Sunday e-mail 14th July: Tough non-American cops

The seventies; TV cops; how to spot a villain

Soon he’s whizzing round the corner, under those suburban trees, round by the newsagents. That whapping sound you’ve been puzzling over is revealed as a pair of Top Trumps wedged between the spokes of his Chopper. There he sails – watch him go! – zooming between an Austin Maxi and a TR7. This is less impressive than it sounds, since neither car is moving. No one can afford petrol, and, anyway, all the motorways are blocked by the lorries that the drivers left behind. They are all on strike. The railways are no better. If British Leyland had a race with British Rail, both would come last.

That rhythmic whapping grows positively tachycardiac as the kid gets closer to home. Our kid knows he needs to leave a few minutes for the black-and-white telly to warm up.

The new imports to British television are rather novel. He doesn’t know that, but his parents do. They, after all, grew up in a gentler postwar world. When they were very young, entire schoolweeks would pass by idyllically with hardly a mention of global annihilation or nuclear winter. Their own need for security was satisfied with more than the occasional dose of, say, Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant. Kids of the seventies need more. They needed someone a bit more potent, a bit more solid, some exotic hardnut with a gun, an attitude, and a moustache.

Over the horizon they galloped, drove, plodded, those legions of gritty crimefighters known to reviewers everywhere as Tough American Cops. These were guys (they were always guys) you could rely on. You could rely on them to Do it Right. You could rely on them to Get the Job Done, even if they Didn’t Play By the Rules. Hell, they didn’t play at all. Dammit, the top brass might not like it, but they were The Best We Had. They were their Own Men (you could tell by the rebellious way they turned their collars up). You knew they were violent because their shows were always on a bit later than you wanted. You could tell they were hard because they named themselves after their favourite weapons: Baretta, Cannon, Victor McSledgehammer. (I may be misremembering some of these.)

Too young fully to understand his spiritual longing for a Gnostic mentor who might provide enlightenment and protection in a Manichean universe, our kid nevertheless just loves these Tough American Cops. He has less love to spare for their British counterparts.  The reason is scheduling: he never gets to see them. He never sees the humble domestic knock-off, the make-do, the swiftly-run-up. For that reason, they take on some forbidden quality, something alien and Not For You.

Watch them now and these homegrown shows can’t help but make you think about that word ‘humble’ and all its implications. They remind you of your Nan’s outfit, that day at church when another parishioner asked her, ’Did you make that dress yourself?’

The very names give them away. Who would you prefer to watch? – Ironside or, well, Shoestring? The title sequence of The Sweeney contains plenty of grainy images of those cop cars that used to be called ‘jam sandwiches’. It all looks promising. And then there’s the theme music. It sounds tough enough. But then the action starts. Or, rather, doesn’t. Detective Inspector Jack Regan leaves his jam sandwich in the car park. He stalks moodily into the nick where who should he bump into but his old mucker, Detective Sergeant George Carter? The stage is surely set for another gritty violent epic. What will our Tough Non-American Cops talk about? Bank raid? Diamond ‘eist? Maybe some fearsome nemesis what’s just broke outta the nick, innit? No such luck – Our Tough Non-American cops spend the first several minutes of the show talking about, um, tea. And commuting. Tea and commuting – twin British obsessions, right enough, but did Kojak ever talk about stuff like this? Of course he didn’t. Just give Kojak a whiff of a  lollipop and he’d be ready for another day, cleaning up the mean streets.

Worn at the elbows and knees, out-of-shape like your old pullover, Tough Non-American Cops could, at least, match their transatlantic cousins in one respect. They could spot a villain. They could spot a villain at a hundred paces with one eye closed, in fact, and not only because the villain was always played by the only member of the supporting cast you recognised from other shows. Television cops could all spot a villain by the way he looked.

Our kid will learn to spot a villain, too, eventually, once he is allowed to stay up late enough. It’s easy, with a bit of practice. A child could do it. A child did do it, week after week, learning, without realising it, everything there is to know about Forensic Psychology.

Villains had their eyes too close together. Their hair was thinning. Maybe they were a bit short or a bit tall or even, whisper it, foreign. Villains looked like wrong ‘uns. Tropes like these were old when Hawaii Five-Oh was young. They have quite a history, as we saw in our last two Crime & Psychology newsletters. They were all about Cesare Lombroso and his theory of ‘Criminal Man’. You’ll remember that Lombroso believed that we, too, could spot a villain. We could be sure who the baddies were, just so long as we had some callipers, measuring tape, and an illustration of the Criminal Ear.

If you missed these classic Crime & Psychology newsletters, by the way, you can check them out here and here.

This week, the plan is to move on from Lombroso’s Criminal Man to…Lombroso’s Criminal Woman. What, I’m sure you’ll be wondering, did this great criminologist have to say about female criminals? How can we spot them? (LATER EDIT - the post about Criminal Woman is here!)

The answers will appear in your inbox Wednesday. I know you can hardly wait. Till then, relieve your impatience by battering a blue button below. Go on – it costs you nothing but it does help keep your favourite newsletter going!

This week’s bullet list could hardly concern anything else. Remember these 70s cop shows? Of course you don’t, you’re far too young. Here are five shows you missed and have to revise if you want to grasp the chequered world of disco, Space Dust, and Mutual Assured Destruction

·       Starsky & Hutch (1975-79) was the famous one. A spicy blend of crime and knitwear, who could ask for more? Was Hutch the one in the sweater or the cardy? Or was that Starsky? Or not? No one could remember. No one could stand it when David Soul started singing, either.

·       Charlie’s Angels (1976-81) – even when it was good, it was awful. I bet it hasn’t aged well, either. It’s what they call high concept: A man who is never seen employs a threesome of sexy detectives who are seen over and over again. And again.

·       The Sweeney (1975-78) we already covered – famous at the time for uncompromisingly violent realism, today it looks, well, more domestic than gritty. Both lead actors - John Thaw and Dennis Waterman – were promoted to much better crime shows: Morse and Minder respectively

.   Kojak (1973-78) was the show that made the era. No, really - every Thursday evening, everyone watched Telly Savalas wreaking angry havoc on his city’s lollipop population, whether they wanted to or not. It was the law. Probably still is. Better dig out those VHS tapes.

·       The Rockford Files (1974-80) is a bit of a revelation. But not in a good way. This show seemed classy at the time. Of course, when you’re in junior school, just about everything does. I caught an episode about a year ago. Well, half an episode. That was all I could take.