Tony Jordan

Hustle is set in a very different world from most TV shows. Where did that setting come from?

You have to find the heart and soul of a project. You have to find a reason for the world, and you have to understand the world, and you have to give it a personality of its own.

So with that in mind, Hustle was a real problem because the inspiration for it was Ocean's 11 - and I just liked the clothes. You know that whole George Clooney, Brad Pitt, bow tie dangling down thing - that was really cool. And I thought we've never done anything like that on television before. When did we last do cool? I remember Jason King... but that doesn't really count.

So that was the premise, that's all we had - conmen, cool, that's it. If you then go off and start writing, you're dead in the water before you start, because there's no heart in it, there's no soul... it's a shell of an idea. You have to put some passion, some love, some soul into it.

And so I went away, locked myself up, watched all the films again, and read about thirty books about the con, grifting, whatever you want to call it. And I found this really fantastic era, in turn-of-the-century America and the twenties and thirties. There was a character called The Yellow Kid Weil, and he said "You can't cheat an honest man. It's not possible, you can only cheat him if he's dishonest." And it talked about the art of the con. And suddenly I bought into this whole idea that they're kind of cultured, that somehow the long con is better than any other kind of crime. But I only found that by realising that I needed to find the heart and soul of the show.

And then the rest all came from there. We decided very early on that we didn't want to show a domestic life, because cool is penthouse suites and hotels, not going home and making beans on toast. Now once I'd made that decision, then I realised what I was doing was I was going to have to create family out of what I had, to give you those emotional links. So we have Mickey and Stacey, who are mum and dad, we have Uncle Ash, we have the avuncular grandfather, who's Albert, and then we have the naughty teenager who's Danny. So what I did was actually created a family in the subtext and that gave it more of an emotional heart.

How do you keep the show fresh?

It's the same as the start of the process, it's character. If you look at the things that have longevity, shows like Morse, Cracker, even Miss Marple, they all have one thing in common: they're all character-based, not story-based. Look at some of the shows that failed in the past, something like Sapphire and Steel, that kind of show. What's all that about? I can hear the pitch: "No it's great, right, get this, a boy and a girl, right, see what I've done there, and one's like ice, like steel, and..." but who are they and why are they doing what they do?

You create a character like Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses, and you can do seven thousand episodes, because you've got that part right. And that's what gives you longevity. And if you understand that as a writer, if you understand that everything begins with character - character first always, in story creation, in series creation, and when you're sitting down to write a script. If you start all those processes with character then you're halfway there.

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