Posts Tagged With 'Leslie Schofield'

Famous Five, The

Posted in F is for... by TV Cream | 7 Comments »

MUCH-TRUMPETED “prestige” adaptation of the venerable Blytonian underage derring-do saga, adapted by RICHARD ‘FLYING KIWI’ SPARKS from the musty-smelling Hodder and Stoughton paperbacks that everyone read whether they wanted to or not, and lavishly filmed in various privately owned chunks of the New Forest for that idyllic “eternal summer of youth” vibe.

It was, of course, all updated for the go-ahead seventies. Starched collars and Pathfinder shoes were ditched to make way for zip-up cagoules, ten-speed Grifters and those lovely polyester polo shirts with an off-centre brown zig-zag up the front. Blyton’s busting out! But only by about so much, as the Enid Blyton Foundation, jealously guarding their intellectual property as well they might, weren’t too keen on that many liberties being taken with those timeless storylines. So despite the Tartrazine-coloured Year of Three Popes costumery, our intrepid heroes still found themselves going after gorblimey smugglers and swarthy gypsies, and the local bobbies still turned up on a rickety old bicycle in the nick of time. (“Constable! Thank goodness you’re here!”) We were still firmly in “lashings of ginger beer” territory, which to your average ’70s child was as exotic as Servalan’s homeworld. And what were the odds, in 1978, of happening across an Aunt Fanny still able to get about under her own steam? Yet here she is, baking scones in a sparkly top. Something doesn’t quite fit.

On top of the period elephant in the room, there was the small matter of the production values not being quite up to scratch. Lots of lovely countryside and stately old piles, yes, but, with all due respect to GARY ‘Dick’ RUSSELL and pals, the acting, direction and pacing were Children’s Film Foundation level at best. Every other shot ended in a pause so long you could practically hear the key grip lighting up a post-take fag. Line delivery was firmly of the posh-gosh declamatory style. The odd medium-big name guest star provided a bit of variation, but much of the action was as flat as the browned-out ’70s film stock that captured it. All kids telly is prone to this to some degree of course, but here it was acute and chronic. Luckily the crims were as stiff as everyone else, otherwise nationwide anarchy would have ruled by the end of the first season.

And yet… everyone watched it. Slothful story progress, niggling period worries and the suspicion that Julian was a bit of a git weren’t nearly enough to offset the fact that here were some kids getting to muck about outdoors on the telly. Which, as it turned out, was all anyone wanted entertainment-wise during those heady Callaghanian summers. Look-In strips and spin-off books (OK, the original books but with cagoules on the cover) abounded. The oddly tuneless school choir theme tune (“Julie and Dick Annan, Georgian TIM-my the do-O-og…”) was, as was seemingly compulsory for all Southern kids TV themes, released as a single for nobody to buy. Hay was well and truly made.

Ironically enough, none of the Five ever went on to become truly famous by themselves, although Dr Who conventions are occasionally set on a roar when some wag claims that old Who is best because at least Tom Baker could operate a punt without falling in the water. The best part of twenty years on, ITV went back to Blyton, this time keeping the thing firmly in the time of grey flannel shorts and postal orders for six shillings. They’d learnt their lesson. Don’t decimalise Dick!

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Thriller

Posted in T is for... by TV Cream | 8 Comments »

A SUPERLATIVE anthology of hour-long suspenseful playlets about well-tailored middle class types methodically doing each other in, THRILLER was a textbook example of straightforward, unpretentious telly drama doing its job to perfection. Mastermind BRIAN CLEMENS conceived and wrote most of the six series: forty three stories of suspense and horror, sometimes with supernatural overtones, often with an American guest star on the books for export purposes, always with plenty of plot twists.

The pre-title sequences were reassuringly formulaic, setting the tone for each week’s dose of macabre happenings in, more often than not, a superficially cosy remote provincial setting.. A charming cottage was seen being cased by a sinister type in a Gabardine coat, or maybe a flashy TR7 would pull into the driveway of a well-appointed country house, arousing the suspicions of the gardener. Something was clearly afoot. Then came the credits, a blood-tinged fish-eye lens title sequence with jarring musical chords, signalling ‘suspense’ in no uncertain terms. Corny episode titles belied the finely-tooled drama they would herald. ‘The Eyes Have It’ was a case in point: a daft pun introducing a largely silent, almost unbearably suspenseful tale of blind medical students (including DENNIS WATERMAN and SINEAD CUSACK) thwarting PETER VAUGHAN’s gang of taciturn terrorists. Elsewhere, the likes of ‘Murder in Mind’ and ‘K is for Killing’ served up exactly what they promised, and needless to say, if Clemens could bodge up a title by working the word ‘scream’ into a well-known expression, he did.

Primark Hitchcock it might have been, but the suspense was well-made for all that. Essentially, the series toyed with clichés. Young married couple freshly moved into mysterious rural location, stranger turning up who may not be all he seems, unidentified killer on the loose etc. It was the masterly variations and wrong-footings wrought from these familiar scenarios that made the programmes riveting, even when acting and production values started to exhibit the tell-tale signs of mid-series sag. Quite often, however, there were great performances, both from name actors (witness DIANA DORS’s sinister country nurse, ‘taking care’ of a bed-ridden American diplomat’s daughter in ‘Nurse Will Make It Better’) and those yet to find fame, particularly one that stops everyone in their tracks, HELEN MIRREN as the potential victim (or – ahem – is she?) of serial wife-knobbler MICHAEL JAYSTON in ‘A Coffin for the Bride’. DINSDALE LANDEN’s turn as suave private eye Matthew Earp was so popular he became the series’ only recurring character, when he was brought back for a second episode. When everything came together, as with the endless double-crosses and revelations and a brilliant cast led by PETER BOWLES in ‘The Double Kill’, you couldn’t ask for a better way to pass an hour of prime time.

This was, as you might expect, a very early ’70s kind of intrigue. Try and play a postmodern drinking game, quaffing along with the hero, or taking a sip every time a detective is seen entering a living room refracted in a crystal decanter, or a white shag-pile carpet is stained crimson with blood, or an anonymous black-gloved hand picks up a telephone receiver and slowly dials a very long number, or a blonde American in a trouser suit merrily announces that she’s ‘new in town’ and you’ll be under the glass coffee table before the first victim. And, quite frankly, serves you right. The show signalled its era in other ways: ‘If It’s a Man, Hang Up’ had Clemens’ stock glamorous soubrette-in-peril (more often than not called ‘Suzy’, the significance of which remains a mystery) menaced by an unknown stalker leaving threatening messages on a big, clunky old telephone answering machine. One of the main things mitigating against any modern revival of the programme is the number of plots that revolve around young women not being able to get to a phone box in time, or killers cutting the phone lines to a remote country cottage. In that sense, as well as that of the many swish glass-’n'-chrome bachelor pads dreamt up by the set designers, this is period drama.

They weren’t wall-to-wall classics. Each of the six seasons served up a couple of makeweights and duffers. (As a rule, seasons three and four were the closest to perfection, while five and six became increasingly silly.) ‘File It Under Fear’ was a library-oriented serial kill-in which had JOHN LE MESURIER, JAN FRANCIS and MAUREEN LIPMAN to play with among others, but still fumbled its chance, while mystical entry ‘Someone at the Top of the Stairs’ was fantastic for forty minutes, then ran smack into one of those tediously long-winded explanatory denouements that plague so much bad telefantasy, even if the masterly DAVID DE KEYSER was delivering it (with his fingers placed on the tip of his chin just so). At the very bottom of the pile, ‘Murder Motel’s daffy PSYCHO homage, despite the appropriately-cast RALPH BATES, stank the place out.

Even in otherwise grand entries, Clemens’ unabashed disregard for research (particularly his habit of just sort of guessing what the police might decide to do) got the goat of the more pernickety viewer, along with the inevitable ‘yes, but what about..?’s and ‘hang on, why didn’t she just..?’s that always plague the best laid plots of Agathas and Roalds. Oh, and the dialogue, with the possible exception of one or two Matthew Earp bon mots, never rose, or even aimed above speakable. But even when it was unspeakable, even when the plots were riddled with inconsistencies, and even when the entire set-up seemed like a dead goose from the off (“there’s this professor of Pavlovian psychology, right, and he’s trained some murderous psychos as his servants, and he invites some young students to dinner…”) the twists, turns and sheer gusto of the whole thing kept your attention front and centre, niggling doubts only edging their way in as the end credits wound to a close. Which, Clemens would argue, was his job done.

One thing that initially puts off the modern viewer is Thriller’s directorial style, which, if it could be said to exist at all was very much the old school approach: four days in the studio, one day on location, bash it out, onto the next one. What would nowadays be considered glacial pacing (the long, deliberate tracking shot across an empty room accompanied by sinister oboe cadence was something of a motif, for instance) was integral to the atmosphere. Rather than cut rapidly from shot to shot, the direction took its time, almost taunting the viewer with its creeping progress. When all the other elements were working, a vivid sense of foreboding was the result. Lew Grade’s ITC hired a roster of big names and gave the scripts relatively lavish treatment, but, being mainly studio-bound, with a couple of sets (all of them meticulously dressed, with nary a wobbling column in sight) and a minimal amount of location filming, they look visually primitive these days. However, this simplicity had the virtue of putting the emphasis firmly on script and action, in lieu of fancy camera angles. In fact, the technical limitations had an atmosphere all of their own: the videotaped interiors were claustrophobic and tense, while the grainy, overcast countryside film inserts looked like they could be hiding untold menaces.

Various ITV series followed in kind – the supernatural ARMCHAIR THRILLER and HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR, and the twist-happy TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED, which was the one that ran off with all the nostalgia value, more through being repeated a lot during ITV strikes than anything else – but for sheer no-nonsense cliffhanging effect, nothing beats the original.

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Twinky

Posted in Cream Classics by TV Cream | 2 Comments »

THE PLOT: 38-year-old American writer of erotic fiction Scott Wardman (Charles Bronson) falls for a swinging 16-year-old London girl (Susan George). Big trub all round!

It was inevitable the ’60s would produce a comedy Lolita. The twin trends of ‘edgy’ age of consent taboo-poking and silly, sped-up, knees-bent-running-about slapstick comedy were bound to end up colliding somewhere over North London before the decade fell over. Well, they weren’t bound to at all really, but they did all the same. It was that kind of decade! And this film marks the spot where the social realism of Karel ‘Morgan!‘ Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning met the silent whimsy of Richard ‘Superman III‘ Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night head on.

Not sure if we've got a particularly bad copy of this film or not, to be honest. Sir Henry, about to get his Rawlinson End away

Richard ‘Superman II’ Donner directs, following on from overseeing daffy Rat Pack Bond pisstake Salt and Pepper. The script comes from one Norman Thaddeus Vane, fresh from penning last year’s Herman’s Hermits vehicle Mrs Brown You’ve Got a Crunchy Snack There. The sprightly songs spring from the ever-chipper quill of Jim Dale. As a lovely old United Dairies milk float trundles down an overcast Rylance Mews, accompanied by a chirpy, 2000mph trumpet-led swinging theme that wouldn’t be out of place heralding a Bruce Forsyth-helmed variety spectacular, it’s hard not to have the grudging expectation that this could well, in some small way, be any good. Let’s get the Rank Organisation/World Film Services network together!

We cut to a none-more-middle-class Ask the Family-style breakfast table (‘stop doing whatever it is you’re not supposed to be doing!’), as dad Mr Londonderry (Michael Craig) and bespectacled, frustrated mum (Honor Blackman) reprimand daughter Sybil (Susan George) for reading a lewd paperback. ‘Absolutely filthy! Your grandfather will hear of this!’ Gramps turns out to be a routinely eccentric, trigger happy (‘Churchill may have signed a peace treaty but I haven’t!’) generically geriatrically bawdy, and played by Trevor Howard, in the first of many fun to spot but ultimately not really any good character cameos.

Ah, Danish! Got any Edison Lighthouse?

This lengthy exposition is jollied up by cutting between the family table and scenes between Bronson and Sybil (or Twinky as he calls her – confusingly he also calls her Lola when he feels like it) in the former’s echoey bachelor pad. (Sound quality in this all-location shoot is diabolical, worse than the Children’s Film Foundation at its most cash-strapped.) Bronson is supposedly 38, but looks a fright, with Planet of the Apes chops and a Leonard Nimoy Number Eight Crop on top of his head – one of those ‘every hair on the scalp precisely one inch long’ jobs, a haircut to identify psychopaths by. He gurgles and wheezes his God-awful lines in a voice halfway between Johnny Cash and Jackie Mason, like he was an especially disaffected tour guide at The American Adventure in the middle of February. In short, he’s not ‘Scott Wardman’, he’s Charles Bronson as bloody ever, and anyone coming to this film with a fine tooth comb in a little tortoiseshell case ready to search this film for evidence of any redeeming features about the man, don’t bother. As ever, there are none.

Countering this, Susan George is terrible in a different way, overdoing the squeaky jolly hockey sticks manner to boiler-busting levels. (‘I’m in a muddle as to whether to tell you something or not!’) It’s intensely irritating, especially in Bronson’s grotty, overlit, echoey kitchenette – a cross between Jenny Agutter in The Railway Children and Harry Enfield’s annoying Kid Brother. No matter how ‘swinging’ the editing style gets, any scene with this pair in it (which is most of the film) goes by very slowly indeed. To wit: Twinky fries breakfast while Bronson smokes his pipe on the bog. She inevitably gets distracted, and it burns to a comedy dramatic musical sting. Except this plays more like a public information film than a featherweight slice of atavistic ribaldry, so vast is the chasm between the way this drab little story looks – cheap and shoddy and falling apart and unremittingly grim – and the way everyone’s playing it, as a sort of underage sex edition of ponderous first series Grange Hill, peppered with stray gags left over from Rentaghost.

Honor's turn with the 1960s white-framed shades No make-up in school time, Suzanne!

Bronson is a writer of trashy soft porn, and it’s his book Twinky’s been caught with. The family continue to debate at home – Blackman ‘can’t see what all the fuss is about’, Trev Howard avers ‘larger, perfectly innocent words begin with f’. When the truth of the affair is gradually revealed (and by gradually we mean suddenly, in a no doubt intentionally virtuoso jump cut from Twinky giggling to Blackman in tears), solicitors are called. Oh good, the family’s solicitor is Lionel Jeffries. Mr Port-Out-Starboard-Home, on the phone, gleefully gossips about the confidential case to a client in the office with him, Eric Chitty. (‘It’s statutory rape!’) Word of Bronson’s nationality comes over the wire. ‘He’s American? I’ll have to have a peep in the immigration act!’ Twinks explains to a sluggish Bronno that ‘English laws are very stiff’, particularly if they come up before a friend of her father’s, Judge Roxbrough, played in a whimsical flash cutaway by Robert Morley. (‘Unfortunately even flogging has been removed for this offence…’) Or, he might find himself up before mummy’s friend, the more lenient Justice Millingdon-Draper. (Jack Hawkins, who suspends his driving licence in a similar gag cut).

There follows a ‘family discussion’ (which Craig runs like a United Nations resolution meeting, complete with arcane voting system) which goes against Twinky’s favour, and sanctions are duly invoked. (‘Oh daddy, please can I have my transistor radio back?’) Two coppers (among them Leslie Schofield) descend on Chuck’s all-white, easy-like-Sunday-morning loft space asking questions about a dodgy Visa. Twinko stupidly tries to impress the plods, and some vintage screwball dialogue ensues. ‘He’s a writer! His book’s so good it’s even been banned in England!’ ‘She’s put you in it now, sir!’ ‘Yup!’ ‘Oh gosh, have I?’ ‘Yup!’ Er, that’s it. Oh, there’s a great line afterwards, where Twinky comforts herself about Chuck’s impending forced departure with a Curly-Wurly: ‘I don’t want my last memories of you smeared with chocolate!’ Then there are the ‘telling’ scenes when La George reveals her inner child (even fluffier than the outer one: e Oh Scott, I just remembered, our school’s got a hockey match on Saturday, can we go?’) and, in the film’s most gruesome sequence, Bronky grades her on sex. (‘Straight A’s!’ Groo…)

Is that Edward Judd's roll-neck off the Think Bike campaign? The Two of Us title sequence not the unique artistic event we assumed shock!

To leaven this bilious tendency, Jim Dale sweeps back onto the soundtrack with a lilting composition, backed by Timotei flutes, called The Lonely Year. (‘She is the dawn, and like the dawn she brings the sunny day to the lonely year…’) He sings this in a strangely put-on posh crooner’s voice, for reasons best known to himself, while Bronny and Twinko snog on a traffic island. As if the script couldn’t get any more clichéd, they decide to elope to Gretna Green. ‘Oh Scotty, you’ll be my mummy and daddy, sweetheart and teacher all rolled into one! You’ll be my super new grandfather!’ They’re married by Eric Barker, who may just be putting on his Scottish accent (‘That’ll be five poonds! A two shines and saxpence fer tha starne!’) Time for a balloons-on-car ‘just married’ montage, and another Dale composition, Go Where the Sky Goes. (‘Go where the sky goes/Tomorrow’s catching up with you, so don’t let go today/Go where wind blows/Just stop at Hertz and rent a breeze and you’ll be on the way/Like a coloured balloon…’)

The marriage becomes notorious (no need to explain why!) and the honeymooning pair check their press cuttings with glee. Bronson muses he’ll become ‘the butt of every TV comic in England’ and sure enough, we flash cut to Norman Vaughan and Jimmy Tarbuck in full-on stand-up mode, alternating lines on the same gag. (Norm: ‘When they booked into their honeymoon hotel they didn’t have the birthday suite…’ Tarby: ‘…they had the romper room!’)

'Right!' You have to match the lampshade

Still, George has become the toast of the school changing rooms, where the film briefly threatens to turn into something very different indeed, but fortunately doesn’t. Or maybe it does, as Trevor Howard is suddenly among the girls for some reason, in the requisite split level pad. He’s a fan of the book Bronno’s based on his Georgian affair (‘I enjoyed the chapter where they both had a bath in olive oil,’ he vouchsafes). Meanwhile, Craig lays down the law while Blackman acts out her panto ‘frustrated housewife’ fag-packet character in the background. ‘There are three things I don’t like about you from the start – you’re ugly, you’re middle aged, you’re filthy and you’re American!’ Bronco, without missing a beat: ‘That’s four!’ No punchline knowingly untelegraphed, it would seem – Norman Thaddeus Vane is the spiritual Godfather of Chucklevision.

So it’s off to America with the pair of them, and an awkward meeting which Charlie’s all-American family, headed by the great (but very old-looking here) Paul ‘Colonel Hall’ Ford in a flat cap, keen to know about his new wife (‘ A British girl? Some of them are very lovely!’) The inevitable reveal, given an unnecessary two minutes of build up, is just the meat-and-potatoes ‘slack-jawed group shot’ textbook gag you’d expect. ‘He’s a nymphetishist!’ But Ford’s nervously diplomatic: ‘Son, she’s as pretty as an 18 year old!’ Things turn to shit rather quickly in New York. George partakes in the wimpiest Vietnam-era student demo you ever saw. Bronson tries to get her out (her arrest not being what they want at this juncture) and ends up punching out a cop to Batman comedy musical squeaks. She comforts him in the police cell: ‘Don’t worry! You’ll be home by six!’ Cut to judge: ‘Thirty days! Bang! (Of gavel!)’ Who said great comedy was something you had to strive for?

Realistic street ruckus! 'Groovy '60s party' wallpaper goes up easy

With Bron in the slammer, Twinky does up their plush new flat, in the inescapable style of the time – a sped-up comedy collapsing DIY montage, with George putting up wobbly shelves to the sound of a Nickelodeon piano. It must be said that, though the funnies in this script are funny only because we’ve called them funnies to differentiate between that which might just possibly be intended to be funny and that which clearly wasn’t intended to be funny, even though both funnies and non-funnies are uniformly unfunny – in spite of that, the script never passes up an opportunity for a funny. When Bronco’s pal Hal visits him in the prison booth, there’s a faltering, laboured gag where Charlie’s too far from the microphone. It’s funny because it’s true! When he gets out, he goes to the flat, but she’s organised a swinging teenage party, and pretends not to know him on the intercom. Bronson is summarily discharged from the premises by the doorman, aka Jerry Seinfeld’s dad.

Relations are strained; Bronco’s reduced to penning adverts and the writing is officially on the Jefferson Airplane poster-covered wall. There’s a long chat between the two which briefly threatens to move into interesting territory but falls off on Neighbours-level attempts at sour naturalism. ‘Last night that cat had an accident on one of my commercials!’ ‘Permission to speak… have we really had it?’ ‘Wash the back of your neck!’ The end in sight, George breaks down into Gainsborough Pictures-style floods of over-enunciated ‘a-boo-hoo-hoo’ tears. (‘It’ll be funny being a washed out divorcee at sixteen!’) She goes briefly missing and he fears the worst. Amidst the turmoil, the cat goes without grub.

Meta-satires! I failed the test card audition, by the way

Finally, she just, er, buggers off, with another exchange of Thaddeus Vane’s patent full strength ‘just like real life’ epithets. (‘I love you quite rather a lot – you’re not a bad old egg.’) Then she’s away on her stowaway shopping bike, to resume her grainily posh English childhood untroubled by thoughts of Bronson’s looming, simian, ‘Casey Kasem dipped head first in iron filings’ face. And who better to send her gliding on her merry way than Jim Dale? ‘Pretty young girl with a two-wheel bike/All grown up and it just don’t seem right/Gone and broke your heart too soon/You’ll get over it/Just one summer and a month or two/You’ll start laughing like the way you used to/You fell in love too soon/Pretty crazy, dizzy as a daisy/That’s the game you play/Now it’s time to play the grown up way…’

Perhaps it goes without saying, but this was the one out of all these films we only watched all the way through in order to write this middle bit (we’ll take the heartfelt expressions of gratitude at this selfless act as read, thanks). It’s a chore to stay interested in this pair of caricatured no-marks and their tiresome fling, which they seem to be having purely because without it this would be a very dull film indeed. Even with it, you’re out cold in minutes. You know the way The Knack has a, er, knack for mixing slapstick tomfoolery with slightly unsettling sexual deviancy, setting up what Geoffrey Grigson, if you pointed a gun at him, might call a fruitful tension between the two? Well, everything that film does, this film tries to do twice as controversially, misses its footing in the process, and falls backwards into a trestle table plied high with raspberry pavlova. The gritty social realism elements don’t produce an exciting tension with the freewheeling comedy elements, they just sort of silently sit there side by side like two completely dissimilar strangers doomed to an afternoon of stilted boredom thanks to a thoughtless wedding reception seating plan.

Stephen J Cannell presents... We've spent a lot of money on this helicopter...

Nothing happens at tremendous speed. The character actor cameos just turn up, turn round and piss off the stage, with no fun to be had like there is with, say, Bunny Lake. The comedy’s so broad and corny a soundtrack of gleefully groaning Play Away audience members wouldn’t go amiss. The result is fart. That the characters are boringly black and white is bad enough, but since the cardboard uptight father is just as nothing-doing as grandad’s by-the-numbers colonial eccentricity, it all merges into a grey splodge (which is what all available prints of this film will look like until it’s picked up on DVD). Likewise, the ‘controv’ storyline just sits about, taking its own controversy as excuse enough never to actually go anywhere or do anything. It combines the worst, smug excesses of the taboo-breaking attention seeker with the slapdash fag-packetry of half-arsed sitcom sloppage. The result is a strangely neutral film, that starts, goes on a bit, and then just sort of ends, leaving nonplussed expressions on every exposed surface. Still, as the ever-optimistic Paul Ford might mollifyingly say, Jim’s good value, isn’t he?

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Play Not-Quite-For Today: Series Two

Posted in Play For Today by TV Cream | No Comments »

Play for Today officially ended with The Amazing Miss Stella Estelle. The single play continued to get an airing on BBC1 however, and the winter 1984/5 season took up the same evening slot and could be considered another ‘unofficial’ part of the canon. As it includes some well-remembered plays, we’ve listed it below.

Terra Nova

By Ted Tally/John Bruce
Sparse, unreal dramatisation of Scott’s doomed South Pole expedition, presenting a less than completely heroic portrait of the man (played by Michael N Harbour), and featuring weird interludes in which his rival Amundsen turns up and starts winding him up.

The Long March

By Anne Devlin
After ten years in England, Doreen Hepburn returns to her native Belfast at the height of the Maze prison ‘dirty protests’ to find her local councillor father (James Ellis) being hounded by the locals for not being seen to give the prisoners enough support in their demands for special status. Filming on location in the Falls Road area caused a great deal of tension with residents, especially the staging of a ‘bin banger’ (noisy protest march) outside councillor’s home.

Punters

By Stephen Wakeham
Mick Ward and Tim Davidson are two young men working a seemingly ‘fail safe’ gambling scheme at the races.

Stars of the Roller State Disco

By Michael Hastings
Odd, well-remembered but perhaps not brilliant near-future dystopian satire, positing a grim future where permanently unemployed youths are forcibly inducted into the graffiti-covered titular disco to learn basic skills from endless instructional videos in the increasingly forlorn hope of gaining employment, skating gormlessly round and round in the meantime. Perry Benson plays Carly, a Chippendale-obsessed apprentice carpenter proudly rejecting offers of work he considers beneath him (‘I’m a craftsman!’) to the consternation of girlfriend Cathy Murphy. Shot on good old videotape in three days by Alan Clarke, on a cavernous set part-designed by writer Hastings, the on-the-nose nature of the play’s overarching conceit is offset to an extent by its many quirks, notably the casting of the gawky, speccy Benson as something approaching a romantic hero.

Talk to Me

By William Humble
Depressed young couple Patrick Barlow and Philomena McDonagh find sessions with psychoanalyst Alan Howard to little to improve their relationship.

More Lives Than One

By John Peacock
Michael N Harbour is caught between marriage and his old life with his mates. With music by Tom Robinson.

The Last Evensong

By Trevor Baxter
Taking the series into 1985, Freddie Jones is a stalwart brigadier resisting modernisation at the local church. With Tony Robinson.

Bird Fancier

By Mal Middleton
Semi-comic intrigue amongst pigeon fanciers in Sheffield, as Michael Elphick’s unstoppable winning streak is plotted against by fellow fanciers George Baker and Bryan Pringle.

The Exercise

By Tim Rose Price
A routine escape and evasion exercise in the Welsh hills for four army cadets turns into something more sinister. With Ian Hart and Leslie Schofield.

Four Days in July

By Mike Leigh
Leigh (overseeing mainly improvised acting as ever) turns his attentions to Northern Ireland with a view of the Troubles as seen through the eyes of two young couples (one Protestant, one Catholic) meeting in a maternity ward, both expecting babies in the run-up to the traditionally fraught Battle of the Boyne anniversary on July 12th. A far more warm, human portrayal of people and life than is found in some of Leigh’s previous, more celebrated, work in the Play for Today strand.

Brigadista

By Terence Hodgkinson
Paul Rogers is a successful author plugging his Spanish Civil War memoirs in Glasgow, and bumping into two old comrades from the conflict, James Copeland and Phil McCall, who remember the events he depicts rather differently.

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Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, The

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SUPREME ROSSITER-ITIS. From the top: bored commuter (Len) lives in ghastly suburban bliss with wife Elizabeth (PAULINE YATES) and cat Ponsonby on Poet’s Estate. Hapless lifeskill-lacking army brother Jimmy ‘Major James Gordonstoun’ Anderson (GEOFFREY “LAMB” PALMER) constantly pops round for sugar and the like (“bit of a cock-up on the catering front”). His daughter Linda (SALLY-JANE “NEWCOMERS” SPENCER) lives in profoundly revolting wedded bliss with pipe-smoking, winemaking hippie liberal Tom Patterson (initially TIM “PORTERHOUSE BLUE” PREECE, latterly LESLIE “JOHNNY BRIGGS’ DAD” SCHOFIELD) instilling sickmaking Guardian values in their two small children, Adam (“I done biggies!”) and Jocasta. His dropout other son (DAVID “SHANG-A-LANG” WARWICK) thankfully drops by only fitfully, looking for handouts to support his eternally fledgling acting career in a “Wedgwood Benn for Pope!” t-shirt. Len commutes every morning to the dilapidated confectionery empire Sunshine Desserts, run by bullet-headed, cliche-spouting go-getter Charles ‘CJ’ Jefferson (JOHN “DOOMWATCH” BARRON), with awful, Tony Blackburn-alike colleague Tony ‘Great!’ Webster (TREVOR “PROFESSIONALS” ADAM), even more awful, drippy colleague David Harris-Jones (BRUCE “STRANGERS” BOULD), lazy, hypochondriac company medic Gerald ‘Doc’ Morrissey (JOHN “HOT METAL” HORSLEY) and vivacious temptress of a personal secretary Joan Greengross (SUE “RENTAGHOST” NICHOLLS). What to do in this repetitive hell, after a disastrous safari park excursion, an abortive affair with Joan, a dinnerless dinner party with the boss and dodgy uncle Percy Spillinger (“I say, what a lovely pair!”) and numerous disturbing hallcinations, but to fake one’s own suicide (in flute-led Brighton front titles) and, after a brief stint on a pig farm, return as bearded, long-lost relative Martin Wellbourne (having spent time in the Amazon basin), and woo Elizabeth all over again, while earning a menial wage at a sewage farm as bucktoothed Donald Potts? Plan soon uncovered by first Linda, then Elizabeth, and Reggie returns as himself once more. Sacked by CJ, he returns to the pig farm. Elizabeth gets a job at Sunshine Desserts. CJ comes onto her, clumsily. Reggie gets sacked. So does Elizabeth. Out of desperation, Grot, a shop selling 100% rubbish (square hoops, Tom’s wine, his dentist’s pictures of the Algarve), is born. It’s a success. Ex-Sunshine employees are poached. In fact, everyone. Including CJ. Having built a success from nothing, Reggie is intent on destroying it again. He fails. Back to where they started, again, Reggie and Elizabeth go off to Brighton, and return as Mr and Mrs Gossamer. The novelty, again, wears off. The idea of Perrins, a commune for the disenfranchised suburban middle-classes, is born. Jimmy, Tom, David, Joan, Doc, CJ etc. are predictably employed. It, predictably, becomes a success. It angers the local community of, er, suburban middle-classes. Violent attacks force it to close. Reggie gets a job at Amalgamated Aerosols, run by suspiciously familiar FJ, alongside the suspiciously familiar Muscroft (“Marvellous!”) and Rosewall (“Teriffic!”). Back where he started, again, again, what else is there to do, but… A case of diminishing returns, to be sure, but repetitiveness was, of course, the point, and in present age of would-be “dark” sitcom bollocks, it’s worth remembering how this ace DAVID NOBBSfest created an incredibly depressing world (many of the early episodes end with Rossiter, alone, screaming in despair – hardly an audience-rousing “you have been watching” punchline) out of the archetypal cheery, harmless sitcom cliches, a feat only equalled by the similarly exceptional EVER DECREASING CIRCLES. 1996 Rossiterless revival was, naturally, appalling, ditto the bizarre 2009 MARTIN CLUNES remake-that-wasn’t-a-remake.

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