Archive TV Reviews

Scrape This You AI Bastards

~ stevejwright ~ Leave a comment

Good evening. All good things must come to an end, and knelly death of “Supermarionation” with Gerry Anderson all puppetloaders sounding was, with not many peoplodes beholding The Secret Service with their eyebolds, oh yes, and why for? With a ready on and soon find out.

Now starting on it was strictly practicold, mariontettes with the strings coming out of the heads all trittly-how, but catching hold of viewing public’s imaginations and many peoploaders watching all it sort of a cult becoming and most populous and deep joy many many peoploaders giving. Oh yes. And what with decade almost passing, Supercar first to the skies taking between and The Secret Service appearing, many many technicold advancing the Supermarionation team was made, with the puppetloaders looky almost like the real peoploaders and movy natural, although still not walking, and the nice modelettes looky really lovely and blow up most realistic and all that. But the imaginings of the viewing public with their eyebolders the screens beholding and looky on is most important, and The Secret Service is trying hard to getting that looky on with all gimmicks and such, but not doing, quite, oh folly.

Being like and many Anderson programmolds with the puppetloaders and everything, The Secret Service is dealing with the hushy secret organizers and having all sorts of technicold does really miraculous stuff, by golly, oh yes. The secret organizers is the BISHOP (British Intelligence Secret Headquarters – Operation Priest) and their technicold the Minimizer, ray and shrinky turns peoploaders into height all the same as an Anderson puppetloader. So you see there are lots of chances, mixy up all the live peoploaders and the little puppetloaders on the screen all trittly-how. (Mixy up like that always happening, with the peoploaders hands closing up and the puppetloaders in the background and suchlike, but The Secret Service more than most of them, my goodness yes.)

Now Minimizer is belonging of Father Stanley Unwin, and he is looky liking and has the same voice as real peoploader Stanley Unwin, and this is another gimmick to get the viewing peoploaders all looky on, bums on seats and all that. Oh yes. Unwin, those days, very populode entertaining with the trademark gibberlode old cobblers talking “Unwinese”. Scripts have him, every episode, talking very fast and some interlocutold bafflemost and in the head confusing, even if, plotting concerned, all this baffling not really needed. Howbesomeover, Unwin’s linguisticold versatibility is deep respect from me having, at least, hence attempting homage thisold, oh yes.

So Father Unwin undercover all pottery about, with the old housekeeper all not knowing about and the old Model T Ford for travellode and very country vicar, and then all of a sudden the BISHOP calls action, and Father Unwin takes his assistant Matthew all faithful and shrinky down and put in briefcase, and drivey off they go. And with Matthew all shrinky down and Father Unwin fast the gibberlode talking at all peoploaders, all excellent for sneaky and the sabotaging criminolds and internationable espionagers, all their nasty plans foiling, oh yes. Well, mostly.

Trouble is, the shrinky down and gibberlode, all samey every week, and sometimes not even some difference any plotwise making, whether Matthew is normal peoploader height or shrinky. (Though always Father Unwin, every episode starting, shrinky Matthew, whether need it or not, until I’m sure complex the poor lad becoming, oh yes.) Now, my thinking, important distinction having between a concept and a gimmick, here, and the Anderson earlier shows all on concept basey; with your Thunderbirds and the concept is the Internationable Rescue with its technicabold and equal to all eventualites and such, or your Joe 90 and the taping on the Big Rat and the skills and everything all into the brainy download for eponymous to handle threat each week … The Secret Service only having the gimmicks, the shrinky down and gibberloding, and it’s not enough, my way of thinking, all of a show to be carrying.

And besides, with the plots and the stories as they go on, lots of them all used and second-hand looking, with the borrowing from the Anderson Captain Scarlet and such from episodes and also the puppetloaders and the modelettes, and (which is sensible because of the espionaging and thrilly bits and such) The Avengers. So you have the tank with the automating all running amok, and the homing pigeonloaders with the secret installings flybold over and pictures taky, and the golf course with the micropholders and buggy and secrets revealing, and the priests all mobsters disguisey, and by crikey I’ve seen it all before with my eyebolds, oh yes.

Now, it’s not The Secret Service exactibold bad show … it’s having the gorgeous modelettes and such, and by the play between the charactolds and entertaining being by and how, and the theme tune all pseudo-ecclesiasticable and crazy up the head … it’s in a cosy and amiabold way all enjoyabold, quite. But with it not having the old Anderson programmold touch with the verving and intellibonce and things, and the viewing peoploaders not beholding so much with their eyebolds … and, besides, of the thirteen episoders halving an hour long, and two-more costing times than fifty minutes of much more populode Thunderbirds and such. So Lord Grade with the cigar-chomping and pulled the plug, and told Gerry Anderson to making other stuff. (Which he did, and UFO all being bloody good, so all right.) But Supermarionation all here ending, and us not beholding with our eyebolds anything like, by crikey, no not ever again. So this is the way Supermarionation not bang ending, but with trittly-how and folly folly folly up the falolloper. Oh yes.

English translation below….

All good things must come to an end, and the death knell of Gerry Anderson’s “Supermarionation” shows was sounded with the seldom-seen oddity The Secret Service. Why? Well, we’re about to find out.…

Anderson’s peculiar sci-fi marionette genre had begun for strictly practical reasons, but grew into something of a cult because of the way the shows managed to catch people’s imaginations; as time went by (The Secret Service was made almost ten years after the pioneering Supercar), the Supermarionation team’s ability to deal with the technical challenges of the material increased – the puppets, by now, had naturalistic proportions and appearance, and even a fair range of movement, and the quality of the models and the effects filming has rarely been equalled. But it was the catching of the viewers’ imaginations that mattered, and that quality is, sadly, rather lacking from The Secret Service, despite its rather obvious attention-grabbing gimmicks …

As with so many other Anderson shows, The Secret Service centres on a secret organization with semi-miraculous technology; in this case, the organization is the BISHOP (British Intelligence Secret Headquarters – Operation Priest), and the technology is the Minimizer, a shrinking ray built into a book, which can reduce a human being’s height to, err, well, roughly the same as a Supermarionation puppet. So The Secret Service has several attempts to blend live action with the puppets on the screen. (This was always a feature of the Supermarionation shows – they all had those cuts to closeups of real human hands handling controls and so forth – but there’s rather more of it in this one.)

The Minimizer is the property of Father Stanley Unwin, who is voiced by, and closely modelled on, the real Stanley unwin. This is the show’s second big gimmick: Unwin was a popular entertainer at the time, whose trademark was speaking in a scrambled dialect of his own invention, dubbed “Unwinese”. The scripts call for him to baffle some hapless interlocutor with this gibberish at least once per episode. Unfortunately, the scripts call on him to do this whether it fits in with the plot or not. Still, Unwin’s linguistic versatility commands respect, at least from me, hence this attempt at a homage to it.

Father Unwin potters about as a country vicar, with an antique Model T Ford and a dim-witted housekeeper, until a call for action from the BISHOP comes in – at which point he reduces his faithful assistant Matthew to marionette-size, packs him into a conveniently customized suitcase, and drives off into action. With his reduced size, Matthew can sneak into places, and with his trademark gibberish Father Unwin can talk his way into them, so they’re admirably suited to foiling the insidious plans of foreign agents or international master criminals… well, mostly they are.

The trouble is, I think, that these particular gimmicks don’t really have much variety in them – indeed, it’s sometimes hard to see how they fit in to a given plot (more than once, Matthew has to go into action in situations where it doesn’t make much difference whether he’s miniaturized or not. Nonetheless, Father Unwin insists on shrinking him down, at the start of every episode. The poor lad’s going to get a complex from all of this, you mark my words.) I think this marks an important difference, between what one might call a concept and a gimmick. Earlier Anderson shows were based on concepts: Thunderbirds had International Rescue with its endless resources of fantastic technology, Joe 90 had the Big Rat, which could program its eponymous hero with whatever skills and knowledge he needed to face a particular threat.… The Secret Service just has gimmicks, in the form of double-talk and a shrinking ray. It’s not enough, really, to carry the show.

It doesn’t help, either, that some of the stories, and some of the effects, look distinctly second-hand; there are open borrowings both from other Anderson shows like Captain Scarlet, and (sensibly enough, I suppose, given the spy/thriller format) The Avengers. Automated tank running amok? Homing pigeons taking photographs of secret installations? Bugged golf courses? Mobsters disguised as priests? Seen it all before, matey.

It’s not that The Secret Service is a bad show, exactly… it has some positively gorgeous model work, odd bits of entertaining byplay between the characters, and that insane pseudo-ecclesiastical theme tune… it’s enjoyable enough, in an amiable, cosy, sort of a way. It just doesn’t have the verve and intelligence of earlier Anderson shows, and this told against it in viewing figures … also, each of the thirteen half-hour episodes cost more than twice as much as a fifty-minute episode of the much more popular Thunderbirds. You can bet that ITC’s cigar-chomping supremo Lord Grade noticed that. So he pulled the plug on The Secret Service, and told Gerry Anderson to go and make something else. (Which he did, and it was UFO, and it was bloody good too.) But that was the end of Supermarionation, and we shall not look upon its like again.… This is the way Supermarionation ends, not with a bang, but with a trittly-how and folly folly folly up the falolloper.

(This originally appeared on a now defunct message board, and is reproduced here by popular demand. From one person. Who is probably now no longer popular.)

If I Could Talk to the Animals

~ stevejwright ~ Leave a comment

Another piece of recycled filler material, here – a review I did, shortly after the DVD release of Nigel Kneale’s short anthology series Beasts.

Beasts, like its subject matter, is a bit of an odd creature really. Nigel Kneale, the writer behind the ground-breaking Quatermass serials of the 1950s, had an on-again, off-again relationship with the BBC, and in the mid-Seventies it was most definitely off. So, it was to independent commercial producers ATV that he turned in 1976 with an idea for an anthology series with a theme of animals.

The short anthology series is a format you don’t see so much of, these days; Beasts is, perhaps, a typical example of that particular genre, a set of six self-contained hour-long dramas with no continuing characters or production continuity, but with a defining all-encompassing theme. Kneale had had a taste of ATV’s anthologies before, contributing a grim little piece called “Murrain” to a series about alienation and social outsiders by the name of Against the Crowd (this one’s actually included as an extra on the recent DVD release of Beasts, which is all to the good.) Some of these things became institutions in their own right (SF anthologies like The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, or the UK’s Out of the Unknown are recognized landmarks in the field); others served to showcase individual dramas that could be developed later into series of their own (like, for example, the Armchair Cinema entry “Regan” which was the forerunner of The Sweeney). However, a fair number of them just appeared, ran their course, and faded away. Production companies are much less inclined to try out drama series this way, today; generally, they’re planned from the outset with the idea of going for a full-season (if not several-season) run, and pilot episodes today are very much more scene-setters for the rest of the show than they are self-contained stories in their own right.

For that reason, then, Beasts is the sort of thing that’s less likely to get made these days … as it is for other reasons besides. The individual stories vary considerably in style, but they all have a relatively slow pace, and they depend on a slowly building feeling of unease rather than on sudden shocks; this is not MTV we’re talking about here. However, just because Beasts is light on thrills, doesn’t mean it lacks chills – the slow-paced scripts can build up a highly effective sense of unease and menace, which, let’s face it, was a trademark of Nigel Kneale’s supernatural stories.

So. What are the individual stories in this anthology like,then? Well, let’s tackle them … (I’m going to go by the ordering on the DVD here, since the original transmission dates were scrambled all over ITV’s regional timetables.)

First up is “Baby”, with Jane Wymark as Jo Gilkes, the troubled pregnant wife of a country vet. While her husband is off being macho on pig farms with his senior partner (Simon McCorkindale and T. P. McKenna turn in good performances, I think, as a pair of testosterone-poisoned arseholes), Jo is confronted by a discovery made by the workmen who are remodelling their house; an urn containing the mummified remains of an unidentifiable creature. While the men in her life are getting on with the shouting and drinking, Jo is increasingly troubled by images and sounds; a feeling of something dark and menacing in the woods nearby, an undefinable dread centred on the inexplicable mummified thing, and, finally, a terrifying vision of deformity.

It’s an effectively creepy piece, possibly more so because nothing’s really explained … there could, certainly, be a supernatural explanation for what’s happening; on the other hand, it could equally well be all in poor old Jo’s head (and, given her pregnancy and the way the men in her life behave, if any woman ever had an excuse for losing her marbles, Jo does). Of course, although leaving things unexplained can be effective in a horror story, it can also leave the viewer feeling cheated at the end; “Baby” is effective in a low-key sort of way, but it doesn’t really come to any sort of resolution. The viewer is rather left hanging after Jo’s final terrifying vision … Maybe it’s meant as an exercise in speculation; having watched the episode, we can come up with our own versions of What Happens Next. (And it’s difficult, I think, to come up with an optimistic outcome … )

The next on the list is “Buddyboy”; I’m not sure if I can describe this in a way which will sound remotely sensible, but bear with me. Enterprising young pornographer Dave (Martin Shaw, sporting his trademark perm as seen in The Professionals) is keen to take over a disused dolphinarium and convert it into a movie theatre and sex club (his plans to sell aphrodisiac hamburgers are only part of the stuff that raised my eyebrows in this one). But the owner, weaselly entrepreneur Hubbard (Wolfe Morris, a familiar face of the period) is so keen to sell, Dave smells a rat. Taking up with Lucy (Pamela Moiseiwitsch), a disturbed former employee of the dolphin show, Dave pieces together the story of a bizarre personality clash between Hubbard and his star attraction, the performing dolphin Buddyboy. Hubbard’s business problems all started after the dolphin died in suspicious circumstances … Dave uses his knowledge to mount an aggressive takeover of Hubbard’s assets, but, in taking the man’s property, he also takes ownership of the dolphin’s curse …

It’s a lot more sensible than it sounds, honestly. But then it would have to be. Apart from the various implausible elements, though, my main problem is with Dave; a go-ahead porn baron for the modern age, Dave is not a very sympathetic character, but he’s not totally unsympathetic, either – certainly not unsympathetic enough to “deserve”, as it were, being haunted by the vengeful spirit of a performing dolphin. (I’ll take “Sentences I never believed I would ever type” for $500, please, Alex.) Between this, and the plausibility gap, I can’t honestly rate “Buddyboy” as a success, I’m afraid.

Next up is “The Dummy” … This one’s set in a down-market horror film studio, an environment familiar to Kneale from his days of watching Hammer Films mangle his TV scripts. The Dummy is the “star” of a series of low-budget horrors; it’s a sort of decomposing-werewolf thing, and the costume is custom-fitted to troubled actor Clyde Boyd (Bernard Horsfall). Boyd is upset about his career being pretty much restricted to playing the monster, and is also stressed by the presence on the set of Peter Wager (Simon “Doomwatch” Oates, radiating smug sleaziness), an actor who’s run off with Boyd’s wife. The well-meaning production crew are sympathetic and supportive of Boyd, but their schedule is tight, and they need him to get into character … So, they psych him up, and he gets too far into character, which proves a bit of a problem given that Visual Effects have helpfully kitted out the Dummy costume with razor-sharp articulated metal claws …

It’s not entirely successful, this one, but it’s entertaining … the problem is that it turns abruptly from a psychological-horror piece (as Boyd succumbs to his inner demons) to a straightforward monster-on-the-loose story (as Boyd goes “rarr!” a lot and claws people). But it moves along fast enough, and there’s one thing about it, you can guarantee the details are authentic – this one is stuffed full of British TV acting stalwarts, many of whom put in uncounted hours screaming and dying horribly for Hammer, Amicus, Tigon and other such film companies. It’s a bit brainless, but it’s fun to watch.

Fourth on the list is “Special Offer”. Noreen (Pauline Quirke) is an incompetent and unlovely shop assistant at the Britebuy supermarket, nurturing a secret crush on its ambitious young manager Mr. Grimley (Geoffrey Bateman playing another case of Beasts testosterone poisoning), whose contempt for her is most certainly not secret. But things happen when Noreen’s around … tins and boxes are thrown on the floor, products tampered with. Noreen blames it on “Britebuy Billy”, the store’s cartoon hamster mascot … but worldly-wise personnel manager Mr. Liversedge knows a poltergeist when he sees one, and advises Grimley accordingly. Can the lecherous and ambitious store manager cope with being nice to Noreen, or is there going to be trouble?

The visual effects team obviously had a lot of fun with this one, and the poltergeist scenes are pretty effectively done. (Curiously enough, I’ve heard a lot about the difficulties of producing this one right from the horse’s mouth, as it were; the sound director is one of my mother’s neighbours. One of two ITV sound men to live near my mother, in fact. I have no idea why.) Pauline Quirke is best known, today, for her long-running stint in the truly dreadful sitcom Birds of a Feather; she was something of a child star on ITV in the early Seventies (her credits include a guest spot in The Tomorrow People – I’m always amazed by how many careers seem to have survived The Tomorrow People), and she’s got some claim to being a serious actor, even today; in this one, she manages to give just about the right air of moon-faced moronic menace, which helps make it a nicely judged piece of supernatural horror, sort of like “Carrie” on a very small budget. (I was intrigued, though I doubt anybody else would be, to notice a comparatively rare on-screen appearance here by helium-lunged voice actor Ysanne Churchman in a supporting role. I’ve heard her near-ultrasonic tones in things from Space Patrol to Doctor Who, and it was interesting to see what she looks like.)

Next is “What Big Eyes” … Zealous RSPCA Inspector Curry (Michael Kitchen), tracking down what he thinks is an illicit trade in un-quarantined canines, winds up at a small pet shop which is inexplicably buying wolves … Here, he runs into elderly eccentric Leo Raymount (Patrick Magee), who has a perfectly reasonable explanation, or so he thinks. Raymount is buying the wolves himself, for use in his experiments – he’s extracting their spinal fluid and brain tissue, and preparing a serum which, he hopes, will turn him into a werewolf …

Even by the standards of Beasts, this one is slow-moving and (almost) devoid of supernatural frissons … but the personality clash between Curry and Raymount is well-handled by two able actors. It shows in their styles, even; Michael Kitchen as Curry gives a realistic portrayal of a man who’s brisk and more than a little officious, but basically cares about his work; meanwhile, Patrick Magee as the daft-as-a-brush lycanthrope wannabe goes so far over the top, you wonder how he did it without an oxygen mask. They’re both fun to watch; they’re not, however, enough to carry a too-slight story.
Finally, “During Barty’s Party”, widely regarded as the best story in the Beasts series, and I can’t bring myself to disagree … Businessman Roger Truscott (Anthony Bate) comes back to his rather nice Hampshire home to find his wife Angela (Elizabeth Sellars) in a bit of a state; she’s heard stories about rats migrating in huge swarms nearby, and she can hear a rat moving around somewhere in the house. Or perhaps it’s more than one rat … While Roger tries some simple and straightforward measures to get rid of the intrusive rodent, Angela tries to get more information by tuning in to an inane local radio programme, “Barty’s Party”. And when things start to go seriously wrong, and the sound of the rats gets louder and louder, the radio phone-in show becomes, in a weird way, the only lifeline they have. Until things get even worse …

The tension in this one rises smoothly and relentlessly, and is effectively counterpointed by the determinedly lightweight tone of the radio programme (complete with stupid jingles, adverts repeated ad nauseam, and a host who sounds eerily like the great Jimmy Young) … We never get to see a rat, or, indeed, anyone besides poor old Roger and Angela, but we certainly get to hear them, and they’re all the more scary for that. If you don’t have chills shooting up your spine in the final sequence, as the camera closes in on the transistor radio with that sound going on all the time, well, there must be something wrong with your spine, that’s all I can say.  Beasts is pretty much worth the price of admission for this one alone.

… So that was Beasts, then. It’s variable, that’s for certain – but, then, the anthology series format is meant to be variable, that’s kind of the point. Some of the stories are undoubtedly hits, and even the misses have something in them to hold your attention … The DVD release (by archive TV specialists Network, who can generally be trusted to do justice to the material) is pretty clearly aimed at the niche market, but I reckon that, even if you’re not a Kneale fan, there’ll be something in this lot you’ll find worth watching. Which is what it’s all about, I suppose.

It’s People Like You What Causes Unrest

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Another blast from the past in the archive TV line, Undermind is a sort of low-budget UK version of The Invaders.  The eleven episodes were initially broadcast May through July 1965, and by happy chance the whole series is complete, which doesn’t always happen with archive TV shows, as we all know.

Personnel officer Drew Heriot (Jeremy Wilkin) returns from a trip abroad to find his brother Frank (Jeremy Kemp) is acting strangely – in particular, persecuting a government minister over a comparatively petty offence.  Puzzled, Drew starts asking some questions and doing a bit of digging, and he finds out something more.  He finds out that Frank has become estranged from his wife Anne (Rosemary Nichols); he gets a colleague to administer a test, and finds that Frank has an abnormal hearing range and his brainwaves show a total lack of emotional response; finally he finds out that Frank is obeying orders from a signal that only he can hear, that his orders are to cause distrust and uncertainty about British social institutions… and that there are more like Frank out there, somewhere.

The subsequent ten episodes involve Drew and his newly widowed sister-in-law looking for other “underminds” and trying to thwart their devious plans – which gradually become more dramatic, until the last episodes revolve around a plan to make an army of new recruits, all depending on a repeat of the enemy “signal” which Drew and Anne have to find some way of blocking.  It’s a neat piece of contemporary paranoia, dealing with social themes of the time, from “reds under the bed” paranoia to the generation gap.

While it’s established early on that the enemy is alien, and the signal comes from somewhere in space (with a magnificent disdain for physics and biology, it’s a radio signal that people with an unusual auditory tract can hear), there is little scope for flashy special effects; the enemy remains off-screen, anonymous, and mysterious.  Its “undermind” agents are, to all intents and purposes, completely normal people, going about their everyday lives… possibly with a little something “off” about them, that only close friends and family might notice.  And the enemy is clearly playing a long game, setting out, not to cause an immediate sensation, but to create a long-drawn-out feeling of malaise, distrust and unrest – chipping away patiently at the foundations of British society until nobody knows where they are any more.  In this respect, it’s very much a product of its time, playing into tensions about the social upheavals of the 1960s.  Perhaps it looks rather quaint, in places, now – though the individual episodes usually manage a fair level of tension; this is TV drama written by people who feel the need to deliver something suitably dramatic to the viewers.

In fact, if you know the TV creators of the time, there are a lot of familiar names involved in this one – the show was created by Robert Banks Stewart, who worked on The Avengers, Doctor Who, The Sweeney, Callan and a number of others; other scriptwriters included Doctor Who contributors like Bill Strutton, David Whitaker and the justly celebrated Robert Holmes.  There are a fair number of familiar faces on the screen, too.  Jeremy Wilkin, in the lead role, was a stalwart of the Gerry Anderson regular cast (voice work on several of the puppet series, and a semi-regular live-action actor in UFO) and would later have guest spots in Doctor Who and Blake’s Seven.  This being a mid-Sixties TV show, Rosemary Nichols isn’t really given enough to do as his partner in undermind-busting Anne; a couple of years later, she would turn up in a somewhat meatier role as sexy, snarky computer expert Annabelle Hurst in Department S.  The guest cast includes many well-known actors, too, from Jeremy Kemp (who turns up in all sorts of things, from an accidental mass murderer in Space: 1999 to Captain Picard’s brother in Star Trek: The Next Generation) through to John Barron (who didn’t get where he is today without being involved in a plot to subvert British democracy).

For fans of a certain vintage (e.g. me), Undermind is a nice long nostalgia fest.  And, to be fair, it is rather dated – it’s constrained by the production techniques and production values of its day (the budget for the whole eleven episodes probably wouldn’t pay for twenty minutes of TV today), and it’s specifically speaking to contemporary concerns, which makes it a very modern show of its day – and nothing goes out of date faster than modernity.  To a twenty-first century audience, it will strike all sorts of wince-inducing false notes with its concerns and its attitudes.  (Particularly, I think, in the episode dealing with youth unrest, which shows the usual picture of youth unrest in 1960s TV – lots of “young” people with leather jackets, hanging round in surprisingly alcohol free dives.  I say “young” people, of course, because all the troubled youths were played by people who’d been in the business long enough to wangle themselves speaking roles in a prime-time TV show – I haven’t seen that many thirty-year-olds pretending to be teenagers since the last time I logged into PornHub.)

But, for all its faults, Undermind still has a lot to commend it, I think.  It’s got a neat central concept, which is effectively executed; it develops over the length of the series, and comes to an actual dramatic climax and resolution.  It is, above all, a professional show.  It’s made by people who have a sci-fi thriller to deliver, and who can write, direct and act a show that sends sci-fi thrills out to the viewing public.  It may not be exactly brilliant, but it is thoroughly competent.  There’s a lot to be said for competence.  Undermind may not be epoch-making TV, but it holds the viewer’s attention, and it doesn’t disappoint.

Meta? I ‘ardly knew ‘er.

~ stevejwright ~ Leave a comment

I am old enough to remember the days when, if you missed a TV show, you missed it – no catch-up-on-demand, no DVD or VHS or downloads, precious few repeats and no certainty of catching those.  So, when archive TV material gets rediscovered and re-released, I’m always glad to catch up on stuff I missed out on first time around.  Well, usually glad.  (Sometimes I find out how lucky I was to miss it in the first place.)

The Strange World of Gurney Slade is one of those fascinating oddities that I’m glad they’ve brought back, though.  It ran for six half-hour episodes on the ITV network in 1960, got one repeat in 1963 (the year of my birth, so I wasn’t really able to appreciate it), and then vanished for several decades.  It was written by the team of Dick Hills and Sid Green – better known as scriptwriters for Morecambe and Wise – to a creative brief by its star, the actor, singer and lyricist Anthony Newley.

The opening scene of the first episode doesn’t look promising – it looks like the set of a conventional sitcom, or possibly a soap opera, with (a contemporary TV conception of) a working-class family at home, engaged in heavy banter with a comically-named neighbour.  Then the wife asks the husband how he’d like his breakfast egg done… and the husband doesn’t answer.  Despite increasingly emphatic help from a prompter, he rises silently from the table, walks across the room… out of the set… out of the studio entirely, and on to the Thames Embankment, where he stops, and plays a one-handed phrase on an invisible piano.  And we’re off, into The Strange World of Gurney Slade.

(The theme tune struck me as maddeningly familiar.  Turns out it was re-used as background music on Vision On – which, though targeted at hearing-impaired children, used a lot of aural wallpaper to keep the rest of us from getting restive – and therefore got a lot more exposure than the show itself.)

It’s strange, certainly.  It’s also low-key, and sometimes maddeningly inconsequential.  Gurney Slade ambles along, musing in an overheard internal monologue.  He holds a perfectly civil conversation with a stranger, in nonsense words they’ve both made up on the spot.  He holds conversations in English with a dog, a litter bin, a stone.  He steals a newspaper, whose front-page headline reads WHAT’S THE MATTER, CAN’T YOU AFFORD TWOPENCE HALFPENNY?  Interior monologue and outside world become inextricably entangled.  He has a brief, wordless romance with a woman from an advertising poster, which leaves him with a vacuum cleaner he can’t get rid of…. And so on.  Having broken both the fourth wall and the conventions of typical television comedy, the show doesn’t seem to do anything but peer bemusedly at the pieces.

The same low-speed surrealist whimsy pervades the next two episodes.  Musing on love, Gurney invents a fantasy ideal date for himself and totally fails to pick her up, then accidentally breaks up a marriage and has to call in a fairy with a magic wand and an Italian suit to put things right.  Next, venturing into the countryside, he comes across the bloody resolution of a rural love triangle, is vamped by a cow with Fenella Fielding’s voice, and attempts to resign from the human race and become an ant.

By this time, bemused viewers were turning over to the BBC in droves, and the ITV schedulers were gradually shifting the show’s time slot from “prime time” to “after everyone is dead”.  A show as introspective as this one couldn’t help but be aware of its own failings, so the next episode has Gurney Slade on trial for his life, accused of not being funny enough.  To win his case, he must get Eleanor of Aquitaine to laugh at a counter-sunk screw….  It’s still weird and low-key and whimsical, examining social attitudes as well as its own conception of comedy, but it’s got something approaching a plot, now, and I think that’s an improvement.

So has the next episode, in which Gurney is telling tales to children, about the wonderful land of imagination, “Gurneyland”, which is inside his mind.  It sounds so wonderful, the children all want to move there.  So they do.  And they invite their families and friends.  Gurney has to venture into his own mind to try and persuade them to leave – in which he is aided by his evil self, who has an immoral (but effective) suggestion: go and see a pornographic French film, which will drive everything else out of his mind.  Returning to the real world, Gurney is accosted by a policeman, who is investigating the mysterious vanishing of a hundred and fifty people.  Nothing to do with him, Gurney assures the man; he’s off to see a French film….

The final episode – as we might, by now, expect – knows it’s the final episode.  Gurney is hanging around a deserted theatre, waiting to be picked up.  A faceless figure in a control room somewhere is monitoring him, and decides to liven up the proceedings by bringing back a slew of characters from earlier episodes.  How will these imperfectly realized walk-on parts cope with the real world?  What are Gurney’s responsibilities to them, as their creator (or, at least, their creator’s mouthpiece)?  Can he find work for them all in other stories before he’s taken away?

And finally, he is taken away – in a scene that, frankly, verges on the horrific.  The unseen figure who’s been watching Gurney arrives at the theatre, and it’s Anthony Newley himself.  As Gurney pleads for more life, the camera cuts between Newley-as-Gurney and Newley-as-himself… and with each cut, Gurney becomes more grotesque, gaining wild hair, exaggerated makeup, larger and more ill-fitting clothes, facial prosthetics… until, at last, he is reduced to nothing more than a ventriloquist’s dummy, which Newley picks up and carries away.  Gurney Slade has become nothing more than a crude puppet designed to deliver someone else’s voice.  Except… isn’t that all he ever was, anyway?

So that was the last of Gurney Slade, and of The Strange World of Gurney Slade.  Anthony Newley moved on to other projects, among them the peculiar movie Can Hieronymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, which addressed similar themes and *ahem* also did not have a universally positive critical reception.

So what are we to make of this one?  I’m tempted to say the correct answer is “whatever you like”, since the show spends most of its time examining itself and coming up with questions, but no answers.  It’s certainly possible to see it as a failed comedy, or as a pretentious Sixties vanity project… but I can’t dismiss it quite so easily.  The questions it asks are deep and penetrating – what is comedy?  What is the nature of fiction?  Does it have a purpose, and if so, what is it?  What’s the relationship between ourselves and the real world, between ourselves and the world of our imaginations?  These might be too deep questions for a half-hour comedy show… but, well, one can’t exactly blame Gurney Slade for failing to come up with succinct answers.

I think there are some problems with it, mind – not all of which are actually the show’s own fault: true, it looks dated and stagy today, but it’s technically competent by the standards of 1960 (when TV was, well, not in its infancy, but certainly no more than adolescent as a medium).  It’s afflicted by the chronically low budgets of the time, meaning (for example) that the psychedelic landscape inside Gurney’s mind (in episode 5) is represented by a control console and a row of painted flats pretending to be doors into other mental states.  (I suspect, given all the location filming, that Gurney Slade might have had a significantly higher budget than other shows of the time, but that really isn’t saying much – when the floor manager, in that opening sequence, tries to tempt Gurney back onto the set with the lure of “We bought an egg!”, that tells you all you need to know about the production budgets of the time.)

Some of its problems are its own fault, though.  The slow, dreamy pace and inconsequential dialogue are, explicitly, a choice made by the production team; there is plenty of room, within the show’s concept, for quick-fire gags and high absurdity, and they made a deliberate decision not to go down that route.  Also, in my opinion, there’s a central problem with mis-casting.  OK, the whole thing was Newley’s idea and he wanted to be central in it, but…. Gurney Slade, as he was presented, is kind of a wistful outsider, commentating on the banalities of life.  And Anthony Newley, while he might not be widely remembered these days, was a big star at the time – actor, pop singer, playboy, on his second wife at the time (he would go on to marry Joan Collins – his third wife, her second husband), he was many things… but “wistful outsider” wasn’t one of them.  His saturnine good looks,  athletic build, and confident carriage would make him, say, a great James Bond, but he looks notably out of place as Gurney Slade.  (Who would I pick for the role?  From the available talent of the time… Dudley Moore might have been a good choice; possibly Michael Palin or Tim Brooke-Taylor; conceivably Ronnie Barker, though he might be too solid and authoritative to look the part.)

So.  Unfunny comedy, or bold experiment in meta-textuality?  Possibly, both; equally possibly, neither.  The Strange World of Gurney Slade always feels as though it is striving for something, but never quite lets you know what it is.  Perhaps the show doesn’t know, itself, what it’s trying to be.  It feels as though it has some fundamental purpose, some higher calling, but never knows what that thing might be.  Kind of like life in general, really.  Maybe it is a success, after all.