The Sweeney: Series Four

Some TV shows run on and on: one hundred episodes, two hundred episodes, four, more, becoming nothing more than a mixture of self parody and soap opera. In 1978 after four series, about 50 episodes, The Sweeney just stops. It's the right time for it to end. The world, policing and television are changing. Crime is changing: the romanticised underworld of swinging London is being replaced by harsh reality, the catastrophic side effects of Nixon's war on drugs. The Yorkshire Ripper dominates the news cycle. Punk, with its modernist, New Wave science fiction aesthetic, was becoming the new sub culture.

In the wake of Star Wars the BBC had hit the small screen with Blake's 7. In the first episode the political dissident Roj Blake (Gareth Thomas) is framed and then convicted in a show trial for paedophilia. His antagonist Servalan (Jacqueline Pearce) blended sexy androgyny with totalitarian evil, a New Romantic premonition. The hard edge had gotten sharper and more stylish. Another year and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) would change what high end television would look like forever. The Seventies are over; The Sweeney's time has passed. Soon the TV will belong to Smiley and the Supreme Commander.

Some attempts were made to freshen up The Sweeney for its fourth series. Gone is the classic monochrome, blue and black photomontage. It is replaced with a kaleidoscopic sequence in which the main characters, Detective Inspector Jack Regan (John Thaw) and Detective Sergeant George Carter (Dennis Waterman), chase down and beat up a pantomimesque Seventies villain. Compared with the original, the new version has aged badly. The titles soundtrack music has the addition of a loud police bell. The bell or 'gong' on police cars was almost universally phased out by the 1980s.

The stories become more sensational. The writing is still there but they seem less grounded than those in the first three series. Nothing ever jumps the shark, it's that a number of the plots feel contrived. There are spies, war crimes, secret formulae and plot contortions. There is more female nudity. The show was never prudish, but it was always incidental, realistic. But now it is competing with the likes of I, Claudius (1976), which flashed more flesh than the first three series of The Sweeney combined.

The Sweeney always used humour in its episodes. This tended to be in-character humour. It was the banter between the various characters, it was what they did as human beings. It lightened up the grimness of some of the stories. A couple of episodes in, the final series lean into this this a lot more. HeartsAand Minds, which featured the comedy duo Morecambe and Wise playing themselves, is the best example of this. It feels a little cringy at times and in the end descends into slapstick.

The final instalment of The Sweeney hasn't aged nearly as well as the previous three. In striving to be more modern, it losses something of its universality. That isn't to say that it is bad. It isn't. It's just not as good as the first three. It was overtaken by a changing world.

Reviewed on: 01 Feb 2026