Fights, camera, action: how The Sweeney collared us all

In 1975, John Thaw's flawed and fallible detective Jack Regan introduced the antihero to mainstream TV. Fifty years later, the show's influence is still clear to see

- says Jonathan Wells

Shut it! This year, The Sweeney turns 50, so get your telly on. Because such is the crime drama's enduring appeal that it'll probably be on right this second - swearing, glaring, and kicking in doors. It might be on ITV4. It used to be on UK Gold. For a time, it even reran on Channel 5. But bash a few buttons and you'll find him: a young (but decidedly not young-looking) John Thaw, laying down the law as Inspector Jack Regan, the character that changed British television drama for ever.

The Sweeney first hit our screens (and also gave a good walloping to every wayward villain in west London) in January 1975. Its second series, of a total of four broadcast on ITV, followed in September of the same year.

Alongside Thaw, who died in 2002, Dennis Waterman costarred as the affable, capable DS George Carter. Waterman died in 2022, leaving few members of the fictionalised Flying Squad (the series derived its name from cockney rhyming slang: “Sweeney Todd”) still with us, let alone still working. But Nick Brimble, who played DC Gerry Burtonshaw, never stopped. Today a mainstay of the detective drama Grantchester, the 80-year-old recalls his Sweeney debut in the programme’s sixth episode, “Night Out”.

“It might have been my first day,” says Brimble, “and we were doing a fight [scene] in a pub. I was there with Dennis, and we were running late. They said: ‘OK, Dennis, Nick, make sure you don’t get hurt. And go!’ Suddenly, the whole place - which I thought was full of extras, turns out it was the entire stunt register - started smashing chairs over each other’s heads and throwing bottles. I just stood there looking surprised!”

But that’s how it was, says the actor, who appeared in three series and the first of two Sweeney films (which made so much money they enabled production company EMI Films to make