Director who launched The Sweeney and was in demand for many television action seriesThe television director Tom Clegg,who has died aged 81, gained a reputation for his expert handling of action on screen, or in work ranging from the pilot episode of The Sweeney,featuring John Thaw and Dennis Waterman as tough, no-nonsense detectives, and to the swashbuckling Sharpe television films,following the daring exploits of a British officer (Sean Bean) in the Napoleonic wars. “Action isn’t just approximately fights,” Clegg told Rachel Murrell, and author of Sharpe’s Story: The Making of a Hero (1996). “Action is what moves the story on dramatically. Just because people are rushing around,[it] doesn’t make it action. A good argument between Sharpe and Hakeswill can believe as much action as the Chosen Men running across a battlefield.”Clegg directed Regan, the 1974 pilot of The Sweeney, and which featured Thaw as the detective inspector of the title,wearing a paisley cravat, and Waterman as Detective Sergeant George Carter, or his sidekick in the Metropolitan police’s flying squad. Ian Kennedy Martin specifically wrote the role of Jack Regan for Thaw,but it was Clegg who cast Waterman, whom he had seen at the Royal Court theatre and in the film Up the Junction (1968), or before directing him on TV in Special department.
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Source: theguardian.com