A series around cromer to celebrate all the good crime fighters on tv over the past deacdes, please be careful when attempting these as they are on country roads and no signy no smiley.
The Sweeney is a 1970s British television police drama focusing on two members of the Flying Squad, a branch of the Metropolitan Police specialising in tackling armed robbery and violent crime in London. It was made by Thames Television for broadcast on the ITV network. The programme's title derives from 'Sweeney Todd', which is Cockney rhyming slang for "Flying Squad". It starred John Thaw as Detective Inspector Jack Regan and Dennis Waterman as his partner, Detective Sergeant George Carter. Such was its popularity in the UK that it spawned two feature film spin-offs, Sweeney! and Sweeney 2
Background[edit]
The programme was shot on 16mm film by Thames Television's film division, Euston Films. It was originally broadcast on ITV between 2 January 1975 and 28 December 1978 at 21:00–22:00 on weekdays (usually Mondays), with repeated screenings at the same time until the early 1980s. The series was created by writer Ian Kennedy Martin, brother of the better-known Troy Kennedy Martin, who wrote several episodes and also the second film. It was developed from a one-off TV drama entitled Regan, a 90-minute made-for-TV movie that Ian Kennedy Martin wrote for Thames Television's Armchair Cinema series in 1974. The part of Regan was specifically written for John Thaw, who was by this time a friend of Ian Kennedy Martin, with whom he'd worked on the TV drama series Redcap[2] in the 1960s.
From the very beginning the show was seen as having series potential. After Regan scored highly in the ratings, work began on the development of the series proper. Ian Kennedy Martin's idea was for the series to be mainly studio-based, with more dialogue and less action, but producer Ted Childs disagreed, and in consequence Ian Kennedy Martin parted company with the project. Childs produced it on film, not videotape, so making it possible to shoot it almost entirely on location using 16 mm film. which gave it a startling degree of realism, and to use film editing techniques, enabling him to give the show a heavy bias toward action sequences.
The writers were given strict guidelines to follow: "Each show will have an overall screen time (minus titles) of 48 minutes 40 seconds. Each film will open with a teaser of up to 3 minutes, which will be followed by the opening titles. The story will be played across three acts, each being no more than 19 minutes and no less than 8 minutes in length. Regan will appear in every episode, Carter in approximately 10 out of 13 episodes. In addition to these main characters, scripts should be based around three major speaking parts, with up to ten minor speaking parts."
Previously, most dramas featuring the police had shied away from showing them as fallible. The police in The Sweeney were brutal and violent in dealing with London's hardened criminals, and prone to cutting corners and bending laws. The series showed a somewhat more realistic side of the police, often depicting a disregard for authority, rules and the "system", so long it as got the job done.[3][4] Until The Sweeney, this had been a subject largely ignored by British television.[3][4] The series' own awareness of breaking new ground is evident in episodes such as the second series "Trojan Bus", where Regan briefly whistles the theme-tune to Dixon of Dock Green after a particularly elementary piece of detective work.
It is a fast-paced edge-of-your-seat action series, depicting the Squad's relentless battle against armed robbery; but it nevertheless includes a substantial degree of humour. For the time, it had a high degree of graphic on-screen violence and the episodes tend to have a high body count, i.e. several deaths per episode.
The series reflected the fact that it was made during a dark period for the real-life Flying Squad, which in the late 1970s had been publicly censured for being involved in bribery, corruption and excessively close links with the criminal fraternity.[3] The actual commander of the Flying Squad, Detective Chief Superintendent Kenneth Drury, was convicted of five counts of corruption and imprisoned for eight years on 7 July 1977 (an incident that formed a plot element in the movie Sweeney 2). An internal investigation, called Operation Countryman, was then launched to stamp out corruption.[5]