Get Nicked by The Sweeney!

"Get your trousers on, you're nicked!" The Sweeney's John Thaw and Dennis Waterman

My wife and I just finished binge-watching all 53 episodes of The Sweeney on Britbox and loved its dated, politically incorrect (but clearly reflective of its time) vibe and colorful Cockney rhyming slang. In fact, the program title itself derives from Cockney rhyming slang, in which the expression “Sweeney Todd” rhymes with (and stands for) “Flying Squad” - the elite branch of the Metropolitan Police Service specializing in combating armed robbery and violent crime within metropolitan London. The Sweeney originally aired on ITV between 1975 and 1978 and starred future Inspector Morse icon John Thaw as Detective Inspector Jack Regan and Dennis Waterman (Up the Junction, New Tricks) as Detective Sergeant George Carter (hmm...Regan and Carter: a wink at our future Presidents?). Such was its popularity in the UK that it got name-checked by a number of UK pop stars of the time, most notably by Squeeze in "Cool For Cats" ("The Sweeney's doing 90/'Cos they've got the word to go/They get a gang of villains/In a shed up at Heathrow"). It also spawned two theatrically-released feature film spin-offs, Sweeney! (1977) and Sweeney 2 (1978), both of which are available for insatiable Sweeney fans  - and newbie converts alike - to stream through Kanopy using their Pratt library card. (In 2012, a movie reboot of The Sweeney starring Ray Winstone as Regan and rapper Plan B (Ben Drew) as Carter was released; the less said about that iteration, the better.)

In Sweeney! (1977), Detective Inspector Regan and Detective Sergeant Carter accidentally get involved in a gigantic top-level plot against the British government when the mistress of a cabinet minister is found dead of an apparent overdose. As the bodies start to pile up in London’s streets, Regan and Carter find themselves embroiled in a murderous international conspiracy involving call girls, multinational oil companies and cold-blooded bureaucrats. Barry Foster (famous for his role as grim killer Roger Rusk in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy) and Ian Banne (The Offense) co-star in this hard-hitting big screen adaptation of the television series. Watch the Sweeney! trailer here.

In Sweeney 2, Regan and Carter are back on the trail of a particularly tough and ruthless gang of bank robbers who always use a gold-plated sawn-off shotgun during their raids. Following a trail of dead bodies, wrecked cars, a mad bomber and bundles of banknotes all the way from London to the isle of Malta, the two detectives ruthlessly pursue their quarry, culminating in a final raid that becomes a desperate shotgun massacre. Veteran character actor Denholm Elliott (A Room With a View, Raiders of the Lost Ark) and Ken Hutchison (Ladyhawke) co-star. Watch the Sweeney 2 trailer here.

Influenced by the action-packed American TV programs of the time, The Sweeney represented a cultural shift in British crime series. Just as the hard-boiled pulp fiction of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett liberated the classic “cozy mystery” from well-groomed detectives solving locked-room murders over tea and biscuits, The Sweeney gave crime back to its rightful owners: nasty villains hard enough to roller-skate on and the equally rough-and-tough coppers out to nick them. It was everything Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot weren’t: rude, crude and brutally realistic. And its protagonists weren’t the heroic good guys in white hats; they were flawed human beings, with the same insecurities and problems we all have. Indeed, Regan and Carter are shown inhabiting the same sleazy world as the criminals they chase, mixing with low-life “snouts” to obtain their leads, and speaking the same vernacular. In that sense, it laid the groundwork for future crime series like Prime Suspect and Luther, with a direct line from John Thaw’s inspector Regan to Philip Glenister’s DCI Gene Hunt on Life On Mars. And the action - car chases with screaming tires, explosive crashes and bare-fisted hand-to-hand fighting - only added to the sense that this wasn’t your dad’s quaint police procedural.

On a sociological level, it’s fun to observe the hideous clothes (wide collars and ties, bell-bottom flared trousers) and dated hairstyles of the series, not to mention the American-styled muscle cars of the “Flying Squad.” Star John Thaw looks like he's 50, even though he's only in his early 30s, and his violent, boozing Regan is as far from the opera-loving Inspector Morse (not to mention sensitive young Endeavor Morse) as conceivable; and Dennis Waterman’s sideburns make him look like a Slade glam music fan, while his Cockney-accented repartee with Thaw (“If Freud had met her, he’d a ditched his couch and become a tattoo artist!”) was a highlight of the series. Indeed, dialogue was as important to The Sweeney as action and many of Regan's best lines have become famous, none more so than “Get your trousers on, you’re nicked!”

Looked at today, with widespread law enforcement abuses headlining the daily news, the insensitive language and extreme violence depicted in The Sweeney clearly dates it. But though Regan and Carter sometimes bent the rules in their pursuit of justice, they were basically honest cops who abhorred corruption and hypocrisy. And The Sweeney’s historical significance as a catalyst for change across the entire police drama genre (an effect we take for granted in virtually every contemporary crime series) makes these films, taken in perspective, well worth a look. 

As a DVD Savant critic described the series: "Some points of reference for those who still haven't a clue what the series was about? If you could imagine teaming Bobby Crocker [Kojak detective] with Ken 'Hutch' Hutchinson [the rough-hewn Scots character actor of The Bill and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs fame], giving them both a couple of extra lessons in Harry Callahan-style insubordination/attitude and a spoonful of the kind of political incorrectness that featured in most ‘70s cop/action features, before flying them out to investigate the events that unfolded in Mike Hodges's Get Carter....you'd be almost on the right track."