cult film freak: NEO NOIR 'THE SWEENEY' EPISODE OF 'CHALK AND CHEESE'

Paul Jones on The Sweeney Year: 1974 Rates: *****

Beginning with a rubbed water-glass rim creating a crystalline sound, there's a misleadingly mellow vibe as we cut from an orange car on the highway to an old rich couple's vehicle cruising a rural, wooded area followed by a blunt-bullying robbery, filmed in askew angles more like an art film than cop TV-show, THE SWEENEY episode title CHALK AND CHEESE means the two ski mask-wearing bandits are polar opposites... yet they have one thing in common...

Real life singer Paul Jones is a lowly boxer... his dad the owner of a grungy boxing gym... while Shane Bryant's a rich kid grown-up flaky and gambling-broke into his mid-twenties...

Paul Jones on The Sweeney: Chalk and Cheese

And there's a femme fatale between them; although the poor tough guy doesn't know everything as Lesley-Anne Down brought both money-hungry fellas together, but is only pretending to belong to him: And as the show will sometimes focus on either John Thaw's Regan or his younger partner Carter in Dennis Waterman, the latter gets the focal point here...

Once a close childhood friend of the boxer, whose "Pop" was like a dad to both of them, enter the episode's most sympathetic character in David Lodge, the working-class gym-trainer who knows something's awry with his son; so the conversations with a subtly investigating Carter ties this slowburn and sublime, unflinching and streamlined neo noir together: like a movie in itself.