Lockdown, Lowdown… Ringside Report Looks Back at the BBC TV Show Hustle

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

What do you do when you are rooting for a wrong un?

What if there is a whole band of wrong uns? Do you ever feel guilty – not a bit of it, especially when they are dealing with a bigger group of wrong uns!

Fact is that we just love a group of people who are crooks. In the UK we kinda love them. When they have a beautiful woman, possible romance, a brash and unruly upstart, a computer whiz who aint a kid, a suave and handsome piece of eye candy at the head as well as American TV royalty in the cast, there is the beginning of a tremendous idea as these grifters take you on their flights of fantasy.

When the production of the series also shows fourth walls being demolished, explanations given which bring you into the “know” of their activities and all of the usual elements of romance, danger and jeopardy in the televising and scripts, and it’s a sure fire winner. Created by Tony Jordan, one of our very best television writers, Hustle, over 8 series and 48 episodes was like a complete and beautiful storyline that brought the art of the con full square into our living rooms with English panache and flair. It managed to so by developing our admiration for the craft of taking money from the greedy that served as zeitgeist after the excesses of the 1980’s and 1990’s; it ran from 2004 to 2012. Capturing some of the focus of films like Ocean’s Eleven and Mission Impossible, it showed that the “con is on” and sitting centrally on mainstream British TV!

It provided us with a deep and well-rounded group of characters including not one but two beautiful women. We began with Jaime Murray as Stacey Monroe who left after the fourth series to temporarily be the love interest for series two of Dexter before returning, right at the end. In her absence we were given Kelly Adams, as Emma Kennedy. Both used their obvious sex appeal, Adams in one episode being used to exploit her obvious likeness to Kylie Minogue, to provide the hapless mark with enough flattery to forget themselves.

Both were quite clearly attracted to the leader of the band for seven out of the eight series – Mickey Briggs, played by Adrian Lester. Suave, sophisticated and the man who held the team together as the brains of the outfit, Briggs was imperious as its brains. Always at least one step ahead of both his team and the “mark”, Briggs left us temporarily for series four as Lester decided to give Hustle a rest before he returned in series five to lead the team in a new format for the remaining time they had together. He served as the narrator for us and his explanations of the con – after the pay offs was part of the charm and attraction of the whole series. He roped us in too.

When Stacey Monroe left, so too did Mickey Briggs’ rival for the top position, Marc Warren’s Danny Blue. Vying to be the head of the team in the first three series, he gets his chance in the fourth when Briggs is out the picture. Blue manages to keep them out of jail and in the money but has always got that brash flaw which brings an element of danger to the team – mainly unnecessary danger! The team always needed an upstart, a figure threatening and moaning that he was the best and should be the leader; Warren was exceptional in the role.

By series five the love interest and that brash and demanding rival roles needed to be replaced. In came sister and brother act Emma and Sean Kennedy, with Sean played by Matt Di Angelo. A seemingly reckless young man but with flair and guile in equal measure, Sean proved his mettle time and again.

In series four where the irrepressible Danny Blue also needed a foil, in came Ashley Walters as Billy Bond. The tension between them was what was really needed to keep the new leader in his place as he was pushed by an upstart, not unlike himself, who was not going to ever take no for an answer.

Continuity throughout was anchored by three characters who survived all eight series and within these three there was a connection to television glamour and the past which was sheer genius.
We had Eddie, played by Rob Jarvis, the hapless owner of a variety of bars in which the team met. Constantly conned by the team, they saw his bars as theirs more than they did his. It led to some tension, but it was always good natured with the relationship between them one of the reasons the whole thing motored so successfully. There was genuine affection though they constantly took advantage of Eddie’s good nature – they knew the limits and never strayed over them.

Given the time sin which it was set they needed a technical computer genius. Robert Glenister gave us Ash “Three Socks” Morgan to fill that void. The nickname, due to an incident in a prison shower, Glenister gave us the man who provided the websites, the false trails and the backstories. What was best about his character was that he was one of the older team members – he was no “whizz kid”. It added some gravitas and avoided cliché.

Then came the genius of the American import. None other than one of the men from uncle – Robert Vaughn. Playing the roper, Albert Stroller, his job was to go out and find marks for the team. Known throughout London by every person working in hotels and high class clubs, Stroller was a man of some distinction. He added the glamour and gave us the glitz for the whole affair. It felt weighty, and though it had a lot of humor, it was a very meaty piece of drama.

There were some notable episodes in the eight series with special storylines when the Kennedy siblings managed to confront their father who left when they were young, Morgan got the help he needed when looking after his sick wife, Eddie got help for his model contract chasing niece, Stacey Monroe managed to get revenge on her cheat of a husband and Albert Stroller righted a family wrong against a cheating casino family.

But my favourite episode of all time was when Stroller decided to challenge the two warring con artists, Mickey and Danny by setting them a huge challenge. Dropped off in central London, naked, they each had to return to the den within a given time period and the one with the most money conned in the time allotted would be the leader of the crew. One of them, through arrogance, gives the other the coin that tips the balance of power, whilst Stroller admits at the end, the whole story was in itself a con!

This was criminality as entertainment with a lovely little homily at the end of each series delivered directly to camera with some form of learning about which we should all take heed – before they were due to return in the next series.

The best was left to last. There had to be an ending. The over arching story of taking on a dangerous cartel was series eight. The finale was set up, with all the principals to be killed and the team’s time would be at an end. To ensure that the real criminals would not have their hands dirtied by the death of the con artists, they hired in assassins. They did not realize that the people they hired were not as they appeared. Returning to finish off the series and the narrative, in came some returning faces to provide the ultimate con and give the team an out which was just the pinnacle of the whole series and gave the BBC one of its best and most popular successes which proved, apparently, that you cannot con an honest man!

British television is a curious affair. Begun through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) it is funded through the universal license fee. In essence, if you wanted to watch the television , you had to pay the license fee. The BBC got it all and is state run, albeit at arms-length. Then came along commercial television in the form of the Independent Television (ITV) in 1955. Designed to bring a bit of competition to the BBC, it was paid for through advertising but still free to air… well they didn’t add another license fee to it. By the time that I was born, 1965, there was BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. And that was it. It was still years before Bruce Springsteen would moan that there were 55 channels and nothing on but here in the UK, we kept this going until in 1982, we added a fourth channel and in 1997, a fifth. With sparkling imagination, they were called Channel Four and ehm Channel Five… In between came Sky and we understood what Springsteen meant. And so, my childhood and leading up to early adulthood we had three options… But the programs made were exceptionally good. And so, here is some critical nostalgia as the lockdown has brought a plethora of reruns, new formats and platforms and old classics trying to make their way back into our consciousness as broadcasters flood their schedules with classics… or are they classics at all? Let me take you through an armchair critics’ view of what we have to see, to find out… Welcome to the Lockdown Lowdown…

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