Wasnt a bad prog at all The Bill but i still reckon John Thaw as the best overall in the Sweeny and laterly Morse.
Pleanty of money for such progs back in the mid late seventies from such companies as Euston Films which is still aroumns to this day!.
The series staring Dennis Waterman "minder" was the longest running!...
For me The Sweeney is still the best TV cop show made, shot a lot on location and on film which was expensive showing a London now long gone, lots of derelict buildings and run down areas. Great acting with many future stars playing small roles, Ray Winstone for example. And spoken about as he was later in the Bill, Burnside who was in the episode Queens Pawn.
The Sweeney also had fantastic storylines, violence and swearing, I have the definitive DVD boxset with uncut episodes like the fab Taste Of Fear with the aptly named George Sweeney playing a psycho and its follow up On The Run. Plus 2 decent films they made quickly to cash in, both not bad, the second with some ultra violence in it plus a good story. The film Villain starring Richard Burton as a mother loving nutter released in 1971 3 years before the first Sweeney episode was influential in Kennedy Martins vision for it though he fell out with the producers.
As to The Bill consistently high standard for decades in my view, the early episodes that were shown on Drama some time ago really were made cheaply but good. Cryer and Jim Carver were heavily featured in those early years, in fact it was made around Carver at the start, he had been in Quadraphenia a while before. The Superintendent Brownlow was also in the early eps a lot, and he stayed a long time as Supt till about 2001 time or so when they brought a new Supt in who later went nuts. This is the time when they axed a number of the cast and brought new characters in, there was a corruption scandal about Beech that sparked that. Billy Murray has always been a good actor in my opinion, he was also good in the Sweeney ep Stoppo Driver years before and in the film McVicar with Roger Daltrey.
I also love Minder with the Waterman eps, they stand up pretty well still, a really good duo him and George Cole as Arthur Daley. And Cole was also in The Sweeney years before in the ep alongside an up and coming John Hurt called Tomorrow Man about computers.
