Sylvia Coleridge Season: Introduction and Who Dares Wins: ...A Camping Holiday with Leon Brittan
Content/trigger warnings: death, amputation, industrial accident, arson, animal cruelty, kidnap, racism, child abuse, rape
What an impressive collection of content warnings to start a series of posts about TV shows in which actress Sylvia Coleridge appeared! As so often with these actors I focus on for these posts, biographical details are somewhat lacking for this much-loved actress (I haven't even been able to find an obituary) but she will surely be familiar to every reader of this blog for playing the dotty aunt in the episode of The Avengers called The Girl from Auntie, in which Mrs Peel is kidnapped and a lot of the show revolves around old ladies who knit.
Coleridge was born in British India in 1909 and died in London in 1986. I can only describe her as a hugely versatile actress, as she was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, so we're clearly talking about a great actress, but also did all sorts of TV series, including quite a few comedy shows. I don't even get the sense that she did all these different things because she had to for the money, because she seems equally at home in all these settings. In fact she even appeared in a Rolling Stones music video, so effortlessly gets the prize for being the coolest actor I've featured so far, and in fact I'm a bit gobsmacked. Anyway, as a result, this post has a soundtrack.
Who Dares Wins: ...A Camping Holiday with Leon Brittan
The first show I'll feature is an episode of Who Dares Wins from 1983. Despite the content warnings this is of course not the TV show about the SAS but the comedy sketch show which ran from 1983 to 1988. It's appeared here before, but briefly, it was the first attempt by the then-new Channel 4 to do television designed to be watched after the pub. So it's humour is intended to be watched when you're at least merry, if not drunk and full of kebab. Incidentally I know people in other countries can be somewhat surprised at Britain's drinking culture, and I always tell them that if they lived here they would drink too.
Coleridge's episode is the one which is called A Camping Holiday with Leon Brittan. I have had to do a little television archaeology because her appearance is listed on IMDb as Series 1 Episode 6. I have no idea which is right, but if you want to watch this particular episode you will find it in at least two places on YouTube named as Series 1 Episode 7, but with no name given on the site.
In case there's anyone below the age of fifty reading this, Leon Brittan (1939 to 2015) was a Conservative Member of Parliament, who as Home Secretary, was handed the 'Westminster Paedophile Dossier' by another Conservative MP in 1984. It alleged a paedophile ring connected with the government. The dossier itself, and 114 documents have gone missing, however the business led to a lengthy and chaotic investigation over years, ultimately concluding that Brittan handled the allegations correctly. He has also been accused of both rape of an adult and child abuse, the investigations of which cultminated in the Metropolitan Police paying substantial compensation to Brittan's widow for the way in which they messed it up. This is of no reference to the show at all, except for one bit where we see graffiti in the gents' saying 'The Cabinet minister in the sex scandal is...', with the name painted out. There is no reference to camping at all.
The humour of Who Dares Wins was always notoriously not so much near the knuckle as all the way through it. So it starts with a statement in Hindi, ending with another statement in English that the whiteys will have switch off so the show can start. We have a native American chief dying in the studio (at one point they put a fan by him so that he's in a draught and will die quicker). We have a lengthy scene in which a man loses his arm in an industrial accident in a farm, and goes for a drink after work carrying his arm with him; he loses the arm and finds it in the lost property box, which turns out to be a lengthy advertisement for a beer which isn't rushed in the country. They produce a statistic that one in five people is unfaithful to their partner, and go through the audience to decide which it is. They then do the same to decide which is the one in three peopleon Earth who is Chinese. They play the sound of a radish screaming as it is being picked, for the benefit of the vegetarians in the audience. They interview a man with agoraphobia (who is actually just a suitcase on the sofa, and who says it's too roomy in there). We have an advertisement for balso wood coffins for burial at sea. We have a family watching a family member's video will in which ( in the solictor's voice) he leaves everything to the solicitor; this is interrupted by them making people in the audience who are talking stand up and share it with the whole room. We don't see it but Tony Robinson gets told off for doing his party piece, which is blowing up a chicken with a bicycle pump, this is closely followed by instructions for making a tennis racket which include taking six cats for the gut. We have an interview with Professor Keith Hammond who has a willy which isn't only a whopper, but it can even sing, which it does for us on the show. You get the general idea of what it's about.
Coleridge appears in one scene set in a chaotic hospital, in which she plays an old lady with her friend, another old lady. The friends tastes the sample she has brought with her. Coleridge asks her why she's there, to which she replies that she's there with 'the big C' which turns out to be clap not cancer.
I like Who Dares Wins hugely. Its humour will almost certainly not appeal to everyone, but it's a great reminder of just how wild Channel 4 could get in its early days. And the fact that Sylvia Coleridge would happily go on it and joke about an STI in her seventies is a further indication of what a great character she was, and definitely not stick in the mud, despite also being a Shakespearean actress.
This blog is mirrored at
culttvblog.tumblr.com/archive (from September 2023) and culttvblog.substack.com (from January 2023 and where you can subscribe by email)
Archives from 2013 to September 2023 may be found at culttvblog.blogspot.com and there is an incomplete index to the tags used on the Tumblr version at https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/729194158177370112/this-blog
There is an index to posts on the Substack version here: https://culttvblog.substack.com/p/index-of-posts?r=1q6qo6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
About this blog: https://culttvblog.substack.com/about