The only episode of ‘The Sweeney’ I was allowed to watch when it originally aired was a late entry in the series; the bargaining chip was the inexplicable presence of Morecambe & Wise as guest stars. I suppose maternal permission was influenced by the expectation that Eric and Ernie would help tone down the violence for which the show was notorious in 1978. Unbeknownst to my mother, I’d already seen an episode screened past my normal bedtime whilst staying at my grandparents’ place during a school holiday; there was never any set bedtime there, so I sat in on ‘The Sweeney’ with granddad and grandma and was treated to a full-frontal pair of tits on their little telly as a reward. If there was one element that gave the adventures of Regan and Carter playground plus-points in the 1970s, it was the perennial possibility of naked female flesh. Along with the anticipated car chases and punch-ups, there was always the outside chance of a scene in a strip-club. There’d be no proper swearing beyond the use of ‘bastard’ (pronounced baa-sted) a lot, so a glimpse of bristols was the next best thing.
I don’t know why it was such a big deal when even our house’s tabloid of choice at the time – the Daily Mirror – had its own equivalent of page 3 back then, so it’s not as if you couldn’t catch a snatch of mammaries, anyway; but ‘The Sweeney’ had a special position in the minds of 70s children. It was the Holy Grail of adult TV shows. Everyone at school claimed to watch it regularly, but such claims were no different from pubescent bullshit bragging about sexual encounters. 9.00 was the cut-off point for most when it came to viewing habits; you might be familiar with the show’s theme tune wafting up from the front room as your head reluctantly hit the pillow, but few from my generation saw it during its original run. It was regarded as ‘hard’ TV – far more realistic than ‘Starsky and Hutch’, and routinely featuring unsettling cockney villains with stockings on their faces, robbing banks clutching sawn-off shotguns – just like the headline crimes you heard during the bongs on ‘News at Ten’ before you finally fell asleep.
To a 70s child, ‘The Sweeney’ had a similar mystique as X-rated movies or girlie magazines, a grown-up world you yearned to be part of but knew you frustratingly had to wait for – a wait that felt like an eternity. In the absence of the real thing, your imagination painted a picture so graphic that by the time you were old enough to see the series during its first full run of repeats in the early 80s, half of the entertainment value came from the dated fashions. Reruns continued well into the 90s, passing through numerous postmodern and ‘ironic’ appreciations or condemnations. Then came the spoofs, the parodies, the pastiches and the eventual homage of ‘Life on Mars’; along the way, the series was simultaneously praised as a slice of gritty realism that blew ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ and ‘Z-Cars’ out of the water as well as a misogynistic example of old-school macho attitudes we were well rid of. ‘The Sweeney’ remains all of these things, yet so much more.
After the best part of 20 years without seeing a single episode – though consistent viewings of VHS off-air recordings preserved numerous lines and scenes in memory’s amber for decades – I recently got round to adding ‘The Sweeney’ to my bulging library of archive British TV shows on DVD. I decided to start proper with the movie-length pilot, titled ‘Regan’. Even 46 years on, it’s possible to see the promise of both the lead character and the set-up in this groundbreaking entry in the ‘Armchair Cinema’ anthology series. John Thaw was a familiar face to viewers by 1974, appearing as a guest star in endless programmes as well as managing an early starring role in the mid-60s series about the military police, ‘Redcap’; but in the gruff and grizzled, hard-boiled character of DI Jack Regan, he stumbled upon the role of a lifetime.
Produced by Euston Films, the Thames division established to make drama entirely on film, ‘The Sweeney’ had some of its ground laid by the final two series of ‘Special Branch’ (1973-74) and recruited Dennis Waterman as Regan’s sidekick Sgt Carter, having impressed in an episode of the earlier series. ‘The Sweeney’ would take the approach of ‘Special Branch’ and push the grittiness to a new level for television. Unlike its predecessor, by focusing on the cases of the Flying Squad, Regan & Carter didn’t have to concern themselves with occasional espionage interludes and had free rein to concentrate on ‘blags’ of the kind that were commonplace when most businesses had physical cash delivered to their premises on pay day.
‘The Sweeney’ is far from being crass, one-dimensional action, however. There’s an abundance of wit in the dialogue, and Regan & Carter are well-rounded, wholly believable characters whose banter and buddy-buddy relationship rings true in the context of their situation. The line between copper and criminal was never more blurred than in ‘The Sweeney’, though in his own way DI Regan possesses as strong a moral streak as Sgt Dixon; he’s averse to bribery and would never be in the pocket of a villain. At the time of its original broadcast, a series of high-profile exposés on real-life Met corruption hogged the headlines, so for all its seemingly unflattering portrait of Scotland Yard, ‘The Sweeney’ actually paints the police in an encouragingly positive light. If anything, Regan’s true nemesis is not the blagger, but the ‘fifth-floor bottlers’ at the Yard, forever frustrating his investigations with bureaucratic interference. Regan is more comfortable as the Wild West sheriff than being marooned behind a desk, happier tooled-up with a shooter than pushing a pen, in his element on the street rather than undergoing ‘diversity awareness’ courses.
In many respects, ‘The Sweeney’ is the definitive British TV series of the mid-70s; the landscape that Regan & Carter screech their tyres through is one of a rundown, worn-out country falling to pieces – and Regan himself often appears to mirror the state of the nation. Despite being able to chase villains on foot, he and his second-in-command smoke a breathtaking amount of cigarettes, they drink like borderline alcoholics, and they each bed a different ‘scrubber’ every episode. Men like them probably still exist, but they’re not portrayed on emasculating primetime television anymore. In one episode, Regan’s ex-wife looks despairingly at him and says ‘You’re 35 and you look 45’, and it’s true that all the men in the series whose ages are stated do indeed look at least a decade older by today’s standards, though I guess all those fags, booze and birds took their toll. Interestingly, however, very few of them are obese.
Regan & Carter take no prisoners and no outsiders are exempt from their contempt. They don’t single anyone out for special treatment, failing to distinguish between posh-boys, northerners, Scotsmen, Irishmen, blacks, Arabs, gays, lesbians, prostitutes – all are fair game for piss-taking and disdain, and all have their derogatory nicknames characteristic of the era. Watching it with a 21st century head on is a pointless exercise; one has to enter into the spirit of the times as much as viewing a Hollywood Film Noir from the 1940s; it’s a different world and one with its own surreal rules and regulations. Even something as basic as the bizarre side-partings and fuzzy barnets of the bad guys becomes the norm after a few episodes, as does the slang. One quickly accepts this world as a separate entity from reality – which is ironic considering realism was a key factor that gained the programme such critical and commercial success first time round. Coming to it anew at a moment when the contemporary world seems a more uncertain environment with each passing day, there’s something oddly comforting about the world inhabited by ‘The Sweeney’; it’s rough and it’s ready, but you know where you stand.
© The Editor
Lest we forget, this is an age in which Marks & Spencer can apologise on behalf of a brown-coloured bra because its name – tobacco – offended a customer for whom it evoked the spirit of George Floyd; yup, everything is racist in 2020, even lingerie. And if you reckon colour is merely skin deep, according to an edict issued by the British Library, that’s tantamount to ‘covert white supremacy’; mind you, I know someone who used to work at the British Library, and from what she told me of her former employers, they’re not quite as enlightened as this latest opportunistic PR stunt paints them. How surprising, as the preachers of Identity Politics are usually such open-minded souls. Yes, we all know by now that more or less every public body, corporation, company and cultural institution in this country is under the Woke yolk, so I suppose the situation becoming even sillier is a natural progression; but the thing with Identity Politics is that one can never give enough inches to the mob when there are so many miles to take.
For good or ill – usually the latter in recent years – the US tends to introduce trends that are then exported to this side of the pond with increasingly indecent haste; we’ve already unfortunately become accustomed to American-style militant race-baiting via the latest strain of a seemingly incurable virus (i.e. Identity Politics), and a recent essay I came across on the current state of America’s most exciting city, New York, could well prove to be the shape of things to come. Of course, anyone with a long memory will know NYC has been in a bad way many times before and has always shown a Phoenix-like propensity to rise again. One only has to recall the trauma of 9/11 as an example, and even a quarter of a century before that the city was on the brink of complete collapse. With a failing economy due to deindustrialisation, and an appalling crime rate that drew the dregs to the city and kept fresh investment away, New York was confronted by bankruptcy.
I suppose it’s inevitable that a medium in such a state of perilous uncertainty over its future as television will go out of its way to promote and overhype some programmes; these tend to be those it hopes will grab the headlines and fuel 24-hour social media discourse, thus providing another stay of execution. In the meantime, the few remaining gems that sparkle under the clickbait radar are usually the ones worth investing in. A wonderful example of this is ‘There She Goes’, which recently completed a second series on BBC2. The central premise of the programme is not an easy sell, dealing as it does with the challenges faced by parents with a severely mentally-disabled child. Not, one would imagine, the formula for a classic sitcom; however, ‘There She Goes’ hovering between humour and pathos actually isn’t that far removed from a good example of the classic sitcom such as ‘Steptoe and Son’, which often had bleak moments worthy of the finest drama – perhaps reflecting the fact it was the first comedy series to employ actors as leads rather than comedians.
In the absence of any volunteers to blow it on my behalf, I again raise my own trumpet and embark upon a tune. It’s a familiar melody, one that I’ve played many times before here; but it’s my party and I’ll blow my own trumpet if I want to. Anyway, the fact that publishing houses have closed their doors along with all other businesses happily doesn’t stifle the creative or publishing process for the independent artist; and knowing one’s endeavours will be available to anyone interested within weeks of the last word hitting the page is a nice benefit of being ignored by the mainstream industry. The removal of alternatives courtesy of Covid-19 has had one personal positive for your humble narrator in that it has channelled 99% of my energies into my art, and it has certainly proven to be the next best thing to compensation. I’ve written and published (via Amazon) three books this year so far – my first collection of short stories; my fifth collection of poetry; and my first book on a facet of pop culture I’ve previously written about on here but never before in book form.
‘Follow the Country Code’ was one of numerous mottos stuck on the end of the Central Office of Information Public Information Films that put the fear of God into schoolchildren during the days when I myself could be counted amongst their ranks. It’s a subject I’ve raised before, but it’s always worth mentioning that the TV shorts this underfunded and overlooked Government department that Dave’s administration dispensed with during their initial Coalition axe-wielding served as a highly effective propaganda tool that got the message across far more efficiently than any other comparable campaigns. Whether consciously scaring the shit out of the population – see the mid-70s rabies series and the notorious Hammer-esque, Grim Reaper-by-the-river nightmare narrated by Donald Pleasence – or choosing to opt for comedic interludes featuring thick animated working-class couple Jo & Petunia (no relation), the PIFs of the past registered with the public and undoubtedly taught more than one generation to look both ways when crossing the road and to refrain from throwing bangers around on 5 November.
I suspect as soon as Kamala Harris was unveiled as Sleepy Joe’s running mate she was referred to as ‘African-American’; if one was to take that ubiquitous phrase literally – i.e. indicating a US citizen descended from slaves – it doesn’t apply to the prospective Vice President. Her scientist mother was from India and her economics professor father was from Jamaica. But, as we all know by now, Identity is everything on what passes for the Left these days, and I guess the Californian Senator can identify as whatever she wants as long as it fits the required model. Because Harris is an American ‘woman of colour’, she’s therefore automatically ‘African-American’. And, of course, being female means she ticks two boxes. The foregone conclusion that Biden’s choice would be a woman of colour meant her selection was no great surprise; the worrying mental decline of the patsy shoved forward as the Democratic nominee implies his potential tenancy of the White House may well be brief, thus opening the back door for Kamala Harris to become the first female US President.
Originally an essay and then expanded into a 1992 book, ‘The End of History’ by US political scientist Francis Fukuyama was an instant philosophical response to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the climax of the Cold War, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Retrospectively perceived by some as having its judgement clouded by the same wave of euphoric optimism as the rest of the West at the beginning of the 1990s, perhaps we can forgive the apparent naivety in declaring the final triumph of liberal democracy after an ideological battle that had spanned half-a-century; it’s easy to forget how such moments feel – and how they lead us to get carried away by possibilities – because it seems so long since the world experienced one. Yes, we know now that the party was pooped by successive gate-crashers like sectarian civil war, ethnic cleansing, Radical Islam, the resurgence of Russia and China, and Identity Politics; but the early 1990s was probably one of the last times people looked to the future and saw something other than dread. It’s understandable if nostalgia for that feeling occasionally surfaces, especially at a time when endless Doomsday narratives have made the future as unappealing as the present.
‘People hate anything well-made, you know; it gives them a guilty conscience.’ So said John Betjeman when surveying the irreparable damage to a railway carriage after it had been (in his own words) ‘smashed by Teds’; this example of vandalism captured on camera in the early 1960s anticipates the familiar wreckage visited upon carriages a decade or so later. That was when British Rail would segregate football fans travelling to an away game from ordinary passengers. The so-called ‘Football Specials’ became notorious mobile war-zones; presumably hoping the supporters would exhaust their appetite for destruction on the train and spare shopkeepers and homeowners around football grounds, the trains laid on for fans were deliberately dirty old stock – after all, if they were going to be smashed up, there didn’t seem much point providing travellers with the latest luxurious carriages. So they weren’t.
There are times when that most basic human necessity – to have a roof over one’s head – becomes a crisis that demands action. The years following the devastation of housing stock during WWII air raids was one such time, even if many of the dwellings destroyed by the Luftwaffe were poor, insanitary slum residences that had already been condemned. Those homes of similar quality to survive the Blitz staggered on through the 1950s and into the 60s, however unfit for human habitation they might have been; unsurprisingly, most were situated in high-density urban areas and were home to people on low (or no) incomes – the kind of dilapidated hovels often captured on campaigning documentaries of the era, the kind infested by bugs, vermin and rising damp, boasting inadequate facilities, outdoor privies and tin baths in front of the fire.
winegumtelegram 