a5c7b9f00b Bodie and Doyle, top agents for Britain&#39;s CI5 (Criminal Intelligence 5), and their controller, George Cowley fight terrorism and similar high-profile crimes. Cowley, a hard ex-MI5 operative, hand-picked each of his men. Bodie was a cynical ex-SAS paratrooper and mercenary whose nature ran to controlled violence, while his partner, Doyle, came to CI5 from the regular police force, and was more of an open minded liberal. Their relationship was often contentious, but they were the top men in their field, and the ones to whom Cowley always assigned to the toughest cases. I wasn&#39;t even born when this show was first shown on British TV in the late 70&#39;s. It was created by Brian Clemens, was a follow-up to a cop show called The Sweeney and starred Gordon JacksonGeorge Cowley, Lewis CollinsBodie and Martin Shaw (who hated the show and his character)Ray Doyle, working for a spy agency called CI5.<br/><br/>Violent, sexist and very politically incorrect, The Professionals was just good fun and it knew how daft it was. Basically an episode would go like this: Bad guy of episode shows up, usually foreign and he was a hitman, terrorist, spy or something like that. He would commit a crime and then the main titles which still impress would come on backed by the great theme tune. Bodie and Doyle would be given the case by Cowley, and then there would be 45 minutes of fights and car chases (in their Ford Capris) which ended with the bad guy dying in an explosion.<br/><br/>The plots were interesting and there were a lot of good ideas from the writers. After the show ended there were lots of pretty awful follow-up shows like Dempsey and Makepeace and Bergerac and have mostly been forgotten. Although The Professionals is not often seen on TV nowadays it&#39;s a cult classic, and way better than any of the stuff they put on nowadays. Alongside &#39;The Sweeney&#39;, &#39;The Professionals&#39; is probably the best-remembered British action series of the 1970&#39;s. It was created by Brian Clemens, and followed hot on the heels of &#39;The New Avengers&#39;. Martin Shaw and Lewis Collins had appeared together in an episode ( &#39;Obsession&#39; ).<br/><br/>I was not immediately won over by &#39;The Professionals&#39;. I had the impression that Clemens had taken some left-over &#39;New Avengers&#39; scripts, scrubbed out the names &#39;Steed&#39;, &#39;Gambit&#39; and &#39;Purdey&#39;, and substituted &#39;Bodie&#39;, &#39;Doyle&#39;, and &#39;Cowley&#39;. Certainly the Russian agents in &#39;The Female Factor&#39; looked and sounded like they had come straight from that show. Even some of Laurie Johnson&#39;s incidental music sounded indistinguishable. I was not alone in my cynicism. A letter writer to &#39;The People&#39; newspaper soon after its debut claimed that &#39;Gordon Jackson was badly miscast&#39; and that the show was basically &#39;the poor man&#39;s Starsky &amp; Hutch&#39;.<br/><br/>The hit U.S. show starring David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser was declining in popularity in the U.K.&#39;The Professionals&#39; debuted. I recall my school friends suddenly raving about this new show and going silent on the subject of Huggy Bear&#39;s pals.<br/><br/>Despite initial misgivings, I stuck with &#39;The Professionals&#39; and am glad that I did because it improvedit went along. The ratings went up in spite of tough competition from B.B.C.-1&#39;s equally violent &#39;Gangsters&#39;. Later on it would be pitted against the popular private eye drama &#39;Shoestring&#39;.<br/><br/>The premise was this; George Cowley ( Gordon Jackson ) is the head of C15, an organisation set up to combat terrorism. His top agents are Bodie ( Lewis Collins ) and Doyle ( Martin Shaw ). That was really all there was to it.<br/><br/>The show boasted lots of exciting action ( violent even by today&#39;s standards ), guest-stars sucha pre-&#39;Not The Nine O&#39;Clock News&#39; Pamela Stephenson, one of the best theme tunes ever, a pair of personable leads, and some pretty good scripts. Particularly memorable were &#39;In The Public Interest&#39; in which C15 investigates an ( unnamed ) city where a zero tolerance policy to crime has unfortunately given rise to massive police corruption; and &#39;The Rack&#39; where C15&#39;s very existence is questioned, and Cowley has to make an impassioned plea to a court to preserve the anonymity of an informer. &#39;Heroes&#39; had witnesses to a robbery coming under threat from the underworld when a newspaper foolishly printed their names. One episode - &#39;Klansman&#39; - dealt with racism and was deemed too controversial to broadcast.<br/><br/>Shaw and Collins made a good team, and Jackson gave solid support in what was basically a thankless role. The show predictably drew complaints on account of its violence, but fans seemed not to mind. Yes, it took a simplistic approach to serious issues suchterrorism, and there was virtually no character development, but it managed to be good entertainment. It ran for five years in all, totalling 57 episodes.<br/><br/>&#39;The Two Ronnies&#39; did a funny parody called &#39;Tinker, Taylor, Smiley, Doyle&#39; in which Ronnie Corbett&#39;s &#39;Doyle&#39; got a new partner in the shape of Ronnie Barker&#39;s mild-mannered &#39;George Smiley&#39;. And, of course, &#39;The Comic Strip Presents&#39; gave us &#39;The Bullshitters&#39;!<br/><br/>Though repeats were blocked for many years by Martin Shaw, &#39;The Professionals&#39; is now to be found on &#39;I.T.V.-4&#39; ( with heavily edited editions going out in afternoon slots ) and before that, &#39;Granada Plus&#39;. Despite changing public tastes, its popularity has endured.<br/><br/>With the arrival of &#39;Life On Mars&#39; on B.B.C.-1 in 2006, the genre of hard-bitten &#39;70&#39;s crime telly was effectively exhumed. Viewers could once again see men being men, and women either being shot, beaten up or taken to bed. &#39;The Professionals&#39; though was the real McCoy.
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