I grew up on a diet of fags and booze, ie, watching, The Sweeney John Thaws fantastic interpretation of the hard bitten, maverick cop made, Detective, Inspector Jack Regan in to TVs greatest ever Cop, an accolade that has never been bettered or never even come close to being bettered! It is my enduring love of, The Sweeney that I pay homage to The forerunner of, The Sweeney, Regan. Regan was the second play shown under the Armchair Cinema banner and Euston, enthused by the play, had already gone into production on The Sweeney before the play was scheduled for transmission. However, the commission for Regan itself developed out of ideas for a drama series that the writer Ian Kennedy-Martin had pitched to Thames and then to Euston. Kennedy-Martin had already, like his brother Troy, carved out a significant career in writing for television by the time he started chatting to Thamess Head of Script Development, George Markstein, about Special Branch. Hed already written scripts for drama series, including Mogul/The Troubleshooters (1965-72), Hadleigh (1969-76), The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1971-73) and The Onedin Line (1971-80), or created his own, such as Parkins Patch (1969-70). He had adapted Bridget Bolands The Prisoner for the BBC (considered an early inspiration for the ITC series of the same name according to Sweeney! The Official Companion) back in 1963 when he spent a number of years in the BBCs writers pool. When he script-edited ABCs Redcap (1964-66) it also cemented his long term professional relationship with actor John Thaw and for whom he specifically created the role of Jack Regan. His first encounter with Lloyd Shirley can also be traced back to the Armchair Theatre play The Detective Waiting in 1971. Of more relevance in the development of Eustons approach to Regan and The Sweeney, Kennedy-Martin had worked with producer-director James Gatward at Southern Television in 1969 on police drama Letters from the Dead, which he describes on his own website as all on film, had ranged aound the City of London, the countryside, four-wallers and all over the place, plus snatched shots where we couldn’t get permission to film. This is interesting in light of the disputes that Kennedy-Martin had with Regan producer Ted Childs who had claimed that his script for the play was too rooted in studio based video-taped drama production. George Markstein, a former journalist who had allegedly worked in military intelligence, had been story consultant on Court Martial (1966) the final episodes of Danger Man (1960-68) and was best known as the script editor for ITCs The Prisoner (1967-68) before moving to Thames and story editing Callan (the last two series 1970-2), Special Branch (the first series in 1969), a selection of Armchair Theatre plays, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (the first series in 1971) and producing the first series of Man at the Top (1970-71). Markstein and Shirley both invited Kennedy-Martin to come up with ideas for a series to replace Special Branch which Euston and Kennedy-Martin felt didnt depict modern policing realistically at all. Kennedy-Martin had been watching with some considerable interest new Metropolitan Police Commissioner Robert Marks attempts to clean up what he saw as a seriously corrupted Scotland Yard. It was an era in which an elite branch of the Metropolitan Police, the Flying Squad, had cultivated very close connections with criminals as part of its strategy that all cases should more or less be informant driven. To this end, Mark created A10, an internal body that would investigate and root out corrupt officers and to ensure that all work with informants was totally transparent and by the book. By the mid 1970s, several scandals about bribery and corruption in the force had come to light, including the Flying Squads own commander Detective Chief Superintendent Kenneth Drury, who was jailed after being convicted of corruption. These scandals eventually led to an extensive internal investigation between 1978-84 codenamed Operation Countryman. Kennedy-Martin knew that there was a great deal of unrest about Marks clean up campaign at the Flying Squad through his connections with officer Dave Wilson, who hed met when his brother Troy was researching for Z Cars. In Shut It! The Inside Story of the Sweeney, he explained: My friend on the Flying Squad didnt like this at all. He said, thats how we function, we gather information by meeting villains. Were right in there with them. Wilson provided Kennedy-Martin with background details about the Flying Squad, perfect material for the story of an anti-establishment Squad officer that he was developing, and by the beginning of 1974 he had submitted a script, entitled McLean, to Lloyd Shirley and George Markstein. They both refined the script with Kennedy-Martin and then greenlit the project as an 80 minute drama for Armchair Cinema. At about the same time, Kennedy-Martin and Shirley mutually agreed that Regan, as it was now titled, would suit John Thaw and a contract had been offered to the actor for the pilot and series, then called The Outcasts. However, the relationship between Kennedy-Martin, producer Ted Childs and the original director, Douglas Camfield, deteriorated when both Childs and Camfield wanted to make changes to the Regan script that he couldnt agree with. Camfield insisted on the scenes he wanted to add, including one featuring a gang rape according to Shut It! The Inside Story of the Sweeney, and Childs felt that the Regan script was full of too many long speeches and little action, something more suitable for a studio-based drama. Kennedy-Martin also refutes that claim on his website and asks, slow action? Long speeches? Where are they? of his pilot script. The dispute eventually saw the departure, before shooting began, of Camfield and Kennedy-Martin, but not before Kennedy-Martin had cannily negotiated the film, book and merchandising rights to what would become The Sweeney. Camfield would later return to direct a number of episodes for the series. Regan not only had its finger on the pulse when it came to examining the sweeping changes that were occurring within the Metropolitan Police, with the central character of Jack Regan articulating the resistance by some officers to how Marks wanted them to abandon some of their unorthodox investigative methodologies and practices, but also reconstructed the genre of the police drama which, although had been revitalised in the 1960s by Allan Prior and Troy Kennedy Martins Z Cars, had by 1974 become a much tamer series and had already spun off into the various regional crime squad iterations of Softly Softly and Barlow at Large. Even cosy old Dixon of Dock Green, which started life in 1955, was still on air when Regan and The Sweeney burst onto the scene. This reconstruction can be partially traced via director Tom Cleggs documentary aesthetic, his use of hand-held cameras and all location filming, the grittier approach to crime drama that British cinema was already tapping into with Peter Yatess Robbery (1967), Mike Hodgess Get Carter (1971) - with the static shot of a police officers injured body at the side of the Thames in the Regan title sequence clearly an homage - and Michael Tuchners Villain (1971). Clegg and Kennedy-Martin were also very enthusiastic about the improvisational acting that theyd seen in Hal Ashbys The Last Detail (1973) and had hoped that Thaw would bring a similar quality to his playing of Regan. Childs and his Special Branch crew had recently seen Friedkins The French Connection (1971) again and realised that its gritty attitude was something they could connect with. Friedkins film was just one of a number of American films of the period that were setting out to transform the received view of the police and lawlessness and certainly Don Siegels Dirty Harry (1971) was another influential film that depicted an officer willing to trangress the boundaries of acceptable behaviour in law enforcement. At the same time, Regan and The Sweeney could be seen as a refracted response to what many perceived as the ungovernable Britain of the 1970s. As the counter-cultural dream of the 1960s dwindled and the Heath-Wilson era of politics was about to give way to a further swing to the right under Thatcher, the country found itself the victim of soaring crime rates, trade union action and terrorism while attempting to come to terms with Britains transformation into a multi-cultural society. With public confidence in the role of the police under scrutiny, perhaps Regan and the unorthodox approach of the Flying Squad articulated what Stuart Hall, quoted in Leon Hunts British Low Culture, saw as the consequence of legitimating the recourse to the law, to constraint and statutory power as the main, indeed the only, effective means left of defending hegemony in conditions of severe crisis. As Robert Reiner suggests in The Dialectics of Dixon: the Changing Image of the TV Cop, Dixon and Regan are the polar opposites of each other within the police drama genre: Dixon presents the police primarily as carers, lightning rods for the post-war consensual climate... The Sweeney portrays the police primarily as controllers, heralding the upsurge of a tough law and order politics in the late 1970s. Dominated by John Thaws extraordinary performance as the loner, maverick Regan, the drama also boasts a splendid supporting cast including Lee Montague as the intimidating Dale, Don Henderson as a rather effete bodyguard to Mallorys girlfriend, Janet Key as Regans ex-wife Kate, David Daker as Tusser and Morris Perrys laconic Maynon. Touching, violent, gritty and funny and superbly set up by director Tom Clegg, it comes as no surprise now that Euston were so confident about turning Regan into a series.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Jun 2014 18:22:45 +0000
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