Barnett A.

Boyle R.

Cole G.

Colley L.

Cooke L.

Du Noyer P.

Griffiths L.

Hawkins B.

Hill C.

Linebaugh P.

Nairn T.

Paddy Hoey

Plain G.

Sennett R.

Stephen Baker

Thompson E. P.

Trentmann F.

Williams T.

Winslow C.

Wollen P.

English

First broadcast in 1979, Thames Television’s comedy drama, Minder, coincidedwith 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 himregarded as epitomising an era marked by the free-market, entrepreneurial zealof 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 thenew economy. As an ex-boxer and an ex-prisoner with a conscience, he reliedon Arthur to find him casual employment as a minder.Far from reading Minder as an endorsement of Thatcherism and its militaryadventurism, enterprise culture and hankering after a perceived past nationalglory, this article considers the series as an ironic comment on such pretentions,and Arthur and Terry as underworld, low-life versions of familiar nationalheroes – the entrepreneur and the ‘honest Tommy’. The article also goesfurther, situating Arthur Daley’s character in a generic tradition of dubiousworking-class enterprise and criminality that pre-dates the image of the spiv,popularised in British films such as Waterloo Road in the 1940s, going backto the picaros and proles of the eighteenth century and illustrated in PeterLinebaugh’s book about the period, The London Hanged

Baker, Steve

Hoey, Paddy

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

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

https://pure.ulster.ac.uk/ws/files/76625977/Minder_Baker_Hoey.pdf

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

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