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- Price: £15.99
- Widescreen: 1.78:1 (16:9)
- Sound: Dolby Digital Mono
The Sweeney: Car Chases is one of two DVDs released featuring the crime-fighting antics of FlyingSquad’s D.I. Jack Regan (John Thaw) and D.S. George Carter (Dennis Waterman), released on thedigital format for the first time ever and looking rather different than you’d expect.
There are two episodes on this disc, the first being Stoppo Driver, which is probably the only timeyou’ll find Benny from Crossroads (Paul Henry) as an armed kidnapper, while The Bill’s D.S. Beech(Billy Murray) is a fellow copper. Faces guest-stars Colin Welland, but each only have two decent carchases in them.
Forever shown on TV in standard 4:3 fullscreen, these DVDs have been digitally remastered from theoriginal 16mm film negative and are presented in anamorphic 16:9 widescreen. For the most part, itsuits the 16:9 ratio fine and looks like the 4:3 version zoomed in to fill the entire widescreen TV area,but of course with the benefit of 33% increased resolution that an anamorphic image brings, but thereare the odd occasions when obvious things are cropped top and bottom and this will look strange ona standard TV.
For a 26-year-old TV show though, you can guess that the print still isn’t perfect. In fact there’s plentyof flecks, scratches and an grain throughout, but it’s no worse than you’d normally expect. The averagebitrate is a steady 4.66Mb/s per episode.
There’s a few extras supplied, which are the same on both discs, but are the type you’ll look at onceand rarely return to. The picture gallery contains a mere six images, while the rest is small amountsof self-explanatory information about car trivia, brief biographies and the programme’s history. I’d liketo have found out how and why the decision was made to release them in widescreen and the processedinvolved though.
While it’s good to release The Sweeney on DVD, how come there’s only two episodes here? At eightquid per shout I can’t see too many takers, but a DVD box-set of an entire series would be a must-have.
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Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.