Chancer: Education for life

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

The most obvious reason to rent the first season of Chancer series (Discs 1-4, Episodes 1-13, each approximately 50 minutes) is to watch the wonderful Clive Owen when he was only 25 (he'll be 44 in October). Filming began in 1989 and the series was shown in the U.K. over the 1990-91 seasons. When I first watched this superb sample of British TV (around 1992, as I recall), it was considered far too racy for prime time and had to be shown at midnight on one of our lesser PBS Stations in the New York City area. It also moved faster and contained more characters, themes and plot elements than I had encountered at that point in my middle-age life. Bracing as all get out, it left me breathless and eager to get to the next episode. Yes, times and mores have changed, and you can't go home again. But if Chancer now seems to move at about the same pace as your typical TV show, the good news is that it still holds up surprisingly well.

The story? Let's start with an automotive factory that produces only high-end, beautifully-made, built-to-last cars, and which of course is a failing business. The factory is owned by an upper-crust family that treats its employees surprisingly well and so wins our good will almost immediately. Now switch to an investment banking firm and watch as Stephen (Owen) and his girlfriend Jo (Susannah Harker: the unforgettable Mattie Storin in House of Cards) do some savvy insider trading, to the dismay of a boss and his underling (Leslie Phillips and Simon Shepherd) who are perhaps twice as nasty as they are smart. (And they're quite smart.) From here the plot gallops into missing children, infidelity, stolen research and so much more that listing it all might provoke screams for mercy. Not to worry: Thanks to consistently crackerjack scripts (by Guy Andrews and Simon Burke), tight direction from Brit TV journeyman Alan Grint and a superb cast--led by an Owen who has never since possessed more energy and pizzazz than he did here--Chancer succeeds.

What is so appealing about the series--and the young Mr. Owen--is that it and he give us a taste of that fantasy so beloved by intelligent progressives: the benevolent dictator. We have learned by now that power corrupts and elected politicians cannot be trusted, Capitalism stinks and Communism is unworkable in any society peopled with human beings given to denial and hypocrisy. So the Owen character lies, cheats, steals and uses everyone and everything (business, press, government) in his path--all in the service of good at the same time as he is enjoying this to the hilt. In fact, so charming, witty, fast and sexy is this light-on-his-feet fellow that we'll follow him anywhere and forgive him everything. By the finale of this first season, we've seen enormous duplicity and finagling, friends become foes and back again, been educated in business, economics and psychology--in short, we've had an education in life.

Among the odd pleasures of watching a state-of-the-art series filmed some seventeen years ago are cell phones the size of small computers, while the actual computers on view sport that ancient green glow and pre-color screens. The more standard pleasures are provided by a beautifully chosen supporting cast, including stalwarts like Peter Vaughan, Benjamin Whitrow, Sean Pertwee, Tom Bell, Lynsey Baxter, Caroline Langrishe, Ralph Riach and Matthew Marsh. All the important characters--at least a dozen of them--are given rounded treatment so that you come to understand and care about each, despite their peccadilloes, as they grow and change, often in surprising ways. Midway into this first season (there were two in all), the series grows darker, identity is called into question and families--particularly fathers--are hung out to dry.

Chancer remains one of Great Britain's great TV series. Humane but clear-eyed and ironic, it was far too ahead of its time to succeed in America in its own day; thanks to DVD, it should finally get the respect it deserves.

Special features are scant on the DVDS, but, as a great one told us, "The play’s the thing..."