Caught by the Fuzz

Where was I?
Boxing Day. Snowed in, more or less. I find myself idly watching Sweeney 2 on the box. Made in 1978, it's not much of a movie. On screen it's inert, dead even, despite a decent budget by the looks of it (all those crowd scenes, all that location filming). Worse it's clumsy at moments - usually the important ones.
And yet I keep watching, seduced by the nostalgia of familiar faces (Denholm Elliott, Georgina Hale) and the accidental surrealism of the odd image - a car hanging halfway out of a shop window a few feet off the ground, a lollipop man killed in a shoot-out, his corpse covered by a blanket, his lollipop still beside him.
But its main interest is as social history. It's so very, very seventies - or a peculiar version of the seventies - boozy, laddish,reactionary. The flying squad frame their conversations by reference to the war and football, the villains live in Malta while lamenting the decline of Britain.
It ends in the pub of course with the curious sight of John Thaw dancing (sort of) and one of his fellow cops twirling around sans trousers in his brown and white (or where they red and white? I'm colourblind I'm afraid, horrible though whatever colour) Y-fronts. That's a kind of realism, I suppose. (TJ)