“All right, so we may have half a dozen names, but only one job. To see that no one messes on our doorstep… by whatever means necessary. That’s our official brief – ‘ by any means necessary’. And that’s our loophole.”
OK, let’s get this out of the way first of all. This was not the first episode of The Professionals that was broadcast. It was, however, the first episode of four “production blocks” that I guess you could refer to as “seasons”. As was fairly common at the time, the show was purely episodic, with no kind of ongoing plot, so the episodes could be shown in any order.
And yet, this is very clearly “episode 1”. There’s no “origin story” for Bodie and Doyle; they’re very much already on board. But there’s a whole lengthy briefing by Cowley for new CI5 recruits (none of whom are ever seen again), explaining what the department is, what it does, and why. For added bonus points, we also get an explanation of Cowley’s (often plot-relevant) limp – when Bodie smirkingly refers to CI5’s practices as “fascist”, he gets a reproving look from Doyle, who explains that Cowley got his leg wound fighting fascists in the Spanish Civil War.
As if to introduce our characters and their skill sets, this ep is divided into two plots. The main one is about a pair of gangster brothers called Charley and Henry Turkel, who love their mum (and are not at all inspired by Reggie and Ronnie Kray). Henry is in the nick, and plainly having a hard time dealing with it psychologically. Charlie, worried, hatches a plan to get him out, based on news stories about terrorist hostage exchanges, and accordingly gets tooled up by interfering with an actual terrorist arms robbery on a British Army base.
Unfortunately, he’s failed to notice that one of his gang, Billy, is an actual nutter (that’s 1970s psychiatric speak), who steals a grenade, hotfoots it to his old psychiatric hospital, and sparks a hostage crisis by grabbing a nurse and shoving a grenade down her bra. As you do. At this point, CI5 notices, and gets involved; as usual, the only people on duty are Bodie and Doyle.
Right from the outset, Bodie displays a sophisticated side that he may not be best remembered for by referencing classic Irish literature – “Samuel Beckett would like that. Life in a word – if”. It’s obviously an example of early episode weirdness before the formula is properly established, as Bodie’s knowledge of highbrow literature isn’t mentioned again later.
He’s more on point with his expert knowledge of how grenades work, though. Doyle, meanwhile, gets to display his sensitive side for the first time by analysing the unfortunate Billy’s mental ailments; sadly Martin Shaw rather fluffs that by mispronouncing “introverted”. Still, marks for trying – this was 1977, when psychiatric therapy in the UK mostly entailed being told to “belt up”.
Obviously our heroes foil the unfortunately tormented Billy, and it’s worth noting that, villain though he may be, the script shows a surprising amount of sympathy (by 70s standards) for somebody suffering from mental illness. Slightly more dubious, though, is Bodie’s ‘heroic’ rescue of the unfortunate Nurse Bolding. OK yeah, she’s got a grenade in her bra, so I can see why you’d need to rip her shirt off. And yeah, she’s screaming hysterically, so (in line with the conventions of the time) I can understand why you’d think you had to slap her. But Bodie’s careful brushing off the dust from her cleavage looks perhaps a bit too creepy; particularly followed by Doyle’s comment, “you were lucky”. It’s left ambiguous who that refers to.
Less ambiguous is the boys’ later byplay in the interrogation room, and this is really where modern audiences might go, “hang on…” Regaling Doyle with stories of an ex-lover who was a doctor in Africa, Bodie disparagingly refers to his partner’s obviously namby-pamby attendance of life drawing classes with nude models. “They were nice girls,” Doyle insists, feebly. “All girls are nice,” Bodie rejoins, “as long as they’re under fifty, warm and come across.” Ouch. That’s the 70s in a nutshell, right there.
Back in the main plot, it becomes clear that Charley Turkel’s plan is to take over a small town police station that the Home Secretary is due to visit, and hold said dignitary ransom for the release of his brother. This is easily foiled by the realisation that none of our heroes actually knows who the Home Secretary (who is, logically, their boss) is, or actually looks like. Guessing that the gangsters don’t either, they substitute Cowley (with Bodie as his bodyguard), who basically talks them out of the plan by telling them it’s a bloody stupid idea, until they give up and surrender. That’s actually a nice resolution for a show that would later become known for car chases and gunplay. And to be fair, I couldn’t name the current Home Secretary either…
The cars
For those of us who remember it from the first time, The Professionals was very much a show associated with Ford, in particular the Capri – iconically, Bodie and Doyle both drove MkIII Capri 3.0S’s, the highest performance version of Ford’s sports coupe you could get at the time.
So it might come as a surprise to find that this first ‘season’, like its predecessor The New Avengers, actually has the vehicles supplied by British Leyland. Being the boss, Cowley drives (or is driven) around in BL’s highest profile executive car of the time, a Rover 3500 SD1. The eagle-eyed car nut and Brian Clemens fan might notice that this appears to be the exact same car driven by John Steed in several eps of The New Avengers; the licence plate being slightly altered from MOC229P (Steed) to MOO229R (Cowley).
Bodie and Doyle, meanwhile, don’t have anything as flash, fast, or poorly handling as a Capri here. For most of the season, they’re seen hurtling around in a Triumph Dolomite Sprint – the first mass production 16v sports saloon, which would have been pretty good if it hadn’t been assembled by bolshy unionists who were more concerned with going on strike than building cars properly.
In these early eps, though, the boys are condemned to chasing villains in a 1970 Rover P6 2000 – and not even the “fast” Twin Carb version. No disrespect to the P6 – I love them, and have had several over the years – but it is not a fast car, and handles like a boat. More puzzling is why, with BL sponsorship, the heroes were driving around in a car that was seven years old. And why they’re driving it with main beam headlights on in broad daylight.
Outside of the heroes’ cars, the police are all driving Triumph 2000s, while the shiny limo bringing Henry Turkel from prison is Leyland’s mid range executive saloon, the Princess. Fortunately it didn’t break down on the way.
1970s references
Cowley refers to the ideal CI5 partnership as being like “the Bisto kids”. For those slightly (or even largely) younger than me, this refers to a series of TV ads for the stock cubes Bisto, which showed a pair of decent, honest, working class boys who were mesmerised by the smell of their mother’s gravy.
The gang responsible for the initial robbery of weapons from a British military base, with their comical and not entirely convincing Irish accents (“by God, we pulled it off”), are clearly meant to be from the IRA – a definite step up in realism from either of the Avengers shows. But writer (and creator) Brian Clemens evidently didn’t want to be too realistic, so Bodie and Doyle simply refer to them as “that Irish lot” and “the Irish group” without actually identifying them.
And of course, there’s “Mr Chippy”…
Hey, it’s that guy from that thing!
Like its predecessors The Avengers and The New Avengers, The Professionals was quite a prestige production and could entice some pretty high profile guest stars. But you also saw plenty of the decade’s hardworking character actors that you’d seen in a hundred shows before; plus actors who were just starting out and became much better known later.
In this ep, that is indeed a very young Phil Davis as the gang’s loose cannon Billy Turner; Davis would later be better known (and indeed typecast) as a succession of “Lahndahn villains”. The unfortunate young nurse receiving his less than welcome grenade-based feels is future Not the Nine O’Clock News star Pamela Stephenson, now better known as “the wife of Billy Connolly”, and rather more respecting of her own existence outside of her husband, as a relationship and sex therapist for the Guardian.
It wasn’t Pamela Stephenson’s last association with the show, but thankfully in her later appearance (as a different character) she got some actual lines.
Nice bit of dialogue
Surly police inspector: “You CI5 boys think you’re the cats’ whiskers, don’t you?”
Bodie: “Well at least we’re at the right end of the cat.”
Bodie, to Cowley: “Permission to be admiringly insolent, sir?”
Opening Titles
The Professionals has a pretty well known opening credit sequence – a montage typical of 70s crime shows, starting with a car crashing through a showroom window to Laurie Johnson’s brass and wah-wah heavy theme tune.
So if you’re used to that, it might come as a surprise to find that this first season/production block has a much sillier title sequence, in which Cowley storms up to a warehouse in a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow, while four Professionals (including Bodie and Doyle) pile out of the back of it and run the most pointless assault course imaginable while Cowley times them with a stopwatch. Assault course completed, they pile back into the Rolls and Cowley speeds off while wheel spinning for no discernible reason.
The Rolls is never seen again in the show…
This is a pretty good opening episode, setting the stall for the series and allowing all three main characters to be involved in the action, playing to all of their strengths. It’s all the more mystifying, then, that it ended up being broadcast third, with the more formulaic “Private Madness, Public Danger” serving as the actual series premiere (and with a voiceover from Gordon Jackson over the opening credits to explain what the show was actually about). Still, that was TV in the 70s for you.
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