The Lotus Eaters: A Touch of Home (Sylvia Coleridge Season)
Content warning: murder
The Lotus Eaters is a series which I last saw well over a decade ago, and somehow seem to have forgotten everything about it, so I was very glad to make its re-acquaintance for this series of posts, and it was like meeting an entirely new series. Once again, directing my attention to a particular actor's work forces me to pay attention and as a result I notice things I otherwise wouldn't.
The Lotus Eaters (1972-3) is a BBC drama broadcast over two series about British expatriates living on Crete. It centres aaround a bar run by the Shepherds, played by Ian Hendry and Wanda Ventham, and it features different aspects of the expatriates' lives in each episode. I had somehow managed to forget both that Mrs Shepherd is a British Intelligence sleeper agent, and that Mr Shepherd is a drunken lout who abuses her and this is part of her cover story, despite these things being very prominent from the start. Apparently the spying aspect becomes more prominent in the second series but I have only watched the first four episodes for the purpose of this post and can't speak for that.
A Touch of Home is the fourth episode, and the final one featuring Sylvia Coleridge. In fact it might as well be subtitled Tales of Those Eccentric Britons Abroad, because it does feature pretty well all the more embarrasing aspects of our national character, and particularly the ones we display abroad which make the entire world wonder what is wrong with us. For a start we have the long British tradition of doing everything we can to avoid actually living here, whatever our reasons are. Then we have the secondary reasons for empire: getting away from Albion and getting anyone slightly odd away from here (if they are really not right, we put them in the House of Lords). Then we have our refusal to learn the language abroad, and the way we demand fish and chips, while at home we happily fill our houses with Benares brassware, eat curry, and incorporate loan words from Hindi and Swahili into the language. And finally there's the simple fact that we have island fever at home but once we escape our windswept island off the coast of Europe we go even stranger.
This episode holds up a mirror to us and it's uncomfortable viewing.
These facets of the British character are all illustrated to perfection by the characters of Major and Mrs (played by Sylvia Coleridge) Woolley, who live on Crete to escape Albion, insist on having the Army and Navy Stores deliver British groceries to them weekly, and plant English roses in Greek soil. They only hang out with other British people and apparently don't speak a word of Greek. It is apparent that (by the standards of old colonials) they are not very well off because they don't have any servants. And they're both insane. The Major loses it when a delivery from the Army and Navy Stores fails to be delivered (surely an even more difficult thing to manage by boat fifty years ago than it would be now). Mrs Woolley very clearly has an acute case of genuine mental illness, seeing tarantulas that aren't there, and trying to kill them by hitting them with a broom or (gulp) poisoning them. The episode ends in tragedy when she accidentally kills the Major's dog with the poison and the Major, naturally enough, loses it completely and torches her roses with a flame thrower. In the course of the ensuing row, she sees a non-existent tarantula on her husband and murders him.
I have to say, Sylvia Coleridge is perfect as the initially quiet but escalatingly insane wife. I have watched through the first four episodes of the series because I saw from IMDb that those are the only ones she is in. They start quietly with her sitting knitting with her husband in the bar and almost never saying anything, until they because the focus of this episode. I wondered what happened in the fourth episode to make her exit the series, and was completely unprepared for the dramatic escalation in this episode, which I had forgotten about. She is wonderful in the role, she really comes across as deranged but doesn't overdo it, and acts it as someone who is genuinely psychotic. I cannot praise her acting of the role highly enough.
I have one criticism about the plot of this episode specifically, which is that it ends inconclusively with the police inspector telling Erik Shepherd that Mrs Woolley isn't likely to be charged because she doesn't understand that she's murdered her husband and sort of shrugging. Surely in reality the Greek police would have been straight onto the British ambassador to have her repatriated.
I also have a comment (not really a criticism) about the series, which is that I think it undersells itself, because it comes across as a series about a bar run by expatriates, which gives no hint of its undercurrents of intelligence and high drama. I mean, a murder! It's clearly a hugely ambitious and successful drama, which presses all sorts of buttons. For example, there is a difficult reflection that Ian Hendry was an alcoholic in real life and actually had to live on the legendary Eel Pie Island so that getting to an off licence to buy booze would be more difficult than usual and give him more time to have second thoughts, and also that the role of Mrs Sheperd was intended for his then wife, Janet Munro, who withdrew after their marriage broke up. This is a series which has hidden depths which are perhaps not apparent in the way it comes across.
All in all, an excellent dramatic episode of a series with real human depth, giving Sylvia Coleridge an excellent and complex role, which she plays to perfection.
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