Cowley: CI5, the squad. The slightest whiff of anything and you move in. Crush them before they even start to grow like an alley fight. Kick him in the goolies first. Do unto others now what they're still thinking about.
Narrator: Next up a double act, Raymond Doyle and William Bodie, proof that two heads are more than one.
Cowley: Anarchy, acts of terror, crimes against the public. To combat it I've got special men, experts from the army, the police, from every service, these are the professionals.
Clemens: It's main strength, is nitro-glycerine black and deckor, two guys who struck sparks off each other and who the audience, the guys wanted to be like and the girls wanted to get into bed with. That's always a good formula.
Bodie: Three inches?
Doyle: Four.
Narrator: However like many a winning formula, the initial concoction needed some work.
Clemens: We'd got Martin Shaw locked in and then Anthony Andrews, as Bodie, there just wasn't chemistry between them, they were almost like mirror images of each other.
Narrator: Up stepped Lewis Collins, who successfully completed this tough audition to land the part of Bodie.
Doyle: Well done.
Collins: Everyone thinks yeah I was walking down the pavement one day and the producer went ah there's Bodie, right we'll have him now see. No, I went through years and years of em you know of… classical… you name it.
Narrator: And so from the Blinding of Gloster to the bashing of cars. That'll teach her to park in the bus lane.
Shaw: It's sort of all about wishful things isn't it? And we have got to be one of them kind of stuff. So you know we get to pull birds.
Bodie: Afternoon ladies, is this golly annoying you?
Shaw: Drive fast-ish cars. Er and er shoot guns.
Clemens: Well of course they were both very good at kicking doors in, and 'cover me' became almost a cliché.
Bodie: Cover me.
McNab: It was just good fun and certainly as a kid, as a teenager, that's what I thought it would all be like and it was only when I started my time at Special Air Service that I realised how boring it all is.
Bodie: I am like a fine piece of machinery, I need lubrication.
Doyle: Yeah and too much lubrication and that fine piece of machinery might end up with a bullet up its crankcase.
McPhail: Doyle was for the sensitive woman and Bodie was the piece of rough, I think.
Julia (from 'Close Quarters'): You're crazy, crazy.
Collins: I was more, a bull in a china shop. Which you know, didn't show off my finer points I felt.
Clemens: Bodie screwed anything that wasn't nailed down. But Martin actually in a couple of episodes was quite tender. I think Martin was the softer character in that sense.
Jill Haydon (from 'When the Heat Cools Off'): Oh Ray.
Narrator: It was this tender side that give academics and TV types the notion that there may be a love that dare not speak it's name betwixt the bosom buddies.
Doyle: Do you know what they've made of us, eh? Well it frightens me to death Bodie.
Montage of clips to the soundtrack of 'I've got you babe'.
Shaw: I must say I hadn't spotted that. I hadn't spotted it until they did er the spoof on The Professionals, The Bullshitters.
Bodie lookalike: I thought I'd lost you, Ralph.
They start rolling around in the dirt together.
Clemens: Nowadays, any… any two guys get together, there are certain people who interpret it their way. Er it was never intended though. If there is, then they're divorced.
Shaw: When we got stressed and fatigued, we would… we would fall out and sometimes we fell out major.
Clip of Doyle hitting Bodie.
Collins: He was my senior and still is by one year, sorry Martin and em, you know so I always had sort of a junior admiration of his abilities and still do.
Doyle: Yeah.
Narrator: The series ended in 1983, since then Martin Shaw has gone on to star in numerous roles in TV and Theatre…
Shaw: Keep it off, keep it off boy, airbrakes. You've done it, you've done it boy.
Narrator: and em, Lewis Collins hasn't really. However time to address the burning question. Who was the hardest? Here's some expert analysis.
Courtney: I think it's a man thing em, but you always attributed the hardest one who had the short haircut. Wouldn't you? You know a bit Spartacus-y, you know he always… he looked the harder.
McNab: I think if it was between Bodie and Doyle, em er running in a team with me, it would have to be Bodie without a doubt. I think Bodie came across more hard than Doyle, I was always sort of suspicious of the curly hair cut.
Shaw: Neither of us are hard believe me, neither of us are really hard men.
Doyle: You dumb crud, what took you so long.
Bodie: You look terrible.
Shaw: Now the sort of fan hysteria has almost completely died out, what you're getting is a kind of warm feeling of people being retrospective about their youth, and that's always… that's always sweet, very pristine.