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 co-starred 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”.
