“Chancer” was the two-season British TV series of 1990-91 that launched Clive Owen’s career, but the smart and very funny serial about British business machinations at the end of the Margaret Thatcher era was packed with terrific actors. Season two was just released on DVD by Acorn Media today.
As good as Owen is in the seven-episode second season of “Chancer” — you can see why he was almost immediately snapped up by British filmmakers and is now an international star — veteran actor Leslie Phillips steals every scene he is in as the London banker Jimmy Blake.
Jimmy is one of those over-the-top villains you love to hate; the biggest kick of the second season is the way that the banker character starts to see the downside of London business life at the beginning of a new political era and shifts some of his alliances.
Jimmy doesn’t quite join forces with the young upstart character played by Owen — Derek Love — but Blake does become a tentative ally in a business war against the Anglo-German industrial czar Tom Franklyn (played by another wonderful veteran British actor, Peter Vaughan).
“Chancer” shows how some Brit businessmen began to turn against the Thatcher philosophy after her reign led to so many industrial concerns moving out of the country.
Thatcher economics left England in the early 1990s in the same scary “service economy” position our country found itself in a few years later, after the passage of NAFTA, under President Clinton.
“I was a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher,” Jimmy Blake tells a group of well-heeled friends gathered at a posh dinner party in “Chancer.”
“She salvaged a country down on its luck and greatly invigorated its industry.”
“Unfortunately, that country is Japan,” Blake adds.
Phillips delivers this little speech so slyly that the guests are as shocked as we are by Jimmy’s sudden attack on Maggie, and the result is one of the funniest moments in a very funny show.
Leslie Phillips is now 83 and still at work — last year, he had a juicy part as one of the old actor friends of the stage star Peter O’Toole played in “Venus.”
Phillips has credits going back to the 1930s, on stage, screen and TV.
In his mid-60s at the time of “Chancer,” Phillips had at his disposal the sort of crack comic timing it takes a lifetime to develop; he makes every scene featuring Jimmy Blake a master class in acting.
Coincidentally, Phillips and his “Chancer” rival Peter Vaughan, who is 84, have just finished filming a new comedy with Michael Caine called “Is Anybody There?”
