Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, last night labelled 1970’s cop shows like The Sweeney and The Professionals as ‘excessively violent and too confrontational”
In a Q&A session in this week’s Socialist Worker magazine, Corbyn slammed the popular TV series for their: ‘overly macho protagonists’ and for having ‘shouty and unsympathetic bosses with little or no regard for the feelings for their subordinates’.
“The way people like Cowley and Haskins spoke to their workers was nothing short of a disgrace,” he said. “No wonder the likes of Jack Regan and Bodie and Doyle treated crooks and terrorists in such an unfeeling and arbitrary manner. Perhaps if their superiors had been a little more understanding we wouldn’t have had Regan bursting into the bedrooms of armed robbers, roughly demanding that they get dressed while their girlfriends had to cover their bosoms with a sheet.
“As for Bodie and Doyle out of The Professionals, was it really necessary for them to drive their car into piles of cardboard boxes in alleyways? Did they not stop to consider there could have been homeless victims of the Thatcher government seeking shelter inside them?
“In my view, PC Plod out of Noddy and Big Ears had the right idea. His portly frame and cheery demeanour would have been more than sufficient to deter any would-be bank robber or crazed, AK7-wielding fundamentalist, from being a silly billy”.
Corbyn’s criticism of TV police officers and members of the security services comes just two weeks after he condemned PC George Dixon of Dock Green, for threatening to clip a young, East London tough round the ear after spotting him holding the owner of a jeweller’s shop at gunpoint in 1965.
You must be logged in to post a comment.