Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - Nothing's gonna harm you, not while I'm around

The Sweeney - "Ringer" - January 2, 1975

I wracked my brain for a while trying to come up with a decent follow-up to my Comic Strip Project. I wanted to find something that had the same breadth (I do enjoy the tangents). So far, I have been unable to find something that narrow. So I cast wider.

As I discussed one of the episodes of the Comic Strip, I talked for a bit about my relationship with British Action Television:

Billions of years ago when I was young I spent half a year saving up for a book called "The ITV Encyclopedia of Adventure" by Dave Rogers. In those days before the internet, it cost $55 to get an import copy of a book that had a list price of £9.95. This book was close to 600 pages of wonders, television programs that I was quite familiar with (The Avengers, The Prisoner) shows that I had heard whispers of, but had no hope of ever seeing in my lifetime (Ace of Wands, Sapphire and Steel) and finally a huge number of programs that I had never heard of. It was like an entire other world was opening up. All of these things had been made and broadcast. Millions of people had watched them. And, of course, many of them had been deleted long ago. Lost forever before I had even a clue that they existed in the first place.

My heavens I poured over that book. I learned all about Man in a Suitcase and Special Branch, and when I, through the magic of videotape trading, was able to get blurry, washed out seventh generation copies of things like Kinvig and The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, I jumped at them.

I've gotten some response from that post. Between helpful friends and strangers, Internet shopping opportunities and Digital Cable, I am filling in the gaps in my UK television experience. And from that comes this latest series of posts. I'm just going to see what I can find and post on what I can see.

So anyway. To start.

In a former life, as I was working toward my MA in Literature, I annoyed a professor by taking these lines from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"

But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.

to presume that Mrs. Porter was being busted by the Flying Squad.

It's horrific the sort of havoc that a bit of useless pop culture flotsam can wreak upon a helpless eight to twelve page essay.

Anyway, the bit of pop culture flotsam that I was aware of was The Sweeney, which I had never seen until I was able to catch the first episode, a little while ago.

Considering that it was sort of odd to be actually watching something that I'd been tangentially hearing about for decades, I was thrown by two things:

1. Hey, that's the guy who plays Inspector Morse!
2. The bad guy in this episode is played by Brian Blessed. This made an impact for two reasons. First, he was not overacting. So much. Until the end. Second, I was watching without looking at any background, but I knew that Brian Blessed had been on a big important British cop show that I had never ever seen, so I watched with the presumption that this was it. So even though he was quite obviously the baddy, I was ready for the twist ending to the first episode to be that he was actually another member of The Sweeney who had infiltrated the bad guys and the episode would conclude with him saying something along the lines of "I'm Captain Fancy of The Sweeney and you're nicked!" These hopes were dashed when Regan shotgunned him over the side of a quarry, at which point I loaded up the IMDB and realized that I was mixed up with Z-Cars. Still, it made the ending seem a bit less cliched - It's the double bluff!

All in all, it was a so so bit of television, but it's nice to have that shoe finally drop, and a good a place as any to start this off.