Twelve other officers were convicted and many more resigned. Detective Chief Superintendent Kenneth Drury, the Flying Squad's real-life commander, was convicted on five counts of corruption and imprisoned for eight years.
#Bbc radio julia mckenzie sweeney todd series#
This reality served as a backdrop to the series and it is reflected in the mood, tone and story lines of The Sweeney. During the mid-1970s Flying Squad officers were publicly censured for being involved in bribery, corruption and for having excessively close links with the criminal fraternity. The series also captured the zeitgeist as it was made during a dark period for the real-world Flying Squad. This is evident in episodes such as 2.7 "Golden Fleece" when Regan brandishes a lollipop at Carter and says "who loves ya, baby" in a nod to hit US crime series Kojak (1973–78) or in 2.10 "Trojan Bus" when Regan whistles the theme-tune to the BBC's sedate police series Dixon of Dock Green (1955–76) after a particularly elementary piece of detective work.
#Bbc radio julia mckenzie sweeney todd tv#
The series broke new ground for TV drama and incorporated self-awareness and genre-referential humour. Until The Sweeney, the violent reality of policing was largely ignored by British television. Police officers in The Sweeney are ready and willing to meet violence with violence when dealing with London's hardened criminals and are prone to cut corners and bend the law in pursuit of their prey, as long as it gets the right result. The series shows a somewhat more realistic side of police life, depicting them as flawed human beings, some with a disregard for authority, rules and the "system". Most TV police dramas had shied away from showing officers as fallible. In addition to these main characters, scripts should be based around three major speaking parts, with up to ten minor speaking parts". Regan will appear in every episode, Carter in approximately 10 out of 13 episodes.
The story will be played across three acts, each being no more than 19 minutes and no fewer than 8 minutes in length. Each film will open with a teaser of up to 3 minutes, which will be followed by the opening titles. His shoes as series writer were filled by his brother Troy Kennedy Martin, Roger Marshall, Ranald Graham and Trevor Preston.Įvery writer on the series was given guidelines, "Each show will have an overall screen time (minus titles) of 48 minutes 40 seconds. Following this battle for creative control, Ian Kennedy Martin parted company with the project. Ian Kennedy Martin saw the subsequent series as being mainly studio-based, with more dialogue and less action but producer Ted Childs, inspired in part by Get Carter (1971) and The French Connection (1971), disagreed. After it scored highly in the ratings, work began on the development of the series proper. The Regan film was seen as having series potential from the very beginning. Dennis Waterman was cast after his performance in the Special Branch episode "Stand and Deliver", also produced by Euston Films.
The part of Jack Regan was written for John Thaw, who was a friend of Ian Kennedy Martin, with whom he had worked on the TV drama series Redcap in the 1960s. Regan is a 90-minute television film written by Ian Kennedy Martin for the Thames Television anthology series Armchair Cinema (see Armchair Theatre) in 1974. The Sweeney was developed from a one-off TV drama entitled Regan which served as the pilot episode for the series. The popularity of the series in the UK led to two feature films, Sweeney! (1977) and Sweeney 2 (1978), both starring Thaw and Waterman, and a later film, The Sweeney (2012), starring Ray Winstone as Regan and Ben Drew as Carter. The programme's title comes from the real-world Cockney rhyming slang nickname " Sweeney Todd" used to refer to the Flying Squad by London's criminal fraternity in the mid 20th century. It was produced by the Thames Television subsidiary Euston Films for broadcast on the ITV network in the UK between 2 January 1975 and 28 December 1978. It stars John Thaw as Detective Inspector Jack Regan and Dennis Waterman as his partner, Detective Sergeant George Carter. 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.
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