Armchair Theatre: A Bit of a Lift
Content warnings: suicide and rape. This post gives away an essential plot point.
This is a 1973 episode of Armchair Theatre, and as far as I can tell is a favourite of the fans. It is therefore naturally my solemn duty to do a hatchet job on it. Of course my oft-repeated policy is that rubbish won't appear here, and this is still quality drama, despite being deeply flawed in a couple of ways. The main ways in which this is quality drama are in dialogue which literally sparkles, brilliant characterisation and a plot which does actually hang together.
The plot is relatively simple: it's about a man and a woman who meet for the first time at a mutual friend's wedding and decide to book into a hotel for a quickie. At the hotel the man (Alec) goes for a bath, forgets which room they were in, and goes into the room of a second man (Frank), who has gone to the hotel to kill himself, who promises to go to the desk and find out what room he is in, which he does. Then the second man goes to their room, sleeps with the woman (Penelope) and feels so much better about himself. It ends with Frank and Penelope exchanging addresses and he's not going to kill himself any more.
You will of course readily see that this is exactly the sort of thing which would have had Mary Whitehouse up in arms, and strangely I have not found any record of her complaining about it. I think it might not be as famous as it could be (I think it's on the first volume of the DVD releases of Armchair Theatre) because of the problems I'll come to.
It's racy, for a start. As a depiction of planning of casual sex between a man and a woman who have just met it's superb. It's almost a situation comedy, in this respect, the situation being the wedding crossing with the suicide.
It also deals with the planning of the suicide in a completely matter of fact way. We see a fascinating scene of the man recording a record of his suicide note to post to his ex-wife. He does this in a machine where you put a coin in and sit in it like a photo booth. You record your record while the light is on and it gives it to you. It's absolutely fascinating. It's a striking contrast between the preparations for his suicide and the wedding reception taking place at the same time, before Alec and Penlope book into the same hotel as Frank.
And so we come to the problems with this play.
The first is the one that when Frank finds out the number of the room in which Penelope is waiting for Alec, he goes in and finds that she's fallen asleep because Alec has been so long. He then sleeps with her and Penelope is so sleepy that she still thinks she's with Alec. This of course sours the previous happy preparations for consensual sex because she isn't consenting to sex with Frank, and in fact is being raped. There is a lot of discussion online about whether this is related to changing mores, and frankly I have limited patience for this. Making yourself happy by nonconsensual sex with a woman who is expecting someone else has always been serial killer territory, even in the seventies. The fact that she apparently comes round to this idea and gets his address (personally I'd have wanted it to give to Hilda Handcuffs) just means that she's being treated as an object in the middle of a light drama bout making a suicidal man feel better about himself. This is proper screwed.
I'm slightly sceptical about the fact of Penelope confusing the two men because they don't look like each other at all and are built quite differently, no matter how sleepy she was. Would she seriously not open her eyes - the room isn't dark? But of course this problem of credibility fades into insignificance in comparison to the slight matter of rape.
Finally, and this may just be me nit picking. There's something horribly wrong with the wedding, which is that the organist plays Wagner's Bridal March far too fast and the bride charges down the aisle like she's a dog after a rabbit. This was bugging me so much that I began to wonder whether it was me, and started looking for recordings online. I was delighted to see that I was right about this and in fact have found a video of how to do it perfectly. It appears at the end of this post largely because if you can find a husband who looks like that at you and talks to you in front of the Archbishop as if there's nobody else there, you want to keep hold of him. I do say that this blog aims to be instructive as well as entertaining!
So to summarise A Bit of a Lift is a deeply flawed play which is still worth watching, if you can deal with its subject matter, for its brilliant dialogue. I just think that probably not including suicide and making all sexual activity consensual would have made it into a perfect light comedy.
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