TV Cream

Films: G is for...

George and Mildred

Always seems to do well in the “fondly remembered” stakes, does the TV version of G&M, which we reckon must be mainly down to the (rightly) high levels of affection people have for Brian Murphy and (especially) Yootha Joyce, because the actual programmes themselves were rather lacklustre – little more than a roles-reversed Terry and June with the volume (to say nothing of the colour balance) turned up. Plus we missed the five-way group dynamic of MATH, and the Fourmiles aren’t going to rank in anyone’s list of Top 100 comic characters, are they? That said, it was watchable, thus outdoing this 1980 Hammer film by a country mile, partly due to a heartbreakingly ill-looking Yootha, but mainly due to the thinness of both plot (Mild takes George on a London-based second honeymoon, George gets mistaken for a gangster, landmark-based mishaps ensue) and gags. And the cameo list only stretches to Stratford Johns, Kenneth Cope, Harry Fowler and Vicky Michelle. Now, a film version of Me Mammy, with Yootha and Milo O’Shea rushing around Television Centre trying to stop Anna Manahan puritanically sabotaging a live beauty pageant hosted by Bruce Forsyth – that’d be sweet.

4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. Glenn Aylett

    July 18, 2009 at 6:54 pm

    This film also marked the end of a highly successful run of films derived from sitcoms which kept the British film industry alive in the seventies. It was a shame the film was so poor- although George’s reference to the Socks Pistols on the Hells Angels jukebox was funny- as the television series was quite good. Sadly around the time this stiffed at the box office, the British film industry was very close to death.

  2. Lee James Turnock

    May 22, 2010 at 12:14 pm

    David Barry (Frankie Abbot from Please, Sir!) as a crap gangster called Elvis…doesn’t bode well, does it?

  3. Sidney Balmoral James

    August 7, 2020 at 10:19 am

    Saw this one Saturday afternoon on ITV in the company of my grandma – and was mortified by the subplot which has George mixed up with the villain’s Mary Millington-esque girlfriend who if my memory serves me tells him she has been in a film called Golders Green Gangbang. Although given state of British film industry at the time that could easily have been a real film, perhaps with Irene Handl and Hugh Lloyd in comic cameos.

  4. Tom Ronson

    March 31, 2022 at 11:23 pm

    This one tanked so badly at the box office that ITV hurriedly shoved it into their Christmas Day schedule just a few months after its cinema release. God knows what the poor sods who actually watched it after their Christmas dinner must have thought, especially if they were expecting either laughs or something that was at least recognisably close to the original series. I bought the DVD from a charity shop last year for the princely sum of fifty pence. Not only is the film terribly paced and crudely made (the restaurant visited by the Ropers is clearly someone’s house with some Christmas lights hurriedly added to the exterior), it’s also brutally unfunny. The only exchange that raised a smile was the above-mentioned reference to ‘The Socks Pistols.’ Quite astonishing to see how many people are casually bumped off by Kenneth Cope’s stressed-out hitman too – did the screenwriter even know that this was meant to be a comedy?

Leave a Reply

Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To Top