Abstract
This article examines depictions of class-encoded agency in the English spy operative and police detective protagonists that appeared on commercial television during the late 1960s and 1970s. Its purpose is to discover connections between constructions of this agency and class-based discourses relating to what Michael Kenny (1995) has termed the ‘first New Left’ (1956–62). The focus of attention is The Sweeney's DI Jack Regan (John Thaw), the most recognisable and fluent expression of the male ‘anti-hero’ archetype in question; but in order to frame an analysis that deals with interrelationships at the level of metanarrative, the article also traces a process of genre interconnection and development. Considerations of class in series such as The Sweeney (ITV, 1975–8), Callan (ITV, 1967–72) and Special Branch (ITV, 1969–74) tend to offer meaning along the lines drawn by the likes of E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, as well as other figures associated with the first New Left. The article proposes that key first New Left themes – working-class men finding ‘voice’; empiricism/theory binaries; and discourses of Americanisation and anti-Americanism – not only provide a historical/contextual lens through which to view class-encoded agency, but also constitute a mechanism through which it is expressed.
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