Armchair Thriller: Quiet As A Nun (Sylvia Coleridge Season)
Having featured Sylvia Coleridge playing a croupier in my previous post it felt right to jump straight to her playing a very different role!
The legendary series Armchair Thriller surely needs no introduction to readers of this blog. Quiet as a Nun was a six-part adventure broadcast in the first series in 1978. It is based on a novel by Lady Antonia Fraser and is about a TV investigative journalist called Jemima Shore, who goes back to the convent where she was educated to investigate the apparent death by self-starvation by one of the nuns, with whom she was at school.
If that sounds utterly bizarre, remember that's the starting point of this mystery and so we lurch into this show's very brave attempt to depict a notionally closed hothouse all-female community where the bodies start piling up. Despite the 'thriller' part of the show's title it's much more a tale of derring-do out of the stable of old-fashioned girls' school stories.
An essential part of the plot is that the convent is an insane community, where the nuns are at best sinister, and range on to deranged and outright lunatic. Creeping through corridors at night is a stock scene, and they can't even get through Benediction without someone collapsing. Not to fear, though, this depiction of steretypical convent hysteria is a red herring, intended to catch us up in the anti-convent rhetoric which comes out in the early part of the adventure.
There is also the essential plot feature that the convent is haunted by the 'black nun' who is a figure only seen before the death of a nun, dressed in a nun's habit, without a face. This figure provides one of the most classic moments of British television ever, when we see the black nun for the first time at the end of the third episode. Despite the black nun's centrality to the plot the solution to the mystery is much more of this world than a phantom nun, however.
Sylvia Coleridge has a magnificent role as Sr Boniface. I am delighted to be able to say that despite the somewhat one-dimensional depiction of the other nuns she plays a faully-fledged character, and in fact falls into the role in the plot of the one character who is sensible and actually constructively helpful. Obviously I can't tell whether this is an artifact of the script or whether she actually put a lot of thought into the role, but Coleridge does a really good job of being a mature, thoughtful, woman in a difficult situation. Excellent portrayal of a great role, and actually she's far closer to any of the real nuns I've known than any of the other characters.
The show struggles valiantly against a few difficulties with its subject matter. Firstly there are times when it goes into matters at best irrelevant to the plot, such as Shore's MP boyfriend's fulminations against nuns and there is a scene where the pupils talk about how privileged they are. I think we are intended to contrast Shore's life of depravity with a married MP with the convent life, and be confused by the suggestion that the convent is about privilege rather than purity, but the attempt rather fails because you will find in every review online everyone remembers the black nun and none of this stuff. Frankly I think this show could have been done in four episodes instead of six. In fact, during my viewing of this show to write this post, I found that I kept losing interest so decided to have a rest part way through and to my surprise found that I was two hours in and there was quite a bit left of it.
There is also the usual absence of research into its subject matter: a lack of awareness of nuns' life or even Roman Catholicism is evident at various times. For example much of the plot revolves around a nun wanting to change her will, Shore keeps asking the Sacred Heart to pray for her and surely at Benediction they could have had the cast mouth along to a record of nuns singing Tantum Ergo instead of having them actually sing Alleluia Sing to Jesus.
Quiet as a Nun is not my favourite of this deservedly much-loved series, but I would highly recommend Dean Man's Kit, Dying Day, or Fear of God, if you're new to it. This adventure is, though, fondly-remembered on the cult TV internet, and has provided many viewers with thrills and chills.
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