Ann Way Season: The Goodies - Cecily
I've been hanging on to this show in which Ann Way had a role, because the particular episode is a great favourite of mine.
Cecily is a first series episode of The Goodies. The premise that they will do anything for anyone is intact here without any of the wilder ideas they had for later shows, and yet this is also a unique episode of the show. The idea is that the Goodies take on a one-day job for a couple who have to go away unexpectedly. They have to look after the couple's niece Cecily, look after the house and garden and do the cooking. This entails Tim Brooke-Taylow spending most of the episode dragged up as the nanny.
The episode can perhaps be divided into three parts.
The first is the sequence where they accept the job, go to the house, are given their tasks and get on with them. This is very much in line with what you would expect from series 1 episodes, in that they have silly and funny ways of doing the jobs, such as Graeme killing weeds with a mallet and Bill mixing pie ingredients on a record player. The Goodies find the aunt and uncle a bit creepy but just get on with it. The garden is also a very strange place, full of tropical animals and other exotic things not found in Surrey.
But then they wake up Cecily, who has been having a nap, for her lunch, and the episode takes a much darker turn. Cecily wants to know if they're also going to feed her real nanny, who her uncle and aunt have locked up in the cellar. Unfortunately when they find the nanny she turns out to be a skeleton. Cecily tells them that the uncle and aunt have done away with twelve nannies and are actually trying to kill Cecily to get at the money she is going to inherit.
It turns out that the house is full of dead nannies set up to frighten Cecily. Once the night comes it turns into a proper haunted house and is a very scary place.
The third part takes place the next day, when the aunt and uncle return and the truth comes out: that actually Cecily is the one who has been killing the aunt and uncle. and tries to kill The Goodies. Ultimately the house explodes.
The explosion of the house has always interested me about this episode, because it's obvious a real house is being destroyed and I can't think any other episode has such an exotic and possibly expensive effect. In The Goodies - The Complete Companion producer Jim Franklin recalls that the effect of blowing up the house was already written into the script and an estate agent friend of his knew of a house which was going to be pulled down anyway, so they used that. I have been unable to find out anything more about the house, although it looks like a typical Tudorbethan house of the type found in the stockbroker belt.
Ann Way's role is as the aunt and she plays it to perfection as being possibly slightly creepy to start off with although she is very concerned that The Goodies have gone out into the summer house with Cecily in their attempt to rescue her.
I don't have a criticism of this episode.
A very good episode with an unusual script with endless twists and turns to keep it interesting.
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