George Cole, as his alter ego Arthur Daley in the long-running series Minder, is to countless British viewers the quintessence of the cockney spiv, a mischief-causing small businessman always with an eye to the main chance and often caught treading on the toes of the law. Endearingly convinced against all the evidence of his own cunning, and equally often driven to distraction by the comical collapse of his schemes, the irrepressible Daley, with his salesman’s patter and naive pretensions as a big-time wheeler and dealer, became an icon for the 1980s, representing the materialist sub-yuppie culture that was fostered under the capitalist leadership of Margaret Thatcher. Every episode of the comedy series, which costarred Dennis Waterman as Daley’s dim-witted but resolutely honest bodyguard-cum-assistant Terry McCann, featured the launch of another of Daley’s shady schemes, or “nice little earners” as he called them, and culminated in the hapless secondhand car salesman and would-be executive being exposed for some fiddle or other and having to be rescued from arrest, physical assault, or worse by his long-suffering minder. Other troubles in Daley’s life, from which he took refuge in his drinking club, the Winchester, came from “ ’ Er indoors,” the formidable Mrs. Daley, who was never seen.

Minder, written by Leon Griffiths and filmed in some of the less picturesque parts of London, was not an instant success. The first two series failed to convince audiences, who welcomed Cole but were confused at the sight of tough-guy Dennis Waterman, fresh from the police series The Sweeney, taking a comic part. Thames Television persevered, however, and the public were gradually won over, the two stars becoming the highest-paid television actors in Britain. After six series, each billed as the last, Waterman finally withdrew to concentrate on other work, but Cole continued just a little longer, now with his nephew Ray (played by Gary Webster) as Terry’s replacement.

The part of Arthur Daley was perfect for Cole, who had in fact been playing variations of the character for years on both the large and small screen (he made his film debut as early as 1941). He had been schooled in the finer points of comic acting as the protégé of the film comedian Alistair Sim and as a young man made a memorable impression as the cockney spiv Flash Harry, an embryonic Daley figure complete with funny walk, loud suits, catchy signature tune, and suitcase bulging with dodgy merchandise, in the St. Trinian’s films of the 1950s. His television career took off in 1960, when he was seen as David Bliss in A Life of Bliss, which had started out as a radio series. Subsequently, he continued to be associated chiefly with similar cockney roles, as in A Man of Our Times, in which he played the manager of a small furniture store, although in reality he has played a much wider variety of parts—including an aspiring playwright in Don’t Forget to Write, a dedicated communist in Comrade Dad, the aristocratic and much put-upon Sir Giles Lynchwood in Tom Sharpe’s hilarious Blott on the Landscape, Henry Root in Root into Europe, and the absentminded central character in Dad, among other assorted characters.

It is, however, as the ever-likable if sometimes unscrupulous Arthur Daley that George Cole, an officer of the British Empire, is best known. Such is his identification with the part that the actor reports that he frequently has trouble getting people to accept his checks, fearing that they will not be honored by the banks because of his on-screen reputation. The extensive use of cockney rhyming slang by Daley in the 70-odd episodes that were made of Minder is also said, incidentally, to have done much to keep this linguistic oddity from extinction.