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I first saw Minder in 1981 when I lived in Western Australia. I can remember that my first reaction was that the programme was a little odd. It was billed as a follow-up to The Sweeney, but apart from the fact that it starred Dennis Waterman there seemed to be little similarity. However, it was set in London and it took me back to a time in my life when I was growing up in London surrounded by people using Cockney rhyming slang. I have always been fascinated by the Cockney argot, and this fascination was strengthened even more after I did an Anthropological Linguistics course at the University of Western Australia and found myself spending more time listening to how people sounded than what they actually said. But at that time in Australia I only caught a few episodes of the first season of Minder. A couple of years later I was living in Hong Kong and Minder used to go out in the television dead spot of the day - Sunday lunchtime - complete with Chinese subtitles (a story in themselves). There was always something else to do at that time and I started to build up a collection of home-recorded videotapes of the programme to watch later. By chance, I also happened to acquire a number of off-air videos of the show made by my friend Terry Dean in Australia. A friend at the University of Hong Kong, David Workman, had also collected a number of off-air videotapes and it was his casual remark, “Between us we’ve probably got enough tapes to write a book” that was the genesis of this one. The book started out as a compendium of London slang as used in the programme, with detailed origins and examples of usage. But then I found that there were already good reference guides to London slang available and that another one was not really necessary. However, I did a little research and discovered that there was no reference book available on the Minder series itself. I decided then to write one. Over many years, and particularly with the help of the Internet, I tracked down and watched every episode, wrote a synopsis, and cross-referenced the salient points. I spent several days at the British Library Newspaper Library in Mill Hill, North London, researching and cross-referencing the TV Times programme listings for every episode. The Phenomenon that was Minder is the end result. I hope that it gives as much pleasure to its readers as it has given to me in producing it.
Brian Hawkins
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All materials © 2002 Brian Hawkins. All rights reserved.
Minder photograph © DC Thomson & Co. Ltd.