What’s the Matter? Don’t You Trust Me?
1991’s Chancer

2,012 words

A TV series that captures an era will always be like one of those time capsules schoolchildren used to bury in their school grounds, a tin box full of examples of day-to-day objects and destined to lie unseen in the earth until someone digs it up decades – or even centuries – later and gets a glimpse of how people used to live. One such series was Chancer, ITV’s 1991, 12-part drama set in the England of the 1980s.

This was the era of the yuppie, or “young, upwardly mobile” man (usually), all Rolex watches and flash cars, high on conspicuous consumption and, as often as not, cocaine. In this rater stylish series, Stephen Crane is one such creature (without the cocaine), a roguish floor trader for a City of London bank. Crane is played by a young Clive Owen, never a versatile English actor, but rather one who does what he does well, like Michael Caine or Ray Winstone. He is the chancer of the title.

For the Englishman, a chancer is not a reputable title by which to be known. My father used it to describe men of a certain stripe. Part maverick, part Flash Harry, the chancer is the polar opposite of the risk-averse straight guy, but with just enough psychopathy to be fundamentally untrustworthy. Stephen Crane is climbing the City ladder by hook and by crook, but his need for risk – and for revenge – kick-start the plot of Chancer.

Passed over for promotion by his snobbish boss, Jimmy Blake (played by veteran Leslie Phillips), and then fired for insider trading, Crane vows to get even. Phillips gets some of the show’s best and most amusing lines, as befits his standing as one of Britain’s finest comic actors. “I don’t wish to appear churlish, Stephen”, he says, “but I do feel a bit of a churl coming on.”

When a friend from the past asks him to bail out an ailing sports car company, Crane embezzles the bank he works for by sweetening the company’s figures and persuading Blake to invest the bank’s money. From this initial scene of betrayal and deceit, Crane goes on an odyssey through his own values and ideals. The ethical system at the heart of high finance is beginning to disgust Crane, he just doesn’t know it yet. Crane against Blake is one of the central conflicts of the storyline and it is convincingly redolent of the image of the City before it all came tumbling down in 1991. The City of London, the financial hub of the world, but always with a whiff of something illicit about it.

And that’s when Crane experiences one of the oldest English poetical and dramatic devices of all: Pastoral. The bucolic shift from the urban to the rural, where all things shall be well, as Shakespeare wrote in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, itself an example of pastoral. In its weird way, so is The Tempest.

Where the action had been confined to London, it now shifts to the English countryside, a crucial distinction which reinforces the moral tension of the plot lines. This is a drama about principles, both how far you will go to stick to them, and when you come to realize that they need replacing. Crane finds a very different value system in the great outdoors, and the country scenes are also beautiful television. I’m not sure if they allow that sort of thing in England anymore.

Stephen takes a job with the car company he bailed out, fends off Blake’s attempts to recover his embezzled money, and falls in love with the daughter of the house, Victoria, as sub-plots grow accordingly. Like all good drama, TV drama is not the telling of just one story. Affairs, business deals honest and dishonest, rivalries and friendships, the web is tangled but scripted and directed superbly. A number of the episodes were written by Guy Andrews, a prolific TV writer throughout the 1980s.

The relationship between the company boss, patrician English gentleman Robert Douglas, and Crane, risk-taking, amoral, devious chancer that he is, is really the introduction of old-school (tie) Tory conservatism to the new breed. Douglas knows Stephen effectively stole the money keeping his company afloat, so it’s either stay in business on dirty money, or face bankruptcy with a clear conscience. Stephen’s wrestling with his own moral coding affects those around him, the true mark of a psychopath in crisis. Crane has a catchphrase – as every central TV drama character must – which is double-edged: What’s the matter, don’t you trust me? It’s not always clear that Crane can trust himself.

The other major player on the chess-board is Thomas Franklin, a self-made tycoon whose daughter is Crane’s girlfriend. When he discovers his daughter’s involvement in insider trading involving a takeover by one of his own companies, and at Crane’s behest, Franklin vows revenge on the disgraced City boy. Franklin is played by Peter Vaughan, another great English character actor. Any Brits reading who are familiar with Ronnie Barker’s prison comedy series Porridge will recognize Vaughan in the role of Grouty, fearsome top dog of the prison.

The battle between Robert Douglas and Thomas Franklin for Stephen throughout the series is one waged not for his soul, but for his role as surrogate son. Franklin has no heir, and although Douglas has a son, he is missing, having absconded from the French Foreign Legion with two of his erstwhile colleagues in pursuit. He is also a borderline psychopath when he does turn up, making an excellent thematic counterweight to Crane, who is only crazy to the limit of the extent to which it will advance his concerns. Jamie is beyond designer craziness and he’s opted for the real thing.

Jamie is one of the standout performances in a strong ensemble cast, and is played by Sean Pertwee. If the name sounds familiar to Dr. Who acolytes, his father Jon played perhaps the most sartorially flamboyant Doctor. The Time Lord’s son’s portrayal of the angst-ridden Jamie is pitched somewhere beyond intense. In a brilliantly scripted scene, he informs his father that he is leaving home again. His father is concerned that he is going back to the Legion, but Jamie promises not to leave the country. “Then where are you going?” he asks. “I don’t know,” the troubled young man replies. In fact, he is going to gas himself in a car in the woods, and the meaning of his replies suddenly takes on a different aspect. He really doesn’t know where he’s going. The scene, and much of the series, has the grit and the wit that has always produced the best British TV drama.

Going pastoral doesn’t stop Stephen pulling scams, it’s just that he deceives people now for the benefit of a community rather than serving himself. When the factory foreman is threatened with foreclosure on his family’s cottage by a ruthless estate agent, Crane invents a toxic waste company which claims to be building a dump in the area. The property market collapses, the foreman makes a successful low offer, and the day is saved. Crane is still breaking the law of the land, but he has found a different code of honor to follow; love. The revelation that Love is Crane’s real name may be a bit hokey, but it is an obvious tell concerning the direction of Stephen’s moral odyssey.

The plot takes a major swerve as one episode opens at a funeral, and the name on the coffin’s brass plaque is Stephen Crane. The dead man turns out to be Crane’s best friend, killed in an oil rig accident, but having given his identity to Stephen before he left. The discovery of Crane’s real identity coincides with the release of his brother from jail, and his emotional return to see estranged father living in squalor. So, from the City to the country to the poverty of his former life, Derek Love – Crane’s real name – finally squares up to his past, which includes a fraud for which he is still wanted by the police.

A dramatically stylish device throughout the series sees Crane getting ideas from chance occurrences. He is, after all, the chancer. He sees a stuffed toy cat in the roof beams to deter pigeons at Douglas Motors, which gives him the idea of falsifying the company’s books to cheat Blake. Seeing a friend reading a collection of Chekov’s stories, he asks what the one he is reading is about. The story is The Bet, about a rich man who bets a poor man he couldn’t spend 20 years in a haunted house. This inspires Crane to get Franklin in public and challenge him to a bet for the future of Douglas Motors, and for his own soul, figuratively speaking. The bet is that Franklin can’t go a day without spending money, and Crane has to live a day by the vagaries of chance, as decided by Franklin. The two adversaries are using one another’s greatest loves against them, Franklin’s love of money versus Crane’s love of amor fati.

After a car crash during the bet, Stephen is missing, presumed dead. But not only is he very much alive, so too is his conscience. The final scene has Crane dining with Franklin and Blake, with the former suggesting he remain dead and take on yet another identity. Being dead, says Blake, can be “jolly useful, on occasion, if only for tax purposes.” Instead, Crane turns himself in to the police for the fraud he committed and that led to him changing his name, denying who he really is. The arc of development is complete.

Stephen Crane has gone from yuppie to jailbird but there is more to his metamorphosis than a simple loss of social status. He reclaimed his old identity, thereby salvaging his relationship with his father, and he faced his past and owned his crimes. Chancer is rather a moral tale to emerge from what are popularly held to be immoral times. For all the “greed is good!” cat-calling of the City, the British have always instinctively found the making of a great deal of money in a short space of time to be vulgar, and the yuppie, the arriviste in his white socks and showy jewellery, became a stock figure of ridicule very quickly in the 1980s.

I feel my age watching Chancer because the world of 35-odd years ago is so familiar to me, and yet so archaic now. The technology is already antiquarian, it’s almost like watching a Victorian period piece. Crane’s mobile phone is the size of a house-brick, it’s like a field telephone. The computers all have that sickly green, dot-matrix font, although it is hard to believe that with what looks like an old Amstrad and a land-line you could steal £3m, as the characters do here.

A second series began its run but was pulled after just seven episodes. It bears all the signs of hasty re-editing, with sub-plots starting and going nowhere, plus a scrambled ending. But I wonder if the central British icon which needed saving this time around, a stately home rather than a down-to-earth car factory, perhaps triggered some vestigial class-war gene in the viewers, in a country even then beginning to drift to the Left.

I have nothing against which to gauge Chancer today because I don’t watch TV anymore, but I grew up watching British drama. I can tell quality from dross. The series is just good, solid, unshowy, well-acted, British TV drama, simple as. For me, it’s a tremendous memory lane excursion, although for many readers it portrays a world into which they had yet to be born, and watching Chancer will be like me watching a black-and-white, 1950s “kitchen sink” drama, as they used to be called in the UK. But if you fancy a bit of English yuppie nostalgia, young but already old, the series can be found here (although it did have some streaming issues), and I recommend it as a decent, English, upwardly mobile morality tale. What’s the matter? Don’t you trust me?