The Sweeney - Background

Background

The series was created by writer Ian Kennedy Martin, brother of the better-known Troy Kennedy Martin who contributed several episodes and wrote the second film. It was born from a one-off drama, entitled Regan, which Ian Kennedy Martin wrote for Thames Television's Armchair Cinema series of standalone films in 1974. The part of Regan was specifically written for Thaw, by a friend of Kennedy Martin with whom he had worked on Redcap.

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 ideas for the series were for it to be partially studio-based, with more dialogue and less action but producer Ted Childs disagreed with this, and Ian Kennedy Martin reluctantly parted company with the project. It was filmed almost entirely on location on filmstock (which gave it a startling degree of realism), and had 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."

The Sweeney was the first really modern police-based series on British television. Previously, most dramas featuring the police had shied away from showing "coppers" as fallible human beings. The police in The Sweeney were far removed from the cosy BBC world of Dixon of Dock Green, or even from the BBC's slightly more realistic Z-Cars (which itself had been co-created by Troy Kennedy-Martin). They 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, which often had a disregard for authority, rules and the "system", as long it got the job done. Until The Sweeney, this had been a subject largely whitewashed by British television.

It was a fast-paced edge-of-your-seat action series, depicting the Squad's relentless battle against armed robbery; but it nevertheless included a substantial degree of humour. For the time, it had a high degree of graphic on-screen violence and the episodes had a high number of on-screen deaths.