Tom Clegg gave action weight and kept stories moving. We recommend his work on The Sweeney, with a reservation about how readily its brisk direction carries us past the questionable behaviour of its policemen.
Fi1m perspective
In The Sweeney (1975), confrontations are blunt, and the violence leaves little room to admire anyone’s technique. Tom Clegg was one of the directors, alongside Douglas Camfield, who gave the programme that unpleasant physical force. We winced at the violence because it felt like people hurting one another, rather than performers demonstrating a skill. That is a substantial virtue in crime television, even when the programme’s affection for its policemen needs questioning.
John Thaw and Dennis Waterman give the series its force and humour, but the pace matters too. Editors Peter Delfgou, Ian Toynton, Chris Burt and John S. Smith keep the action readable and the exchanges brisk. Their work helps explain why the programme’s roughness does not become an excuse for careless storytelling. It also exposes the limit of that approach: the speed can carry us past questionable behaviour before we have had time to object.
Clegg moved from directing television comedy and soaps into crime and action in the early 1970s. He directed Regan (1974), the pilot for The Sweeney, then multiple episodes of the series and Sweeney 2 (1978). He also directed and wrote the prison-break drama McVicar (1980), another example of his preference for convincing ensemble casts. His skill with location shooting helps explain his suitability for The Sweeney: those drab London surroundings give the confrontations somewhere credible to happen, without making the setting more interesting than the people in it.
The later turn to military drama gave that practical approach a longer home in Sharpe (1993–2008), with Sean Bean. As its principal director, Clegg treated arguments as action too, a useful safeguard against measuring excitement by the number of people running across a battlefield. Bravo Two Zero (1999) reunited him with Bean in a Gulf War SAS drama. Start with The Sweeney, provided you can enjoy its pace without accepting every excuse it makes for the police.
Biography
Tom Clegg was a British television and film director. Born Thomas Harrison Clegg on 16 October 1934 in Lancashire, England, he performed national service in the Royal Air Force between 1952 and 1954. He began his career as a cameraman in the 1960s, working for Granada and ABC Television, before moving into directing.
Clegg directed the 1974 pilot episode Regan and many episodes of the series The Sweeney (1975–78). He also directed the feature film Sweeney 2 (1978) and McVicar (1980). He was one of the principal directors on the long-running Sharpe series (1993–2008) and worked on other series including Space: 1999 (1975–77), The Professionals (1977), Hammer House of Horror (1980) and Bravo Two Zero (1999). He died on 24 July 2016.
