The Picaro and the Prole, the Spiv and the Honest Tommy in Leon Griffiths'sMinder

Abstract

First broadcast in 1979, Thames Television's comedy drama, Minder, coincided with the arrival of the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher. Central to the series’ popularity was the character of Arthur Daley, a shady, small-time businessman whose proclivity for wheeling and dealing saw him regarded as epitomising an era marked by the free-market, entrepreneurial zeal of the Thatcher administration. Arthur's ‘partner’, Terry McCann, by contrast, was a disconcerting picture of what life could be like for the working class in the new economy. As an ex-boxer and an ex-prisoner with a conscience, he relied on Arthur to find him casual employment as a minder.Far from reading Minder as an endorsement of Thatcherism and its military adventurism, enterprise culture and hankering after a perceived past national glory, this article considers the series as an ironic comment on such pretentions, and Arthur and Terry as underworld, low-life versions of familiar national heroes – the entrepreneur and the ‘honest Tommy’. The article also goes further, situating Arthur Daley's character in a generic tradition of dubious working-class enterprise and criminality that pre-dates the image of the spiv, popularised in British films such as Waterloo Road in the 1940s, going back to the picaros and proles of the eighteenth century and illustrated in Peter Linebaugh's book about the period, The London Hanged.