Lockdown, Lowdown… Ringside Report Looks Back at the TV Show Broker’s Man

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

Anyone reading this in the United States may be ahead of me here because the Insurance Investigator character was well known in 20th Century crime based drama – Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar gathered legions of fans and ran, thanks to eight different iterations of Dollar, from 1948 to 1962. We had nobody in our literary cannon with quite the same level of insured pressure upon them…

When The Broker’s Man arrived on our screens, and ran for two series in the late 1990s, it was a unique take on the crime procedural for a British audience. This was a BBC programme, so it had some clout to add to having Kevin Whately in the title role.

Whately played former detective Jimmy Griffin whose backstory was grubby enough that it seemed like he was still in the police force! He had a difficult relationship with his ex-wife, there were a couple of kids who loved both but had stability from mum and a cast of characters who worked with him, depended on him bringing in the work but had as little faith in him as his ex-wife: though he seemed to always fall on his feet.

This appeared to be a vehicle for Whately and was filmed around his better known work as Lewis, in the franchise series based on the Inspector Morse books, Inspector Morse and Lewis. There was a decent enough back up cast with Annette Ekblom as Sally Griffin, Al Hunter Ashton as Vinnie Stanley, Jill Baker as Claudette Monro-Foster and then a couple of changes to the original casting as Harriet Potter was played by both Sarah-Jane Potts and Charlotte Bellamy whilst Alex ‘Godzilla’ Turnbull – the man who gave out the insurance jobs – was played with some joy by Peter Firth in series one and then John McEnery in series two.

The first series had three mysteries which were spread over two episodes each and were my favorite of the two. They gave you time to consider the characters and get to grips with their complexities. By the time we got to series two and were having to contemplate each episode being without the cliffhanger and the overarching narrative being twisted further it became just like many other crime dramas. It also became increasingly complex itself without the room to make the complexities be authentic. It did, however manage some decent comic juxtapositions – we did have the search for two children in the same episode as a porn star who had insured his bits against loss of earnings! It made someone laugh…

Of course, Whately was always in his own shadow and successful stints on the aforementioned Morse and Lewis backed by coming to prominence in an iconic piece of TV drama in the UK – The Boys from the Black Stuff – was always going to mark his star out for attention and comparison. As such, Jimmy Griffin was to find himself dealing with such difficulties as having to search for his daughter, try and explain to his wife and daughter why he was working during a family holiday and end up finding out how it felt to be on the end of his own insurance claim!

It was a bit rollercoaster at times and given we got only 9 criminal storylines to follow it was difficult to stay the pace and become enthusiastic for series three.

Series three was, of course, never to be made, as Whately went back to continue his Morse universe. In that more conventional place we got how to end a series as the death of Inspector Morse was a national event – and then Whately continued in his role by taking his character, Lewis off to his own series.

Both Morse and Lewis made it to 33 episodes each. The strength of them was that Whately was teamed up with actors of some distinction. Morse was played by England’s iconic John Thaw whilst Lewis was accompanied by Laurence Fox, whose family has been iconic themselves, in the business for decades.

I was, however, sorry it ended after two series as I could see myself getting lost in further insurance style scams. Though series two was underwhelming I was attracted by Griffin and his team. It was interesting how he got through to the truth of each puzzle, from a fairly unique angle – for a UK crime series. He had no special insight as a Holmes might have and sheer luck seemed to often play a part but his was an honest depiction which I thought, given the unique nature of the idea for us Brits, had some legs to run; but I appear to have been heavily in the minority over that.

It ended with a burglary at his own home, and I cannot feel that what we may have been robbed of as the standard fare of Lewis won, was a character that would have added slightly more to the whole crime drama genre for British audiences. But then again Lewis was a tad sublime… as was Morse… and now Endeavor…

But that, as someone always says at this time, is another story…

But maybe not as original…

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…