Keep fit The Sweeney

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The actor John Thaw (an active Labour supporter) as The Sweeny's Inspector Reegan ALL 500 often, I seem to write about things people shouldn't do, so for a change, here's something people should do -exercise!

Most animals are naturally. quite physically active, and we are no exception. However, the societies we live in frequently discourage the sort of all-round exercise we need to remain fit. Keeping us cooped up in offices, buses and tower blocks makes us unfit, obese and prone to heart disease (like animals in cages). It is therefore up to us to find the time and energy for exercise, no easy thing if you're exhausted after a day of work, looking after kids, driving a bus or pushing a pen or a broom.

Anyway, here is some encouragement.

Regular exercise, even in moderate amounts, provides significant protection against heart disease. This protection uperates even when a person is ATHLCTOS MOJAIM.

IEN at risk of heart disease from smoking or high blood pressure, ete.

In addiion, regular exercise can have a beneficial effect on ubesity, diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure, depression poor circulation, survival from heart disease and ageing.

There are two types of exercise - aerobic and anaerobic. Let' s have a look at each and see what their effects are on the body's health.

Aerobic exercise involves the complete breakdown of darbohydrates (starch and sugar) and fats, using up oxygen and producing carbon dioxide and energy. It involves an adequate supply of oxygen through the bloud and the supply of fats and carbohydrates from the liver and fatty tissues. Aerobic exercise can be kept up for hours, depending on how fit you are.

Anaerobic exercise does not require oxygen, but can only be kept up for about a minute before exhaustion sets in.

Anaerobic metabolism comes into play when the body is making a massive but shortlived effort, e.b. sprinting or weight-lifting. This builds up your muscles but doesn't do much fur your heart and blood vessels.

Aerobic exercise (e.g. running) trains you for endurance. Aerobic muscles use more fat and less carbohydrate and can work for longer before exhaustion takes over. They are circulation of blood is improved su that more oxygen can get round the body. A fit person's heart seems larger and capable of pumping more blood. The heart muscle is better supplied with blood, reducing the risk of oxygen starvation and heart attack. In consequence, healthy heart beats slower than average.

Aerobic exercise also counteracts atherosclerosis, a disease in which plaques of fat build up on the walls of arteries, reducing blood supply to the heart itself (risking hear. attrck). Exercise helps the body get rid of the diolesterol that causes atherosclerosis.

Exercise must be regular to have effect. Former athletes whu have given up exercise get as much heart disease as anyAndrew Hornung reviews the return of the TV series "The Sweeney'.

I REMEMBER once asking a group of young workers (all male) what they thought was so good about The Sweeney, which they all rated among their favourite programmes. The answer was never in doubt, "It's realistic"

Of course, realistic is as realistic seems. The young workers I was talking to knew as much about the Flying Squad as The Sweeney told them and no more. But most had had enough bother with "the filth" to know the difference between a tender heart and a panda car. Realism was less a matter of plot than of character presentation.

Watching the re-run of The Sweeney last week, I was struck by the crudity of that presentation, a crudity that was partly obscured when the series was new to our screens because of the novelty of the treatment. After all, no media event stands in isolation: its reception is determined in part by prior media experience of the viewers. In this case, it is the memory of tightlipped conservative clones like Fabian of the Yard, your commanding officer sitting in a squad car wearing a trilby, never racked by self-doubt or conflicts of interest in a pre-Suez society with morals as stout as truncheons.

However fresh The Sweeney might have seemed when first screened, today it seems about as innovatory as a piece of burned toast. Take last week's romp of realism: an eccentric professor (can make you go nutty, you know, being too brainy) has developed a wonder drug which the NHS isn't backing (the kind of hide-bound bureaucratic bungling you can expect).

But which the Americans are willing to finance (typical of the Yanks, we invent the stuff - the jet engine, pencillin, World War 2 - and they come along with their money and take it over).

Anyway ... a ruthless group of Arab revolutionaries (typical Arabs, even the revolutionaries are rich; typical Middle-Easterners, nutty and fiendish; typical Marxists, Russian-backed and murderous) are after the wonderdrug because it's the only thing keeping the ruler of their country alive and they want him dead (typical of these banana republies with no bananas and plenty of monarchy, one man stands between a prosperous stable present and a fanatical unstable future... and that man's a tinpot tyrant).

Anyway... the professor's wife is a psychologist, laughably upper class, sexually libertine and involved with a young black man (nothing surprising in that, is there, guv'nor?) Not that that's got anything to do with anything, it's just part of the closely observed richly real tapestry of life The Sweeney specialises in.

Chorus girl

Anyway ... this professor is really in love with this chorus girl who works as a fall-girl with Morecombe and Wise. He hasn't been in touch with her for more than a year, but when he explain. that he's been busy in the lab anc now he's being chased by the police, MIS and members of the National-Liberation-Front-Marxist-Leninist and that he loves her and wants her to join him in California next week, she says yes! What woman could resist a line like that?

Anyway... The Sweeney's main attraction is its realism.

What this comes to is little more than the screen-credibility of a "dropped aitch" , piffling conflicts with superior orders and impatience with people who play it "by the book".

What is being acted out is a grand social and historical drama; class war, hatred of vested interests and the bold assertion of the

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mure efficient at taking oxygen frum the blood. In addition, the