The Fenn Street Gang: When Did You Last See Your Father? (Seventies TV Season)
The introduction to this series of posts on 1970s TV shows can be found here: https://culttvblog.substack.com/p/seventies-tv-season-introduction
Perhaps I had better apologise in advance for this post because it is going to be even less focused than they normally are - this show has made me think about all sorts of things which, while related to the subject, aren't the immediate subject of the episode.
I had managed never to watch The Fenn Street Gang, for the simple reason that it's another show I didn't fancy based on everything I had read about it. It is the sequal to the hugely successful series set in a school, Please Sir! (1968 to 1972), which I have also never fancied, and is based on the adventures of the former pupils after they leave.
To my surprise this episode has been a revelation, and it's an absolute delight. It's about one of the former pupils, Frankie Abbott, who goes around acting very hard, despite being perpetually henpecked by his overbearing, hypochondriac mother. As a result of threatening a police officer with a potato gun he gets on probation because of having done vandalism before (considering the gammons always make out that the policing of past ages mainly consisted of clips around the ear, this seems somewhat excessive for being incredibly silly with what is obviously a child's toy). Anyway he gets a probation officer who visits and elicits that Frankie's father left the family 12 years ago when he was four, and Frankie's mother refuses to disclose where is father is despite the probation officer's insistence that Frankie is old enough to decide for himself whether to see his father and that it would be good for him to know both his parents.
And this is, of course, the narrative hinge on which the whole episode swings: being childish despite being old enough to leave school, acting hard with a child's toy, being old enough to make decisions, and yet being stopped from doing so by his pushy mother. Even the fact that the probation officer discusses him with his mother without his consent indicates that he is being infantilised by all concerned. I do honestly get that one of the more difficult bits of parenting is the difficult balance between not treating them as if they don't need you too soon, and the letting go at the exact right moment so that they can become autonomous adults with a changed relationship with their parents.
Only earlier today I was reading again about Victoria Gillick. She may not be familiar to non-UK readers, but she was the mother who took her argument that none of her ten children should be given contraception before the age of sixteen without her consent (yes, I know, if you've got ten children the only thing you can do when contraception comes up is shut up) and unwittingly gave her name to the principle in English and Welsh law that a young person can consent to their own medical treatment without parental consent being necessary if they are judged to have Gillick competence. The irony of this tickles me no end, and is exactly the sort of come back that you get if you are over-involved in your children's lives. Incidentally the principle has since been joined by the Mental Capacity Act (2005) where you are presumed to have capacity to make your own decisions unless there is some reason to suspect you don't and only then do you have an assessment.
To cut to the chase, if these events happened in Frankie Abbott's life nowadays, he would be within his rights to tell the probation officer not to release his information to his mother.
As it happens he decides he does want to meet his father but obviously there is no law on this earth that will stop mothers being difficult so he has to be a bit sneaky to find out that his dad works in a labour exchange. It was at this point that I knew Frankie would ultimately be alright in life. I am a firm believer that fantasy is good for you, because it gives you a source for possibilities and a place to go. As long as you are someone who knows the difference between fantasy and reality you will be alright. He listens in on his mother's private conversation. What a hero.
Actually the mother is a masterpiece of characterisation. She is a Mrs Malaprop character and a hypochondriac (or, as she corrects the probation officer when he tells her she is a hypochondriac, an insomnomaniac). She could quite easily have been an awful woman and really just made the whole episode miserable by her dominance of Frankie, but they've got it just right so that she is amusing while also being terrible. The role must have been terrible to play because she wears rubber gloves (of the short you wear to do the washing up) for some supposed skin disease reason throughout the episode, and literally never takes them off. Even if you were brought up with that by the time you are sixteen you would have seen other people's mothers and known that wearing Marigolds 24/7 is not normal and of doubtful medical efficacy. Every time he wants to do anything to assert his naturity she announces that she's dying or has some recurrence of one of her diseases.
Frankie's mother does actually remind me of a real life mother I know of (but have never met) who is even more pushy than my own. I keep hearing from a mutual friend of someone I knew years ago who is my age but still living at home and keeps expressing an intention to do the sorts of things adults do, like leaving home and establishing themselves in the world outside. My god the man's in his fifties. But every time he takes a hesitant step towards doing this his mother has something terrible happen. Once she fell over the dog and was laid up in bed for a week. Another time she actually managed to end up in accident and emergency (with indigestion). And she keeps being very good to him, which is exactly another strategy used by Frankie's mother to keep him close to her, although when she does buy him the scooter he wants it turns out the be a child's pink scooter.
Frankie has a turning point in this episode because after deciding he wants to see his father he has the wit to go to the labour exchange to have a look at him before trying to contact him. His father is exactly what you would imagine: downtrodden and still working as a tea boy as a grown man with an adult child. This is understandably a disappointment to Frankie and he changes his mind about seeing his dad. I expect that this tension with his mother has had to be continued for the sake of the programme but you do genuinely get the impression that Frankie would ultimately be ok. As you can tell the episode has really drawn me in and caught my interest.
It is perfectly paced, being presumably originally a half hour episode with advertisements, there is no dragging at all. I'm trying to think of a criticism but am actually having real difficulty doing so!
I'm going to look out more episodes of The Fenn Street Gang on the basis of seeing this one.
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 index to the tags used on the Tumblr version at https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/729194158177370112/this-blog