Tony Hoare; Getaway driver who became a scriptwriter for 'Minder'
Hyfler/Rosner
'Minder'
Monday, 15 December 2008
Tony Hoare was an unconvincing bank robber who, following
spells in prison, and with a helping hand from a literary
figure, went on to become a highly convincing television
scriptwriter. Or, as he might perhaps have put it in his
scripts for series such as Minder and The Sweeney: he packed
in blagging while banged up in the clink and made some dosh
by going legit and tapping a typewriter.
It was an unlikely literary career path but it paid off for
Hoare, who became an important figure in popular TV drama
during a career which stretched from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Almost everything he wrote was concerned with crime, whether
serious or marginal, but his substantial output was by no
means dependent on his own criminal experiences. He showed
expertise in drama, humour, dialogue and character
development.
His writing remained firmly rooted, however, in a world
which ranged from shotgun killings, through the strengths
and weaknesses of the justice system, to the more humorous
side of handling stolen goods. Things that fell off the back
of a lorry automatically became Hoare's intellectual
property. He wrote 20 episodes of the hugely successful
Minder series starring Dennis Waterman and George Cole, who
as the shady Cockney Arthur Daley struck an almost
Dickensian chord with the watching public.
Hoare was born in Oxford where his mother was a college
waitress while his father worked in a factory. They moved to
Luton where he was bright and promising at school, but he
was drawn to London. There he worked as a welder but fell in
with a gang of criminals who specialised in robberies. Hoare
became their getaway driver.
This contained an element of Minder-style comedy in that he
was a notoriously poor driver, with a constricting back
condition which was compounded by the fact that he was
legally blind in one eye. He and his associates were,
perhaps unsurprisingly, failures as robbers, on one occasion
being arrested when their London accents aroused suspicions
as they drank in a Warrington pub after a job.
As a result of their shortcomings Hoare found himself
carrying out involuntary but eventually valuable research
during terms in jails in Liverpool, Dartmoor and Hull in the
1960s. He attracted early publicity by escaping from
Liverpool prison. In Hull, however, he concentrated on
reading and writing, working in the library and producing a
novel as well as a magazine called Contact (its title a pun
on the word "con"). His second big prison break involved not
an escape but an introduction, in this case to the
playwright Alan Plater, who had made his name as a
scriptwriter for the police drama series Z Cars. Plater, a
prison visitor, took Hoare under his wing and encouraged him
to think of writing for radio and television. Eventually the
BBC broadcast his semi-autobiographical play The Chaps.
From the early 1970s on, Hoare's work appeared regularly on
TV. His credits include episodes of many of the crime dramas
of the time, including Softly Softly, Crown Court, Hazell,
Within These Walls and New Scotland Yard. He wrote several
episodes of The Sweeney, the often violent cop drama which
featured John Thaw and Dennis Waterman careering through
London's then-derelict docklands.
It famously featured action-packed car chases of a type
which Hoare, with his bad back and one good eye, never quite
managed to match duringhis own time as a getaway driver.He
went on to write 20 episodes of Minder, which was a
follow-up starring Waterman as bodyguard for Arthur Daley, a
second-hand car salesman. This too started out in a fairly
violent manner, but as episodes passed there was more
emphasis on humour and on the evolving relationship between
the two leading actors.
According to Jaz Wiseman, an expert in the TV drama of the
time, "The first Minder series was a lot grittier, more like
a follow-up to the Sweeney. Then it became a sort of comedy
action show. Tony really understood the relationship, played
on it and exploited it."
Arthur Daley was a denizen of the criminal underworld,
forever immersed in shady deals, intent on making money from
"nice little earners". He bucked the system, one critic
noting: "He does it with such panache, manifesting a winning
mixture of bluster and bravado." The novelist Malcolm
Bradbury described him as "the Richard Nixon of the
forecourt."
Minder first aired months after Margaret Thatcher came to
power although Daley's was not quite the type of
entrepreneurship she hoped to promote. The show outlasted
her, however: she went in 1990, but it kept going until
1994. In its day it was a TV institution. Some derided it
but many watched: at its peak it commanded more than 17
million viewers.
Hoare also wrote much else during this period, including
episodes of London's Burning and a number of one-off plays.
Jaz Wiseman said of him: "He came across as typical East
End, a guy who was always up for a laugh, always saw the
sunny side of life, an all-round nice guy." Hoare the
convict got an unexpected second chance in life, and seized
it. Second time around, he made crime pay.
David McKittrick
Tony Hoare, television scriptwriter: born Oxford 4 February
1938; married (one daughter); died Perpignan, France 2
October 2008.
Dave Sill
> Tony Hoare: Getaway driver who became a scriptwriter for
> 'Minder'
Obviously not the same person as:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare
Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare who developed the quicksort algorithm,
who is still OT.
-Dave