ARMCHAIR CINEMA: REGAN (1974)
Euston Films, ‘kick, bollock and scramble’ film making and the birth of Ian Kennedy-Martin’s classic TV series ‘The Sweeney’.
Prior to the formation of Euston Films as a subsidiary of British commercial television franchise Thames Television in 1971, directors Jim Goddard and Terry Green and writer Trevor Preston had previously proposed to ABC (the ITV franchise that was eventually merged with Rediffusion to become Thames) the creation of a small group to produce work entirely on 16mm film. It was a gauge normally used to film inserts on location for British video taped television drama between the late 1950s and 1990s but was not considered a suitable format to shoot an entire drama.
Euston Films’ executives Lloyd Shirley (Controller of Drama), George Taylor (Head of Film Facilities) and Brian Tesler (Director of Programmes), later recognised that British television drama, predominantly a mix of location filming and studio-based taping, could be made faster and cheaper by shooting it entirely on film. However, a template using lightweight film cameras, ten-day turnarounds with little or no rehearsal, non-union crews, and all-location filming — the ‘kick, bollock and scramble’ approach later coined by the crew of celebrated British police drama The Sweeney (ITV, 1975–78) — took time and persuasion to develop and establish.
Further inspiration came from director Mike Hodges. Over at Thames Lloyd Shirley found spare capacity to test his conviction that drama could be shot entirely and economically on film and approached Hodges, who he knew from ABC, having worked alongside him, Goddard, Green and Preston on the arts series Tempo (ITV, 1961–1968). He offered Hodges an opportunity to shoot and edit children’s drama The Tyrant King (adapted by Preston from Aylmer Hall’s book) on 16mm film and in colour. The series was considered a successful enough trial run for Hodges to then write, produce and direct two television plays on film for Thames Television under the ‘ITV Playhouse’ (1967–83) banner. Suspect (transmitted 17/11/69 — Thames’s first evening of colour programmes) and Rumour (Thames, 02/03/70) anticipate the development of Hodges’s own style, a documentary aesthetic honed while working on Granada’s World in Action (1963–98) and used expressively in his seminal British crime film Get Carter (1971). Hodges proved to Shirley, Taylor and Tesler that their drive towards authenticity and realism could be best realised by abandoning standard studio-based, multi-camera video tape production and, from a practical and economic sense, make new drama series on film.
“a reasonable bet to take a tape series that had enjoyed decent public acceptance on to film”
With this in mind, Euston Films were contracted to rework Special Branch (Thames/Euston, 1969–74), a video taped drama originally produced by Thames, for two further series in 1973 and 1974. As Lloyd Shirley commented in Made for Television: Euston Films Ltd, Euston believed it “a reasonable bet to take a tape series that had enjoyed decent public acceptance on to film, so at least we would know there was some sort of audience for it.” Euston recast the series and replaced the original studio-based, multi-camera set up with all 16mm shooting on location, emphasising tougher action and realism.
During the revision of Special Branch, Euston also gained producer Ted Childs, who had worked mainly in documentaries for ABC and then Thames, and who would become a key producer and writer at Euston. He recalled the changes to the series in Made for Television: “… Although I felt that Special Branch as a television film format left something to be desired, I learnt a great deal. I brought in directors I’d worked with, some with a documentary background, and really what we tried to do was incorporate the ‘wobbly-scope’ techniques of 16mm documentary film-making into a drama situation.” It was not a particularly popular move with the television technicians’ union and disputes and disruptions rumbled on about Euston’s freelance status and the threat to the ailing British film studio system.
However, despite good viewing figures, no one at Euston particularly liked Special Branch. In Made for Television Jeremy Isaacs, Director of Programmes at Thames, reflected that they had already started looking for something better: “It was obvious that in the crime area if we could find the right people and the right sort of format, that was perhaps the most useful thing Euston could do.” As they completed production on the final series of Special Branch, Euston was commissioned by Thames to produce Armchair Cinema, both an attempt to reverse the fortunes of ITV’s highly-regarded but, by now, seriously flagging single play strand Armchair Theatre and to produce a series of filmed plays as potential pilots for future drama series, with the grittiness of Hodges’ work as their initial inspiration.
Regan (transmitted 04/06/1974) was the second play shown under the Armchair Cinema banner and was itself developed out of ideas for a drama series the writer Ian Kennedy-Martin had pitched to Thames and then to Euston. Kennedy-Martin had already, like his brother Troy, carved out a significant career in writing for television by the time he started chatting to Thames’s Head of Script Development, George Markstein, about Special Branch.
He’d already written scripts for drama series, including Mogul/ The Troubleshooters (1965–72), Hadleigh (1969–76), The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1971–73) and The Onedin Line (1971–80), or created his own, such as Parkin’s Patch (1969–70). He had adapted Bridget Boland’s The Prisoner for the BBC (considered an early inspiration for the ITC series of the same name according to Sweeney! The Official Companion) back in 1963 when he spent a number of years in the BBC’s writers’ pool. When he script-edited ABC’s Redcap (1964–66) it also cemented his long term professional relationship with actor John Thaw and for whom he specifically created the role of Jack Regan. His first encounter with Lloyd Shirley can also be traced back to the Armchair Theatre play ‘The Detective Waiting’ in 1971.
Of more relevance to the development of Euston’s approach to Regan and its eventual spin-off crime series The Sweeney, Kennedy-Martin had worked with producer-director James Gatward at Southern Television in 1969 on police drama Letters from the Dead, which he describes on his own website as “all on film, had ranged around the City of London, the countryside, four-wallers and all over the place, plus snatched shots where we couldn’t get permission to film.” This is interesting in light of the disputes that Kennedy-Martin went on to have with producer Ted Childs, who had claimed that his script for Regan was too rooted in studio based video-taped drama production.
‘that’s how we function, we gather information by meeting villains. We’re right in there with them.’
The man Kennedy-Martin first spoke to, George Markstein, was a former journalist who had allegedly worked in military intelligence. Markstein had been story consultant on Court Martial (1966), the final episodes of Danger Man (1960–68), and was best known as the script editor for ITC’s The Prisoner (1967–68) before he moved to Thames. Since then, he had story edited Callan (the last two series 1970–2), Special Branch (the first series in 1969), a selection of Armchair Theatre plays, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (the first series in 1971), and produced the first series of Man at the Top (1970–71). Markstein and Shirley both invited Kennedy-Martin to come up with ideas for a series to replace Special Branch which Euston and Kennedy-Martin felt didn’t depict modern policing realistically at all.
Kennedy-Martin had been watching with some considerable interest new Metropolitan Police Commissioner Robert Mark’s attempts to clean up what he saw as a seriously corrupted Scotland Yard. It was an era in which an elite branch of the Metropolitan Police, the Flying Squad, had cultivated very close connections with criminals as part of its strategy that all cases should more or less be informant driven. To this end, Mark created A10, an internal body that would investigate and root out corrupt officers and to ensure that all work with informants was totally transparent and by the book. By the mid 1970s, several scandals about bribery and corruption in the force had come to light, including the Flying Squad’s own commander Detective Chief Superintendent Kenneth Drury, who was jailed after being convicted of corruption. These scandals eventually led to an extensive internal investigation between 1978–84 codenamed Operation Countryman.
Kennedy-Martin knew that there was a great deal of unrest about Mark’s clean up campaign at the Flying Squad through his connections with officer Dave Wilson, who he’d met when his brother Troy was researching for Z Cars. In Shut It! The Inside Story of the Sweeney, he explained: “My friend on the Flying Squad didn’t like this at all. He said, ‘that’s how we function, we gather information by meeting villains. We’re right in there with them.’” Wilson provided Kennedy-Martin with background details about the Flying Squad, perfect material for the story of an anti-establishment Squad officer that he was developing, and by the beginning of 1974 he had submitted a script, entitled McLean, to Lloyd Shirley and George Markstein. They both refined the script with Kennedy-Martin and then greenlit the project as an 80 minute drama for Armchair Cinema.
At about the same time, Kennedy-Martin and Shirley mutually agreed that Regan, as it was now titled, would suit John Thaw and a contract had been offered to the actor for the pilot and a series, then called The Outcasts. However, the relationship between Kennedy-Martin, producer Ted Childs and the play’s original director, Douglas Camfield, deteriorated when both Childs and Camfield wanted to make changes to the Regan script that he couldn’t agree with. Camfield insisted on the scenes he wanted to add, including one featuring a gang rape according to Shut It! The Inside Story of the Sweeney, and Childs also felt that the script was full of long speeches and little action, as something more suitable for a studio-based drama. Kennedy-Martin also refutes that claim on his website and asks, “slow action? Long speeches? Where are they?” of his pilot script. The dispute eventually saw the departure, before shooting began, of Camfield and Kennedy-Martin, but not before Kennedy-Martin had cannily negotiated the film, book and merchandising rights to what would become The Sweeney. Camfield would later return to direct a number of episodes for the series. He was replaced by Tom Clegg on Regan. Clegg cast Dennis Waterman to play Carter, Regan’s sidekick, having recently worked with him on an episode of Special Branch.
… the police primarily as controllers, heralding the upsurge of a tough law and order politics in the late 1970s
Regan not only had its finger on the pulse when it came to examining the sweeping changes that were occurring within the Metropolitan Police, with the central character of Jack Regan articulating the resistance by some officers to how Marks wanted them to abandon some of their unorthodox investigative methodologies and practices, but also reconstructed the genre of the police drama which, revitalised in the 1960s by Allan Prior and Troy Kennedy Martin’s Z Cars, had by 1974 become a much tamer beast. Z Cars had already spun off into the various regional crime squad iterations of Softly Softly and Barlow at Large. Even cosy old Dixon of Dock Green, which started life in 1955, was still on air when Regan and The Sweeney burst onto the scene.
This reconstruction of the crime drama can be evidenced in director Tom Clegg’s documentary realist aesthetic, with his use of hand-held cameras and all location filming reflecting the grittier approach to crime drama that British cinema was already tapping into. Not only did this chime with Peter Yates’s Robbery (1967) and Michael Tuchner’s Villain (1971) but Clegg’s static shot of a police officer’s injured body at the side of the Thames in the Regan title sequence also offers an homage to Mike Hodges’ Get Carter (1971).
Clegg and Kennedy-Martin were also very enthusiastic about the improvisational acting that they’d seen in Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail (1973) and had hoped that Thaw would bring a similar quality to his playing of Regan. Childs and his Special Branch crew had also recently seen William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) and felt that its gritty attitude was something they could connect with. Friedkin’s film was one of a number of American films of the period that were setting out to transform the received view of the police and lawlessness and it stood alongside Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971) as an influential film that depicted an officer willing to transgress the boundaries of acceptable behaviour in law enforcement.
At the same time, Regan and The Sweeney offered their own response to what many perceived as the ungovernable Britain of the 1970s. It was Kennedy-Martin’s intention that The Sweeney was a ‘state of the nation’ piece reflecting the end of the counter-cultural dream of the 1960s as the Heath-Wilson era of politics was about to give way to a further swing to the right under Thatcher and the country found itself the victim of soaring crime rates, trade union action and terrorism while attempting to come to terms with Britain’s transformation into a multi-cultural society.
With public confidence in the role of the police under scrutiny, perhaps Regan and the unorthodox approach of the Flying Squad articulated what Stuart Hall, quoted in Leon Hunt’s British Low Culture, saw as the “consequence of legitimating the recourse to the law, to constraint and statutory power as the main, indeed the only, effective means left of defending hegemony in conditions of severe crisis.” As Robert Reiner suggests in The Dialectics of Dixon: the Changing Image of the TV Cop, Dixon and Regan are the polar opposites of each other within the police drama genre: “Dixon presents the police primarily as carers, lightning rods for the post-war consensual climate… The Sweeney portrays the police primarily as controllers, heralding the upsurge of a tough law and order politics in the late 1970s.”
“No more lone rangers”
Clegg opens Regan with hand-held shots of the denizens of a smoke filled East End pub, beneath the surface clearly denoted as a threatening environment where villains and the police meet, and he carries this vérité approach to shooting the pilot through various locations around Wapping, Chamber’s Wharf and Bermondsey, a skating rink in Richmond and for added authenticity the Thomas a Beckett pub on the Old Kent Road “where the worlds of legitimate boxing and organised crime overlapped” notes Shut It! The Inside Story of the Sweeney. The noirish cinematography depicting Detective Sergeant Cowley’s death at the hands of villain Dale and his cohorts is mixed with equally considered landscape views of warehouses, docklands, shabby looking streets and the claustrophobic interiors of houses blessed with some alarming colour schemes.
Regan’s investigation into the death of his colleague Cowley (Del Baker) is motivated not just by achieving justice but also about exacting revenge. This posits Regan as an individualist rule-breaker with often right wing and, what would now be seen as, politically incorrect views about women, ethnic minorities, foreigners (“I’ve never met a Kraut I liked”) and his superiors. As early as Regan, the line between orthodox policing and criminal activity in order to secure a conviction is blurred by Regan as he resorts to ‘borrowing’ a gun from the armoury, blackmail and threats of violence to bring Cowley’s killer to book.
But it is also about a man needing to prove himself as the younger Detective Inspector Laker (Stephen Yardley) is handed the case and a rather unhealthy competition ensues between them. There is additional pressure on Jack from his bosses Haskins and Maynon who despair at his methods and who, just as he gets closer to Cowley’s killer, threaten to suspend him. As Maynon warns Jack at the end of the play, even after he has successfully arrested Dale for the death of Cowley, there will be “No more lone rangers. From now on you’ll be one two-hundredth part of any successful case — not the hero of the hour.”
Regan, whose marriage is over and who finds intimacy in affairs with the likes of Annie (Maureen Lipman), is addicted to his career, drink and cigarettes and is the epitome of unreconstructed masculinity undergoing crisis that Andrew Tolson described in The Limits of Masculinity as a “contemporary ‘problem of masculinity’, involving adjustment to disintegrating images of the ‘self’” and where Regan and Carter find themselves in a world where the idea of masculinity is in flux and domestic life becomes an arena of emasculation.
When Regan visits his ex-wife Kate (Janet Key) there is a very ironic moment played out where she suggests “it would be a good idea if you ate regular meals and drank less. You’re 35 and you look 45.” Kennedy-Martin and the crew regularly ribbed the 32 year old Thaw about his own rather haggard looks. Carter (Dennis Waterman) himself is very unsure about working with Regan on the case because he has made a very conscious effort to return to divisional duties in order to protect his own marriage and disapproves of the methods that Jack uses. By the end of Regan that lack of confidence in his ‘guv’ has been partially replaced by an acknowledgement of Regan’s observation that they are two of a kind, outcasts who prefer to work out in the cold of the streets to get results rather than sit behind a desk and do the paperwork.
There are then three versions of Regan in the pilot — the rookie cop Cowley who wants to be just like Regan but gets killed for his troubles, Regan himself who mismanages Cowley because he’s too busy tilting at windmills like Haskins (Garfield Morgan) and Maynon (Morris Perry), whom he sees as two among “hundreds of little grey men, all working on top of each other, pots of tea and committees”, and finally Maynon himself, who not only understands why Jack is so resistant to change and admires his tenacity if not his methods but also sees that the changes in policing are inevitable. Kennedy-Martin shows how guilty Regan feels about the death of Cowley in an extremely tender but awkward moment when he realises that he’ll have to break the news of Cowley’s death to his grandmother, “How can I walk in there and tell that old lady that it’s over?” he asks Carter. This is placed in direct contrast to a Regan who will pose as a blackmailer to flush out Dale, the gang boss who killed Cowley because he discovered that two rival gangs, the Tusser and Mallory boys, were uniting. Regan instinctively understands that this has happened only because Dale has murdered his opponent Mallory.
While the pacing on Regan is more sedate compared to the series that followed six months later, the building blocks for The Sweeney are definitely in place. There is the growing relationship between Regan and Carter, with their domestic lives as a contrast to their journey through the murkier underbelly of London and the internal politics of the Squad and Regan’s antagonistic challenges to his bosses. This a depiction of the police that might have little validity now, with time, procedures and progress having moved on, but the difficulties at the Met in recent years seem to suggest that there are still many internal problems dogging 21st century policing.
Dropped into this unreconstructed raw and gritty soup are some amusing, if politically incorrect, set pieces and one-liners where Kennedy-Martin captures the absurdities of the job in this mid-1970s world. In the opening raid Regan declares to his criminal quarry, caught in flagrante with his girlfriend, that now infamous line, “Get yer trousers on, you’re nicked!” and later interviews the larger than life photographer cum forger George South (Michale da Costa) while South attempts, to no avail, to get a smile from a child he is photographing with a rather dreadful looking ventriloquist’s dummy. There’s even a pot shot at Maynon’s pompous self-importance as he’s preparing for a television interview and asks Haskins, “Do I look shifty?” Later, Regan introduces Carter to small time criminal Morton (Barry Jackson) with, “this is a colleague of mine. He hits people. Isn’t that right, colleague?” and finally, after arresting, physically attacking and leaving Dale slumped over his car in the climax of the play, Regan notices that Dale’s “stinking heap is licensed till March. It’s April the twentieth. I’ll have you for that, an’ all!”
Another key aesthetic is the use of library music to score the play and subsequently much of the series that followed. Music featured in Regan is from the KPM, De Wolfe and Chappell libraries and is comprised of fast paced jazz funk pieces from the likes of Keith Papworth, Simon Park, Alan Parker, Steve Gray and John Cameron. In a way, this was the equivalent of television following in the wake of Roy Budd’s exceptional music for Get Carter and also, underlining the important influence that 1970’s American crime cinema had on the series, capturing the flavour of Lalo Schifrin’s work on Bullitt (1968) and Dirty Harry or David Shire’s soundtrack to The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three (1974).
Dominated by John Thaw’s extraordinary performance as the loner, maverick Regan, the drama also boasts a splendid British supporting cast including Lee Montague as the intimidating Dale, Don Henderson as a rather effete bodyguard to Mallory’s girlfriend, Janet Key as Regan’s ex-wife Kate, David Daker as Tusser and Morris Perry’s laconic Maynon. Touching, violent, gritty and funny and superbly set up by director Tom Clegg, it comes as no surprise now that Euston were so confident about turning Regan into a series. Enthused, it had already gone into production on The Sweeney before the play was scheduled for transmission.
About the transfer
With this being shot on 16mm format it’s hardly surprising that it lacks the glossy depth you’d find in 35mm picture reproduction. On Network’s 2011 Blu-ray edition the 1080p image is often quite soft and grainy but that’s commensurate with the format. However, this does look good in high definition. It often attains real depth and good detail, particularly in the close ups of faces or in clothing. Colour is certainly more vibrant and there are very good contrast levels, especially in the scenes shot at night.
Special Features
- Commentary with Dennis Waterman, producer Ted Childs and director Tom Clegg Ported over from the original Network DVD this is a lively, rambunctious chat between three men who clearly enjoyed making the series and delight in sharing their often very funny recollections. Well worth a listen.
- Interview with Ian Kennedy-Martin Although it’s listed on the press release, this interview with Kennedy-Martin from the Network DVD was not present on the review disc.
- Dolby 5.1 surround, original mono and music-only tracks The 5.1 remix is reasonably good if not exactly strident and you get the original mono if you’re a purist. Some of the library music mentioned above is provided on a separate track but many of the cues are not the full versions and are only extracts used for scoring the play itself.
Armchair Theatre: Regan
Euston Films and Thames Television 1974
Network Blu-Ray / Released 10th October 2011 / 7957045 / 77 mins approx / Region: ABC / Subtitles: English / Sound: Dolby 5.1 and Mono / Picture: 1080p HD / 1.33:1 / Colour
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