw was by no means an unknown, having already starred in the fairly successful series Redcap. The Sweeney would make him a television legend and he would of course go on to even greater fame in the late 80s with Inspector Morse.

Jack Regan could have been just another maverick cop but as well as making him a very convincing tough guy Thaw adds unexpected touches of warmth and a wry sense of humour. Dennis Waterman as Detective-Sergeant George Carter is the perfect foil for Thaw. Garfield Morgan is superb as their boss, Detective Chief Inspector Haskins, another character who could have been a mere stereotype but becomes an interestingly complex personality.

The Sweeney is certainly gritty and it’s also at times very dark and with a fair leavening of cynicism. Regan and Carter don’t always get their man. Sometimes things go wrong; sometimes things go badly wrong. However The Sweeney avoids the excessively cynical and even nihilistic tone that makes some British series of the era very heavy going. There are moments of humour in every episode and there’s the occasional episode that is played in an almost tongue-in-cheek style. And while Regan and Carter don’t solve every case they do solve a lot of them. Sometimes the good guys do win.

The Sweeney attracted attention at the time for its violence and its toughness but its success had a lot to do with finding just the right balance. It wasn’t too pessimistic. It portrayed a criminal justice system that was far from perfect but that did work a lot of the time. The police could be brutal but they were dealing with brutal criminals. If society expects to be protected from brutal people then we have to accept that policemen can’t always be Boy Scouts. The 1970s was a period of social disintegration. This was no longer  the kind of England that could be policed by loveable kindly bobbies like Dixon of Dock Green.

Jack Regan is prepared to bend the rules when he needs to and on occasions he bends them quite a bit. In spite of this he is unequivocally an honest cop. And while he is happy to break a few heads when dealing with the nastier sort of villains he is not without human feelings. Regan does a job that he believes in and he does it as efficiently as he knows how. He’s not a mere thug or a vigilante. 

In The Placer Regan goes undercover investigating a series of lorry hijackings. It’s an episode that demonstrates the series’ ability to take a fairly routine crime story but make it memorable due to the fact that the execution is top-notch. Stoppo Driver starts with a robbery gone wrong in which the getaway driver is killed, leaving a criminal gang in search of a new driver whom they find in a rather unexpected place.

Cover Story is one of many episodes in which Regan gets personally involved in a case, usually too personally involved. This time it’s a beautiful female crime reporter, but does she just report crime or does she actually get involved in the crimes she reports on? Regan’s human side is very much in evidence in this one.

Abduction deals with a theme that is somewhat overused in TV cop shows - criminals targeting a police officer and/or his family. However it’s done well in this episode. It offers another opportunity to see Regan’s human side. More importantly it fleshes out the relationship between Regan and his boss, DCI Haskins. Haskins often disapproves of Regan’s methods and in this case he disapproves very strongly but he finally realises where Regan is coming from and his disapproval changes to respect. It’s typical of the complexity of this series that Haskins, a secondary character, is a fully rounded character who has his weaknesses and his blind spots but also has the ability to admit to being wrong and the ability to try to understand Regan even though the two men are temperamentally poles apart. 

Interestingly enough in the episode Contact Breaker it’s Jack Regan who has to admit that he’s been wrong about Haskins. These are two men who find it very difficult to admit to making mistakes but, just as in the real world, sometimes you have to learn to do just that. This is a cop show for grownups - it avoids easy stereotypes about people and their inter-relationships. Contact Breaker also shows Regan having to put aside his prejudices. He has enough evidence to make an arrest and the suspect is a known villain but Regan has a niggling suspicion that he might be innocent. As much as he dislikes professional villains he dislikes the idea of sending an innocent man to prison even more.

In Golden Boy Regan and Carter just happen to come across Harry Fuller in a pub. Harry is very drunk and he has a lot of money to throw about. Which is odd, since a week earlier he was penniless. Harry sells information, to the police and to anyone else who pays, but he’s small-time. To have that much money means he’s sold some important information and he hasn’t sold it to the police. Carter thinks there’s nothing in it but Regan has a hunch there’s something big behind it. And he’s right. Regan gets his big break on this case when a successful young CEO reports his car stolen. This seems to have no connection with a major crime but Regan is sure it just doesn’t smell right.

Big Spender starts with Regan and Carter being ordered to find evidence, any evidence, that will put away three clever but vicious criminal brothers. Their prospects don’t seem promising until they stumble onto a connection with a multi-storey car park, a mild-mannered accountant with way too much money and a very high-class courtesan. There’s the touch of sleaze that you expect in mid-70s British TV, and some dark humour courtesy of Warren Mitchell’s outrageous performance as the errant accountant.

Network have released the entire series on DVD and it looks extremely good. More recently they have released season 1 on Blu-Ray.

The Sweeney has aged remarkably well. If you ignore the sometimes embarrassing 1970s fashions this series still comes across as tough, fast-moving, action-packed and exciting with a leavening of wry humour and flashes of human warmth. And a great deal of style.