Give Us A Break - The Frame Game
Before there was Big Deal, the BBC and Geoff McQueen cued up a snooker drama...
After Robert Lindsey had sought for freedom for Tooting but before Paul McGann went on holiday by mistake, they teamed-up for a BBC drama about a snooker protégé and the professional gambler who sees there’s a few quid to be made out of him.
Not to be confused with Jim Davidson’s comedic tour de force Big Break, Give Us A Break sprang from the pen of Geoff McQueen. That the show only lasted eight episodes might have had something to do with the country’s snooker halls being too niche a location to attract mainstream attention.
The writer was well served by his actors, though. In McGann, he had the perfect person to depict Mo Morris, a swaggering Scouse wunderkind with more talent than sense. And with his black Fedora and porn star moustache, Lindsey provided an object lesson in greed and sleaze as the marvellously monikered Micky Noades.
Beyond the leads, there was further gold to be found in the shape of Shirin Taylor (excellent as the most done wrong of women done wrong), David ‘Boon’ Daker and Alan Ford (aka Snatch’s barking-mad Brick Top). Also worth keeping an eye out for is Johnny Shannon, who was in Henry Cooper’s corner the night he floored Cassius Clay, who co-starred with Mick Jagger and James Fox in Performance (1970), and who played notorious slum landlord Peter Rachman in both Michael Caton-Jones’ Scandal (1989) and Stephen Woolley’s Stoned (2005).
It was a shame Give Us A Break didn’t last longer. Still, its premature end did at least give Geoff McQueen the opportunity to pen an even better gambling-centric series, the Ray Brooks poker vehicle Big Deal.