Jason King: It's Too Bad About Auntie (Sylvia Coleridge Season)
Jason King is, of course, a series which needs no introduction to readers of this blog. Although it hasn't appeared here very much, and this is for the simple reason that it is one of those shows where I don't seem to have very much to say. My blog posts would essentially run along the lines of: look at this quintessential 70s scene of ITC sophistication on the continong; oh heavens look what Jason King is wearing; he's solved the mystery.
Which makes it all the more pleasing that that isn't all I have to say about episode, far from it, and especially given that this episode really isn't a favourite among the classic TV blogerati on t'internet. I am therefore going to leap in and lock horns with pretty well everyone whose ever reviewed this episode.
I quite understand why this episode is so unpopular: it is that it makes a huge mistake right from the start, and you come across this mistake before you even watch the episode. If you'd seen the title of this blog post, pondered that you'd forgotten about this episode and gone onto IMDb to remind yourself what it was about, you would see that Andrew Bishop is a nasty piece of work who lives with, and makes life unpleasant for, his elderly, housebound Aunt Claire. The plot then revolves around a murdered vacuum cleaner salesman, whose samples have gone missing.
The episode sets up this premise by first showing him threatening to take away Aunt Claire's glasses so that she can't read any more and being horrible to her. Of course the problem is that elder abuse is never entertaining in any way so is best avoided in a light and frothy TV series like Jason King. If the baddies are, say, cheating a casino in Monte Carlo, that's not a crime that's likely to affect the viewer in their council flat in Sheffield, and is safely distant.
This set up also has the problem that it distracts our attention from what the police then do to mess up the investigation, which is what we're supposed to be paying attention to.
This is why all the reviews are uniformly terrible: viewers are repulsed by the treatment of auntie and then can't pay attention to the murder and its investigation. It would have been much better if the opening scene had shown Bishop and Auntie living in abject poverty and trying to find some way out of it *together*. There is a later scene of Jason King making a promotional video for food, before throwing them out of the flat, and that also could have been better put first to disorientate, rather than completely blind, the viewer.
Ignoring this massive misstep and what you have is an interesting drama, which contains more art in the script than is initially apparent, including a sequence of comparisons between different characters. We have the comparison between the repugnant Andrew Bishop and the unfortunate vacuum cleaner salesman who has been unfortunate enough to fall from having been head boy at his public school. There is a comparison between the titular auntie and Jason King's current woman's auntie. Jason becomes a vacuum cleaner salesman and talk about how uninhibited the British housewife can be when she thinks she is sniffing a bargain, and the shot immediately cuts to the housebound, disabled Auntie. Bishop contrasts with Jason King, who frankly is shown in a hugely unpleasant light in this episode: very frankly using a woman and then leaving her abruptly. And yet he becomes the person who solves who did the murder and so the story gives a promise of redemption. In this Jason is also contrasted with the police, who are quite as unpleasant as pretty well everyone else in this sorry tale of sorrow and domestic appliances.
Frankly I think that this episode is worthy watching for the 1970s London street scenes, when the city was in a major period of demolition and rebuilding, alone. It is so very atmospheric.
Sylvia Coleridge's role is as the titular auntie. it's an interesting role because the character's stroke has made her non-verbal so she doesn't have a single word to say. Far from her normal effervescent, eccentric characters she plays the abused auntie to perfection. After being rescued from her nephew by Jason King he even flirts with auntie and they kiss!
I have one major criticism, which is that I think the way Jason produces the solution is dissatisfying, as is the way he elicits a confession of sorts from the murderer, but then Jason King isn't a show about investigation, which is why I think the contrasts between characters are much more the point, and much more interesting. I have a minor personal criticism, which comes from my personal dislike of familiar 1960s actors who appear in all these ITC dramas and distract me by making me think about what else I've seen them in. The character who made me spend the first viewing pondering about her was Sarah Lawson, who plays the police's chief suspect for the murder, and who is best known to me as one of the gaggle of feminist murderers being presided over by a ventriloquist's dummy in The Avengers episode How To Succeed at Murder. I know it is slightly unreasonable of me to expect professional actors not to have different roles and distract me, so this remains a completely personal criticism.
In all, an interesting episode of Jason King, as long as you forget about the murder and watch the characterisation unfold.
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