GET YOUR TROUSERS ON, YOU'RE NICKED!

Coarse, unapologetic and grimly funny, The Sweeney was the ground-breaking 1970s police drama that rewrote the rulebook on screen coppers. In fact, the only complaint from the real hard-living members of the Flying Squad was that it was a little too realistic...

- By Tom Fordy

EW TV characters have had a more arresting introduction than DI Jack Regan, John Thaw’s no-nonsense copper from The Sweeney. Storming into the flat of a villain in the pilot episode, Regan finds his suspect in bed with a strumpet and utters the immortal line, “Get your trousers on, you're nicked.”

That's The Sweeney in a rough-and-ready nutshell: coarse, streetwise, funny, straight to the point and unapologetically aggressive. With that line, the detective inspector booted down the doors of TV history.

The Sweeney, which ran for four series between 1975 to 1978, followed Regan and his partner DS George Carter, played by Dennis Waterman, of the Flying Squad (the “Sweeney” in cockney rhyming slang — “Flying Squad, Sweeney Todd”). The first series is now available on remastered Blu-ray to mark its 50th anniversary, with the second series set to follow in September.

Racing around London in their Ford Consul, Regan and Carter were hard in every way: hard-hitting, hard-edged, hard-talking, and hard-drinking. Watched 50 years on, it’s still infectiously macho stuff. Just the theme tune alone conjures up images of Regan and Carter roughing up a rascal.

On-screen they bent the rules to get a collar. Putting the boot into a suspect to get a confession followed by a heavy session at the boozer was all in a day’s work for the Sweeney lads. But off-screen they rewrote the rulebook entirely.

It was the first drama series shot entirely on film — 16mm was used at various West London locations - and the first to show police as fallible tough nuts. Regan and Carter’s methods blur the lines between hero and villain, using their own liberal interpretation of the law.

As The Sweeney’s creator Ian Kennedy Martin says, TV police officers until that point were “all good and honest coppers”. But, adds Kennedy Martin, “all coppers weren’t good and honest”.