‘Get yer trousers on...you’re nicked’
Fifty years ago this month filming started on one of the greatest and grittiest TV crime dramas ever made. GARRY BUSHELL looks back on the hard-hitting no-nonsense world of The Sweeney...
THE show was based on the Metropolitan Police’s Flying Squad – also referred to as the Heavy Mob but more popularly known in Cockney rhyming slang as The Sweeney, from Sweeney Todd.
The squad was an instant response team of detectives set up to counter the growing problem of “blaggers” – armed robbers who went “over the pavement” to carry out fast, violent raids on banks, bookies and security vans.
Viewers were suddenly exposed to a subculture of snouts (informers), brasses (prostitutes), sawn-offs (shotguns), and police who were a long way removed from the cosier eras of George Dixon or Z Cars.
These cops were tough, brutal and flawed, but not gratuitously so.
The show felt totally authentic. The episodes were beautifully plotted and the cast was excellent.
The late John Thaw, later known as the cerebral, classical music-loving Inspector Morse, played two-fisted DI Jack Regan, a cynical and self-righteous loose cannon with a hair-trigger temper.
Thaw looked old and grizzled even though he was still in his early 30s.
Dennis Waterman played his Detective Sergeant sidekick George Carter, and both reported to Garfield Morgan’s DCI Frank Haskins, who was more concerned with public image and police politics than the business of “banging up” wrong-uns.
These detectives kept whisky bottles
‘Officers had whisky in their desks and women on the side’
in their desk drawers and had women on the side. And the writers brought in the corruption that had tainted the real 1970s Flying Squad.
Part of the show’s appeal was the earthy dialogue, with stinging lines like “Don’t p*** on my boots and tell me it’s raining”, “Get yer trousers on, you’re nicked”, and the immortal “We’re the Sweeney, son, and we haven’t had any dinner”.
Created by Ian Kennedy Martin, the show ran for four series between 1975 and 1978, building an audience of 20 million viewers and spawning two movie spin-offs. The guest list was spectacular.
Diana Dors, Alfred Marks, Maureen Lipman, Brian Blessed, Prunella Gee, Ian Hendry, Geraldine James, George Sewell, a young Ray Winstone and many more. Even Morecambe andwise had a cameo.
Despite that, the series always felt real. Thaw made audiences totally believe in Regan.we trusted him even when he bent the rules like a pro wrestler.and we felt his pain when he berated the way the system was stacked against law and order.
“It’s a bloody holiday camp for thieves and weirdos – all the rubbish,” he raged.
“You age prematurely trying to sort some of them out. Try and protect the public and all they do is call you fascist.
“You nail a villain and some ponced-up, pin-stripe Hampstead barrister screws it up on a point of procedure, then pops off for a game of squash and a glass of Madeira. He’s taking home 30 grand a year, and we can just about afford 10 days in Eastbourne and a second-hand car. It’s all bloody wrong, my son.” Regan’s cynicism and frustration is a constant factor.
He feels he is denied the resources to do his job properly in a boom age for armed robberies. In a time before CCTV and supergrasses, blaggers in balaclavas were viewed as the aristocrats of the criminal fraternity.
Compare and contrast Regan and Carter’s world with US TV’S fantasy crime-fighters Starsky and Hutch. It wasn’t just a different country, it was a different planet.
Britain’s telly tecs wore corduroy jackets and drove Fords – Consuls, Granadas and Cortinas. Anyone driving a Mark 2 Jaguar was almost certainly a villain.
And Carter was no yesman. He often disagreed with Regan and sometimes disobeyed him but he also took a beating for him.
The Sweeney didn’t always win and didn’t have it easy. George’s wife was murdered. Jack’s daughter was kidnapped.
For authenticity, The Sweeney has rarely been bettered. Nor has Harry South’s funky brass-driven theme tune. The inspiration for the show was a one-off 90-minute Euston Films TV movie called Regan, written by Martin for Thames TV’S Armchair Cinema series.
Screened on June 4, 1974, it was so well received that a series was commissioned. Ian fell out with producer Ted Childs about its direction – he wanted it to be more dialogue-heavy with less action – and was replaced by a team of proven screenwriters, including his brother Troy, Roger Marshall, Trevor Preston and Ranald Graham who had worked variously on shows such as The Avengers and The Gentle Touch. Their police contacts helped keep the scripts on the money.
Directors, including Tom Clegg and David Wickes, turned the series into a love letter to a lost London.
Our mid-70s capital was drab, grey and semi-derelict; still pockmarked with bomb sites from the war.
The very last episode – the 53rd – titled Jack Or Knave, saw disillusioned DI Regan resign after being falsely accused of corruption. “You want me to crawl back to work and be terribly grateful that I didn’t get nicked for something I didn’t do,” he sneered. “Well, you can stuff it.”
He is last seen hailing a cab and being driven away, slowly, down the Hammersmith Road. It was a fitting finale to a brilliant series but it didn’t quite end there.
The show had a huge impact on popular culture, most notably in Squeeze’s 1979 Top 3 hit Cool For Cats, with the lyrics: “The Sweeney’s doing ninety cos they’ve got the word to go/ They get a gang of villains in a shed up at Heathrow.”
In the Noughties, it inspired the excellent BBC TV drama Life On Mars.
And ITV’S Minder was created as a vehicle for Dennis Waterman on the back of it, although he was trumped by the genius of George Cole’s Arthur Daley.
Less impressive was the 2012 Nick Love big-screen Sweeney reboot, even if it did star Ray Winstone as Regan.
Heavy-handed and humourless, Plan B was no Waterman and it felt out of time and over the top with Kalashnikovs replacing Webley revolvers. Not a single “collared” villain asked for a brief.
The original, still running on ITV4, ITVX and Amazon Prime, was far classier.
It’s a thoroughly arresting drama and a reminder of a time when British police officers weren’t just uniformed social workers.