Brian Hawkins

Thank you for visiting the home page of The Complete Minder, the new edition of my 2002 book The Phenomenon that was Minder. Cockney born and bred, and raised in and around East London, I became a committed ‘Minderphile’ after seeing the first few episodes of the show in the early 1980s while I was living in Perth, Western Australia. Those early episodes took me right back to my childhood in London. Many of the characters were just like people I remembered from when I was growing up and hearing rhyming slang all around me. It was pure nostalgia.

I originally set out to compile a compendium of Minder's slang but later discovered that there were already some good dictionaries available. However, what surprised me was that there were no reference books available about the show itself. I firmly believed that Minder was a phenomenon that deserved to be written about; that's why I called the first edition The Phenomenon that was Minder. It was undoubtedly a labour of love. When I started, there were only limited copies of the show available commercially, the Internet was still in its infancy and there was no YouTube, so I had to beg, borrow, and, in some cases, buy copies of every episode to watch and cross-reference.

Over the eleven years since the first edition was produced, additional material about the show has become available. This revised and expanded edition, under its new title The Complete Minder, seeks to bring the original editionup to date. There is discussion of Minder material not intended for general transmission, the 2009 remake of the show in the UK by Channel Five, a new section on ‘Minder in Australia’, plus a list of Australian first transmission dates that I hope will be useful for the show's many antipodean viewers. In addition, there is an expanded discussion of how Minder became the phenomenon that it did.

I do hope that you find this site helpful and that you enjoy the book.

Brian Hawkins
December 2013