The Sweeney: Chalk and Cheese (1975)

"He wants to marry me. How suburban can you get?"

Giles Nunn and Carrie Selhurst are an upper crust couple who, partly for kicks and for the profits, commit highway robbery in lonely country lanes…

Let us go back in time to the London of the mid-1970s. When the toffs mingled with the criminal classes, villains drove getaway Jags, and plummy, sophisticated, RADA-educated actresses — romantic foil for a bit of rough — spoke proper. This is the London of Lord Lucan, of The Clermont Club, of Paddy Kennedy, the Irish landlord of The Star Tavern, Belgravia, where in 1963, in an upstairs room, the Great Train Robbers planned their infamous heist; the London of the eccentric Gasworks Restaurant in Fulham, champion of fenced Victorian bric-a-brac and the trend-setting avocado pear, where HRH The Princess Margaret dined, it is rumoured, à deux with gangster, John Bindon. I have a small, but fascinating collection of books on this now vanished world, which comes with my recommendation: John Pearson’s The Gamblers (2005), Douglas Thompson’s The Hustlers (2012), Kerion Pym’s Jumpin’ Jack Flash: David Litvinoff and the Rock n’ Roll Underworld (2016) and Wensley Clarkson’s Bindon (2005). And there are most probably others…

‘A London of understated privilege and run-down poverty…’

It is a London gone. A London of tea, soot, understated privilege and run-down poverty, a London of mews houses (scarlet geraniums in black and white tubs) and Victorian boozers, a London I now barely recognise, where in Pimlico, the last bombsites had yet to be cleared, where in the City of London, the only skyscraper was the NatWest tower, where in Sloane Square one might buy a Parker Pen, a boxed Monopoly set or a bag of paper-clips from W. H. Smith. In the East End, children still played barefoot on cobbled streets. And in the Pembridge Road, there was a strange shop run by two decrepit old boys in egg-stained formal attire: here you could buy black silk toppers and mother o’ pearl studs and cut-away stiff-collars, third-hand suits from Savile Row and moth-eaten taxidermy.

Yet, for all its faults, it is a place I hold in affection and nostalgia: a London of eccentricity, freedom and creativity, now quashed in a sea of brash international vulgarity, corporate homogeny and local government control. I caught the fag-end of this London, the last gasp perhaps, in the very early 90s, working initially as a hapless and cack-handed van driver for the original Bonhams auctioneers, then in the shabby Lots Road (at the unfashionable end of the King’s Road, Chelsea) and then as an equally cack-handed furniture porter at Phillips, at the top end of the New Bond Street, where the clientele of the Green Room (the main salesroom) included a motley assortment of chancers, antique dealers and connoisseurs, from the higher end of the market (Vigo Street’s Christopher Gibbs) and an elegant lady dealer in 18th century porcelain (Eton High Street) to Portobello Road traders, Fulham Gangsters and Irish tinkers, plus predatory actors and bored rich men’s wives on the prowl: “Come, Luke. I vill take you to Crockford’s…”

‘…nothing like a bit of good, old-fashioned armed robbery…’

And it is this vanished world, I think, which is captured so beautifully in Chalk and Cheese, an episode of The Sweeney from 1975 (Series 2, episode 1). An ‘Oxbridge Golden Boy’ takes up armed robbery: “Giles Nunn (Shane Briant) and Carrie Selhurst (Lesley-Anne Down) are an upper crust couple who, partly for kicks and for the profits, commit highway robbery in lonely country lanes…” Actually, the blurb gets this wrong, as Carrie’s really more of an accomplice in crime — but there’s nothing like a bit of good, old-fashioned armed robbery, with sawn-off shotgun, a stocking over your head and a getaway Jaguar Mark 2 — or in the case of Carrie and Giles, a turmeric-sprayed Porsche.

Their first victim drives a Rolls-Royce Silver Shad, and their second victims, a rich upper-middle class couple, typically live in Hampstead, along the lines of A Clockwork Orange (1972). For my international readers, as yet unaware of the charms of The Sweeney (1975-1978), this was a gritty British crime series made by Euston Films for Thames Television (Danger UXB, Minder and Reilly Ace of Spies) and set in foggy old London Town, starring John Thaw (he of Morse) as one of the greatest grump-pots in television history, the Metropolitan Police’s very own Detective Inspector Regan and Dennis Waterman as his long-haired sidekick. If you’re up on your Cockney Rhyming Slang, you will, of course, immediately clock the title: Sweeney Todd/Flying Squad.

‘A turmeric-sprayed Porsche…’