I have to put my leg up in the afternoon. Usually, I work on the computer or catch up on phone calls. Occasionally, I have a nap, but this afternoon I treated myself to a couple of hours knitting accompanied by some Seventies TV.
Minder
Source JJ Mooney (T. P. McKenna) making his getaway out the staff entrance of the Dorchester in "Sorry, Pal, Wrong Number". Actually filmed round the back of St Chatles Square, off Ladbroke Grove, west London.
This was a lovely episode with con artist, JJ Mooney, exhibiting his consummate skills, a bent copper, Sprott, getting his come uppance and an exquisite turn by George Cole as Arthur Daley having a chat with the man from the Inland Revenue. I don't know the name of the actor that played Arthur's accountant, but he was very funny, too.
It seems this series was mainly filmed around west London, but it is very reminiscent of south London where I grew up. Similar characters: dodgy, eccentric, pulling together a living somehow; similar places - lock ups and drinking clubs, rented bedsits, council estates; similar relationships: full of humour and piss-taking, never quite on the straight and narrow and you don't dob your mates in.
The Professionals
Source Bodie and Doyle doing espionage stuff for an hour in The Professionals. Apparently, Martin Shaw and Lewis Collins often did their own stunts, which didn't always go well.
I used to think these blokes looked ridiculous. Bodie never smiled and Doyle gurned like an idiot. Someone should have told them. This episode was unintentionally hilarious with Russians in dark glasses and camel coats, Bodie thinking he'd been double-crossed (yawn, again?) and the luxury hotel looking unaccountably drab. Everything was so brown in the Seventies.
The Sweeney
Source On to the main course, and a slight sense of deja vu as George Cole turns up again, opposite Dennis Waterman as George Carter and John Thaw as Jack Regan. The Sweeney was the business, and the luxury hotel, out at Heathrow Airport, did at least have a touch of glitz about it.
The show was produced
on film, not videotape, so making it possible to shoot it almost entirely on location which gave it a startling degree of realism, and to use film editing techniques, enabling ... a heavy bias toward action sequences.
Previously, most dramas featuring the police had shied away from showing them as fallible. The police in The Sweeney 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, often depicting a disregard for authority, rules and the "system", so long it as got the job done.
The series was made during a dark period for the real-life Flying Squad, which in the late 1970s had been publicly censured for being involved in bribery, corruption and excessively close links with the criminal fraternity. The actual commander of the Flying Squad, Detective Chief Superintendent Kenneth Drury, was convicted of five counts of corruption and imprisoned for eight years on 7 July 1977. (from Wikipedia)
This episode, Tomorrow Man, has a young John Hurt as a computer whizzo, come back for vengeance on his previous boss, Longfield (George Cole), for whom he created a "high security" computer system. Needless to say, this early geek is able to hack into the computer system and divert a delivery of gold bullion, making his getaway to Brazil with his girlfriend by posing as aircrew while his mate paraded round in his very conspicuous maxi-coat, pretending to be the drunken geek and fooling the local plod.
I loved it, but it didn't get such a good review from The Anorak Zone:
there's a subtext involved in Tomorrow Man: the suggestion that old-school villainy was on the way out, to be swept aside by the 80s' growing reliance on business culture and stealing behind a computer screen.
While such a prescient plot is to be commended, it leaves the leads without much to do, and is perhaps too esoteric to really compel. Having someone rob a post office is something that works in TV terms, but having John Hurt hack computers, particularly in this age of extremely basic computer systems, is like having Regan investigate the philosophical musings of Nietzsche. ("I've got a lead on him, guv... he's sat down, and we reckon he's thinking about the Will To Power." "Let's watch him thinking for forty minutes then nick that bastid, George!")
Then it was time to put my leg back down and go for a walk.
