This is a repost of a post I wrote a decade ago to the month, which I found when thinking about blogging about Undermind (1965). I find I like it so much I don’t think I can do better so will repost it. As always I’m not promising this will become systematic posts about Undermind.

I’ve had this series for some time.

Plot-wise, we are in totally familiar territory with Undermind. Well, I say totally familiar, it is in the sense that technology, some kind of signal, is being used to get inside people and undermine society. The use of technology is very apparent from the very beginning of the series, and of course that is a characteristic subject of the 1960s television I write about here. The only different from the short of shows I watch normally is that the enemy here is an alien force, which I suppose places us with one foot in the sort of horror films of the 1950s when an all-American town is taken over by an alien force, only in this case of course it is set in Britain.

In the case of Undermind the fear is placed in a very specific period of time. It is not for nothing that Heriot’s profession is given as a personnel selection manager, and he has just come back from working abroad. Rather than the earlier welfare officer and manager dealing with pay disputes and bonuses, the 1960s was the time when personnel took off as a profession, and so Heriot is part of an up and coming profession. They also pioneered the use of psychological tests for selection and I feel it is important when watching Undermind to remember that Heriot would have been seen at the time very much as the Business Efficiency Bureau in The Avengers episode The Fear Merchants. To many members of the contemporary audience, Heriot would have seemed almost a magician; he would have known the questions to ask to find out very specific psychological answers. It is therefore very pointed that a member of his profession is up against the forces of psychological invasion.

There would also have been an ambivalence about Heriot and his profession among the contemporary audience of Undermind, since one of the things in the zeitgeist of the time was the way in which advertising was actually being used to get inside people; exactly the way the signal is being used to make people behave in very uncharacteristic ways. In fact there is hardly a popular fear of the time which is not exploited at some point in Undermind. Think of most plot arcs of the last three series of The Avengers, cross them with Doomwatch, The Champions and Adam Adamant Lives, and you have pretty much a plot summary of Undermind.

Otherwise there is a sense in which the plot of Undermind is a very conventional example of the little people against a great force, with no resources and in this case no real knowledge of what they are up against. Undermind very successfully paints the scenario of paranoia by placing the invasion in all levels of society, from the high to the low. That is the basic premise, and the show also draws on virtually every premise used in science fiction and the culture of the time. One of the things I notice about the reviews of this show on the internet are the frequency with which it is compared to other shows. I’ve already done it myself.

But there is something wrong with Undermind. There is a conflict at the heart of the show, and which I am feeling even as I write that there is something wrong with it. I actually don’t want to, because I have a sensation of being in the presence of Great Television. For a start many of the reviews deal with the episodes as individual story arcs, as indeed they are with different writers, and the episodes are often not seen in a very good light. I think this is the start of Undermind going awry for me: I have read that there is a very clear single story arc through the entire series. I’m sure there is, but if I pause to think about it during any particular episode I find I can’t, which I think is a result of patchy writing rather than a lack of concentration on my part. It is a personal opinion but while I see that other reviewers are appreciative that the sense of the opponent is deliberately left nebulous, that drives me nuts, and contributes to the sense of the series not really having a single clear plotline, because there isn’t a clear enemy. This is my one largest criticism of this show, and this is a criticism which has compromised my enjoyment of watching this show.

I think Undermind also suffers because it doesn’t stand up well to some of our modern sensibilities - such things as how Irish people are portrayed and the insensitivity of this depiction in the run up to the Troubles in Northern Ireland are of course unacceptable to modern eyes but I think are apt to detract from the actual show. My personal opinion is that Undermind is best watched as a compendium of all sorts of ideas present in the cult TV and thus psyche of the 1960s, a snapshot of a particular time’s treatment of these ideas, and a vehicle for the various Big Name guest stars.

A particular way in which Undermind is open to criticism is that even for the time - it was broadcast in 1965 - it seems quite old-fashioned. This was Emma Peel-era Avengers time, and that show looks much more modern than Undermind, and a criticism I have read repeatedly is that it is almost completely studio-bound. Personally that isn’t a problem for me, since I quite like the reflection that television at the time was much closer to the theatre than to the film industry. Interestingly, the sets use much of the visual language that I like so much in the Avengers. I particularly like the way modern office sets are used to indicate modernity and futurism. More domestic settings are used to indicate solid middle England, although of course in this case it is infiltrated by a mysterious power rather than populated by ruthless megalomaniacs. Production values are very much of the time. The pacing is, as you would expect, slow by modern standards. To my mind there is a drawback with the DVD release that I wouldn’t like to guess at how much work has gone into restoration. I can’t believe it is none, but there rae points at which the picture is quite grainy or unstable. I personally don’t have any difficulty with hearing the soundtrack, but I have read that some people do.

There are some familiar faces in this show, chief amongst them being Jeremy Wilkin playing Drew Heriot. It took me ages to work out where he was familiar from (see, these reappearing actors, do distract you from the actual show itself) and realise that he is more familiar to me personally wearing a string vest uniform in the Gerry Anderson show UFO. Since I’m not actually planning on posting about UFO here I will just weigh in on the debate raging on the internet over what the female cast of UFO wear under their string uniforms. A sort of skin coloured bra-thing. Easy. The only thing that’s wrong there is that Sylvia Anderson should have done something to hide the men’s chest hair and nipples, to create a futuristic look and a mystery that will rage for decades to come. But back to Undermind. The fact that it took me a long time to work out where I had seen Wilkin before indicates his acting ability, and his role in this show is quite different from his more senior role in UFO. Of course Rosemary Nichols is instantly recognisable to someone of my televisual interests as the IT expert in Department S, although once again her role is very different here, and it is the sound of her voice which makes her familiar. I’m torn at this point, frankly: there is an irony that so many of the shows I like are ITC ones when so many of the actors in those shows were recycled round all the other shows, and that drives me crazy! That said, in this case the fact that I had to spend some minutes thinking who the key actors were didn’t seem too distracting from the actual show. I am indebted to the ladydontfallbackwards.wordpress.com blog for the insight that this technique of using familiar faces is actually used to advantage here by casting the actor Jeremy Kemp, who would have been known to audiences at the time from Z Cars, in a completely uncharacteristic role, to reinforce the feeling that there is something very wrong.

Yet despite its weaknesses, my opinion is that Undermind manages to have an extraordinary effect on the viewer, no doubt intentional, and done with remarkably little razzamataz. It has been some time since I first watched it but I have been watching episodes several times over the past few days to write this blog post, and I find that they are different to what I remember. I don’t just mean that I had forgotten them, but the music (which is used very sparingly indeed) manages to get inside your head. I remembered it being used much more than it actually is. I have found the music going through my head while I have been out and about, and yet if you asked me to hum it to you I would be unable to. The show has actually managed to invade me in a very real sense, which is surely an achievement for any TV show, especially one which has rather been forgotten about for sixty years.

I suspect that the audience for this show is very much the same as the audience for this blog, namely hard core classic and cult TV fans. There will no doubt be some people who remember the show from when it was first broadcast, and others like myself who prefer old TV to modern TV. I would very much recommend this show to the dedicated cult TV fan, just simply as a showcase for many of the great names (both writers and actors) of the time, and also as a vehicle for so many of the common plot arcs which were prominent at the time. If you watch this with a mindset of setting out to be reminded of other shows and plots of the time, you will find it a great success. Its studio-bound setting does not really provide much in the way of reminiscence of the time, if that is what you are looking for. If you are a sci-fi fan, you will also like it as a lengthier and slower example of ge dating from the 1960s.

I would not like to suggest that this show’s weaknesses are such as would prevent people watching it. In fact I think people should watch it. But then I’ve seen it, and you don’t know whether I’m an undermind as a result...

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Centre Play (1973 to 1983) was a BBC anthology series of plays. It has briefly appeared here before, when I blogged about A Passage to Inverness, a complicated play about colonialism and family featuring a male stripper. I can’t tell you whether all the episodes are similarly ambitious, because as far as I knew at the time the only one on the internet was A Passage to Inverness, and I was pleased to see there are several others online now.

You Talk too Much is about Mrs Foster, a middle-aged lady who goes to her doctor complaining that she has logorrhoea, which is defined in the play as simply talking too much, or just not being able to stop yourself. The very good relationship she has with her GP is compared and contrasted with the relationship she has with her daughter and son-in-law, who is the one who has given her this diagnosis.

Interestingly I have had the same difficulty with You Talk Too much as I had with A Passage to Inverness, which is that it is really quite difficult to get to grips with. There are elements where the issue is the relationship withe the daughter and son in law, and there are occasions where the lady’s complaint seems to spill over into the field of mental health: the play could represent a personality trait being ‘psychiatrised’ by the family and/or doctor. There is also an element where Mrs Foster comes across as quite pushy and her daughter seems overly pushy so it’s not entirely clear whether the play is intended to be about the relationship.

It’s complicated by the fact that part way through the play she simply stops talking at all, which is contrasted with everyone else chattering away, including the doctor gossiping to his wife about his patients’ personal business, up to and including an abortion. The doctor admits he doesn’t know what to do about Mrs Foster.

Patricia Hayes, of course, plays Mrs Foster, to great effect. The role builds on the rather shrewish housekeeper role she played quite often, and she’s really quite creepy when she just stops talking.

My only criticism of this play is that Mrs Foster’s descent into approaching the GP to ask for help with her condition isn’t depicted as either violent or sudden enough. There could have been a single incident of disagreement with her family precipitating her visit or a depiction of real family ructions, but instead it comes across that the fanily has just been carrying on as it always did and yet she suddenly feels her lifelong behaviour needs help.

Ultimately this play is about relationships and communication, and the reality that everyone in this piece is busy chattering away and not listening to each other. Ironically Mrs Foster comes across as the most sensible one, and is also apparently the most talkative. She is depicted as the best-adapted character in that nobody else knows what to do and is constantly in despair, while she just gets on with it. We see her in one scene talking to herself in the mirror, which is depicted as a positive action to take. Talking is depicted as a bothersome, almost antisocial act, but yet not talking is a real problem.

You might say, and you’d be right, that this is a bit of a heavy drama and of course it is, but it has a very real sense of being a depiction of one sane person amongs utter incompetence and lunacy. A bit Alice in Wonderland, if you like.

And so we are at the end of Patricia Hayes’s TV appearances, at least the ones I am going to blog about. I was going to blog again about Grasshopper Island (1971) however on watching it again it’s struck me as quite different. I remember thinking it was an absolute delight when I first saw it, which from the boys’ point of view it probably would be. But on watching it again I’m not sure that depicting your three sons running round in their Y-fronts and going off with Charles Hawtrey who is described ambiguously as an ‘elderly boy’ and in the face of these things I have shied away from blogging about it again.

Conclusions

Before writing this series of posts I would probably have thought first of Patricia Hayes as Tony Hancock’s help, but have been struck by the sheer range of her roles. She shows a real versatility, to the extent that sometimes I have had to stop and check that the character I am looking at is actually Patricia Hayes, always the sign of an excellent actor in my book.

As always this series of posts has introduced me to things I didn’t know about before, primarily Edna the Inebriate Woman. I had never heard of it before, despite it apparently being Hayes’s best-known work. I have also now seen The Wall Came Tumbling Down, an episode of Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense which I had never seen but always been intrigued by its description.

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This isn’t a series I’m well acquainted with (in fact this is the only episode I have ever seen all the way through) so for my own benefit some introduction is in order. The Four Just Men (1959) is a series based on a number of novels by Edgar Wallace. The premise is that four men who knew each other as Allied soldiers during World War 2 are brought back together by their commanding officer and tasked with various jobs promoting justice and fighting tyranny. Of the four characters only one features as the main character in each episode: in this one the just man is Ben Manfred, who i think is supposed to be an independent MP but is more likely to be a Tory since he spends the whole of this chasing after a painting rather than doing constituency work.

The premise of the episode is that on his deathbed Lord Eastleigh confesses that the ‘Rembrandt’ on his bedroom wall is not a copy but the original and the supposed original in a gallery is in fact a copy. The episode is spent covertly swapping the two pictures then finding out who was responsible for the forgery and original swap.

It’s interesting enough but also illustrates why I’ve never got on with Edgar Wallace, and also a whacking great whole in the plot. I am sure that in 1959 there were bigger injustices in the world than one forged picture, so the premise of the show rather falls flat on its face from the beginning. When asked by Lord Eastleigh to go to see him to hear his deathbed confession about the picture, Manfred really could have just told the son to ring the police or tell the gallery where the forgery was, without any of the rigmarole involved in this episode. That course of action would surely be the natural thing to do (Lord Eastleigh dies in the first scene so wouldn’t have faced any criminal consequences) and would have had the advantage of revealing what was actually going on with the picture by the son’s reaction.

Instead the whole investigation goes on covertly, the power structure is maintained, and nobody is any the wiser. There are no real consequences for the criminal and there is no real justice. I have tried this series before and remember that this was why I could never get on with it: it rather assumed that the structure of society was absolutely fine and there were just a few rotten apples within it. Yes I know that this is exactly the premise of The Avengers, but The Avengers has the advantage of deliberately not being real so that justice will always be done and we can continue in our fantasy. On my limited experience of The Four Just Men all that happens is essentially nothing.

Patricia Hayes has a marvellous role as a lady who stands in the gallery day after day trying to copy the Rembrandt very badly. Ultimately she gives up and takes out all her savings to treat herself to the forgery instead, but doesn’t win it at auction. This is another role which shows her versatility in that she is much more cultured and with a markedly different accent than the succession of Cockney charmwomen she can tend to gravitate towards elsewhere.

My considered judgement of this show is that it would be interesting if you like adventure shows with a bit of a spy element but aren’t too quick to scratch beneath the surface and ask too many searching questions.

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I commented in the introduction to this series of posts that I have tried and attempted to find any of the Benny Hill episodes in which Patricia Hayes guested. I have, however, found some other comedies she was in and will try to get them all out of the way in one single post, because I don’t think I’ll manage to make any of them up to a full post.

Holiday with Strings (1974)

The premise of Holiday with Strings is the straightforward trope familiar from the 1970s as more Britons started going abroad on holiday, of holidaymakers being stranded by collapsing airlines, hotels which aren’t finished, dodgy food, and so on. This one stars Les Dawson and was written by Galton and Simpson who have already appeared in this series of posts.

It carries the ropey holiday trope well beyond where anyone else was willing to take it, to the extent that there isn’t even an airport, but a tent. There is a raffle on the plane for what you get to eat. Passengers are apparently press ganged. You have to put a penny in the scale to weigh you r luggage, and so on. Dawson isn’t actually allowed to take any luggage at all and ultimately has to travel with a couple of shirts shoved in his pocket. He’s charged excess weight, and that is for him, never mind his two shirts. He describes the trip as absolute lunacy but proceeds with it. You get the idea. Actually I much prefer this televisual treatment of the trope because it feels more intimate, the sets are obviously sets, and so on. I do love Carry on Abroad, but a TV programme somehow suits it better.

Patricia Hayes’s role is to be the air hostess. Dawson has to wake her up and get her out of his seat and remind her that she’s on a plane. She’s only just started after being on the buses. She plays the absolutely ridiculous role (running the raffle to decide which passengers get food and which don’t for example) completely deadpan, which suits it perfectly. It must have been very difficult to make the announcement that the passengers would have to get out at the Pyrenees and the plane would meet them on the other side.

I don’t have any criticisms, and according to IMDB Dawson wrote in his autobiography that just leaving this as a single half-hour play was the mistake of his career, and he should have made it into a series.

Hancock’s Half Hour: The Cold

I have picked this episode because she plays her recurring character of Mrs Cravatte, who normally ‘does’ for Hancock, but in this one she does a sort of spell , so has a more interesting role than just plopping bacon down in front of him. Like the Les Dawson, this is of course also written by Galton and Simpson.

The episode is the usual histrionics of Hancock having a cold and stretching it out to be a huge drama. Having already tried various quack remedies, Mrs Cravatte is one of the places Hancock goes for help in trying to get rid of his cold. He then finds that even his GP can only suggest Mrs Cravatte’s help before ultimately taking Sid’s advice and getting fit, which feels so much worse than having a cold that he is relieved to get another cold at the end of the episode.

I like the way Sid just pretty much makes fun of Hancock throughout this episode.

Patricia Hayes’s role is so dramatic, and she plays it to the full. It’s a really fun role for her.

Life with Cooper: Getting a Passport

This 1966 to 1969 series did appear briefly on this blog’s predecessor. It was a vehicle for national Treasure Tommy Cooper a decade before his absolutely raging alcoholism ensured that nobody would give him a show of his own any more. In each episode he tells some jokes and does some tricks before a number of sketches with various guest actors, in which he plays his bumbling public persona. Interestingly the guests on this show read like a who’s who of showbiz at the time.

In this one the extended sketch is about the chaos he causes when trying to get a clergyman or magistrate (etc) to sign his application for a passport. In one scene he asks a vicar to sign the application only to find that he has walked into a wedding where the groom has not turned up and everyone is treating him as the groom.

Patricia Hayes’s role is as the bride, of course, who comes up the aisle veiled before revealing her veil and getting an enthusiastic round of applause from the audience. Of course she immediately recognises that the man next to her is not her fiance but nonetheless announces that she’ll ‘take this one’. Chaos ensues.

It obviously isn’t a very complicated role but her small frame is perfect next to the 6’4” Cooper.

The Goodies: That Old Black Magic

In this one Hayes plays a witch who approaches the Goodies for help with her witchcraft. Interestingly, it highlights to me both why this show got the reputation for being a children’s show and why it absolutely isn’t. I mean that quite a lot of it is taken up with a chase, but also quite a lot of it is taken up with scantily-clad magical shenanigans. And when Bill is dragged up as a virgin his beard is given as the reason for his virginity.

Hayes’s role is probably one of the most theatrical roles I’ve seen her in, and was clearly intended to be hugely dranmatic, which is exactly how she plays it.

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One of the lesser-known episodes of Mystery and Suspense, this. It’s also one that I have been unable to find pirated online. I’ve described in a recent post how I chased down an affordable copy of the German box set of this series to a seller in Edinburgh, and honestly it was largely to see this episode, because I loved the summaries I found online.

Given it’s not so well known it may seem somewhat churlish that I’m not going to trouble you with a full summary of the plot (for that I would direct you to the excellent review at the Peter Wyngarde Society website https://peterwyngarde.uk/2016/11/28/review-hammer-house-of-mystery-and-suspense-and-the-wall-came-tumbling-down/). The simple reason is that I don’t feel I can. It starts in a church being demolished where we see a workman breaking through a wall. He looks through the hole and what looks like blood runs out of it. At the same time he is mysteriously killed by ropes or tubes which entwine themselves around his body. The wall he breaks through is the wall of the title. As well as the mysterious death what comes out of the wall is a complicated tale of a satanic coven operating at the height of the witch crase in the 17th century, every character of which is still involved in this story carrying on the struggle that was started then.

You will readily see that this is a hugely ambitious plot, switching between time periods, and using the same cast in each time perios so that they all look the same.

Into the midst of this minces Peter Wyngarde as (I’m not entirely certain) some sort of avenger of the coven character and witchfinder, and later as a NATO officer. I’m not making this up, there is so much in this drama.

Something unrelated which does interest me is that I’m wondering about a connection between this play (broadcast November 1984 although I have been unable to find the production dates) and Kenny Everett’s film Bloodbath at the House of Death (released March 1984): I say this purely because Vincent Price’s and Peter Wyngarde’s red outfits look very similar and there is the same device of members of the coven having a sort of mark made on their hand or arm.

Patricia Hayes’s role is to be part of the reincarnated local community, in the form of the grandmother of the young man. She’s a wonderful cockney grandmother.

The main criticism of this episode is of course that the plot is way too complicated. I do like the idea of a major historical trauma carrying on through a close-knit community through generations. I think rightly the episode leaves unclear whether these people are all reincarnated or what has happened. We’re supposed to be suitably horrified but it just doesn’t take analysis. Similarly, its approach to history, specifically the witch craze, is that of Hollywood so don’t expect realistic history.

There is also some misinformation on the internet about the location. The episode obviously weaves together different footage of external demolition and building and externals of the church. Although set in London the church used for the externals is St Andrew’s, Woodwalton, in Cambridgeshire. You will read online that this episode was filmed in a church which was actually being demolished, and possibly another church may have been used as well as a set for internals, but St Andrew’s is definitely still standing and under the care of the Friends of Friendless Churches: https://friendsoffriendlesschurches.org.uk/church/st-andrews-wood-walton-cambridgeshire/

My conclusion on this play is that it’s worth watching as a piece of fun. It’s worth watching just to see Peter Wyngarde being walled up alive. However don’t expect the overly-complicated plot to make any sense: just sit back and enjoy the atmosphere.

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This is one of those occasions when your life would be far better spent not reading this blog and going off to watch this play, since it is an absolute delight.

It is part of this 1969 series of six stand-alone plays, commissioned from Galton and Simpson for ITV ny Frank Muir, who was Head of Entertainment at LWT. By this time they were of course well into their career of jointly writing comedy, and really require no introduction to anyone who watches British TV of a certain vintage.

This play takes age and ageing as its subject. George is 58 but looks and feels much older. In the opening scene we see him being woken by the alarm in bed with his wife, played by Patricia Hayes. We see him coughing, having to light a fag first thing, gtalking about back pain, after putting in his false teeth. Even allowing that people tended to look older in those days he does look considerably older than 58, and in fact looks like he feels like I do in the morning.

The ‘friends in high places’ of the title are actually three angels in heaven. When I say angels I mean childhood steretypical angels, complete with wings and harp. George’s life changes when one of them decides to make him 30 years younger. In a replay of the opening scene we see him waking up next to Patricia Hayes, who is naturally horrified that she’s apparently been in bed with a strange man. He’s of considerable fitness, and even his own daughter gets a bit flirty with him.

Much of the rest of the play is taken up with the cast hilariously dealing with the consequences of George’s rejuvenation, including what they will tell people, teaching him young people’s slang, and him announcing that he’s not going in to work again. The play ends with a very unlucky consequence of George’s rejuvenation, and the angel being reminded that he’ll regret doing that when ‘he’ finds out.

This is an unusual play in the casting. Regular readers will know that the repeat familiar faces in much TV and film of this era can rather irritate me because I find them distracting as actors among less familiar faces, who I just see as the characters they are playing. In this case, though, the entire cast are well-known actors, and curiously this has the opposite effect on me in that I don’t mind it at all, I barely notice them. So it turns out I’m happy with familiar faces if the entire cast consists of them! Patricia Hayes plays her role hysterically (literally) screaming when she wakes up with the strange man and dressing too young in case her husband, who is suddenly 28, loses interest in her at her age.

The only posssible criticism of this play that I have is that Bob Monkhouse, who plays George, was too old convincingly to be 28, but in a play where angels take decades off a man you can easily suspend disbelief a bit.

You may say that this play is something of a light souffle, but this is what makes it an absolute delight. As so often you can tell the cast are enjoying it, as well as the audience roaring with laughter. In fact according to IMDB in his autobiography Bob Monkhouse said that this was his facourite role ever.

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Content warning: racism and blackface.

Patricia Hayes is the occasion for the first time this hugely popular series (1965 to 1975) has appeared on the blog, or its successors Till Death... (1981) and In Sickness and In Health (1985 to 1992).

There are only two things you need to know about the series. The first is that if you think it’s wonderful that Alf Garnett could express racist ideas on the telly then and everything has become woke since , the joke is on you and the series is making fun of you, you inbred, six-fingered, roundabout-painting, flag-shagging, knuckle-dragging gammon. And if you’re going to make out that Spike Milligan blacking up as an Indian indicates that it was saying racism is OK, you’re even more stupid because this series started sixty years ago and so they both wanted to criticise racism and yet didn’t quite get it yet. Both the writer and Warren Mitchell were very plain that the intention was to take the piss out of racists.

The other is that as the series goes on (particularly in In Sickness and in Health) it pulls absolutely no punches on the subject of ageing and illness, and can actuallly be quite heart-rending. The episodes I’ll be focussing on in this post are actually from the series where National Treasure Dandy Nichols was too unwell and had to have a trip to Australia written into the series so that she could be absent. In Sickness and in Health actually continued after Nichols’s death. I will place the three episodes out of broadcast order because the first two have a natural connection, being about sex and marriage, and the third is about death.

Part of the huge absence created by Nichols’s absence was filled by Patricia Hayes who played Min, the wife of Bert Reed, the Garnetts’ neighbours. She became an increasing mainstay of the series as it went on and honestly her performances can only be described as tours de force.

Marital Bliss

This episode starts with the Garnetts at dinner (minus Elsie) arguing over Alf’s inability to open a jar of pickled onions. Now looking at the Garnetts’ back room you may think it extraordinary the number of pictures of members of the royal family and Churchill, but you have to understand that we only have a monarchy because nobody can remember who is the prime minister this week and at least we know who Charlie is. Quite suddenly, Bert from next door walks in with his own dinner on a plate and sits down at the table with them. He makes himself at home, taking the top off the salt cellar and pouring some on the tablecloth before throwing a pinch over his shoulder. He asks Alf if it’s alright if he sits there and Alf agrees. He says that he’s there because he’s not speaking to ‘her’.

‘Her’ (Patricia Hayes) can be heard through the wall bellowing from next door that it’s not him who’s not speaking to her it’s her who’s not speaking to him. Now I’m aware that my reporting of this conversation may make Min come across as rather shrewish, but that isn’t the effect at all. The whole effect is absolutely hysterical. She starts also replying to things Alf says, telling him to keep his long noise out of it. She says that she wished she’d never got married, and they’re always ‘too tired’, and she might just as well be a spinster for all Alf ever does. ‘He was too drunk on our wedding night and he’s been too tired ever since’. She tells Alf to wipe the grin off his face ‘because you’re not much better from what your wife tells me.’

To cut to the chase Min also comes round from next door with Bert’s pudding in a bowl and continues the row in the Garnetts’ living room. It becomes apparent that Bert has never consummated their marriage, and much of the ensuing conversation revolves around this, marriage and Alf’s views on how a wife should be employed. Min stamps out and goes back to her mother, and Bert goes to the pub with the Garnetts.

Min comes back from her mother’s to find that her husband has collapsed in bed with Alf in their house, and beats them both with her handbag, accusing them of turning pansy and Alf protests that they’re just good friends.

As a portrayal of a woman who is very reasonably fed up at the state of her marriage but may slightly overdo the humiliating her husband motif, Hayes’s performance cannot be bettered. Everything she says if perfectly pitched and timed and has the audience in stitches. The Garnetts also laugh at this argument going on and you have to wonder whether this was real laughter because it’s hysterical.

Moving in with Min

In this one Alf moves in with the Reeds next door after an argument with his daughter and son-in-law. He turns up carrying only a small suitcase, a bottle of whisky and a picture of the queen.

Min is very disappointed that he hasn’t brought his colour TV with him, but the tour de force Patricia Hayes puts on in this episode is a scene where (remembering from the last episode that she hasn’t been getting any) she gets rid of Bert by sending him to the shop and comes on very strong to Alf indeed, to the extent that he has to physically push her off. Again, the effect is absolutely hysterical because he is just not interested at all, and she is doing literally all the running.

The next night she repays him for not sleeping with her by giving her husband a proper dinner, and Alf a single sardine on a slice of toast.

Then Alf comes on strong to her when Bert and he come home drunk from the pub, and Min slams the door in his face. In a variant of the previous episode, he has to go home to his own house and collapses into his own bed only to find he’s in bed with his son-in-law who thinks it’s his own wife, with predictable results.

The Wake

This episode starts with Alf, Bert and Min coming back to the house for a drink after they’ve buried Min’s mother. It starts with Alf commenting on how expensive funerals are and Min talking about how the insurance they took out for her mother didn’t actually cover her funeral. To my delight she expatiates at some length, hoping that Alf is insured and worrying that he is going to be the next one to be buried. The episode becomes more and more deranged as it goes on, culminating in Min expressing her belief in reincarnation. Not only that, she brings her goldfish, who she claims to be a reincarnated unble of hers, to watch the TV. She even gives the fish a drink by pouring it in the bowl.

All three of these episodes are excellent vehicles for the Min character played by Patricia Hayes, even though she is a minor character. Honestly, they are worth watching just for her performance, since she almost steals the show, but that is clearly the intention. Hayes was so good at the rather shrewish, nagging character (exemplified by her role as the woman who ‘does’ for Hancock) but she is quite different here, her character is pure entertainment and she clearly enjoys the hysterical role.

I love Till Death Us Do Part, and think it’s pitched exactly right by not being overly didactic. The characters are just allowed to be themselves and Alf, in particular, has gained a life of his own.

Let me conclude this lengthy post with a short video of Alf Garnett showing us how to drink tea properly (watch what he’s doing, don’t pay attention to what they’re saying). I used to do that when I lived at home because it was guaranteed to get my mother absolutely raging every time.

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Content warning: self harm, ECT

As always, these series of posts about an individual actor bring things to my attention that I wouldn’t otherwise know about. This play is one of those and according to both Wikipedia and IMDB it is the work for which Patricia Hayes is best known, although I’d never heard of it until I started reading round for these posts. It was the second Play for Today and broadcast in 1971.

The play is about the titular Edna, who is what we would now call a homeless person, and it depicts her various adventures on the road, with hostels, hospitals, and even prison. Patricia Hayes plays Edna, inpossibly the most challenging role I have seen her in.

The main difficulty for the play is to depict Edna accurately without it becoming a depiction from Edna’s own point of view. The play was written by Jeremy Sandford, who as research, lived rough himself for two periods of weeks, and used much of the things people said to him directly in the play. I think this purely observational approach, with no explanatory material except as it is presented by the characters, explains a few interesting things about this play.

For a start I’m interested in the role of Edna’s alcoholism. Right at the start of the play she describes tremors which definitely sound like withdrawal. Yet considering this is given as the only major description of Edna in the title, it makes relatively little appearance in the rest of the play. It is rarely mentioned by the professionals she comes into contact with. She rarely talks about it. I’m not suggesting that this is a problem, I’m commenting on the depiction of Edna which avoids the only major description of her given in the title. I wonder whether this is intended to represent her own avoidance or denial of the problem, however I think generally the play is depicted as seen by an onlooker so we’re not allowed much insight into Edna’s own thought processes. Strangely, I think we only see Edna drinking an alcoholic drink once, and on the surface the viewer could miss that she’s an alcoholic at all.

There is an interesting theme of identity which recurs. In a time before logins and so on, Edna gives a different name to everyone she comes into contact with, and of course there was no way of checking her identity so everyone just fills in a new paper form with a different identity. Towards the end of the play we are startlingly given an insight into the disturbing conditions of Edna’s childhood which have left her as she is, which is again not overly explained or overtly applied to her present life, and we are left to apply these facts to her current identity and attachment. She has an interesting ‘thing’ that if ever she hears a telephone ring she immediately assumes it’s for her and demands to be given the receiver. Again we are given no explanation for this, but when a hospital porter, who is the only person who addresses this behaviour with her, points out that it’s for someone with a different name, Edna starts off saying her name but doesn’t finish. Identity is at the heart of Edna’s situation. Her tendency to go off on one whenever anyone calls her a vagrant (under the recently-repealed Vagrancy Act 1824), and loudly expostulating that she is not the vagrant, unfortunately isn’t explained. I expect it was a behaviour that Sandford saw on his research.

This identity theme extends at one point, to Edna pretending to be a man to get into a hostel, which surely nobody would have a problem with, so there are some gender issues here. There is another scene in a hostel where she is being offered some shoes and the man steers her away from the men’s clothes and expresses regret that women’s shoes aren’t as durable as men. I was cheering Edna on to tell him that she wanted some men’s shoes for her tramping and didn’t want women’s fripperies, but sadly she didn’t. Most startlingly, there is a scene where another homeless person describes being either hermaphrodite (suggested by having some surgery) or what we would now call transgender, although I’m not sure how much that word would have been available to audiences in the early 1970s. I am absolutely certain that for most viewers it would have been the first time most viewers had come across someone whose gender issues are described flatly without drama. The character is abundantly clear that she is not a ‘les’, and I’m sure that this, and every other scene, was a great shock to much of the viewers at the time.

The approach of depiction without much analysis means that I’m not sure what the viewer is intended to make of Edna and her situation. Probably you could have a good row at home over the TV set over it. No doubt there are monsters who would take the view that she was somehow morally at fault (remember that at this time in England and Wales you could still be sectioned under the Mental Health Act 1959 for alcoholism) and should have been punished or kept in a psychiatric hospital until ‘recovered’. There is an ongoing theme that the help she comes across really doesn’t help her in any meaningful way, except for one hostel owned by nuns and staffed by laypeople, which sets out to be the home its residents have never had, but unfortunately gets closed because it didn’t have planning permission. I am sure there are also people who would criticise Edna for ‘playing the system’.

Regular readers will not be surprised to know that I have an opinion about this which centres around the time she spends in a psychiatric hospital. They give her unnamed tablets, and she is seen having a single electro-convulsive therapy treatment, for no reason that I can see, makes a point of acting madder each time she sees a doctor so that she can stay in, and is ultimately discharged, being told by the doctor that she has no psychological needs. This is the summit of services letting her down, because given that they were giving her both tablets and ECT, they presumably felt she did have a treatable mental disorder. This is a difficulty with the way events are depicted in the play, that we can have no idea what the hospital staff were thinking, why they gave her treatment, or how she came across in any meaningful way. We just see the external events Edna experiences. This is not a criticism, it’s a feature of the approach taken, but it’s absolutely maddening! Unless the hospital gave her an alcohol detox and then didn’t bother to explore her inner life any further, I think they certainly could have concluded that she had a treatable mental disorder. For example another patient (played by our very own June Brown) dies after taking tablets Edna hasn’t been taking herself, and Edna really doesn’t seem bothered at all. At another point in the play she is depicted self harming, and of course there’s the alcoholism. There is a host of unaddressed mental health needs she’s got going on and I think of all the let downs she has in the play, the one by the psychiatric hospital is worst after the one by her mother.

You will read online that the ending of the play, where she tells her current traveling companion that she prefers to be alone and walks off on her own, suggests that she likes her way of life. I think that is only one of the things it could suggest and once again would suggest that the play is depicting behaviours and allowing the viewer to draw their own conclusion about them.

It is clearly a very challenging role and Hayes plays it incredibly convincingly. Both she and the play won awards.

I do have a few criticisms. The first is the obvious one that given that this play would have brought the reality of homelessness home (as it were) to many viewers for ths first time, itcan only have been expected to have a had a certain didactic function. Very much out of the same stable as the similar play Cathy, Come Home, also by Sandford. It is therefore, in my opinion, not really a play, despite the accuracy and sympathy of its depiction, there is a strong element of it being a fictionalised documentary. I do appreciate that making this as a documentary would have its own ethical issues, but I honestly think this is more documentary than play, assuming that a television play must at least have an element of entertainment.

My other criticism is a product of the play’s approach of depicting what is happening. Once again, as a former mental heath nurse of 25 years the sequence in the psychiatric hospital interests me most. The challenge for both the script and Patricia Hayes is to depict her acting mentally disordered in an attempt to get kept inside the hospital, while also actually being mentally disordered by virtue of her childhood experiences. At the same time she has to get kicked out because of pretending to be mentally disordered while having the staff miss that she is really quite mentally disordered.

Obviously we don’t know what the tablets they gave her were, but I can tell you for a fact that if you are an alcoholic in the alcohol-free surroundings of a psychiatric hospital, the staff will find this out very quickly. If you pretend to be mentally disordered they will also suss you very quickly. I think the problem here is that Sandford’s research didn’t include asking mental health professionals how to make it look convincing, and I do wonder whether the ECT scene was put in to indicate mistreatment by the hospital.

The whole sequence in the hospital raises questions and it would have been more convincing if she had been admitted for assessment, acted mad, been mistreated and beaten by the staff, and then absconded to break into the nearest shop for the whisky she was craving.

However I would not want these criticisms to make anyone think they shouldn’t watch this play which is an excellent depiction of observed life among homeless people in the early 1970s, and a stellar performance by Patricia Hayes.

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Content warning: suicide.

I’ve been saving up odd episodes of shows with a view to doing a Patricia Hayes season for ages, because I was originally only aware of her as the lady who ‘did’ for Tony Hancock, until I looked her up and found that she did all sorts of other things as well.

Patricia Hayes (1909 to 1998) became an actress as a result of having a stage-struck mother. She went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she won a gold medal.

Of course this mere biographical fact should immediately give an indication that she was a far more varied actress than merely the rather waspish housekeeper roles she tends to play in surviving TV shows. Unfortunately her TV work exactly coincides with the policy of wiping TV shows but she did also work in films which I’m not going to touch on in this series of posts because I’ve found enough varied TV work, and also in theatre, which hasn’t survived obviously.

As with all these actors who I choose for a ‘season’ I haven’t really been able to find out much more than this about her, not even an obituary. It’s very strange that actors can leave relatively little trace of themselves beyond their roles, unless they’re absolutely massive celebs or have their wives revealing stuff about them like Tony Wright did!

Anyway, one of the shows I haven’t managed to find is that apparently Hayes had a regular slot with Benny Hill on TV, and unfortunately the online state of his shows have meant that I haven’t been able to track down any Benny Hill with Patricia Hayes. I may have been able to do if I’d been prepared to shell out for a box set but unfortunately I’m not. Nonetheless we can start with another comedy role of hers, supporting cast with Marty Feldman, who is someone else I love dearly but whose output is one which doesn’t really lend itself to my style of blogging, so I’m delighted to have this occasion to feature them together.

The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine: (Series 1) Episode 3

Marty Feldman (1934 to 1982) probably requires no introduction to readers on bith sides of the Atlantic. Here in Britain he is probably best known for his work in comedy: he had several series of his own (which are not commercially available and if they survive their availability is all over the place on the internet), and also worked with pretty much every other big comedy name of the sixties and seventies. For example the titles to The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine were done by Terry Gilliam. He was a writer on Round the Horne (go and listen to that if you haven’t). He was main cast on At Last the 1948 Show, so is very much in the same circle as The Flying Circus and The Goodies. He also had the same trajectory of doing films as well as comedy. Possibly in the US he’s better known for appearing as a guest on a long list of TV shows which appear on his Wikipedia page and almost none of which I’ve ever heard of, but my transatlantic readers can best judge his work there.

His TV shows here all had the same format: of a number of sketches usually with star guests, interspersed with musical numbers by guests. You will see on his Wikipedia that this format is described as variety, once again illustrating that television took its inspiration from the theatre rather than from the cinema. The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine was a single series of 50-minute shows broadcast from 1971 to 1972 and with a full house of guest stars, including regular Spike Milligan, Hugh Paddick, Bob Todd (who would get a season of his own except that he was essentially in every comedy programme for several decades so the posts would be incredibly monotonous), Valentine Dyall, and John Junkin. The fifty-ish minutes running time is to account for commercial breaks to take it up to an hour, although according to Wikipedia in the USA it only ran for thirty minutes, but I can’t explain what happened there. This post is requiring quite a bit of television archaeology, not least because I found that of various episodes of the show I have saved from various places over the years the one which proved to be the one in which Patricia Hayes guested was not listed as number 3. Anyway, according to IMDB she is in Episode 3, broadcast on Friday, October 15th, 1971. If there is any doubt, the episode you want is the one which straight after the titles goes into Marty Feldman in evening dress on television, conducting Spike Milligan playing a flute at home.

Of the sketches I particularly like one of Feldman in the bath, and we can see that the character has a ship tattooed on his stomach. A periscope comes up and shoots him. There’s also one where he plays a man with no friends who goes to the telephone people to complain that he never gets any calls and the conversation becomes more and more deranged. Feldman’s humour is very much based on thinking of the impossible or saying things that we have all been told we mustn’t so that we can see what happens. I like this very much. Some of his sketches clearly are inspired by very similar sketches in At Last the 1948 Show. The recurring theme of this episode is that many of the sketches are parodies of film or TV genres. I particularly like one sketch which is very Noel Coward indeed. Patricia Hayes appears in two of the sketches.

One takes place in a lift (and if you can’t immediately identify an antecedent for this scene you have no business reading a cult British TV blog). Feldman himself plays the lift operator and the narrative is about the lives of him and the other people who get on the lift, all of whom want to go on to roof to jump off. The lift operator doesn’t, but it is his last day on the job. The lift keeps stopping unexpectedly, leading to panic among the patrons. Patricia Hayes plays one of the people who want the roof so that they can jump off. She wants to kill herself because she is totally alone. Bob Todd plays a vicar wearing an old-fashioned one-piece bathing suit. Finally the lift does actually get stuck and they are trapped in the lift. This persepctive changes their wish to kill themselves and Bob Todd marries to two other pairs of people in the lift. As the lift starts moving again, the hasty marriages both fail and they all get out on the roof to kill themselves, except for the lift operator, and another young woman gets in who wants to throw herself in the furnace in the cellar, and so it starts again.

Now you may say that suicide is not a suitable subject for comedy, but this is exactly the sort of thing I meant by Marty Feldman’s humour taking things rather further than good taste would indicate. It doesn’t come across as insensitive at all, the suicide references come across as a parody of other dramas (and this sketch is immeidately followed by one with Feldman telling The Invisible Man that he has a face under his bandages).

Then in Patricia Hayes’s next sketch she is an elderly lady with a blue rinse at home, who has two policemen, played by Feldman and Bob Todd, break in on her solitude. The dialogue in this one can only be described as surreal: it’s definitely a police interrogation, but one where everything is upside down. I particularly like the bit where Bob Todd reads a statement written inside his toupee. The police finally arrest Patricia Hayes’s character for a lewd actor, and she is revealed to be an Interpol officer and arrests Marty Feldman’s character for impersonating a police officer. Eventually Inspector Scrumptious marries Patricia Hayes and they start stealing stuff off the sideboard.

I like Hayes in both of these roles. I think that something which comes across in the shows I’ve seen her in is that her sheer enjoyment of acting comes across to the audience, and she certainly throws herself into these two roles with gusto.

I don’t really have any criticisms of this show. You could probably say that the humour can be a little near the bone at times or may not appeal to everyone, but that is of course the lot of humorous TV programmes.

Something I find peculiar is the way the cast are credited. Everyone who appears is credited in the end credits as you’d expect. But at the beginning there is a definite hierarchy as some of the cast’s names are read out and others aren’t. Neithe Patricia Hayes nor Bob Todd gets their name read out at the beginning, but I find this strange because it suggests they are somehow lesser guest stars. Yet Spike Milligan gets his name read out, while he was a regular on the show. I just find this really strange and can’t understand how he chose whose name to include in the List of Big Stars and whose to omit. Perhaps he just chose the really big stars and the ones he thought could be difficult if they weren’t included?

I like this series, and Patricia Hayes’s minor role in it, very much, and would strongly advise readers to do the difficult work is seeking out Marty Feldman’s UK TV series on the internet, because it is worth it once you’ve done the TV archaeology.

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Five years ago I wrote a post on this blog’s predecessor about Avengers novelisations available to borrow on the Internet Archive, which you can read here:

https://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-avengers-novelisations-at-internet.html?m=1

This post is simply to update it with a few other things I’ve found available on the Internet Archive. Unfortunately the book which illustrates the post is not available online, so if anyone knows of a place where a pirated copy can be downloaded or read for free I would love to know. Currently there are no copies available on UK Ebay (it was definitely sold here because I’ve seen phenomenally expensive copies on sale in second hand shops) and the cheapest copy available internationally is about $50 which I just don’t have.

First up we have The Gold Bomb, which is here:

https://archive.org/details/avengers7thegold0000davi

Next we have the intriguingly titled Moon Express, which is here:

https://archive.org/details/avengers9moonexp0000unse

I haven’t noticed any New Avengers novels on there before but they do have House of Cards (along with various other goodies:

https://archive.org/details/new-avengers-tv-times-souvenir-extra-1976/New%20Avengers%2001%20House%20of%20cards%20%201978%20-/page/n3/mode/1up

And finally the novelisation of the 1998 film:

https://archive.org/details/avengers0000kaew

(Funny to think that as recently as 1998 the older means of taking a film or TV programme home as a novel persisted alongside DVD and video).

There is an encyclopedic guide to Avengers novelisations here:

http://deadduck.theavengers.tv/bookshel.html

A couple of posts ago, I posted about Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense, and by coincidence Journey to the Unknown is also a co-operation between Hammer here and Fox in the USA and was another of those shows which had an American in the cast to help the marketing, despite being set in Britain. I last wrote about this 1969 show four years ago and I see then that I commented that it was a slippery sort of show, being about the unknown in its broadest sense, and also was badly served by TV, being shown at odd times, not repeated, and so son. I have had no reason to change this verdict in the intervening four years.

As far as I can tell, online opinion is unanimous that The Indian Spirit Guide is the best episode of the series, with a story written by Robert Bloch and a clearly supernatural/deception theme. Leona Gillings wants to contact her deceased husband via a medium, and enlists the help of her secretary’s private detective boyfriend with the extraordinary name of Jerry Crown, to guide her through this exercise and avoid the number of frauds there are around. So the episode starts off with Crown straightforwardly revealing fake mediums and the tricks they are using. The first one he reveals is actually a man in drag and the revelation is very funny indeed.

As the episode progresses Crown realises he is on to a good thing and starts actually setting up false mediums for him to reveal so that Mrs Gillings will keep paying him his fees until she finds one who will actually contact her dead husband. Of course he assumes that he will never find a medium he can disprove in one way or another, and that this will just continue, until something happens to end his happy financial situation.

My favourite thing about this episode is that absolute stream of dodgy conmen and people clearly on their uppers forced to make a living by pretending to be psychic. I used to live hear a row of shops with flats above and knew someone who lived in the flat above an antiques shop which wasn’t. I don’t know why they felt they had to run a pretend antiques shop as a cover for the seances in the back room, but if you went in they would always find some reason not to sell any of their stock. My friend said that she was always being disturbed by people ringing the bell wanting to know where ‘the sitting’ was. It is in this slightly strange world of pretence and theatre that this episode is set. It isn’t part of the plot but if we stop to think about the number of frauds running various dodgy scams in this episode (one of the fake mediums is even a knife-throwing act), it is clear that not one of them could ever hold a job down of any sort. Crown himself describes being up to his ears in unpaid rent on his flat. Literally everybody in this episode is desperate in one way or another and it has made me look on Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) in a completely different way!

There is a criticism of this show on the internet which I don’t accept, which is that the ending of the episode is pretty much inevitable so it is completely predictable. In my opinion there are a few possible outcomes to the scenario that I’ve outlined above: for example, Crown could be revealed to be a conman, since it’s a show about the unknown the husband could actually appear to his wife and warn her, Crown could get a revelation that he himself has psychic ability and is hounded by the ex-husband forever, and so on.

I do have some criticisms, which are relatively minor ones. The single American actress in this is Julie Harris, who plays Mrs Gillings. I have a criticism about her accent, because she doesn’t do a bad go at a cut glass RP British accent, but the problem is that she slips in and out of the accent, sometimes sounded RP British and sometimes American. Stick to one or the other. The other criticism I have about her is more serious, and I’m probably going to upset so many people since her IMDB says that she was one of the finest classical and contemporary leading ladies ever to grace the 20th century American stage and won the Ton award five times (not being funny but she can’t have been that good if she couldn’t stick to one accent, I’m afraid). My criticism is that she is clearly hired to be the star but is completely outclassed by Catherine Lacey, who plays one of the mediums, and who has that genuine star quality which can hold an audience effortlessly. Of the two it is Lacey who dominates the scene, is clearly the leading lady and is clearly the better actress. Lacey is perhaps best known for playing the nun in Hitchock’s The Lady Vanishes, but of course here she is much older, rather wraith-like and has clearly grown into a mature, confident woman who just makes everyone else vanish. Not that she’s intending to dominate, it’s just that in my opinion nobody else can match up to her act. I suspect the problem is that the character Harris playing is intended to be utterly ineffectual, dependant on a conman for help, and so she fades into the background.

In comparison Tom Adams (think of the man who runs the home invasion in The Avengers’s Take-Over) plays his conman role in a quite understated way, which I think is absolutely right because it gives him the dependable, thinking impression that Mrs Gillings needs to get to trust in him. He also has to have a knowledge of the various tricks used by fake mediums, so a solid impression is the right one to give, I think.

I have a further quibble which I wouldn’t necessarily call a criticism, which is that at one of the seances Crown , in the name of controlling what is happening suddenly produces a case full of handcuffs, which I can’t believe you wouldn’t pre-arrange! However it is possible that this slightly bizarre scene is intended to crank up the weird, to get us ready for the truly bizarre thing which happens at the end, and aren’t I good, I’ve managed to write the whole blog post without giving the end away!

All in all an excellent journey to the unknown, just one where the medium manages to outclass the leading lady.

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This post is going to be one of my occasional attempts at rehabilitation on a programme which is, in my opinion, neglected or far less popular than it should be. This time, this delightful TV film which has pretty lukewarm reviews at best, isn’t best portrayed by IMDB and was aimed wrongly by its own creator and star, National Treasure Eric Sykes.

To start with the IMDB summary, I’m afraid it gives the wrong impression, because it says:

‘A scoutmaster and eight scouts go camping in Tangle Woods. When he and a cub get lost, their mishaps draw attention from military, intelligence, and criminals, causing chaos.’ This is to misunderstand what is happening completely and a better plot summary would be:

‘When eight scouts with their scoutmaster (who isn’t their regular scoutmaster because he has fallen ill) go camping in Tangle Woods, they find the woods mysteriously full of strange characters. In this eccentric world, nobody is who they seem to be and several agencies have an interest in what is happening in the woods. What will happen to the scouts and can they manage to light a camp fire?’

There is also a problem in that the show, being written and directed by Eric Sykes, who also starts as the scoutmaster, is reasonably expected by most viewers to be a comedy. This is reinforced when the scouts draw up by train and the scoutmaster opens the door of the freight compartment they are in to reveal the first four letters of the station name, which happens to be Twittering. Unfortunately I think Sykes has aimed it wrong and I think the atrocious reviews online are right that as a comedy it absolutely fails.

However I should note that IMDB puts it in dual categories of humour and parody, and I think as a parody film it functions much better. In addition to the mystery genre I think a recent possible influence could be the updated Famous Five series of 1978, because If You Go Down in the Woods Today is set very much in the world of the Famous Five: the English countryside, which is heaving with suspicious men doing criminal things. At further remove I think it is very much in the parody vein of the later series of The Avengers, and I think viewers could do a lot worse to get in the right midset to watch this than watch a Series 6 episode of The Avengers, All Done by Mirrors or Wish You Were Here, for example. I obviously can’t say whether this film was a conscious influence on The Comic Strip but I would suggest their Five Go Mad in Dorset (1982) is in a similar parody vein to this film and also picks up on the Famous Five connection, of course.

The opening scene at the station reinforces the Famous Five/folk horror ethos of the film when the scoutmaster tells they stationmaster they are going camping in Tangle Woods, and the stationmaster in a reallly creepy way warns him against the dangers of the woods, telling him that something strange is going on there and the heaps of coffins in the station have all been taken out of the woods.

After the scoutmaster and cubs leave the station, the stationmaster reveals to us that he is not what he seems by ringing two Roman Catholic priests in a car to tell them to head off the cubs. They drive off and tell the cub pack that they could camp in other places than in Tangle Woods. Of course scoutmaster and cubs ignore this advice and carry on to Tangle Woods.

On the way they pass a picnicking couple, who use a radio in their car to tell the police that they are on their way. The suspicious characters really are mounting up.

At every step the scoutmaster and cubs encounter strange characters who are not what they appear to be. I can only say that in my opinion, if you watch this film as a humorous parody of the Famous Five-type adventure genre, it’s an absolute delight.

However it is subsequently revealed to us (but not to the scoutmaster or cubs) that the reaason the woods are absolutely crawling with Hilda Handcuffs is three celebrities of the criminal underworld are there after two million pounds which has been hidden somewhere there. As the film goes on, MI5, the army, and even the navy get involved in the operation in the woods. I think another possible genre that this film can be compared to is spoofs of spying or army films. Examples which spring to mind are, of course, Carry on Spying (1964), Morecambe and Wise’s The Intelligence Men (1965) and their 1985 film Night Train to Murder is very much in the vein I’m thinking of.

I would therefore suggest watching this film without any thought that it is a comedy and trying to appreciate it for its atmosphere and spoofing.

It certainly has a full house of Big Names: Tony Selby, George Sewell, Anna Dawson, Nosher Powell, Joe Lynch, Roy Kinnear, and Fulton McKay, whose agents obviously thought that it wouldn’t be a complete flop so I’m really not sure what has gone wrong.

I’m not going to reveal what happens at the end and let you find out for yourself if you want to take the plunge.

I accept the repeated criticism in various reviews that if you’re exapecting a comedy you won’t get it with this one, but haven’t mentioned the other criticism that I also agree with, which is that it’s too long for the plot and so rather loses it towards the end. Probably this should have been an hour at the absolute longest and not a full length TV film.

A delightful film which I recommend for its atmosphere, if you go into it expecting the right thing. Probably best to watch a series 6 Avengers immediately before to get into the mood, though.

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Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense has only appeared on this blog once before, as part of a series of posts on ‘White Jaguar’ television, because Black Carrion uses the famous jaguar-going-over-a-cliff footage that appeared so often in 1960s and 1970s independent TV. However the reason it hasn’t appeared more often is that, at least in Britain, the series is quite inaccessible.

I find this strange. The series’ predecessor, Hammer House of Horror, is all over the internet and widely available on DVD, and is accordingly popular. Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense was an attempted follow-up in the dying days of Hammer Studios, and was a joint effort between Hammer and 20th Century Fox Television in the US (where it is known as Fox Mystery Theater), and is one of those shows in which it was perceived an American actor or two would help it along across the Atlantic. Yet Hammer House of Horror has had several releases on both region 1 and 2 DVDs, is pirated all over the internet and Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense was last released on UK DVD in 2005 and every time an episode gets put on the internet it tends to get taken down. Or rather, some episodes do. Some of the episodes remain online, and others are as rare as rocking horse shit. It’s very strange.

I’m afraid if you’re in the US you’re on your own with this one but the good news is that there is an alternative to the prohibitively-expensive-on-the-used-market UK-issued DVDS. This is in the shape of a Germany-released box set which has the English-language soundtrack as an alternative to the German-dubbed track. The even better news is that there is an Edinburgh-based seller on UK ebay selling it for less than £20 so there is no need to worry about getting it into the country. If you’re looking for the set on the continent the German title is Vorsicht, Hochspannung!

The Sweet Scent of Death is written by our old friend Brian Clemens, and its similarity to episodes of the earlier anthology series called Thriller. It is about an American ambassador to Britain and his wife, who take a country house to find strange things happening, which are apparently somebody taking revenge related to a case the wife won in court in her previous life as a barrister.

I would be very interested to hear from anyone who has watched this episode where actress Shirley Knight (who plays the wife)’s accent comes from. Is it a Boston Brahmin accent? It is certainly less rhotic than a lot of American accents but I have been unable to place it.

One of the interesting things about this episode to me is that I think the general perception of it would have changed since its original broadcast in 1984. What I mean by this is that I think in 1984 when the diplomat’s wife is absolutely distraught howling that there is a strange man looking at her in the garden, viewers would probably have watched her husband telling her that she was imagining it and seen this as him being sensible and calming her down by not paying attention to the strange ideas she has and encouraging them. I think forty years later this looks quite different and probably viewers now would be more likely to see this as him being unsupportive or even suspicious on his part.

I have a few criticisms. For example we see an ambassador assault a presumably British citizen in full view of a police officer with no comeback of any sort. I think in reality, he would probably just be back in the US in no time making use of that diplomatic immunity. Another major problem with the plot is that we are expected to believe that the US ambassador and his wife have just gone to live in a house in the country with no security and not even any staff. I do not believe that being an ambasssador to another country is the sort of job where you do it at the office and just retain your own life at home with nobody around. Also the other thing is that nobody in their right mind would take on that sort of house with only a cleaning lady who we never actually see, certainly not when you’re used to being in the diplomatic/political set.

An interesting mystery, marred only by a few credibility gaps.

Have a quick snatch of Count Binface reciting Homer in Greek.

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In fact the similarities are largely incidental because the plots of the two broadcasts are quite different. Never, Never Say Die is more science fiction and Night of the Big Heat is more horror.

Never, Never Say Die is about people being copied with robots who are indestructible but have problems with radio and television waves.

Night of the Big Heat features a couple running an inn on an island: he is a novelist and manages to hire a woman with whom he has already had an affair as his secretary. For some reason the island is experiencing a massive heat wave, and a scientist checks in to the inn to do experiments on the island. There are unexplained things happening to people and animals, and lots of unexplained interference with electrical appliances. The reason for the strange happenings is that the island has been invaded by aliens, who are banished by an unexpected thunderstorm.

I am going to lay out the things which strike me as similarities about the two.

In both shows we see banks of electronic equipment in shots which at least look like each other.

Both shows feature disturbance on communication equipment: televisions and/or radio.

In Never, Never Say Die, Christopher Lee’s character repeatedly gets run over, always just standing in the road before this happens. In Night of the Big Heat a character nearly gets run over because he’s just standing in the road.

Both shows feature similar-looking fantasy cottagey interiors: Night of the Big Heat is very definitely set in the fantasy world of The Avengers.

Peter Cushing’s character in Night of the Big Heat is called Dr Stone and there is also a Professor Stone in Never, Never Say Die, played by Christopher Lee.

Night of the Big Heat has a full house of 1960s regulars who had appeared at various times in The Avengers, which is another way it looks very much like the ITC TV of the 1960s: Christopher Lee, Patrick Allen, Peter Cushing, Sarah Lawson, Thomas Heathcote and William Lucas. Kenneth Cope needs no introduction to the readers of this blog, of course.

I badly want there to be a connection between this Avengers episode and this film, but haven’t been able to find one. At the very leaast there are similarities and if you like The Avengers I think you would definitely like Night of the Big Heat as being set in the same fantasy world. In fact there was an earlier television adaptation of the novel of Night of the Big Heat in 1960, so it’s possible that was an influence on The Avengers first, and then the Avengersy elements in the 1960s zeitgeist also affected the production of the film so they ended up looking like each other. Unfortunately the 1960 TV adaptation is missing believed wiped.

Something I find hilarious about the film is that they’ve slathered the entire male cast in glycerin to make them look sweaty in the heat (and I mean absolutely covered) but they’ve only done this on the cleavage of the secretary and not on the other female actress. Obviously she’s a lady and just glows. Speaking of the secretary, who is best candidate to be what my late mother would have called a sexy piece, I do have one criticism, which is that Night of the Big Heat is actually quite sexy because everyone is glistening, but I honestly think it could have been so much more sexy in horror film tradition. The secretary is basically the only sex object but there are way too many clothes being worn for the situation to my mind, and they’ve missed an opportunity.

Nonetheless an Avengers episode and film which bear a passing resemblance to each other, and if you like the Avengers I would definitely say you will like the film.

Meanwhile in Clacton the record-length postal ballots have started arriving and as you can see this one went to a patriot who voted Binface.

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Forty Minutes (1981 to 1994) was a BBC documentary series which ran to 324 episodes. You already know how long each one lasted, and that is the only thing they all have in common: there are all sorts of riches in the back catalogue and being so recent, many of them are available online. Separate Tables is also online as Last Days on Grand Parade, although the actual title on-screen is Separate Tables, referring to the behaviour of permanent residents in Eastbourne’s hotels.

I have written here before about the thing I have about hotels. In my opinion they are just as magical and evocative as theatres: there is a public front where people go to experience a smooth illusion for a time and then leave, and there is a behind the scenes, where we don’t see what happens in service to the grand illusion in front of house. The service stairs or lifts of a hotel are just as theatrical as all the kit around a stage and the props. Far more than theatres, hotels support our dreams in that we might go there on holiday, or a conference to help with employment, or while staying in an area for a significant life event. I think this is why so many mysteries take place in hotels, because they are pregnant with meaning for us.

I said that the phrase ‘separate tables’ refers to the behaviour of the permanent residents in Eastbourne’s seafront hotels. The documentary focuses on The Burlington, but also mentions other hotels with permanent residents. We see them sitting at breakfast, literally at separate tables in the dining room not talking to each other. This is very strange because otherwise we do see the residents chatting with each other over the crossword or in the evening. And yet when asked they tend to say they don’t have very much in common with each other. It’s genuinely a really strange relationship they have with each other and the staff of the hotel.

Otherwise the residents live the sort of life you would expect elderly people who live in a hotel and don’t have a home to look after, to live. They amuse themselves with walks and their own interests.

The documentary gives us the reason some of them have chosen to live in a hotel rather than anywhere else. I have no idea whether people still live as permanent residents in hotels (presumably you can get anything if you’re able to pay for it); certainly in this documentary they are presented as very much a dying species who used to help tide hotels through the winter but weren’t really very much of a financial asset to a hotel by the 1980s. The documentary leaves their future rather uncertain because the hotel is having a building project to make the place more suitable for the burgeoning conference trade and it is heavily hinted that the residents probably won’t want to live in the reconstructed version.

It is noticeable that the concerns of the elderly residents are of course quite similar as befitting people at the same stage of life. They have mostly experienced bereavement, for example. They think about their future and the possibilities of becoming unwell or having to go into care. The documentary pulls no punches about depicting a group of people who have the best years of their lives behind them, and I wonder whether there is something about the sort of people who go to live in hotels that puts them in this mindset. There isn’t a single one of those elderly people who just ignore their age and carry on without worrying about it, for example. They are all, or nearly all, widows or widowers but there isn’t a hint of any one of them thinking about marrying another of the residents or even having a romantic life. This aspect of their mindset, however, remains unremarked. Certainly when I was a nurse working in elderly care I can assure you they were at it like rabbits and ignored any rules they were presented with, really quite different from this lot, but as I say the strange absence of sex isn’t remarked.

My only criticism of this documentary is generally that it is very selective about what it asks - it is really a documentary about the residents of a hotel, rather than about the residents as people - and leaves this viewer absolutely dying to know more about the people. Of course you may consider this a strength and the sign of a good documentary rather than a weakness as I do! For example one of the residents interviewed at length is Mrs Sybil Bloom (pictured) who was just born to be a gift to the camera. She’s a character and hugely personable, which may explain why she is so prominent. However, it mentioned that she is 86 at the time of the programme and has been living in hotels for over forty years. There isn’t a hint of why a married couple (as she was at the time) would be living in hotels rather than their own home in their mid-forties. Unless I’m mistaken she’s got a very slight South African accent and I really really want to know what happened.

On the whole, though, I think this documentary accurately reproduces the atmosphere of a hotel. You hear bits of other people’s stories, and they are essentially fairly unreal places where people pass each other.

Incidentally I see from the internet that the Burlington Hotel is still going (it’s massive so it’s a bit difficult to see what else it could be used for) although I’m going to be just as much of a crashing snob as Mrs Bloom and pass comment that judging by the pictures of the rooms on the website things have gone a bit downhill in quality terms since 1988. Of course this is exactly what you would expect in a huge seaside hotel, and there is no mention of long-term residents of course.

An absolutely fascinating documentary, whether you see its failure to give me all the information I wanted, as a strength or weakness.

Speaking of the seaside, support for Count Binface in Clacton is growing throughout the country. It would be hysterical if the Binface Party ended up being a serious political party as a result of this moment.

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I have commented before that a Monty Python episode, or even just a sketch, will tend to enter my head for a time and rather preoccupy me before leaving and being replaced with another. Mrs Premise and Mrs Conclusion Go to See Jean-Paul Sartre has finally left my head and the Science Fiction Sketch has entered it instead. I have also commented that the reason Monty Python doesn’t appear very much here is because I find I can’t write about it. The Monty Python humour rather evaporates when analysed in my opinion: the best you can do is describe it as if you are sharing it at school or work the day after the broadcast. That is rather what I did with the Monty Python advertisement for Birdseye Peas. I felt it worked well with that little-known piece, but my ambition with this blog has always been to avoid description if possible.

In fact I was thinking I would be at a disadvantage with this one because science fiction films really aren’t my strong point, and I knew there would be endless references to famous films which I wouldn’t recognise and would end up making a fool of myself. I have therefore been heavily dependent on Darl Larsen’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus: An Utterly Complete, Thoroughly Unillustrated, Absolutely Unauthorised Guide to Possibly All the References, which is certainly exhaustive. Of course Mr Larsen is a foreigner so sometimes misses some meanings, although the only absolute howler I’ve spotted while reading about this episode was where he calls Scots language Scots accent, which it certainly isn’t.

One of the things he has made me realise about this episode is that there are far more sexual references than I had realised. This does make me feel a bit silly, because the ‘you’re no fun any more’ is an explicitly sexual reference, even as portrayed in the episode. Larsen takes it further to point out that the reference to Scotland being so full that there are three men to a caber is also a positively filthy innuendo which I’m ashamed to say I’d missed completely. The reference to whipping is of course directly kinky. Larsen suggests that the preceding snatch of the vampire not biting the woman also has a directly sexual reference in terms of a vampire being, as it were, engorged with blood but I could leave that one myself.

I am once again struck by the different pace of television at this time. Specifically what makes me think of this is the little detail that the camel spotter is called Mr Sopwith. While not an obsessive fan I consider myself fairly familiar with the Flying Circus but had never spotted this momentary reference. How would anyone, seeing it just once in their family living room, have a chance to spot all these details? It’s quite something that so many TV programmes at the time put in tiny details many of which were probably missed by viewers over 50 years ago.

However of course the main attraction for me is the blancmange which invades the planet to turn Englishmen into Scotsmen.

I knew of course that there would be references galore to science fiction films here. I was thinking of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), because it is one I like and is actually on my laptop. It is also very close to the plot of the spoof science fiction film, in terms of people being changed. Of course The Blob has a distinctly blancmange-like alien, which has many similarities. Larsen also suggests references to The Invisible Man (1933), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), Forbidden Planet (1956), Angry Red Planet (1960), and Them! (1954).

The Pythons have a swipe at pretty much everyone here, all in the name of parodying the ridiculous conventions of the science fiction genre. Most obviously Scotsmen, who are depicted as primitive, stupid, foreign, and generally othered. However the woman in the research lab also embodies the dumb bimbo of science fiction. He gives a lengthy list of the tropes from science fiction the episode uses, and there is a shorter, slightly differently-named list on Tekevision Tropes is you want to look.

Larsen makes the excellent point which I really hadn;t noticed that the woman in the lab doesn’t have a name and is only referred to by pronouns. The fact that she is just calle She or You puts her on the same footing as the invaders here just referred to as Them, so that she is made the Other in common with the invading blancmange.

There is also the strange effect that incidental music can be heard inside the lab, while rhetorical statements are taken literally by Graham Chapman, and the other way round. This episode genuinely takes every convention of science fiction at once and stuffs them into a relatively short sketch.

I don’t have any criticisms of this episode, and particularly like the way it ends with Scottish music instead of the normal Monty Python music. Highly recommended, although other people will certainly get more science fiction references than me.

Finally a short video, and in case you are reading this abroad and don’t know who this man is, it’s Sir Edward Davey, leader of the ultra-sensible and serious Liberal Democrat Party, and he’s endorsing Count Binface for Clacton.

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This is a spare post I’ve been keeping for emergencies as once again we’re in Resignation Week and the entire country has a banging hangover so I’m in no position to get the post I was writing in order.

I am delighted to have found this show down the back of the internet since although the whole series is available commercially, I’m too mean to buy it. Six Dates with Barker (1971) is a set of six plays by different writers but all featuring Ronnie Barker in various roles and set at different dates. I haven’t seen the others because The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town made a particular appeal to me; it also happens that the date for the play is 1899.

It was written by Spike Milligan and is therefore naturally insane. He intended it for his fellow Goons Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe, and himself: however in the event Sellers was unavailable and so it found its way into this anthology series. Fans of the Goon Show will know that the show made several journeys from radio onto television. In mmy humble opinion this play most resembles The Case of the Mukkinese Battle-Horn (1956), which I also love dearly and which has the advantage of not featuring Harry Secombe, whose voice goes through me. The Mukkinese Battle Horn and The Phantom Raspberry Blower have exactly the same surreal, satirical, punning and ludicrous humour as The Goon Show, and it’s very much in the same tradition. In fact there are two versions of The Phantom Raspberry Blower: this, the earlier one, and a redone version which appeared on The Two Ronnies’ show a few years later. I have seen the other version some time ago and remember not liking it as much as this. Judging by the internet reviews both versions have their fans and detractors.

The premise is that a killer is stalking the streets of Victorian London and killing or hospitalising his victims by blowing a raspberry at them. It is a parody of Jack the Ripper. The parody actually starts even before the titles with the words ‘Chopper Films Presents,’ a parody of course of Hammer Films. Being set right at the turn of the twentieth century it also satirises much of Victorian society including a whole set of policeman all disguised as Queen Victoria.

There is further surrealism and punning humour as you would expect. A suspect identified in a photograph by an arrow turns out to have an actual arrow suspended from him head pointing at him. An identity parade is assembled but rather than get the other members from the public they get them from Harrods. The detective doing the investigation walks out of interrogating someone, goes to feed the ducks, and all the time we hear the interview continuing as the lady he is talking to remains in his office. A victim of the Phantom Raspberry Blower finds a moustache tattoed on her face as a result. The detective has a nervous breakdown in the middle of the show and as a result spends quite a lot of it in an asylum dressed as Napoleon. There is a recurring visual pun on the sound of the raspberries blown by the Phantom Raspberry Blower and the appearance of real raspberries in one form or another.

In production terms there are some very familiar faces as well as both Ronnies, although they’re all well disguised for the period. Ronnie Barker carries most of the roles with ease. Cleverly there are certain scenes done to look as if they are old footage, which then turn out not to be when you recognise Ronnie Barker in the scene. Honestly I’m still not sure if some genuinely old footage has been used. If you watched the rest of it with the colour turned down you could think it was old footage, so good are the production values, if a little surreal.

My only real criticism of this is that it is wildly politically incorrect. There is a completely unnecessarily anti-Semitic depiction of Disraeli and also a scene featuring black face. In what is otherwise a fun romp through crime-ridden Vistorian London these things rather deflate the moment.

Otherwise this is a very fun play written by a master of comedy which is also excellently produced. Highly recommended.

This time the resignation is of the odious Nigel Farage who thinks to save himself from various investigations by resigning his seat in the Commons and immediately standing for the same seat.

I am delighted that one by one the other major parties have announced that they will not be standing candidates in the resulting by-election because they will have nothing to do with Farages games. I love the way they’re refusing to stand against him: it’s a remarkable achievement by Farage to unite all five major parties against him. The result is at the time of writing the only candidate standing against Farage is Count Binface. We all love Count Binface and this means he has been tacitly endorsed by all the other major parties.

It also means both candidates are unserious novelty candidates.

So let’s have the Count destroying a journalist shall we?

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Vote Green for real hope and real change! greenparty.org.uk

I had probably best start by apologising for this blog post in advance, since it’s partly driven by sheer irritation at the plot summary on IMDB and so I’m feeling a bit ratty. The plot summary is ‘Three underachievers have fun at a school speech day’. Honestly, they’d have been better leaving it blank because the only way you could come up with that as a summary of this play is by either writing it without watching it or volitionally missing the entire point of the play. What this play actually is is a play about a school speech day in which the real point is society and the class system. I’m also going to have one of my discursions away from the subject of the blog post onto Jerusalem, driven by irritation at the Wikipedia page.

After an easily-missed tiny scene in which a family are eating, we are straight on to the National Anthem. I’m not making this up.

Actually the societal and class subject of the play is highlighted in the easily-missed prologue by the father (with a Yorkshire accent) quoting Cromwell telling his men that they could pray if they liked but should keep their powder dry. And thus we are straight into class struggle, civil war and crown vs parliament. I’m just sorry he didn’t use the Cromwell quote about keeping your bowels open. I would have done.

Obviously moving straight from this to the National Anthem is making a point. The reason we hear it is the mum of the family is ironing her son’s uniform ready for the school speech day the next day and the National Anthem is playing during close down on the BBC. We then see the outside of the building and the camera pans over the block of flats, which happens to be the famous Hyde Park flats (pictured) in Sheffield. It was one of two absolute behemoths of social housing in Sheffield, but has now been demolished. The other one, Park Hill, is still standing and English Heritage did the absolutely unthinkable and listed it, making it the biggest listed building in Europe, to the visible fury of the city council who had spent years running it down ready to demolish it. If you fancy it I highly recommend a documentary called Streets in the Sky, all about Park Hill. In fact if you fancy a trip to Sheffield, Park Hill is a seriously sexy building which leaves its mark on everyone who encounters it and I highly recommend a visit. Anyway, the anthem praying God to save the monarch is playing in social housing at the other end of the social scale.

Given that this is a TV blog you lucky people get the behind the scenes making of the shut down video that I have found down the back of the internet, with a definitely pre-CGI spinning globe.

Of course the significance of Sheffield as the setting is that it is the Steel City and we see scenes of work in the steelworks. Another point about class.

I have to say that I think the school is a rather odd one, probably deliberately so for the purpose of the play, in that it is clearly a normal comprehensive school, attended by all sorts of pupils, some of whom are largely uneducatable, others can’t afford the uniform, and so on. Yet it obviously has aspirations to be a much posher sort of school. This disjoint is largely the point of the play: (most of) the staff go along with this fantasy which is almost based in unreality. The kids are expected to be in uniform with white shirts for the day, despite some of them not having these things. The mayor is the one presenting the prizes, despite the fact that he himself also worked in the steelworks for years. The vice chancellor of a university is giving a speech, and let me tell you very few if any of those kids would ever have seen the inside of a university except as employee in the 1970s. Finally most of the teacher wear academic gowns and hoods for the speech day. I don’t think you needed to have a degree to be a teacher at this time, and I’m certain gowns and hoods would not have been the norm. The school is largely a fantasy. This is not a play about having fun, it’s about who benefits and how the structures of society and state aren’t quite real.

The boy who is mainly the protagonist is the one who lives in the modern flat and goes to see his grandfather who still lives in a virtually derelict terraced house, and who is coded as the voice of reality in this situation. He doesn’t believe that the future will be positive, is convinced that the social strata will never change, and so on.

One of the boys gets thrown out of the speech day for laughing and goes to talk to the school gardener, who is another voice of reason in this play. During this sequence the entire school sings the unofficial anthem of England, Jerusalem, by England’s maddest poet William Blake, and set to music and gifted to the suffragette movement by Parry. During this we see further industrial scenes appropriate to the words of the hymn about satanic mills.

So this is the bit where I leave the subject of the blog post far behind, because I made the mistake of going on to Wikipedia to check the idea I’ve got in my head that Blake’s dark satanic mills can be understood to be a reference to the Church of England.

I found that the Wikipedia page for Jerusalem is dominated by folklorist A W Smith’s opinion that the hymn is about a mythical visit to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea alone, rather than the other mythical visit of Jesus to Britain with Joseph, and I’m afraid this opinion has set me off. It is clearly arrant nonsense, and the poem clearly refers to the mythical visit of the Divine Child to this island. I can tell you this for a fact because of the way the words go: ‘And did those feet in ancient time, walk upon England’s mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen? And did the Countenance Divine shine forth upon our clouded hills?’ etc. This cannot refer to Joseph of Arimathea alone because there is no tradition of Christianity in which he is called the Lamb of God, also his face cannot be described as divine. The only person in Christianity who both had human feet to walk on England’s mountains, is also divine and referred to as the Lamb of God is Jesus himself. I’m not about to get involved in a Wikipedia war, and I’m not one of those people who look down on Wikipedia, but I think that page has gone very wrong. I also didn’t find confirmation for my idea that the mills were intended to refer to the Church of England.

Back to the subject of the blog post, I have to say that this is an excellent drama. Every character is drawm in detail and comes out loud and clear. The schoolboys are just the right degree of revolting and the contrast with the utter fantasy of the school is perfectly drawn.

In fact while I do try to be critical I’m so desperate for a criticism of this play that the only one I can think of is that the school sings Jerusalem slightly too fast in my opinion. You may take this as a marker of what quality this play is.

But wait, before you go, you all knew I was going to go there.

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A fairly lightweight thing to post about this time, given that the entire British isles have an absolutely BANGING hangover after celebrating this week. It’s also strangely suitable because someone commented that every time he saw Starmer the theme to Monty Python went through his head and I’m afraid that’s now stuck, so this is the week to do Monty Python.

If you’ve worked through the Flying Circus, the records, the live performances, Fliegender Zirkus, the films, and are still hungry for more there are a few not-so-rarities knocking around the internet in the shape of the commercial work they did. Strangely, considering I’m not a capitalist, I actually think the commercial plays they did are amongst their best work. I have known about Henry Cleans Up (1974), which Michael Palin and Terry Jones did for Guinness, but have only recently discovered the very existence of The Great Birds Eye Peas Relaunch of 1971 and Is This a Record? (1973). Henry Cleans Up is essentially a training film on how to run a pub, with the details on what you actually have to physically do and all the mysterious stuff that goes on in the cellar. Is This a Record was made (confusingly) for The Guinness Book of Records and is essentially a guide to how to get a record for doing something.

How do you even begin to describe The Great Birdseye Peas Relaunch of 1971? Well it’s an advertisement for Birds Eye Peas. Made by Monty Python, with, as far as I can see complete independence to do their thing. It lasts nearly half an hour. It was intended for internal use at Birds Eye. I can’t begin to think why a frozen food company would need to advertise their own products in Monty Python style to their own staff but I’m very glad they did!

It starts as if it is a great epic film before giving up that idea and we are straight into the Birdseye board room with the Pythons being the board, and let me tell you they are all blind drunk (but again, that’s life in the UK for you. If an American ever comments on the amount we drink, well you would drink if you lived here). All I can say is that I don’t think many businesses are happy to have their board depicted as making business decisions blind drunk, so this is an interesting insight into the attitude of Birdseye in the early 1970s. Into the midst of all the empty bottles appears the Comparatively Good Fairy, who helps the board decide the sales targets for the salesman. Along with turning a few of the board into frogs of course.

Did I mention that this piece is absolutely wild?

We see the effect of the new target on a salesman, who had been dancing with abandon until then, and is terrified after hearing of the new target.

Next we have a very sxy bit of buxon ladies in bikinis. If I say that the camera only focuses on the bits contained by the bikini, you get the idea. This is Monty Python cast free from the constraints of television and allowed to go wild at a frozen food company’s expense. I am absolutely certain that nobody who watched this actually got hold of the methods outlined for increasing their sales in 1971!

We return to the board room for a talk in characteristic style by Graham Chapman about how to grow peas. They ask a marketing man about how to do this. The marketing man comes into the board room with an interpreter because he speaks absolute gibberish, which I’m sure went down well with anyone who hated the marketing men.

We then move onto the familiar theme of Monty Python vox pops on the subject of peas, calling in all the familiar characters from theFlying Circus. Of course none of these is serious in the slightest and I can only repeat that this was a remarkably brave thing for Birdseye to do, albeit making them bang up to date.

You get the idea. This is genuinely Monty Python let loose and it’s great.

Normally I like to be somewhat critical about eh programmes I blog about here, but honestly I don’t have a criticism, I could watch this until the next Prime Minister resigns in about six months. I see online that there are a couple of reviews from people who feel that this isn’t nearly as good as The Flying Circus, although those reviews don’t tend to give a clear reason. Probably frozen peas as a theme for Monty Python doesn’t appeal to them.

This is an excellent programme for anyone wishing for just a bit more Monty Python.

Since we’re in Prime Minister Resignation Week perhaps it’s a suitable occasion to have Mrs Thatcher quoting the Dead Parrot Sketch at Tory Party Conference.

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It does this by very bravely introducing a whole new raft of characters and a whole plot twist in the final episode, none of which we’ve seen before so that you could think you’d tuned in to the wrong show. Of course doing this would break all the classic commandments of detective fiction.

The episode introduces agents from the other side of the Iron Curtain, brought here by Intelligence who then disappear. Of course Crane psychically gets hints of what has happened to them, and also of course he believes in the existence of Omega, a belief which is discouraged. Our man who met the agent from East Germany has also disappeared.

While resolving the plot this way might seem like a huge gamble, it is probably best to make clear that this episode was not intended to be the end of the series, but was meant to be the end of the first series and it would continue in a second series which was never made. Apparently the cancellation of the second was largely down to the intervention of Mrs Whitehouse.

In fact I think this episode is a high point for the apparently unrelated reason that atmospherically it is superb. This and two other episodes (the one with the students and the one investigating the haunted house) are all absolutely superb at giving the viewer the willies with simple atmospheric tricks. This one uses the classic film noir technique of having some of the action take place at night in the middle of a thunderstorm, which automatically ramps up the tension. Since the subject is defected people from Eastern Europe some of it takes place either in actual hotels or in a large country house which is as near as damnit to a hotel, and as I commented in the series of posts before, if you set something in a hotel I will automatically love it.

I don’t really have a criticism of this episode. It certainly works to resolve most of the questions which have arisen over the previous nine episodes. The ones it doesn’t are clearly left because it was not intended to be the final episode. In true X-Files fashion it leaves us still not sure who is who. I have not heard them but Big Finish did a series of audio adventures continuing the series, so I don’t know how they continue or conclude it.

Conclusions about the Series

I’ve really enjoyed blogging through this series again. It has real tension and particular high points which I have mentioned above.

I have two major criticisms. Firstly that the series does not adequately develop the existence of Omega, the organisation which is after all the entire point of the series, before suddenly splurging the details of the organisation’s activities in the final episode. I would have liked more specific detail as it went along, to establish the group as a clear hook for the whole series. The other is that the anthology series format doesn’t work that well for a series of ten episodes with a single plot arc: it makes the episodes lose contact with each other and the viewer really has to work to discern the single thread through the series.

This isn’t a criticism and probably reflects whether viewers will like this series or not, but nearly five decades later there is also the reality that what is being investigated by the department cannot be described as measurable or objective and so is not what you could call scientific. You have to be willing to suspend disbelief and return to the world of 1970s popular parapsychology to get into this series.

However this series is rightly hugely popular, indeed legendary. As a forerunner to the X-Files, it intriguingly lays the ground work for the later series in fascinating ways.

Just don’t go probing into my mind, you don’t know what you might find.

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