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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