Scorpion Tales: The Ghost in the Pale Blue Dress
The introduction to this series of posts about 1970s TV shows can be found here: https://culttvblog.substack.com/p/seventies-tv-season-introduction
Normally I write one blog post at a time and don't start another one until it's pretty much left my head. Which is why I'm slightly surprised at this juncture to have four different blog posts in various stages of preparation but nowhere near publication, so obviously the thing to do is start a fifth.
Scorpion Tales (1978) was a single series of plays, all of which have some sort of unexpected sting in the tale. I am not terribly impressed with the write ups they get in the cult TV blogosphere because they are some very high quality TV. They all have the huge advantage of top drawer writers, production staff and actors, and honestly this is an excellent show, not deserving of the slightly sniffy attention it tends to get. In fact it is so good that I had it mentally pigeonholed as a show to write about sparingly and allowing myself to savour every episode as a I wrote about it. In fact I have obviously been sparing it so much that I was surprised to find that I have ended up only ever blogging about one of the episodes, so it's high time we had another.
The Ghost in the Pale Blue Dress is about a young woman who is engaged to a young merchant banker, and is a labyrinthine plot about the son and his father, family conflict and conflict in the bank and the woman's place in this. This isn't giving away the twist in the plot, but it hinges on the son finding a woman who looks exactly like his deceased mother to get engaged to.
Well we all know what 'merchant banker' means in Cockney rhyming slang.
The show throws conflicting plotlines at us left, right and centre, and can only be described as excellent. I have read that this is a show which amongst others was affected by the oil crisis of the 1970s and as a result the production is rather cheaper than it would otherwise have been. The result is that we have this mystifying show with dazzling dialogue in a totally studio-bound environment, with sets which aren't always necessarily very good, and in fact compared to shows like The Sweeney it feels very old fashioned. This may be the reason for its relatively poor esteem on t'internet.
Again I am very aware that I have spent a week thinking about this plot and have watched the episode several times in that time so I am subjecting this show to a scrutiny it wouldn't have got from viewers on its original broadcast but there is one fault with the plot if you like. It may even be something which is a personal opinion and other people may disagree that this is a plot fault, but I personally would have expected Karen to run away quickly shouting 'You dirty old man' on discovering that her boyfriend had sought out a woman the spitting image of his mother. But that might just be me.
Otherwise this show is a very complex, nuanced account of complex relationships both in a family and on the board of a bank, and that's even before the sting in the tail!
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