Now the law is joining Arthur’s club

Press, 19 August 1985, Page 18

Now the law is joining Arthur’s club

By

RUPERT BUTLER

Features International

It’s London’s best known drinking club — the place a certain Arthur Daley escapes to when the V.A.T. inspector and other humourless citizens are breathing down his neck.

It also happens to- be where, on two or three evenings a week, you can find real-life coppers from the West End Central Police Station having a quiet drink! The Winchester Club is the creation of television scriptwriter Leon Griffiths, the creator of “Minder” (starring George Cole and Dennis Waterman). The fifth series of “Minder” starts screening in Britain next month, but that series is likely to be the last. The Winchester Club is

only a film set, but it has become so real to viewers and fans of the popular series that Euston Films, who make “Minder,” now keep it open after filming and use it as a private club for the favoured few.

It just shows how fact and television fiction merge in a classic showbusiness hit which, after six years, is spawning not only the new series, but an ambitious

feature film length drama called “Minder On The Orient Express” — in which Arthur and his sidekick, Terry, are, for the first time, seen working their fiddles on the other side of the English Channel. How did it all begin, this saga of Terry McCann, a boxer released from prison, who teams up with Arthur (invariably pronounced “Arfur”) Daley, owner of a secondhand car yard and a mysterious warehouse? Leon Griffiths is apt to hold his head these days and groan about “the monster I’ve created.”

“I have this useful knack of listening and simply writing down what I hear. You don’t have to invent much. It’s just there,” he says. Even so, his “Minder” scripts have won him an Oscar from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

It all started with a couple of shady-looking blokes he saw propping up a bar well after closing time. “I found myself in this north London club, listening to a big bloke called Be Fair Bill

and his mate, Bert, a minicab driver,” says Griffiths. “Bert said: ‘l’ve got to get home to ’er indoors,’ while Be Fair Bill was talking about a friend of his: ‘Well, be fair. He’d been a bit naughty, so I had togive him a bit of a spanking’.”

Both these exchanges have ended up at different times in “Minder” scripts. “The club was full of minor villains like Arthur. “He’s a mix of about three drinking friends I’ve known over the years. “Bert was the inventor of

‘er indoors.’ The strange thing is that, when I pointed this out to him, he couldn’t even remember using the phrase.” Although Griffiths is not the only writer who produces scripts for “Minder,” he is still very much boss of

the show and has very strong ideas on the personalities of the two main characters. “Arthur is the archetypal, lovable rogue, but he can more or less look after himself. “Terry is slightly more of

a problem child. He has an innate honesty and is an innocent. That makes him sound like a wally, which he is very far from being. George Cole is quick to deny that there is anything of Arthur in his own makeup — beyond, perhaps, a weakness for cheap cigars and a fondness for the adjective “one” in conversation.

“I’ve never been able to analyse Arthur’s appeal,’ says Cole.

“People say that he has a heart of gold, but he’d melt it down for its sales value if he thought he could get away with it!

“1 suppose the truth is that everyone loves a scamp. There was this child who asked me for an autograph and said he loved Arthur.

“When I asked him why, he said: ‘l’d like to be him because he always gets away with it’.” Like Leon Griffiths, George Cole is a fierce guardian of what Arthur can or cannot do. If one of the writers on the series makes Arthur do something blatantly illegal, he protests. “He’s a coward certainly,

a double-dealer, undoubtedly. But he’s an artful dodger through loopholes in the law, not a breaker of it,” says Cole.

How does the chemistry with Dennis Waterman work so well? “Probably because it darn well has to! Do you realise that, when we’re working, we see more of each other than we do of our better halves?” says Cole.

. The bulk of each “Minder” episode is shot on location. Once a series starts, it is a bit like an urban waggon train, with trucks full of lights and cameras, vans stuffed with props, trailers bulging with costumes and cars full of cast and crew.

With this procession goes a luxurious trailer containing a sitting-room, diningarea and kitchen. Safe from the gaze of the curious, the two stirs can relax behind the smoke-glass windows.

They have evolved a surefire way of killing boredom between takes — doing crosswords.

It was Cole who turned Waterman into an addict, and their record for “The Times” crossword is 17 minutes.