Sunderland Echo

Sassy and fiendishly clever series

t’s amazing what you can find while channelhop­ping in the early hours –

Iand my find of

the week –

Because it was the BBC, of which I tired decades ago, and was of roughly the same vintage of the truly, shocklingl­y awful

I shut the door on

That would be my mistake – minutes into an episode about the team conning a wealthy woman I, to use the vernacular, ‘was in’.

Heading straight for BBC iPlayer, I binge-watched the whole lot – eight series, from 2004 to 2012 – 48 episodes about con artists, tricksters, grifters. Unlike Del Boy and Arfur Daley they had an edge – they were perfect at it.

Hustle is a series that benefits from watching the episodes in order. That way you understand the characters, their relationsh­ips, their purpose and how they operate.

The team of tricksters are introduced in the first episode – a cat-and-mouse plot where the cops are keeping their suspects under surveillan­ce as they plan one last mark. It also plays like the

– Yul Brynner putting together a team to fight bandits terrorisin­g Mexican farmers.

The cast – though it changes for later series which pale alongside the first few – is led by Adrian Lester as Michael “Mickey Bricks” Stone – the lead ‘inside man' – ambitious and intelligen­t conman,

Fresh out of prison, he is assembling a team for one last con. The rest of the team are:

The deliciousl­y devilish Robert Vaughn plays Albert Vaughan – the roper, a semiretire­d, legendary old-school grifter, who has a fondness for gambling and cheating at cards and specialise­s in identifyin­g potential marks.

Whenever there’s a double act – Starksy and Hutch or

Bodie and Doyle – everyone as a favourite. In

Vaughan played Napoleon

Solo to David McCullum’s Illya Kuryakin. Vaughan was my favourite, his was the face on the poster on my bedroom wall. I never lost my passion for him.

Ash “Three Socks” Morgan was played by Robert Glenister – the ‘fixer’ resourcefu­l, allround grifter, capable of finding and setting up locations and securing people, items and websites that are needed in the long con.

Woke alert – Stacie Monroe is played Jaime Murray, an unabashed lure – using her sex appeal to manipulate potential marks.

My favourite character is Danny Blue played by Marc Warren. He is Chico in the

the young, hot-blooded shootist who wants in Brynner’s gang but has to prove himself first.

The other regular character is Eddie, Rob Jarvis, the owner and proprietor of a London bar frequented by the team. Despite the team playing tricks and short cons on him, usually to get out of paying drinks or winning money from him, the team hold a deep affection for him.

The relationsh­ips between the main characters are complex, sometimes charged with sexual tension, jealousy and rivalry.

is television from grown-ups. The plots are complicate­d, the scripts slick and sassy, the dialogue snappy and riddled with references to classic films, plays and, yes, musicals.

The filming is slick and glossy in the best of USAtelevis­ion way – and delivered with a jazzy score, the like of which is seldom heard any more.

In the first episode:

Eddie tells Ash: “Guy does something dumb, five will get you 10, there’s a woman there somewhere.”

That is straight out of Damon Runyon’s A line in the song runs “the guy’s only doing it for some doll”.

Later Mickey tells Danny:

“If you want to be a grifter don’t have anything in your life that you cannot walk away from in a second.” Check out the Robert De Niro/Al Pacino top-notch crime thriller

In each episode there is a mark – the person the team are out to con out of loads of money. The guest stars are a ‘starry’ lot – ranging from Mel Smith to Sara Cox and Kenneth Cranham to Richard Chamberlai­n.

As many times episodes I have watched, some more than once, I have never got to the punchline before the joke was finished.

The plots are fiendishly clever, they unravel slowly but are full of sleights of hand, cons, feints and magicians’ ways.

Each one ends with the ‘fixes’ you have missed which make sense of the con for you. It is a joy to be ‘had’ – to know you have been Hustled.