Jack Rosenthal 9781847794499

Table of contents :
Front matter
Dedication
Contents
General editors’ preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The beginnings
Little England
Men at work
Love stories
Structure and plot
Television satire in 1976 and 2005
Versions of autobiography
Anglo-Jewish plays
Appendix: list of television programmes
Select bibliography
Index

Citation preview

THE TELEVISION

SERIES

Jack Rosenthal

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THE TELEVISION

SERIES series editors sarah cardwell jonathan bignell already published

Alan Bennett  kara mckechnie Alan Clarke  dave rolinson Andrew Davies  sarah cardwell Tony Garnett  stephen lacy Trevor Griffiths  john tulloch Troy Kennedy Martin  lez cooke Terry Nation  jonathan bignell and andrew o’day Jimmy Perry and David Croft  simon morgan-russell Lynda La Plante  julia hallam

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sue vice

Jack Rosenthal

Manchester University Press manchester and new york distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Sue Vice 2009 The right of Sue Vice to be identified as the author of this work has been ­asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester m13 9nr, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada v6t 1z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for isbn 978 0 7190 7704 3 hardback First published 2009 18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11  10  09     10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Typeset in Scala with Meta display by Koinonia, Manchester Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn

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I dedicate this book to my parents, Elizabeth and Anthony Vice

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Contents



general editors’ preface acknowledgements



Introduction

page ix xi 1

1 The beginnings Coronation Street (1961–69)

14

2 Little England Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar (1968) Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. (1972) There’ll Almost Always be an England (1974) Mr Ellis Versus the People (1974)

33

3 Men at work The Dustbinmen (1969–70) The Knowledge (1979) London’s Burning (1986)

58

4 Love stories The Lovers (1970) Sadie, It’s Cold Outside (1975) Wide-Eyed and Legless (1993)

84

5 Structure and plot Spend, Spend, Spend (1977) The Chain (1984) Moving Story (1994) Bag Lady (1989)

112

6 Television satire in 1976 and 2005 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill

134

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viii  Contents 7 Versions of autobiography P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang (1982) Bye, Bye, Baby (1992) Eskimo Day (1996) Cold Enough for Snow (1997)

147

8 Anglo-Jewish plays The Evacuees (1975) Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976)

165



189 193 197

appendix: list of television programmes select bibliography index

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General editors’ preface

Television is part of our everyday experience, and is one of the most significant aspects of our cultural lives today. Yet its practitioners and its artistic and cultural achievements remain relatively unacknowledged. The books in this series aim to remedy this by addressing the work of major tele­vision writers and creators. Each volume provides an authoritative and accessible guide to a particular practitioner’s body of work, and assesses his or her contribution to television over the years. Many of the volumes draw on original sources, such as specially conducted interviews and archive material, and all of them list relevant bibliographic sources and further reading and viewing. The author of each book makes a case for the importance of the work considered therein, and the series includes books on neglected or overlooked practitioners alongside well-known ones. In comparison with some related disciplines, Television Studies scholarship is still relatively young, and the series aims to contribute to establishing the subject as a vigorous and evolving field. This series provides resources for critical thinking about television. While maintaining a clear focus on the writers, on the creators and on the programmes themselves, the books in this series also take account of key critical concepts and theories in Television Studies. Each book is written from a particular critical or theoretical perspective, with reference to pertinent issues, and the approaches included in the series are varied and sometimes dissenting. Each author explicitly outlines the reasons for his or her particular focus, methodology or perspective. Readers are invited to think critically about the subject matter and approach covered in each book. Although the series is addressed primarily to students and scholars of television, the books will also appeal to the many people who are interested in how television programmes have been commissioned, made and enjoyed. Since television has been so much a part of personal and public life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we hope that the series will engage with, and sometimes challenge, a broad and diverse readership. Sarah Cardwell Jonathan Bignell

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following for all kinds of help in completing this book: Lawrence Aspden, Amanda Bernstein, Jeffrey Bernstein, Jonathan Bignell, Don Black, Rosemary Cameron, Sarah Cardwell, Bryan Cheyette, Graham Falconer, Rachel Falconer, Michael Frayn, Alex George, John Haffenden, Trish Hayes and the staff at the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham, Deborah Hill, Jacky Hodgson, Daniel Isaacson, Alison Kelly, Edward Knighton, Martin Lewis, Jo Lloyd, Wayne Lovell of Fremantle Media, Jonathan Lynn, Pete Lyons, Agnes McAuley, Jane Mason, Sue Owen, Andrew Roach, John Roach, Neil Roberts, Veronica Roberts, Jonathan Shepard, Nicola Shepard, Irene Shubik and Paul Steinberg. Thanks are also due to Maureen Lipman for patiently answering my questions and granting permission to quote from the Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection; to Matthew Frost and all the staff at MUP; to John Vice, Harriet Coles, Flossie, Luke and Nell, Pip Vice, John Slaytor, Millie and Jake, and my parents, to whom I dedicate this book. I could not have completed this project without study leave from the University of Sheffield and a Matching Study Leave Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

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Introduction

Jack Rosenthal once claimed that writing ‘starts with the realisation that eccentric means absolutely normal, that comedy comes from pain, and that every day is drama’.1 His plays were fêted during his lifetime and after his death for their gentle comedy,2 and taken to typify the kind of ‘golden age’ social comedy that is no longer in vogue with television networks. Yet, as his own statement suggests, Rosenthal did not shy away from less ‘gentle’ themes, including self-delusion, loneliness, misunderstanding, regret, cruelty and death. His long career as a prizewinning television playwright began with a Coronation Street script, the first of 129, for an episode broadcast in March 1961, and carried on until the early years of the present millennium. Rosenthal’s plays attracted directors such as Alan Parker, Mike Newell, Michael Apted – who was responsible for five plays, not counting several of Rosenthal’s Coronation Street episodes – and Jack Gold. The actors who appeared in his work are a roll-call of fifty years of British talent, ranging from Alec Guinness to Ron Moody, Richard Griffiths to Ben Whishaw, Sheila Hancock to Connie Booth, Yootha Joyce to Amanda Holden. The careers of sitcom stars Paula Wilcox and Richard Beckinsale began in Rosenthal’s The Lovers, while Nigel Hawthorne’s flourished after The Knowledge; and Rosenthal claimed that some of his best work was written expressly for his wife, the actor Maureen Lipman. Rosenthal was not simply the stayat-home dramatist husband of a well-known thespian wife, as popular mythology often has it, but was notorious for attending the shoots of all his plays to keep a close eye on the transformation of script to scene.3 Rosenthal was delighted to be commissioned in 1961 to write for Coronation Street, a soap opera set in a milieu he knew well: a tightly knit northern working-class community, rife with feuds and neighbourliness in equal measure, whose occupants were never short of pithy put-downs. Almost everything for which Rosenthal’s writing became famous stems from Coronation Street, including his interest in the

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2  Jack Rosenthal underprivileged and the underdog and their salty, everyday discourse, and in Englishness – his plays were never a resounding transatlantic success – but also in Jewishness. Coronation Street is not well known for its Jewish characters, but in an episode from 1967 about Elsie Tanner’s wedding Stan Ogden asks the photographer if the photographs come out of his Japanese camera right to left, only to be told, ‘No, pal, those are Jewish cameras.’ Rosenthal was the producer rather than the writer for these episodes, but it seems more than likely that the dialogue here was the result of collaboration between Rosenthal and the writer, his long-standing friend and sometime landlord, Geoffrey Lancashire.4 Rosenthal’s career paralleled and was integral to a formative period in the history of British television drama. Rosenthal worked for the independent television company Granada before he became a freelance writer in 1962. This was the year of the Pilkington Committee Report. This Report roundly criticised the overly populist priorities of ITV and paved the way for the 1964 Television Act which awarded the third new channel to the BBC. Yet ITV’s output in the 1960s featured important drama strands, including series such as The Prisoner (1967–68) and The Avengers (1961–69), as well as Coronation Street itself. Rosenthal also wrote for other commercial companies including ABC and LWT, and his later work appeared on Channel Four, which was established in 1982, and a Sky TV channel. Rosenthal’s first full-length BBC script, the Play for Today And for My Next Trick, was broadcast in 1972, and his subsequent writing is characterised by jokes about the rivalry between state and commercial networks. Rosenthal’s work on Coronation Street and his contact with its ensemble of writers established many of the concerns and dramatic habits of his later work. He always expressed a distaste for serial drama,5 and this is borne out by the format of his writing for the soap opera. Rosenthal’s episodes are usually self-contained and comic, pointing towards the priorities of his future work in the genres of situation comedy and the single play. In the 1980s, although Rosenthal wrote the pilot, he declined to be involved in what turned out to be the very successful series London’s Burning (ITV 1988–2002). Even the sitcoms that Rosenthal devised, such as The Dustbinmen (1969) and The Lovers (1970) – for which he also acted as producer – were handed over to other writers after their initial series. Jack Rosenthal was born in 1931 in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, the second son of Sam and Leah (née Miller). His parents were workingclass and Jewish, elements of his background which characterised all his work. Like Louis Miller (Ray Mort) in 1975’s The Evacuees and several of the characters in Coronation Street in the 1960s, Rosenthal’s parents worked in the local raincoat factory where Sam was a ‘schmeerer’,

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Introduction  3 responsible for sealing the seams of rubber coats with glue using his fingers,6 Leah a machinist. Rosenthal’s play The Evacuees (1975) relates the experience of war-time evacuation undergone by the Rosenthal children, David and Jack. They were placed with a non-Jewish family whose provision of non-kosher food caused the boys consternation, and whose old-fashioned notions of child-rearing prompted Leah Rosenthal to take her offspring straight back to Manchester, despite its status as a target for German bombs. When the boys were evacuated a second time, to Colne in Lancashire, their mother accompanied them. Rosenthal went to university at Sheffield, where he studied English Language and Literature and met the prototype of a certain kind of female character in his plays, the Catholic Wendy. According to his own accounts and to the dramatised versions – she appears as Phoebe in Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar (1968) and as Penny in Bye, Bye, Baby (1992) – Wendy not only eschewed sexual love on religious grounds, but instilled in her boyfriend a rather un-Jewish guilty conscience on the same topic. Academically, Rosenthal was profoundly influenced at university by his tutors, including the Shakespearean scholars L.C. Knights and John Danby. In Jack the Lad (2004), the biographical television programme broadcast in the BBC’s Timeshift series, Rosenthal describes Danby’s lecture on the fundamental structure of all drama consisting of a ‘protagonist trying to score a goal and an antagonist trying to stop him. That’s drama.’ This structure underlies many of Rosenthal’s later works, but most paradigmatically his 1972 play about an amateur football match, Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. This opens with an almost literal version of Danby’s notion: mr armistead: Good morning. A few pearls of wisdom from one who knows. What we’re now about to witness is called a football match – not the beginning of World War III, not the destruction of the human race – a football match. In it, each of the teams will attempt to score more goals than the other ... albion captain (glaring at Parker Street captain): What are you looking at? parker street captain (glaring back): Not much.

However, even Danby’s notion is subject to comic irony as it is the referee who is the protagonist, both team captains his antagonists. At Sheffield, Rosenthal wrote his undergraduate dissertation on James Joyce, demonstrating a telling interest in wordplay and tragi-comic domesticity. Rosenthal also wrote a sports column for the student newspaper, Darts, thereby trying out contrasting literary styles.7 One of Rosenthal’s first forays into television writing was an adaptation of Joyce’s play Exiles, which was promptly rejected by the BBC.8 On his Department of

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4  Jack Rosenthal English Literature record card for 1951–52 his tutor writes, ‘Thorough. Diligent. His manner may improve’, while a second tutor the following year has a prescient observation: ‘His written work has been first class. He goes into subjects deeply but hasn’t so wide a range as some other students at the same stage.’9 Rosenthal gained a 2.1 degree in 1953 – his chagrin at narrowly missing a First is presented in fictional form in Bye, Bye, Baby (1992), where it is the protagonist Leo Wiseman’s rival for Penny who has gained what he calls a ‘premier’. Although the only one of his plays to be set partly in Sheffield is Wide-Eyed and Legless (1993), which is based on an anterior source, Rosenthal’s fondness for his alma mater is shown by his choosing Sheffield University Library to be the home for his extensive archive, which was acquired by Special Collections in 2002. Rosenthal gained an honorary degree from the University and, as the Maisie Glass Visiting Professor in Drama in 2001–2, conducted master-classes with students. After gaining his degree Rosenthal undertook National Service in the Navy as a Russian translator, an experience he fictionalised in Bye, Bye, Baby. On his return to Manchester, Rosenthal was appointed to a job at Granada in 1955 as a graduate trainee – turning down what appeared to be an equally attractive job with a men’s shirt manufacturer – and was invited by Tony Warren to submit a script for the new soap opera Coronation Street. The formative nature of this experience is shown by the fact that even the dialogue quoted above from Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. is a development of an exchange which takes place in Rosenthal’s first-ever episode of Coronation Street, in Snape’s Café between the waitress Doreen Lostock (Angela Crow) and a rowdy teddy-boy: teddy-boy: What are you starin’ at? doreen: Not much.

The young working woman’s reflex response is elaborated out of its gendered context in Coronation Street to that in Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. where it conveys both Mr Armistead’s (David Swift) lack of authority, despite his hectoring words, and the animosity of a ‘friendly’ match.10 The exchange appears again in Spend, Spend, Spend, where it is part of Vivian’s (Susan Littler) ploy to gain her future husband Keith’s (John Duttine) attention, its sexual inflection restored. These are the first words exchanged by the couple, in tones of feigned brusqueness: keith: What are you gawping at? vivian: Not much. keith: Do you want a photograph or summat? vivian: You’d bust the camera.

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Introduction  5 While writing as part of the Coronation Street stable of regular writers during the 1960s, Rosenthal also contributed to the satirical BBC series That Was the Week That Was (1962–63)11 and co-wrote with Harry Driver pilot plays for potential BBC sitcoms which were not developed, on such subjects as cleaning-ladies (The Chars, 1963) and a door-to-door salesman (On the Knocker, 1963). Rosenthal moved on at the end of the decade to his first 90-minute play, There’s a Hole in Your Dustbin, Delilah (ITV Playhouse, 1968), the pilot for the hugely popular sitcom The Dustbinmen. There followed what Rosenthal himself referred to as his ‘writing storm’ of the 1970s.12 This is also the decade in which there is the closest fit between Rosenthal’s dramatic preferences and the priorities of televisual commissioning. As well as continuing to devise sitcoms for ITV, such as The Lovers and its midlife counterpart, Sadie, It’s Cold Outside (1975), Rosenthal wrote a trio of award-winning Plays for Today for the BBC: The Evacuees (1975), Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976) and Spend, Spend, Spend (1977). Each won a BAFTA. The playwright David Hare has argued that the single television play, showcased in strands like BBC’s The Wednesday Play (1964–70) and Play for Today (1970–84), and ITV’s Armchair Theatre (1956–74), was ‘the most important new indigenous [British] art form of the twentieth century’.13 Hare had in mind such figures as Dennis Potter and Alan Bleasdale, who, like Rosenthal, were playwrights known for work almost exclusively in a televisual medium. Spend, Spend, Spend was the first of several plays that Rosenthal adapted from other sources, in this case Vivian Nicholson’s autobiography of the same title, while others include Wide-Eyed and Legless, adapted from Deric Longden’s memoirs; the award-winning feature film The Lucky Star (Max Fischer 1980), set during the Holocaust years; and a new version of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim for ITV (Robin Shepperd 2003). The Evacuees and Bar Mitzvah Boy are, I would argue, central works in the canon of British-Jewish writing. The television critic Mark Lawson wrote of Rosenthal in a posthumous appreciation that Bar Mitzvah Boy ‘is among the few British Jewish comedies to match the work of Woody Allen and Neil Simon’.14 By this I take him to mean that the humour of Rosenthal’s Jewish plays depends upon a blend of British-Jewishness equivalent to the cultural hybridity of the American writers’ work. In this respect Rosenthal’s Anglo-Jewish plays are unique, and do not share such practices as the efforts at ‘translation’ made, for instance, in the dialogue and notes to the published script of Mike Leigh’s 2005 play about British-Jewish life, Two Thousand Years.15 In 1973 Rosenthal married Maureen Lipman and their relocation from Manchester to London led to a focus on working life in the capital

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6  Jack Rosenthal in The Knowledge (1979) and The Chain (1984), in place of earlier plays’ northern settings such as Colne (Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar), Salford (The Dustbinmen) and Altrincham (The Lovers). Many of Rosenthal’s best-known plays appeared in the 1980s, but his work during the decade shows the effects of Thatcherism – Margaret Thatcher was prime minister from 1979 to 1990 and the Conservatives remained in office until 1997. These effects are perceptible in the dialogue and ethos of Rosenthal’s plays of the time, both of which react against the political climate. The Chain is about the social and economic gulf between rich and poor, comically symbolised by the ‘great chain’ of the British class structure, while Bag Lady is a comic fable about a homeless woman whose fruitless quest is to find the prime minister. Although Rosenthal did not write overtly ‘anti-consensual drama’,16 like Alan Bleasdale’s The Boys from the Blackstuff (BBC2 1982) which was intended to record the specific conditions of recession and unemployment in Liverpool, all his plays make clear their comically sceptical view of contemporary politics. It is no coincidence that the ‘golden age’ of British television drama is often taken to have ended – if ended it has – in 1987, at the height of the Thatcher era.17 The deregulation and private enterprise espoused by the Conservative government was directed at television in a White Paper of 1988, made clear in its title: ‘Broadcasting in the 1990s: Competition, Choice and Quality’. This was followed by the 1990 Broadcasting Act which prepared for an ‘auction’ of ITV franchises based solely on the size of the companies’ bids.18 Rosenthal’s second-last play, completed in 2003 and broadcast posthumously in 2005, was an updated version of his 1976 television satire Ready When You Are, Mr McGill. The differences between the two versions embody this legacy of privileging ‘costeffectiveness and private enterprise over creativity and public service’,19 consumers and programme controllers over writers and producers. In the 1990s, Rosenthal’s plays became less reliant on comedy and more conventionally dramatic. Jonathan Bignell writes in relation to the BBC situation comedy The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976–79) of the ‘non-realist tradition of satire and social comedy in British television, which makes use of parody, the grotesque, and the absurd’,20 and which characterised a significant strand of Rosenthal’s work in the 1960s and 1970s. Even in, for instance, Rosenthal’s coming-of-age plays Bar Mitzvah Boy and 1982’s P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang, the dominant mode is comedy. Bye, Bye, Baby, in contrast, is comic only incidentally. The same is true of Rosenthal’s pair of empty-nester plays, Eskimo Day (1996) and Cold Enough for Snow (1997), the composition of which was inspired by the departure of his children Amy and Adam for university. Some critics detected a mawkish note in these two plays.

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Introduction  7 John Preston in the Sunday Telegraph declared of Cold Enough for Snow, ‘Seldom have I seen anything so anodyne’ and lamented the play’s ‘excruciating attempts at soul-searching’.21 Although other critics were much more complimentary about the play, it is true that Cold Enough for Snow employs emotional rather than comic exaggeration. The representation of class in Rosenthal’s work changes over time, following shifts in media expectations and, perhaps, his professional success and affluence. By the time of Cold Enough for Snow, we see Hugh Lloyd (Tom Wilkinson) trying to give the cleaner, Carmella, a message for his wife. Dressed for a business trip and clutching a suitcase, Hugh calls out as he comes down the stairs: ‘Maria! Gretta!’, and then as he enters the living-room where Carmella is cleaning: ‘Um … Ursula … Yvonne ….’ In this instance, humour arises from Hugh’s inability, as a wealthy Cheltenham-based professional working in ‘financial services’, to distinguish between the many women of varied nationalities who have cleaned his house. It relies upon the viewer’s knowledge of late-twentieth-century patterns of casual labour, as well as, in dramatic terms, conveying Hugh’s guilty conscience – he is flustered not because he is embarking on an affair, as the audience is briefly led to believe, but because he is going to Amsterdam to check up on his daughter Pippa. A great distance has been travelled between this and one of the episodes of The Dustbinmen in which Heavy Breathing (Trevor Bannister) meets an old school friend, Terry Yoxall (William Maxwell), whose social escalation has been enabled by his success as a salesman of plastic ducks. Yoxall now cocks his little finger when he drinks tea, has suppressed his Lancashire accent, and asks Heavy Breathing if he ‘gets to the Conservative club much’. Class-based humour in Rosenthal’s work is always a matter of small, detailed signifiers – indeed, Chris Dunkley compares Rosenthal’s miniaturist scope to that of Jane Austen’s small piece of ivory22 – and the parodic simplicity of The Dustbinmen has been replaced in Cold Enough for Snow by a middle-class self-consciousness. Throughout his career, Rosenthal’s writing is characterised by the same kinds of comic verbal trope. This is clear, for example, at the level of stage direction, in both his published and unpublished scripts, in which characters perform their actions with hyperbolic expressiveness. They ‘beam’ in delight or are ‘niggled’ by irritations, ‘peer’ for a better view and ‘boggle’ in surprise, and when someone else speaks they may answer ‘blankly’ or respond despite being ‘not interested’. Dialogue may take place without either party listening to the other, as in the following from the 1976 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill, where the extra Mr McGill tells the milkman he is to star in a television play:

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8  Jack Rosenthal milkman: Has it got a beginning, a middle and an end? mr mcgill: I speak in this one. milkman: Never bloody do have, do they?

The habit of not listening is often expanded into the art of the fully fledged non-sequitur, existing, as in this instance from London’s Burning, to demonstrate a wilfully limited self-concern. As a fire rages, bystanders are only concerned with the fact that they know the person who reported it: man’s wife: Gordon’s our Sheila’s eldest. He once went to Toronto, but he couldn’t settle … man: Do we claim a reward or anything for that?

Indeed, there is a deaf wedding-guest in Polly Put the Kettle On (1974) who exists purely as a motivation for surreal non-sequiturs: polly (shouting): Alright, Mrs Edwards? mrs edwards (shouting): Mick Jagger. polly (shouting): Your hair’s nice. mrs edwards (shouting): In a bit. They haven’t had the Gay Gordons yet, have they?

Like Ricky Gervais, whose claim to find in self-delusion the essence of comedy will not surprise viewers of The Office (BBC2 2001–3) or Extras (BBC2 2005–6), Rosenthal’s characters give free rein to this trait, as typified by the reply on the part of the elderly Mr McGill (Tom Courtenay) in the 2005 version, to a question about who he played in Shakespeare in Love: No one, as such. I think they thought I was too young. (beat) You know, reading between the lines.

Rosenthal’s characters are frequently ‘thrown’ or ‘puzzled’ by what they hear; yet they are described as talking ‘reasonably’ when their utterances are patently not so. This is true in the case of Manchester City fan Winston (Jerry Haberfield) in The Dustbinmen hoping that he may meet his hero the Manchester City midfielder Colin Bell, whose aunt’s house is on one of the lads’ dustbin runs: winston (reasonably): Colin might be going for his tea. There might be potato peelings in that bin that’s come off the spuds that made Colin’s chips.

Rosenthal clearly relished the linguistic playfulness of adolescent boys, and develops distinctive habits of this kind for the boys in The Evacuees, Alan Duckworth in P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang, Eliot Green in Bar Mitzvah Boy and Neil in Eskimo Day. While the workmen listening to

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Introduction  9 Alan talk say they blame ‘Dicky Valentine and Lita Rosa’, in Eskimo Day the culprit identified by Neil’s father is Blackadder (BBC 1 1983–89), as if the influence of popular culture underlies all argots. At the opposite end of the spectrum of such linguistic playfulness is the mileage Rosenthal’s characters extract from the single word ‘Pardon?’, which can convey astonishment, outrage, dissent, or blank incomprehension, while the following exchange from The Chain between a young married couple moving to their first home relies almost entirely upon interrogatives: carrie: We can start a family and that now. keith: What? carrie: What? keith: Can what? carrie: Start a family. keith (Incredulously): Kids?? carrie: What? … keith: We’re buying a bloody twenty-nine-and-a-half grand flat! carrie: Yeah, well, that’s why, innit? keith: Why what?

Rosenthal’s characters’ quests for a cup of tea may reach plot-driving proportions (in the case of Bamber in The Chain and Rabbi Sherman in Bar Mitzvah Boy), while certain kinds of food are both historically and socially exact. As class signifiers, the details of food are comic by their very specificity and because they frequently embody a wish for betterment. ‘Boeuf bourguignon’, that aspirational dish of the 1970s, features unexpectedly and is mispronounced in both The Chain and Moving Story (ITV 1994). The mushroom vol-au-vents which delight Rita Green (Maria Charles) in Bar Mitzvah Boy as part of the dinnerdance menu cause a ‘pained’ reaction in Mr Ellis (Ron Moody), in Mr Ellis Versus the People (1974), when he hears they are to be served at the Lord Mayor’s post-election drinks party. Rita’s uncritical lower-middleclass aspiration, against which her son Eliot rebels, contrasts with Mr Ellis’s sardonic disenchantment. Rosenthal’s work is characterised by visual and structural as well as linguistic humour. The beefy milkman in Eskimo Day incongruously wears a football shirt bearing the legend ‘Alan Shearer’, after the svelte England striker; while Beryl in The Lovers claims to be ‘drinking in the glories of the English countryside’ on a train journey when the back-projected view out of the window is one of the chimney-stacks and factories of Lancashire industry. Rosenthal’s published and unpublished scripts give directions for particular kinds of shot construction and editing, including meaningful cuts, juxta­ positions and dissolves. For instance, in both versions of Ready When

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10  Jack Rosenthal You Are, Mr McGill comedy arises from the visual corroboration of bystanders’ comments about the director of a television film: second woman: See that half-dead one? He’s in charge. first woman: Fancies himself, does he? second woman: Oh, he thinks he’s God. phil (calling to the sparks): OK, let there be light! (The sparks switch on.)

Despite his many industry awards and nominations, Rosenthal’s archive contains several examples of plays that were never televised or filmed. These are an eclectic group and include The Best, a play about the troubled career of footballer George Best which is structured, like Spend, Spend, Spend, so that past and present are ironically juxtaposed; Maiden, based on the true story of the Whitbread Round the World Race of 1989–90 in which the eponymous yacht was captained by Tracey Edwards with an all-female crew; and Black and White, about the problematic visit to the Soviet Union of American chess grandmaster Sam Hoffman and his Russian wife Ludmilla.23 Although his work is held in high critical esteem and public affection, and he enjoyed occasional forays into Hollywood – he co-scripted Barbra Streisand’s 1983 film Yentl – Rosenthal has never been as well known as his contemporaries Dennis Potter, Alan Bennett or Alan Bleasdale. Mark Lawson ascribes this to Rosenthal’s professional self-effacement, the fact that he was ‘neither a public controversialist like Dennis Potter nor an actor-writer like Alan Bennett’, and that generically Rosenthal’s plays were not experimental or surreal but ‘realist’.24 While it is true that Rosenthal’s plays have a comic focus on ordinary working life, their tenor is more mixed than this suggests. Much of Rosenthal’s writing can be described as ‘everyday surrealism’, particularly that for such televisual genres as sitcoms where domesticity is rendered at a high pitch of comedy. For instance, in The Chain we hear the following exchange: bamber: Vico. Giambattista Vico. nick: Irishman, is he?

In The Knowledge, trainee cabby Gordon laments to examiner Mr Burgess about the toll taken on his personal life: ‘I used to be a smart fella. Birds used to give me the eye in Selfridges’; while in The Lovers Mrs Battersby makes an apparently telling remark, interrupting an argument between courting couple Geoffrey and Beryl, her daughter: ‘I know what you two were doing, and neither of you can win’, only to be followed by, ‘when you play me at Scrabble’. Such ‘everyday surrealism’ takes the form of comically precise detail which undermines, overwhelms, or contradicts the speaker’s utterance and confounds audience expectation.

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Introduction  11 As I argue in Chapter 1, Rosenthal’s stylistic influences include Tony Warren and other contemporaries, such as Vince Powell, Peter Eckersley and Geoffrey Lancashire, in the Coronation Street writing team of the 1960s.25 Rosenthal’s trademark everyday surrealism emerges partly from this source, but it is also, less predictably, indebted to the Modernist style of Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Some have also detected a Pinteresque interest in Rosenthal’s use of the rhythms and hidden depths of ordinary speech.26 Such influences were always, however, integrated into Rosenthal’s particular brand of comedy in contrast to the experimentalism of writers such as Dennis Potter or David Mercer.27 Other sources are quoted more overtly and knowingly. While Annie Walker (Doris Speed) in Coronation Street and Heavy Breathing in The Dustbinmen cite Keats’ Endymion in rapt tones, Phil (Jack ­Shepherd) in Ready When You Are, Mr McGill ‘wearily’ quotes Byron’s – and, in A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood 1935), Groucho Marx’s – ‘Let joy be unconfined’ at the first of thirteen takes. In turn, Rosenthal’s influence is ­perceptible in a variety of recent film and television productions. The Royle Family (BBC 1998–2000) concerns a family clustered around a television whose screen we do not see, a trope which symbolised existential inertia in Rosenthal’s Sadie, It’s Cold Outside a quarter of a century earlier. In Alan Bennett’s 2004 play The History Boys, History teacher Mr Irwin tries to encourage a class of Oxbridge candidates to think for themselves, citing his own instructive experience at Oxford. While the film critic Peter Bradshaw contrasted the film version of The History Boys (Nicholas Hytner 2006) with what he saw as Rosenthal’s superior P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang,28 it is paterfamilias Hugh Lloyd in Eskimo Day who is the true precursor to Bennett’s Irwin: like the latter’s at Oxford, Hugh Lloyd’s student days at Cambridge are a complete fabrication. In Ricky Gervais’ Extras, Daniel Radcliffe plays himself as a callow youth trying indiscriminately to seduce any female on the set, just as Bruno (Ben Whishaw) had done in the 2005 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill, also all about an extra. Finally, in Paul Weiland’s 2006 film Sixty-Six, concerning a bar mitzvah that clashes with the 1966 World Cup, the casting of Maria Charles as bar mitzvah guest Mrs Glitzman constitutes a metafictional glance backwards at the film’s thirty-year-old precursor Bar Mitzvah Boy, in which she played the formidable mother.

Notes 1 Quoted in the Daily Telegraph obituary of Jack Rosenthal, 31 May 2004. 2 See for instance Philip Purser’s obituary of Jack Rosenthal in the Guardian 31 May 2004.

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12  Jack Rosenthal 3 The files concerning Rosenthal at the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham contain many invoices for his presence at shoots, ‘in an advisory capacity’ (see for instance the £170 he was paid for attending the filming of Bar Mitzvah Boy, WAC R/cont 21). 4 Maureen Lipman, personal communication, 2.9.07. 5 Rosenthal describes the effect of ‘writing for series and serials’ as ‘running on the spot’, quoted in the preface to Another Sunday and Sweet F.A., in The Television Dramatists, selected and introduced by Robert Muller, London: Paul Elek 1973, p. 244. 6 Jack Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal: A Life in Six Acts, London: Robson Books 2005, p. 129. 7 Almost any of the mellifluous and even orotund observations in Rosenthal’s dissertation suggest that it, like his plays in later life, was the product of an assumed and stylised literary voice; for instance, Rosenthal writes of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘The predominant cold realism of the book is, however, liberally impregnated with the warmth of Stephen’s perspicacity in which intellectual detachment and emotionalism combine in presenting Joyce’s dilemma; and the novel, apart from its enunciation of Joyce’s aesthetic and artistic credos, and elucidation of his position, is effective as an powerful literature in its own right’ (Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, ‘A Study in the Development of James Joyce’, MS 286, 2/5/6 1953, p. 63). 8 ‘Introduction: In conversation with Jack Rosenthal’, in Jack Rosenthal, P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang and Other TV Plays, ed. Alison Leake, London: Longman 1984, p. vii. 9 Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, 2/16/1. 10 Although Rosenthal describes his ‘horror’ at finding the same words of dialogue in his plays on re-reading them (‘Introduction: In conversation with Jack Rosenthal’, p. vi), this is a significant part of his creative method. For instance, many of the lines in Bar Mitzvah Boy had already appeared elsewhere and it is only their context in the play that makes them sound typical of Jewish discourse. 11 The BBC Written Archives Centre holdings reveal that Rosenthal contributed short monologues to the series, on such topics as ‘Lord Hailsham in the North’, ‘Work’, and ‘Enoch Powell’ (WAC Rcont/19, ‘Copyright clumps 1963–9’). 12 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 203. 13 David Hare, ‘Theatre’s great malcontent’, the Guardian Review, 8 June 2002. 14 Mark Lawson, ‘Jack Rosenthal’, www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/cinema/features/rosenthal-lawson.shtml, visited 28.7.07. 15 In an interview, Mike Leigh described the cast’s use of Yiddish and Hebrew phrases as ‘esoteric aspects’ of Two Thousand Years ‘which clearly [do] not speak to everybody’ (‘Mike Leigh Comes Out’, interview with Golda Zafer Smith, Jewish Renaissance October 2005); while in the play’s Glossary appear such words as ‘meshuggah’ and ‘yarmulke’, similar to words uttered untranslated in Bar Mitzvah Boy (Mike Leigh, Two Thousand Years, London: Faber 2006). 16 The phrase is the editors’, Jonathan Bignell et al., eds, British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2000, p. 30. 17 George Brandt, in the introduction to his British Television Drama in the 1980s, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993, laments the end of an era (p. 17), while other commentators either celebrate forms apart from the single play (see Glen Creeber, Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen, London: BFI 2004) or argue that the ‘golden age’ was never a distinctive era – see Tony Garnett, ‘Contexts’, in Bignell et al., British Television Drama, p. 18, and Steve Barnett and Emily Seymour, ‘A Shrinking Iceberg Travelling South’: Charting Trends in British Television, London: Campaign for Quality Television 1999, p. 46 – this is despite

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Introduction  13 the authors’ argument that positive conditions for television writers are, as their title implies, melting away. 18 See Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History, London: BFI 2003, pp. 158–9. 19 Ibid., p. 160. 20 Bignell et al., British Television Drama, p. 88. 21 John Preston, ‘Everything there bar facial hair’, Sunday Telegraph 4 January 1998. 22 Chris Dunkley, television critic for the Financial Times, interviewed in Jack Rosenthal: The Voice of Television Drama, BBC 4 Timeshift 2004. 23 Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, BEST/1, 1986; MAID/1, 1991; BLAC/1 and 2, 1983. 24 Lawson, ‘Jack Rosenthal’. 25 Rosenthal wrote in a memoir of Eckersley that, ‘Even his vocabulary rubbed off’ on his colleagues, and concludes, ‘“A prince among men” was Peter’s favourite tribute. And that’s exactly what he was’ (Jack Rosenthal, ‘Peter Eckersley’, in John Finch, ed., Granada Television: The First Generation, Manchester: Manchester University Press 2003, pp. 161, 162). This phrase itself clearly ‘rubbed off’ on Rosenthal, as it is uttered ad nauseam by Amanda Holden’s ingratiating driver Henry in Ready When You Are, Mr McGill (2005). 26 Maureen Lipman, personal correspondence, 2.9.07. 27 See John Caughie’s description of Potter and Mercer’s interest in what he calls ‘the great modernist themes’ of ‘sexuality, the individual in history, the irrepressible unconscious, class and power, the role of the creative artist, god and godlessness’ (Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture, Oxford: Oxford Univesity Press 2000, p. 169). Even where Rosenthal’s work approaches most closely to these themes, for instance in the case of Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar, the emphasis is always primarily comic. 28 Peter Bradshaw, ‘The History Boys’, the Guardian 13 October 2006.

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The beginnings

1

Coronation Street (1961–69)

The television presenter Russell Harty once observed, ‘There was life before Coronation Street. But it didn’t add up to much’, while the Labour politician Roy Hattersley called the serial ‘a national institution which has won its way into the hearts of eighteen million viewers’,1 one of whom is famously the Queen. The late poet laureate John Betjeman likened Coronation Street to Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, and added, in reference to its broadcasting schedule, ‘Mondays and Wednesdays, I live for them. Thank God, half past seven and I shall be in paradise.’2 It was Jack Rosenthal’s great good fortune to be employed by Granada, as a graduate trainee working in research and promotions, at just the time the production company launched their groundbreaking serial. He had ‘the biggest, luckiest break a hopeful writer could have dreamt of’ when he was invited to write his first-ever script for Coronation Street.3 Rosenthal’s first foray into dramatic writing was episode 30 of this, the world’s longest-running continuous television serial, broadcast on 17 March 1961. The serial was innovative in its representation on the small screen of northern working-class life, and Rosenthal clearly relished the chance to add to Coronation Street’s sparky dialogue and the strong female roles of the 1960s.4 Yet Rosenthal’s first episode was not an unqualified success. When it was timed during a rehearsal at twenty-five minutes, the actor Jack Howarth, who played the curmudgeonly Albert Tatlock, complained that it was too long by twenty-fourand-a-half.5 However, the rather leaden dialogue of Rosenthal’s first episode – in Snape’s Café Christine Hardman (Christine Hargreaves) unaccountably lectures her boyfriend Joe Makinson (Brian Rawlinson) about his blackheads for several minutes too many – soon gave way to comic assurance of the kind we hear in episode 60. Ena Sharples (Violet Carson) harangues Leonard Swindley (Arthur Lowe) on the subject of Emily Nugent (Eileen Derbyshire) toiling like a ‘pit pony’ in his draper’s shop:

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The beginnings  15 ena: Miss Nugent here works wonders in that Black Hole of Calcutta. How a young woman in the flower of her youth can slave away all day up to her ears in babies’ rubber underpants I’ll never know … From dawn to dusk she’s dishing out needlework, camisoles and embroidered transfers. No wonder she looks like death warmed up; she’ll soon be a lovely memory … Iron tablets? By Jove, it wouldn’t keep you above the ground if you swallowed the Blackpool Tower!

Unlike Christine’s lecture to Joe, Ena’s is not only entertaining in its overloaded detail but also furthers the plot – she is scheming to have Doreen Lostock employed at Swindley’s shop. Although much has been written on the serial’s history,6 Rosenthal’s role in it has not been analysed. He was a member of the core team of Coronation Street writers between 1961 and 1969, while working on other material such as the short-lived comedy series The Bulldog Breed (Granada 1962). Rosenthal became a freelance writer in 1962, and spent a period in 1967 as the producer of Coronation Street, a role he was ‘reluctant’7 to take up in contrast to that of writer. It was the experience Rosenthal gained from the 129 scripts he wrote for the soap opera8 over eight years that formed his later dramatic style, and he was profoundly influenced by the work of other Coronation Street regulars, in particular that of its creator, Tony Warren. Several of the early episodes of Coronation Street written by Rosenthal are of a self-contained and comic kind, and in this way they resemble his later single plays. They also conform to the structural patterns of the serial as a whole: while high drama in Coronation Street, such as the kidnap of Harry and Concepta Hewitt’s baby in October 1962 (scripted by John Finch), is often spun out over several episodes using cliffhanger endings between each to ensure continued viewing, comedy plots are confined to individual episodes. Cliffhangers in the comic episodes are much more muted or parodic. Christine Geraghty notes that the device of the cliffhanger marks, or even responds to, the ‘enforced interruption’9 between the episodes of a serial such as Coronation Street, but this is not the case for high comedy, which may fit into a single episode. Nor are comic plots usually ongoing, in contrast to, for instance, Elsie Tanner’s (Pat Phoenix) affair with seaman Bill Gregory (Jack Watson), begun in the episode about Harry Hewitt and Concepta Riley’s wedding (2 October 1961) and continued in the episode in which Rovers Return regulars make a trip to Blackpool (16 October 1961), both scripted by Rosenthal. Rather, comic episodes constitute mini-narratives within the soap opera’s open-ended framework, and often include more elaborate than usual elements in the mise-en-scène. Harry and Concepta’s wedding, which takes place away from the usual locations and unfolds

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16  Jack Rosenthal in completed form during a single instalment, is an instance of this. Rosenthal worked most keenly with a particular strain of soap opera narrative, preferring to concentrate on self-contained comic material which anticipates his later work in single plays and situation comedies. Both the Coronation Street episodes I will discuss are of this comic kind. Rosenthal’s dramatic preference was less for the melodramatic excess implied in the genre’s ‘opera’ label and more for its working-class focus and what has been called its ‘emotional realism’.10

Blackpool Illuminations This episode is about the trip to see the Blackpool Illuminations11 organised by Leonard Swindley (Arthur Lowe), broadcast on 16 October 1961 and directed by Howard Baker. As the Illuminations are an annual attraction taking place between September and November, the episode is set, as is customary for serials such as Coronation Street,12 in real seasonal time. The first half of the episode concerns preparations for the journey and ends with the characters seating themselves in the charabanc, while the second begins with the filmic black-and-white flickering of the Illuminations viewed from the coach windows and shown by means of back projection. By definition, as one of a pool of writers involved in the series at any time, Rosenthal added his own material to pre-existing plots and themes.13 There are two particular examples of this in the Blackpool episode. The first concerns the nature of dialogue, the second the representation of class, as they anticipate these elements in Rosenthal’s later plays. The Blackpool episode opens with Leonard Swindley, lay preacher at the Glad Tidings Mission as well as manager of the draper’s, confirming the details of the evening’s activities in the Rovers Return: mr swindley: Well, that seems to complete the arrangements for the trip, gentlemen. I’ll take my leave, and the coach will pick up your party at the appointed hour. (brightly) Let’s hope that we shall find it’s an illuminating experience. jack walker (blankly): What is? mr swindley: The lights – an illuminating experience. jack walker: (suddenly understanding): Oh, aye – aye!

The dialogue in all of Rosenthal’s plays is characterised by comic failure of just this kind. Characters variously do not understand, listen, or respond to each other’s utterances; embarrassment, dissent, or incomprehension may be signalled by the device of confusion over a perfectly obvious pronoun, as in the exchange above. In The Lovers (1970) Geoffrey

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The beginnings  17 (Richard Beckinsale) is reluctantly introduced to newly married couple Sandra and Neville Appleton as Beryl’s (Paula Wilcox) boyfriend: sandra: Oh, and this is – er – Geoffrey, is it? geoffrey: Is what? sandra: Pardon?

Just as Jack Walker’s (Arthur Leslie) ‘blank’ question to Swindley conveyed his distance from the latter’s pompous language and puerile pun, here Geoffrey’s fear of Beryl ‘brainwashing’ him by showing him the Appletons’ married bliss makes him defensive about a question Sandra has not asked. The second instance of pre-existing material given a distinctive shape takes place as part of a videotaped montage of characters meeting at Blackpool’s South Pier – shown in the mise-en-scène as a railing overlooking a filmed backdrop of moving lights – and expressing different attitudes to the experience. The sequence concludes with a dialogue about class between Ken Barlow (William Roache) and his girlfriend Valerie Tatlock (Anne Reid), of whom wide-boy Jed Stone (Kenneth Cope) observes, ‘Them two drips. If I know them, they’ll be holding hands – in the public library.’ At the South Pier Elsie Tanner is angry that her suitor Bill Gregory is late for their tryst, while Jed Stone offers to take Jean Stark (Renny Lister) under the pier to prove that he has eyes only for her. Mr Swindley and his reticent admirer Emily Nugent discuss what was showing at the theatre on the Golden Mile, which Mr Swindley describes as ‘a childish catchpenny … those sideshows are not our kind of entertainment, Miss Nugent’. Such cameos of varying responses, particularly moral ones, to the Blackpool outing culminate in a metafictional – since it acknowledges the presence of the audience – and class-related dialogue between Ken and his girlfriend Valerie Tatlock, of the kind that characterises Rosenthal’s subsequent work: ken: I don’t know, Val. It doesn’t take much to amuse some people, does it? val: How do you mean, Ken? ken: Well, look at it – beside the Great British Seaside. Masstopia here we come. Just think of it, they work hard for fifty weeks of the year to save up for this – a fortnight in Blackpool. Chipshops, stink of onions, lights, some imbecile sideshow, the dirty great concrete fairground, and they’re happy – or so they think. … They don’t know any better, they live in dumps like Coronation Street. … It’s not right, Val. People deserve better than this.

Rosenthal continues the representation of Ken’s conflicted identity as a ‘scholarship boy’, to use Richard Hoggart’s phrase from his The Uses

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18  Jack Rosenthal of Literacy (1957). Throughout the early episodes of Coronation Street Ken often exhibits, as he does here, a mixture of class patronage and sympathy that arises from this position. The scholarship boy is a young man who, in Hoggart’s words, is ‘emotionally uprooted from [his] class, often under the stimulus of a stronger critical intelligence or imagination’.14 This is certainly true of Ken Barlow. In the series’ first episode the ne’er-do-well Dennis Tanner (Philip Lowrie) asks Ken challengingly why his name hasn’t been in the paper – ‘’aven’t you been winnin’ any more scholarships?’; and in 1962 Ken graduates with a second-class degree in English and History from Manchester University, the first to do so not only in his family but in the neighbourhood. Hoggart adds that, ‘the test of [the scholarship boy’s] real education lies in his ability, by about the age of twenty-five, to smile at his father with his whole face’.15 Although Ken is slightly younger than this, having been born in 1939, it is a test he fails. In the very first episode of Coronation Street, written by Tony Warren and broadcast live on 9 December 1960, we see Ken in conflict with his father at the dinner table. I will discuss the evidence for Warren’s influence on Rosenthal more fully below, but this scenario is repeated at the Friday night dinner-table in Rosenthal’s 1976 BAFTA-winning play Bar Mitzvah Boy where the eponymous thirteen-year-old hero is equally unable to ‘smile at his father with his whole face’. Indeed, the young Ken Barlow is a prototype for the protagonists in several of Rosenthal’s coming-of-age plays, including Eliot Green in Bar Mitzvah Boy and Leo Wiseman in Bye, Bye, Baby, both of whom are ill-at-ease in their own class. In the first episode of Coronation Street Ken exhibits such uneasiness as he ‘shudders involuntarily’ when Frank Barlow pours HP sauce over his food, inspiring his father to ask, ‘What’s that snooty expression for? … Don’t they do this at College then? I’ll bet they don’t eat in their shirt-sleeves either.’ Such details of food and behaviour are just those that constitute class-based humour in Rosenthal’s work. When Ken Barlow is inspired by the Blackpool trip to wish that his fellow inhabitants in Coronation Street could ‘want a bit more’, however, we see a somewhat different emphasis in the portrayal of class relations from that in Rosenthal’s later drama. As Valerie suggests, Ken’s outlook is that of an educated white-collar worker. He does not value the work of his father, who is a postman, nor that of his father’s friends, who are variously a builder, a publican, and a bus inspector, while the women of the Street work in service industry jobs, cleaning, running a boutique or shop, or waitressing.16 At Blackpool, Ken’s speech prefigures an episode of 12 February 1962 in which he writes an article for a left-wing journal which is quoted in the local paper, criticising both the small ambitions and limited opportunities for the inhabitants of the street in which he

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The beginnings  19 lives. Just as he claims to Val that amusements like outings to Blackpool are an unworthy reward for working people, so in the article Ken argues that television is a pacifying force. This foreshadows a significant strand in Rosenthal’s later writing, evident in many small instances but most sustainedly in the sitcom Sadie, It’s Cold Outside (1975), in which the very medium of expression is placed under comic attack. Ironically, the humour of inertia and reduced ambitions which characterises Sadie, It’s Cold Outside is also a feature of Ken Barlow’s persona, as a scholarship boy who never leaves the street where he was born.17 In Rosenthal’s later writing, although class is omnipresent, we do not often see characters analysing the effect of class status on ‘life-styles and life chances’,18 as Ken does here. Rather, we see comic clashes between different class positions and behaviour, in the dialogue and mise-en-scène alike. However, Coronation Street tends only to show the work environments of its characters, such as Elliston’s raincoat factory in the early episodes, as they affect people’s domestic lives. The representation of personal relationships is its bedrock and its plot is character-driven. This has implications for the narrative structure of the serial, as its composition out of several alternating and often interwoven personal stories suggests, and Rosenthal’s later plays follow this pattern of prioritising personal drama over portrayals of work. For instance, in an episode written by Rosenthal and broadcast on 27 October 1961, the plot focuses on Ken Barlow being chastised by his boss Mr Wentworth at Amalgamated Steel for believing the excuses of work-shy colleague Frank Schofield, rather than on the detail of the steelworks itself. As Charlotte Brunsdon puts it in an analysis of another soap opera, Crossroads (ATV/ Granada 1964–88, Carlton 2001–3), such serials are ‘in the business not of creating narrative excitement, suspense, delay and resolution, but of constructing moral consensus about the conduct of personal life’.19 An argument for such a narrative preference for the personal, in the sense of domestic and romantic activity, may seem curious, as several of Rosenthal’s best-known plays and series are about working men, including The Dustbinmen, The Knowledge (1979), about trainee taxi-drivers, and The Chain (1985), about removal men, and in each case he conducted practical research into the workings of the job. However, the structure and content of such plays about groups of men and the ‘minutiae’20 of their working lives serve a profoundly dramatic purpose. While the detail of these jobs is contextually significant, all entail the narratively crucial conflict and friction of relationships with the public, between the men, and with their families. For instance, in The Dustbinmen episodes about depot elections rigged by the team leader Cheese and Egg (Bryan Pringle), and about a strike in protest at his temporary

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20  Jack Rosenthal elevation to the role of Depot Inspector, are pretexts to introduce into the sitcom confrontation and status-related comedy, rather than accurate representations of class relations per se. Class-based humour is the central way in which Rosenthal represents class relations. The Blackpool Illuminations episode of Coronation Street exemplifies other characteristics of Rosenthal’s subsequent writing. Much is made of the continuing importance for individuals of the war in all Rosenthal’s work well into the 1980s, and in Coronation Street it appears for comic ends. Annie Walker (Doris Speed) accuses her husband Jack of helping a Wren to climb up Queen Victoria’s statue on VE night despite the fact that she was ‘perfectly capable of sinking the entire German navy single-handed’, to which he replies that Annie is wrong – the woman was in the WAAF, ‘or was that another time, eh?’ Petty Officer Bill Gregory tells Elsie of his travels in the ‘Andrew’ [navy] during the war, to ‘Hong Kong, Gib, Alex and Guzz’, the latter a mythical place where everyone wore grass skirts and spoke English – but he allays Elsie’s suspicions through humour, by revealing that Guzz was located at ‘Devonport Barracks, near Plymouth’. As well as demonstrating the hold of the war over British citizens decades on, such examples emphasise the fact that nostalgia for the war may have a romantic or sexual meaning. In these instances from the Blackpool episode of Coronation Street intra-diegetic humour is used to deflect sexual jealousy about the past. In Rosenthal’s subsequent writing the war continues to signify uncomfortable sexuality. The schoolteacher Miss Land in P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang (1982) fends off unwelcome memories of illicit romance in conversation with the headmaster: ‘I thought we both agreed to draw a veil over the war, Henry. Since VJ night.’ Miss Land is described as ‘squirming uncomfortably’ during this dialogue with her former married lover, and such regret is an alternative way in which Rosenthal represents the war. Nostalgia for the period of history which informs the disruptions of The Evacuees and Bye, Bye, Baby is not a straightforward emotion in Rosenthal’s work. The ending of the Blackpool episode of Coronation Street demonstrates its affinity with Rosenthal’s later single plays in its self-contained yet enigmatic resolution. In this case, the enigma is resolved in the following Wednesday’s episode, although it is not a cliffhanger that demands further narrative explanation. At the end of the evening in Blackpool, Ena Sharples and Martha Longhurst (Lynne Carol) wait outside Gypsy Smith’s tent for their friend Minnie Caldwell (Margot Bryant) who is having her palm read. Ena complains about Minnie ‘keeping us standing here like a couple of Christmas cards’ – an inspired phrase which reappears in Barry Ridehalgh’s (Richard Griffiths) dialogue in

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The beginnings  21 Mr Ellis Versus the People – but when Minnie eventually emerges, Ena announces, ‘I’m going into this Fanny b‘ Gaslight here.’ The character of Ena seems to have inspired in Rosenthal the sharply concrete dialogue that characterises his best work. In this episode, Minnie and Martha leave for the charabanc home while Ena, despite her avowed scepticism, gives the Gypsy a piece of silver rather than ‘a piece of my mind’: ena: Now you’ve had your money, tell me what you can see. gypsy: I can see you on a long journey. ena: Oh, that’ll be me going back on the chara. gypsy: Oh, no, this is a long, lonely journey, with a long separation from your friends …

We hear the last utterance to the accompaniment of a gradual close-up on Ena’s dumbstruck expression. She raises her eyes upwards, towards the audience for a fleeting eyeline match before she looks away. The intertitle, ‘Next episode Wednesday at 7.30’, is then superimposed on her face. Such a juxtaposition of the intertitle with Ena’s horrified look acts as a comic cliffhanger, since we are reassured that the ‘long journey’ and ‘separation’ refer not to her death but to her missing the coach home. This is indeed confirmed in the episode of Wednesday 18 October 1961, when we learn that Ena got a lift back on a lorry. It is an entirely different cliffhanger from that which ends, for instance, the episode of high drama broadcast on 3 October 1962, in which Harry and Concepta Hewitt’s baby son Christopher is kidnapped from outside a shop. Here, the episode – which was written by John Finch – ends as Harry leaves the house to act on information given to him by his daughter Lucille (Jennifer Moss); this plot-line can indeed only be resolved by watching the next episode.

Dennis Tanner’s Concert This episode was broadcast on 7 March 1962 and directed by Christopher McMaster. It is about a Grand Charity Concert organised by Dennis Tanner, which has to be cancelled at the last minute when one of the acts is banned and another is stranded on the Huddersfield road. The episode is even more self-contained than that about the trip to Blackpool.21 Unlike the latter, the concert episode does not contain any extraneous story-lines and more closely follows the clearly causal structure and conclusive denouements of Rosenthal’s subsequent work, sitcoms as well as single plays. Its tone is so consistently comic that it is at odds with Eric Spear’s famously plangent Coronation Street theme-tune.22

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22  Jack Rosenthal Indeed, the intra-diegetic song, ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag’, which Minnie Caldwell plays on the piano while the concert audience restively waits for it to begin, is heard over the first break-bumper instead of the theme-tune, while ‘Goodbye Dolly Gray’ is heard over the second. This comically transforms the advertisement break into a temporal ellipsis of significant duration in the narrative, during which we imagine Minnie to have kept playing her limited repertoire. The episode points forward in its play-within-a-play format to P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang, in which the school play hastens that film’s denouement; and to both versions of Ready When You Are, Mr McGill (1976, 2005) about a hapless extra in a television play who, echoing Dennis Tanner, meaningfully repeats such phrases as, ‘The show must go on’ – even though it does not. Just as back-projection and filmed inserts constitute Blackpool in the mise-en-scène of the earlier episode, here we never see the ‘hundreds’ of audience members who turn up for Dennis’s concert. This involves withholding reverse shots when Dennis peers through the stage curtain and when he is pelted with food for announcing the concert’s cancellation. By its very invisibility the concert audience is identified with the television audience at home. We do not see any of the performers either, despite the fact that they loom large in the dialogue – except for two sealions, who are concealed within the dialogue for comic effect.23 We learn from a note sent by Captain Johnson, who, with his troupe, is stranded by a ‘big end’ malfunction in Yorkshire, that ‘Sherry and Bonnie’ will arrive ‘as promised’. Our expectation is that, like the other named acts, such as Katrina the Razzle-Dazzle Girl, these will be more ‘smashing lasses’. The audience hears Dennis’s side of a telephone conversation with Captain Johnson about Sherry and Bonnie which only increases such expectation: dennis: No, I haven’t seen them, where are they? What do they do? … They’re what!! … I can’t do that!

But there follows instead a cut to a close-up on two sea-lions in the foreground of the shot, a group of human protagonists – Frank Barlow, Ken Barlow and Albert Tatlock – suddenly out of focus in the background. The real catalysts of the episode’s narrative have been identified by the camera’s attention. The same method of using comic concealment constructs the unravelling of Dennis’s débâcle – and such a device features in many of Rosenthal’s later plays. Rather than the multiple stories of almost every other Coronation Street episode, this one includes what appears to be only two but turns out to be a single interwoven plot. This is implied at

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The beginnings  23 the episode’s opening by a fade from a close-up on Elsie Tanner’s face, who has been quizzing Dennis about where the Blue Streak Rockets dancers will stay overnight, to a two-shot of Annie and Jack Walker, who are preparing to attend the Annual Dinner of the Licensed Victuallers’ Association. The fade itself implies a narrative connection. As with the comic concealment of the sea-lions’ existence, the details of Dennis’s ‘dead foolproof idea’ for accommodating the sea-lions in water overnight is withheld, although audience ‘competence’24 in judging his character – ‘Not much cop at owt, are you’, as his mother tells him – leads us to anticipate the narrative failure of his ‘foolproof’ plan. The Tanners have no bath for the sea-lions, and the audience is encouraged to suspect Dennis’s motives in wheedling the key to the Rovers Return out of barmaid Concepta. A dissolve from Dennis ushering the sea-lions into the Rovers Return, to Annie and Jack leaving the Royal Hotel by taxi to return home because Jack didn’t confirm his room-booking, constitutes a visual pointer to the episode’s inevitable conclusion through the crosscutting. Dennis tells his mother that he has made ‘special arrangements’ for the sea-lions, and a close-up on Elsie Tanner’s sceptical look is followed by a quick cut to Annie’s similarly critical expression in her dialogue with Jack – ‘A sixpenny tip would have been quite enough’ – as the Walkers arrive back at the Rovers. We see from Annie’s viewpoint the sea-lions playing in her bath, in the form of a comic shot-reverseshot sequence between her astonished look and that of the phlegmatic animals; while Jack responds to her news with, ‘That’s nowt, love. There are three young women in our bed!’ Interestingly, although we are shown the sea-lions, we still do not see the young women. This is not just because of the serial’s habit of showing only the communal rooms of the Street’s inhabitants,25 but emphasises the episode’s true raison d’être, which is to enhance and confirm our knowledge of the regular inhabitants’ characters and relationships. The invisibility of the Blue Streak Rockets also confirms the low production values of Coronation Street, while their being constantly mentioned in the dialogue raises narrative and visual anticipation only comically to deflate it. We learn from Ena Sharples that the act has already been banned ‘in Cardiff, Barnsley and the Golden Mile’, while Dennis Tanner’s question to Albert Tatlock, at whose house the young women have a cup of tea, ‘They’re not running about wi’ nowt on, are they?’ is also directed at the audience’s expectations. It is not only the ‘hundreds’ of intra-diegetic concert-goers who may be disappointed by the cancellation of the evening’s entertainment, but the extra-diegetic audience too.

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24  Jack Rosenthal Influences and developments Coronation Street provided Rosenthal with a model of an ensemble drama in which individuals alternate as the narrative focus of each episode. This pattern appears particularly in his plays and series about groups of working men, but also in such plays as Spaghetti Two-Step (ITV 1977), about an evening’s customers in a restaurant, and Hot Fat, a 1974 BBC Play for Today about men meeting in a sauna. It is clear that in Coronation Street Rosenthal both tried out ideas which reappeared in fully fledged form later on, and was influenced by its particular televisual methods of representation. This is particularly obvious at the level of small detail. For instance, in the concert episode of Coronation Street Elsie says to Dennis, ‘You’ve got a stye coming’; while this is a pointer to his stressed state as concert organiser and a riposte to his remark, ‘You’ve got a dirty mind’, it reappears in more developed form in Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar, as a bodily symbol of Edgar’s existential malaise. Similarly, in the concert episode Annie Walker urges Jack to get ready in good time for dinner at the Royal Hotel – ‘unless you prefer sitting down for dinner with blobs of blood all over your face’. The trope of cutting oneself while shaving, which features here simply to demonstrate – or reaffirm – Annie’s traits of concern with appearances and her bossiness, also takes on the form of a bodily symbol in Rosenthal’s other works. In P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang it represents the pain of impending adulthood, as we learn when the comic Greek chorus of workmen offers a final comment on fourteen-year-old Alan Duckworth: workman 1: He’ll be starting shaving next. workman 2: Then spend the rest of his life trying to stop the bleeding.

However, as we shall see, it is in Spend, Spend, Spend (1977) that this trope is most fully integrated into the narrative as a graphic foreshadowing of the bloody fate awaiting pools winner Keith Nicholson. As Keith shaves while watching the crucial football results on television, his ‘chin, throat and shirt [become] much more bloodied’,26 the excess of blood matching the excess to come and its sudden end. Following on from his writing for Coronation Street, Rosenthal uses mundane domestic detail for dramatic and even symbolic effect. Likewise, in Coronation Street Rosenthal experiments with comic satire at television’s expense. Such metafictional humour appears in the serial from its inception. In an episode of 17 April 1961 written by Harry Kershaw, Ena, watching a western on a television-set whose screen we cannot see, pours scorn on television ‘critics and them that gawp at it’. In another episode by Kershaw, of 16 September 1963, Florrie Lindley (Betty Alberge) tells Lucille Hewitt, ‘There’s more important things

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The beginnings  25 in life than serials’, while in John Finch’s episode of 8 July 1964 Ken Barlow announces to Albert Tatlock his intention to ‘go commercial’ and write a television script rather than a novel. Rosenthal’s scripts continue this theme. In an episode written by him and broadcast on 21 March 1962, Minnie and Martha persuade Ena to do her weekly wash at the local launderette. We see a close-up of a whirling washing-machine, of which Minnie claims, ‘I like watching them going round. It’s just like the television.’ This prefigures the more developed role of a joke about the interchangeability of television screen and washing-machine window in Sadie, It’s Cold Outside and its satire about passive spectatorship in all its forms. According to his autobiography, Rosenthal was invited by Tony Warren to join the serial’s team of writers the day after the first episode was broadcast when he rang to congratulate its creator,27 demonstrating his early and long-standing engagement. The same pattern of influence and development occurs in relation to the trademark wordplay of Rosenthal’s dramatic dialogue. In Coronation Street episodes by writers including Harry Driver, Vince Powell and Peter Eckersley, who later became head of drama at Granada, the dramatis personae exhibit traits we will become familiar with in Rosenthal’s later work. Characters reply to urgent questions with ‘Pardon?’, and have words about the offerings in the chip shop, a locale which features in Sadie, It’s Cold Outside and P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang; men express anxiety by constantly asking what the time is, as Norman does in Sadie, and, as in The Dustbinmen, are teased for their unmanliness – ‘We’ll make an honest woman of you’, as Len Fairclough says to Mr Swindley on his wedding day. In an episode by John Finch of 8 July 1964, Stan Ogden demands of his wife about the Street landlord: ‘Where’s that greasy, tight …’ only to receive Mr Wormald’s eager answer, ‘I’m here, Mr Ogden!’, in a prefiguring of Ready When You Are, Mr McGill in which the director Phil asks insistently about the eponymous extra, ‘Where is the stupid old bugger?’ and gets another eager reply: ‘Here, Mr Parish!’ Indeed, the introduction of Stan (Bernard Youens) and Hilda Ogden (Jean Alexander) in 1964 seems to have suited Rosenthal’s dramatic bent. They are represented in comically precise terms as aspirational working-class figures. In an episode written by Rosenthal and broadcast on 9 September 1964, class position is parodically symbolised by the sandwich fillings we will also come across in subsequent plays. Hilda offers her husband an idiosyncratic combination of ‘crab paste and cheese’ while he demands ‘caviar butties’ to suit his new job as chauffeur of a Rolls Bentley. When he is sacked from this job, Stan observes to Hilda that there is ‘summat uncanny about me and work – we don’t seem to get on’. Hilda, famous

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26  Jack Rosenthal for the ‘muriel’ and flight of plaster ducks on her living-room wall, is untroubled by her husband’s work-shyness and claims affectionately to like having him at home. This contrasts with the angst experienced by the lower-middle-class Sadie in Sadie, It’s Cold Outside when Norman becomes ‘redundant’, as he meaningfully puts it, and is under her feet at home all day: the comedy in the sitcom has a different, anxiety-filled source. The feckless but happily married Ogdens suit Rosenthal’s comic preferences, although this episode also sees Florrie Lindley smash the contents of her shop during a nervous breakdown. The sequence in which Stan takes a group of Street inhabitants for a drive in the Rolls is filmed as a pastiche of a silent film, the soundtrack composed not of dialogue – although we see characters speaking – but of a piano score. Throughout the episode the Ogdens’ home life is crosscut with Annie Walker at her most aspirational, as she pours scorn on the local accent and declares proudly to her husband in unmistakably suppressed Lancashire tones, ‘And the amazing part is, you know, Jack, I’ve never had an elocution lesson in my life! I suppose it’s just a natural gift.’ Important Rosenthalian themes of comic self-delusion and a clash of class values are tried out here. A particular instance of comic wordplay, initiated in Coronation Street by Tony Warren and elaborated upon by Rosenthal, is that of comic mispronunciation. For example, Geoffrey’s mistakes in The Lovers – he pronounces ‘misled’ as ‘mizzled’, ‘mishap’ as ‘mish-ap’ – are prefigured in an episode of Coronation Street by Rosenthal in which Martha Longhurst refers to a ‘menu’ as a ‘mee-nu’, and in turn by the serial’s very first episode, in which Tony Warren gives Ena an eccentric rendering of ‘éclair’ as ‘ee-clair’. There is a characteristic shift in meaning in these instances. Geoffrey’s errors take place during an episode of the sitcom in which his girlfriend Beryl contradictorily demands that he ‘wear the trousers’ in their relationship. Beryl’s true preference for doing so herself is revealed by her correcting Geoffrey’s mistakes; but the episode ends with his using both words in public after Beryl has gone home, defiantly mispronounced. By contrast, the Coronation Street characters’ mispronunciations suggest unfamiliarity with words of foreign origin and any kind of exotic lifestyle. Rosenthal’s first script for the serial had Minnie, Martha and Ena debate foreign travel in just such terms: martha: They live different, abroad. minnie: There’s a lot of foreignness there, abroad. … I went to London once, on Clough’s Coaches, for the Festival of Britain. ena: You’re a right Dr Livingstone when you get going! Careful, you’re slopping your stout!

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The beginnings  27 Not only does Ena get the best lines here, but her superior intelligence – which is the real reason for her dominance – is emphasised in the script. Such humour implicates the television audience itself, just as it was obliquely addressed by Leonard Swindley’s hope that the trip to Blackpool would prove ‘illuminating’ and by Ken Barlow’s acid words at the resort, and was mirrored in the irate crowd at Dennis Tanner’s concert. The audience of a soap opera is often called upon to do more ‘work’ than is the case with other forms of televisual narrative,28 in the sense of deploying accumulated knowledge as well as deciphering narrative puzzles; such work may be increased by the fact that the audience is frequently addressed or situated by the serial. While Geoffrey’s mispronunciations in The Lovers arise from a root of linguistic comedy shared with Coronation Street, they take a greater role in the plot than those uttered by the three women in the serial. It is not only the first ten scripts for Coronation Street written by Tony Warren which particularly influenced Rosenthal, although these are characterised by the sharp turns of plot and inventive wordplay of Rosenthal’s later work. Adele Rose wrote for the serial between November 1961 and April 1998 and was its longest-serving scriptwriter. She was Rosenthal’s protégée – he invited her to submit her first script for Coronation Street, and they co-wrote two episodes in December 1961 and September 1962. In Rose’s episode of 8 November 1961, it is hard to say who has influenced whom. The episode concerns Elsie Tanner’s conviction that Ena Sharples has sent her a poison-pen letter, and we see the two women square up to each other with shared cries of ‘Right then!’ as if in imitation of High Noon (Fred Zinneman 1952) but involving battle by ‘double-barrelled rolling-pins’, as Harry Hewitt puts it. Rosenthal went on to write, with Harry Driver, a much more explicit homage to Zinneman’s film, which was broadcast in July 1964. Both film and soap opera episode concern a lone man given no help by his friends in facing a gang of thugs. Len Fairclough took the role of Gary Cooper’s Will Kane from the film and, as Philip Purser describes it, at the episode’s end ‘the pastiche was declared with a shot of the three toughs framed by Len’s legs while the usual title music was replaced by Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darling’.29 In Rose’s episode, Annie Walker’s heirloom willowpattern plate, ‘a badly needed touch of gracious living’, as she puts it, gets broken in the Rovers Return, and after an outburst Annie apologises for her behaviour: ‘I’m always like this when a thing of beauty is destroyed’. Annie’s quotation of Keats’ Endymion is comically bathetic in its reference to a piece of china, but also looks forward to Rosenthal’s development of more polarised linguistic and visual clashes between high and low culture. As we shall see, Keats’ epic poem is quoted again

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28  Jack Rosenthal in The Dustbinmen to even more unexpected and incongruous effect. All of Rosenthal’s writing is characterised by references to contemporary figures and events. Although this can be a limiting feature, if it is successfully integrated into a play’s plot it may have the opposite effect of imparting to it political and cultural significance. Coronation Street was from the very first located in time through references to media figures, such as that in the episode of 23 April 1962, written by Tony Warren, where Florrie Lindley remarks to Elsie Tanner about a blind date that he is ‘no Raymond Novarro’, in reference to the Latino Hollywood star of the 1950s, and in Adele Rose’s episode Elsie accuses her son Dennis of ‘lounging around like Marlon Brando’ because he is wearing pyjamas in the kitchen. Rosenthal’s early Coronation Street episodes make many references of this kind and act as precursors to his later and extended use of the trope. In the Blackpool episode Jed Stone imitates media personalities and asks his friends to guess who they are. Their inability to do so – Marlon Brando is mistaken for Bruce Forsyth, Elvis Presley for Adam Faith – makes a joke about glamorous American performers at the expense of more humdrum British ones, but also casts a sly glance at the status of Coronation Street actors themselves as homegrown Hollywood stars. On the other hand, despite its occasional incorporation of social issues and even government policies into story-lines,30 specific political topicality is unusual in Coronation Street. Ken Barlow’s campaigns against the atom bomb during his student days in the early 1960s and against the war in Vietnam in 1967 are exceptions – although since they represent yet more of a gulf between him and his father, their function is dramatic. In Adele Rose’s episode of 8 November 1961, Frank Barlow justifies his local interests by saying to his son, ‘I just don’t see it the same way as you. Kruschev and Kennedy don’t live in Coronation Street, and Elsie Tanner does.’ Frank’s observation acts metafictionally as a comment on the serial’s priorities. The implications of his remark are exemplified by an exchange between Ena and Minnie in the Blackpool episode when Minnie emerges from Gypsy Smith’s tent: ena: Who’ve you had in there with you, Hugh Gaitskell? minnie: Oh, no, Ena, the Conservative party finished last Saturday.

Minnie’s ignorance of politics – Gaitskell was leader of the opposition Labour Party in 1961 – leads her to make unwittingly a joke based on the Conservatives’ habit of locating its annual conference at Blackpool, and a pun based on the undetectable spoken difference between ‘party’ and ‘Party’. While a focus on the dramatis personae rather than the outside world continues in Rosenthal’s later writing, the sort of reference to

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The beginnings  29 public figures that Frank Barlow makes is often used to more political effect. For example, in Mr Ellis Versus the People, which is set on the day of a by-election in a voting station, we follow a subplot about the poll observers from the three main political parties. While the Labour observer Mrs Barber (Madge Hindle) informs the ‘Conservative and Unionist’ Mrs Clegg (Joy Stewart) that she is ‘no relation to your Mr Barber’, Mrs Clegg observes that there is someone named Hugh Scanlon in their branch ‘but he’s quite pleasant’. On one level this is simply absurdist humour, suggesting that Anthony Barber, Edward Heath’s Chancellor of the Exchequer until the defeat of Heath’s government in 1972, could be related to a Labour Party member, while Hugh Scanlon, the militant leader of the AEU engineering union, might appear at Tory Party branch meetings. However, such humour also contains an implicit reference to the contemporary political situation. The general election of February 1974 resulted in a hung parliament, suggesting that voters genuinely saw little to choose between the main parties. In conclusion, it is clear that Rosenthal forged his dramatic style while writing scripts for Coronation Street. It is possible to see both the origin of, and the likeness to, Rosenthal’s interests in Tony Warren’s description for Granada producers of what the serial would be like: A fascinating freemasonry, a volume of unwritten rules. These are the driving forces behind life in a working-class street in the North of England. The purpose of Florizel Street [its original name] is to examine a community of this nature, and to entertain.31

It is implied here that the serial will take the form of a fictional documentary in its focus on a socially defined slice of domestic life. This is a style that characterises many of Rosenthal’s single plays and series, although absurdist and surreal elements are often present as well. Indeed, Rosenthal’s play London’s Burning (ITV 1986), a pilot for the long-running series, was so successful in its use of documentary tropes that critics treated it as a drama documentary. Warren’s notion of the Street inhabitants’ ‘fascinating freemasonry’ also appears in Rosenthal’s later plays, as an examination of small or confined communities in terms of their concerns and linguistic habits. Such communities may be work-related, like the registrar’s office setting of Well, Thank You Thursday (ITV 1976) or the depot and refuse van in The Dustbinmen, the Jewish community in The Evacuees (1975) and Bar Mitzvah Boy, adolescence in Eskimo Day (1996) and P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang, and even the Navy, in Bye, Bye, Baby (1992). Although precise lines of stylistic influence are hard to establish – Rosenthal must have emulated Warren’s first ten episodes, while Adele Rose followed Rosenthal’s example – Rosenthal benefited

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30  Jack Rosenthal from what became a Coronation Street house style and from its introduction of working-class representations into mainstream television. The comedy and narrative use of televisual effects is not as fully integrated into the plot of the episodes Rosenthal wrote for Coronation Street as it is in his subsequent work. This is partly explicable by the generic terms of the soap opera’s perpetually deferred conclusion and reliance upon resolutions that are only temporary. By contrast, in Rosenthal’s later work, small details such as the joke about political figures’ names in Mr Ellis Versus the People occur within a self-contained drama, in this case a satire on Britishness and democracy.

Notes 1 Russell Harty, quoted in Graham Nown, Coronation Street: Twenty-Five Years, 1960–1985, London: Ward Lock 1985, p. 9; Roy Hattersley, quoted in Daran Little, The Coronation Street Story: Celebrating Thirty-Five Years of the Street, London: Boxtree 1995, p. 7. 2 John Betjeman, quoted in Graeme Kay, ed., Coronation Street: Celebrating Thirty Years, London: Boxtree 1990, p. 6. 3 Jack Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal: A Life in Six Acts, London: Robson Books 2005, p. 122. 4 See Dick Fiddy’s account of Coronation Street in the 1960s in these terms, Screenonline, www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/1136020/index.html, visited 26.2.08. 5 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 126. 6 See for instance Tony Warren, I Was Ena Sharples’ Father, London: Duckworth 1969, and the five-yearly anniversary publications. 7 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 151. 8 Coronation Street falls into the soap opera subsection of the television serial. ‘Soap opera’ is variously defined. Graeme Kay describes soap operas in terms of scheduling as ‘half-hour serials screened more than once a week and for 52 weeks of the year’ (Coronation Street, p. 23). Jane Feuer analyses what is narratively definitional to soap operas as, ‘multiple plot-lines and a continuing narrative (no closure)’ concentrating on the domestic sphere (‘Melodrama, serial form and television today’, Screen 25 (1) 1984, pp. 4–17: 4), while Annette Kuhn analyses the implied feminine spectator and female audience of the soap opera (‘Women’s genres’, Screen 25 (1) 1984, pp. 18–28: 23–5). 9 See Christine Geraghty, ‘The continous serial: a definition’, in Richard Dyer et al., Coronation Street, London: BFI 1981, p. 14. 10 This term is Ien Ang’s, from Watching Dallas: Television and the Melodramatic Imagination, London: Routledge 1985, p. 47. 11 The Illuminations have been a Blackpool attraction since 1879, when eight arc lamps lit up the promenade and were known as ‘artificial sunshine’. By the 1960s the Illuminations consisted of several miles of lights. On 8 September 1961, an event out of which the episode makes a metafictional joke, Violet Carson, who played Ena Sharples in the serial, was invited to switch on the lights; the names and faces of Coronation Street characters appeared as part of the display. 12 See Geraghty on the distinctive ‘organisation of time’ in soap opera, ‘The continuous serial’, p. 10. 13 Richard Paterson notes that ‘Certain writers have established reputations for types

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The beginnings  31 of storyline’ and this is used as the basis for allocating episodes – it seems that Rosenthal’s gift for a particular kind of comic writing had already been recognised (‘The production context of Coronation Street’, in Dyer et al., Coronation Street, p. 57). 14 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, with Specific Reference to Publications and Entertainment, London: Chatto & Windus 1957, p. 239; Hoggart does not mention ‘scholarship girls’. See Dyer on Hoggart’s analysis of working-class culture in the ‘Introduction’ to Dyer et al., Coronation Street, pp. 1–5; and Sue Owen’s forthcoming study of Richard Hoggatt. 15 Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, p. 239. 16 See the discussion of the absence of any representation of heavy industry in Coronation Street in preference for these ‘petty bourgeois’ jobs, for reasons of both narrative imperative and nostalgia, in Richard Dyer, Terry Lovell, and Jean McCrindle, ‘Soap opera and women’, in Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan, eds, Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader, London: Arnold 1997, pp. 36–7. 17 Ken is the only character from Coronation Street’s first episode still to be starring in the soap. 18 See Ivan Reid, Class in Britain, Cambridge: Polity 1998. 19 Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘Crossroads: notes on soap opera’, Screen 22 (4) 1981, pp. 32–7: 35. 20 Jack Rosenthal, P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang and Other Plays, ed. Alison Leake, London: Longman 1984, p. v. 21 In this way both the Blackpool and concert episodes go against Richard Paterson’s argument that soap opera’s ‘narrative is constructed of multiple short segments, with continued repetition of narrative information, but no overall dramatic coherence in any episode’, ‘Planning the family: the art of the schedule’, Screen Education 35, summer 1980, p. 73. 22 The original theme-tune consists of Spear’s ‘air on a trumpet’ (Kay, Coronation Street, p. 15) with clarinet and double bass accompaniment, reminiscent of northern band music – or, as Marion Jordan argues, of ‘Thanks for the Memory’, Bob Hope’s signature tune of the 1930s (‘Realism and convention’, in Dyer et al., Coronation Street, p. 35). It was a fitting accompaniment to what has been called ‘Granada’s nostalgic look back to the 1950s before affluence and consumerist ethics corrupted working-class values of community and togetherness’ (Dyer et al., ‘Soap opera and women’, p. 35). 23 Animals were introduced into the serial on several occasions in 1961 during a strike called by Equity against the independent television companies, which meant that only cast members on long-term contracts were available for work; see Little, The Coronation Story, pp. 30–2. In this instance, performing seals were expected by the production team but the much bigger sea-lions were provided instead. 24 Susan Boyd-Bowman, ‘Back to camp’, in Jim Cook, ed., Television Sitcom, London: BFI 1981, p. 56. 25 See Jordan, ‘Realism and convention’, p. 30. 26 Jack Rosenthal, Three Award-Winning Television Plays: Bar Mitzvah Boy, The Evacuees, Spend, Spend, Spend, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1981, p. 211. 27 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, pp. 121–4. Bill Podmore, writing in 1990, describes the serial’s production system, focusing around a Story Conference held every third Monday and attended by all the current writers, two story-line writers, a historian, secretary and producer; three directors are involved at any one time (‘Coronation Street behind the scenes’, in Kay, Coronation Street , pp. 17–18). See also Paterson, ‘The production context of Coronation Street’. 28 Geraghty, ‘The continuous serial’, p. 17.

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32  Jack Rosenthal 9 Philip Purser, ‘Jack Rosenthal: Obituary’, the Guardian 31 May 2004. 2 30 Daran Little gives the example of several episodes in 1967 in which the older ­characters applied for the new supplementary state pensions, The Coronation Street Story, p. 71. 31 Warren, I was Ena Sharples’ Father, p. 58.

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Little England

2

Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar (1968), Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. (1972), Mr Ellis Versus the People (1974) and There’ll Almost Always be an England (1974)

Rosenthal wrote a series of single plays for Granada in the 1970s, each of which has a clearly defined scenario and depends for its humour on a particular notion of British life. This life is characterised by people’s self-delusions, aspirations and small-scale concerns as set against such institutions as English amateur football, the legacy of Empire, and democracy itself. In this chapter, I discuss four of these plays. The earliest of these, Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar, uses the cinematic form of 1960s British New Wave cinema,1 focusing on everyday or ‘kitchen sink’ drama in a working-class setting. However, the eponymous hero of Rosenthal’s film suffers comic confusion over the era’s permissiveness rather than being an angry young man. In this way Edgar differs from the protagonists of Room at the Top (Jack Clayton 1958) or The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (Tony Richardson 1962) who react against the status quo and its class-based restrictions, although Edgar is shown to have communist sympathies.2 In Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. the supposedly British virtue of fairness is sacrificed by an amateur football league referee to the end of salvaging his own crushed ambitions. The last two works appeared in ITV’s Village Hall anthology series, the very title of which points to the ‘little Britishness’ that the plays interrogate. In There’ll Almost Always Be an England, comedy arises from the dissonance between nostalgic wartime views of Britishness and its classridden, consumerist present; while disenchantment with the process of voting is represented in Mr Ellis Versus the People in a way well suited to its mid-1970s context.

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34  Jack Rosenthal Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar was directed by Michael Apted and shown on ITV Playhouse on 9 December 1968. It is about the fortunes of Edgar Lunt (Alfred Lynch), who works as a train-carriage cleaner in Colne, Lancashire. The plot concerns his comically exaggerated sense of sin and punishment, particularly for sexual misdemeanours. As Edgar puts it to his friend Trevor (Richard Warwick), in a melodramatic reference to Hitler’s downfall, ‘If you do wrong, you get punished – you read your Hugh Trevor-Roper.’ Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar has a mixed tone – both farcical and realist – and as such is a transitional work in Rosenthal’s oeuvre. Its mise-en-scène shows, in black and white, working-class streets and the sites of work, including train-yards and a cotton-mill. Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar has elements in common with Rosenthal’s writing for Coronation Street and The Dustbinmen, but also looks forward to his comedies about sexual relationships from the 1960s onwards, particularly The Lovers (1970). Like Geoffrey (Richard Beckinsale) in the latter, Edgar is at once intrigued by and apprehensive of the era’s apparent permissiveness. While Edgar is eager to spend a weekend away from his fiancée Phoebe meeting women in London, he also proudly implies to his friend Trevor (Richard Warwick) that their relationship is platonic, because Phoebe is so saintly that she ‘used to be in Meals on Wheels’.3 Englishness and repression are linked in Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar from the outset. The film opens with a close-up of donkeys grazing, broadening out into an establishing shot of Pendle Hill and the open Lancashire countryside, over which the camera pans slowly. This gives a visual connection to the soundtrack, on which we hear a woman singing ‘Jerusalem’, and to the hymn’s link between England and Palestine.4 In Rosenthal’s play it is donkeys, the animals that Christ rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, rather than the ‘holy lamb of God’, who are in ‘England’s pleasant pastures seen’, as the hymn has it. The place of sexuality in British life is introduced into this pious and pastoral opening as we hear the lines, ‘And was Jersualem builded here,/Among these dark Satanic mills’, accompanied by a cut to a terraced house in a small industrial town. As the stage direction describes the scene, we see ‘the industrial revolution in the Garden of Eden’.5 A middle-aged woman comes out of the house and in voiceover we hear her commentary on the hymn she has been singing. The woman, Lilly (Gabrielle Day), claims that God was in the Wrens with her during the war, as evidenced by her husband deciding to return to his munitions work and not discovering her entertaining a Petty Officer at home. ‘Jerusalem was builded there for a start’, Lilly claims. Her

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Little England  35 nostalgic interest in the war is signalled in the mise-en-scène by her use of a gas-mask-holder as a shoulder-bag. Lilly shouts through the letterbox of a neighbouring house to waken Edgar, of whom she observes, ‘If the countenance divine shines forth from any feller, it’s that lad’ – a cut to Edgar, whistling in the kitchen, establishes a visual pun since he is shining his shoes. Lilly’s remark, quoting ‘Jerusalem’ again for her own purposes, raises by association in the audience’s mind a question about Edgar’s sexual life. Such a question is answered by the next scene, in which we witness Edgar’s father demanding breakfast in bed, and Edgar addressing his reflection in the mirror to the effect that ‘It’s a sin to tell lies … it’s hurting other people’ for saying his father’s tea was already brewing – particularly as his father was instantly stricken by an attack of cramps. We infer that Edgar leads an infantilised and Oedipalised life, in which his father begrudges time spent by his son with ‘friends’ – by which he means Edgar’s fiancée, Phoebe Ratcliffe (Yootha Joyce6). What we learn of Edgar’s sexual pathology is represented throughout the film by comically self-conscious and experimental televisual techniques. Edgar’s fear of transgression is explained by a stylised flashback, as he looks at himself in the mirror, to a scene in a library from his teenage years. As if aware of Edgar’s true motives, a sternly glamorous librarian asks if he needs help, but he proceeds unaided to tear a photograph of a woman with bare shoulders out of an art-book called Beauty. Like the bathing beauty pin-up which passes from Neville to Danny in The Evacuees (1975) as a signifier of impending puberty, Edgar’s photograph represents both sexuality and maternity, and it is his mother in particular who, he imagines, has suffered deflected punishment because of her son’s sinfulness. Edgar’s girlfriend Phoebe is introduced by means of a freeze-frame when Edgar reluctantly embraces her in the street at her insistence. Their pose is defamiliarised into absurdity by the editing, and conveys a sense of subjective time: for Edgar, the kiss seems endless. It is accompanied by Edgar’s voiceover, relating the fact that he went to a ‘continental film’ the night before his mother died, thus emphasising his fear of retribution for sexual activity even as he engages in it. We are reminded that Edgar’s relationship with Phoebe is celibate – as she says to her friend Dora (Denise Coffey), ‘We’re not like that … Edgar’s a gentleman. He never even starts!’ This gives the occasion for the meaningful use of another televisual trope. In a newsagent’s shop Edgar’s attention is drawn to a photograph of a woman in a bikini in the newspaper Reveille while buying a copy of The Morning Star – he imagines that the woman depicted returns his look, since in an insert we see a giant stylised eye winking. This artificially

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36  Jack Rosenthal enhanced ­encouragement suggests Edgar’s wish to evade Phoebe’s more challenging look. ‘Fresh this morning’, observes the newsagent of the eggs he is selling, to which Edgar guiltily responds, ‘Who is?’ As in The Lovers, in Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar such verbal ‘smuttiness’ takes the place of the very activities it signifies. The soundtrack throughout Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar equally uses obtrusive devices which contribute to the film’s mixed tone. At moments of particular sexual significance we hear a ‘comic boing’,7 which is, like the winking eye, a televisual signifier of Edgar’s inner life. It sounds out throughout Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar, suggesting a comically thwarted sexual yearning, for instance when Edgar looks at the page torn from the library book; when a young woman at work smiles at him; and when Trevor persuades him that a trip to London will allow him to experience ‘what you’re not doing here’. This aural trope comes to be so firmly established that it needs no visual corroboration. When Trevor tells Edgar on the train to London to ‘stop thinking about it’, followed by a close-up on Edgar’s face and the comic boing on the soundtrack, the combination acts as a shorthand for what he is thinking about. Edgar’s wish to escape the constrictions of his life leads to his visiting London with Trevor, who cleans train-carriages as work experience while on a course at the LSE. In keeping with the focus on Englishness and sexuality in Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar, Trevor reassures Edgar about ‘swinging London’:8 ‘It’s still England, you know. Same Union Jack. Same Queen.’ Although the only representation of London in the film takes the form of library footage, Edgar’s uncomfortable relation to it is shown in the mise-en-scène by his clothes – he wears a suit and tie, Trevor jeans and polo-neck – and by a quick series of receding shots of him at Euston, the last one a bird’s-eye view of a tiny figure standing lost amidst bustle. Edgar’s time away is crosscut with scenes which show his father and Phoebe back in Colne. In Edgar’s absence they are thrown together and decide to marry. For Edgar, the symbolic culmination of this crosscutting between different geographical locations is his meeting Trevor’s landlady, Mrs Bewley. It is ironic that not only is Edgar drawn to an older woman rather than any of the avantgarde girls whom Trevor mentions, but also that Mrs Bewley, like his fiancée Phoebe, is played by Yootha Joyce. In contrast to the unmarried blonde Phoebe, who wears a turban and apron, Mrs Bewley is a glamorous widowed brunette who favours a shift dress and pearls. It is as if the crosscutting between London and Colne has a psychic equivalent: Edgar can only express his love for Phoebe towards her sexualised counterpart. As Edgar puts it, Mrs Bewley is ‘Phoebe risen up from the Co-op

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Little England  37 Funeral Parlour’, the unpromising location of the couple’s nightly trysts back home. There is another Oedipal joke in this almost Shakespearean resolution to the film’s plot. While Edgar’s intended becomes engaged to his father, Edgar is to marry a woman who resembles his mother. Mrs Bewley, in a sideways glance at Mary Whitehouse, whose National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association campaign to ‘clean up television’ was at its height in the late 1960s, enjoys noting examples of violence and obscenity on television and invites Edgar to join her. ‘Seven for obscenity, eleven for violence: the BBC’s winning tonight’, as she puts it, in a metafictional acknowledgement of Rosenthal’s loyalty during the 1960s to ITV. The crosscutting also emphasises the fact that Edgar’s actions have no consequences except for himself. What he regards as the enormity of his planned marriage to Mrs Bewley is signified by a visual representation of Trevor’s words: ‘If you got yourself a bird, what then: nuclear war, the end of the world?’ As Edgar travels home, we see an insert of a mushroom cloud, as if viewed from the train window, and hear the 1965 song ‘Eve of Destruction’ on the soundtrack. This anti-nuclear protest song, written by P.F. Sloan, was most famously recorded by Barry McGuire. In Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar, however, ‘Eve’ also has a rather predictable punning reference to womankind in the form of Mrs Bewley. Indeed, Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar relies on the sexist humour of the era, justifying this in narrative terms through the trope of Edgar’s flight from repression – for instance, in London he is apparently transfixed by the sight of a car being washed, until a change of camera angle reveals it is the posture of the woman who is doing the washing at which he is looking. However, such humour coexists with Edgar’s efforts to adhere to a personal morality in a way which is typical of the play’s mixed discourses. Part of the reason Edgar is attracted to Mrs Bewley is that she shares his devotion to the saying we have heard him repeat throughout the film: I expect to pass through this world but once: if therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.9

The ‘good thing’ in the play’s ironic denouement is the fact that only Edgar is the victim of his own actions. Neither his father nor Phoebe is in plaster-of-Paris on his return from London, as he had feared. Edgar himself, however, is interrupted in his triumphal yell: ‘No punishment! No vengeance, no retribution!’, as he falls onto a rail track and sustains three broken ribs. This is just the injury Edgar has expected to cause in others since tearing the photograph from the library book. It is perhaps

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38  Jack Rosenthal to make too much of this comic conclusion, but it seems that thanks to Mrs Bewley Edgar has achieved mental health and can accept the sentiment of the play’s title, a phrase uttered within the play by Trevor, that he is only human. When the ambulance driver asks if his injuries hurt, Edgar replies, ‘Something wicked!’ and the film ends with a close-up on his laughing face.

Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. was directed by Michael Apted for Granada and shown on ITV’s Saturday Night Theatre on 9 January 1972. It went on to win the TV Critics’ Best Play Award for that year. Some reviews, for instance that in The Times,10 implied that its plot was overly limited – which is ironic, considering that, as we shall see, Rosenthal set out to reduce the play in various drafts to a spare version of its earlier, more baroque self. The final version concerns a Sunday morning Collyhurst and District Third Division League Match between football teams CWS Albion 2nd XI and Parker Street Bus Depot, as seen from the viewpoint of the referee Eric Armistead (David Swift). The paring down of Rosenthal’s original script makes starker, pace the estimate of The Times, both the character of Eric and his existential investment in football, and the comedy of the match itself. The ‘cold open’ (that is, a drama opening in media res, often even before the credits) to Another Sunday and Sweet F.A., follows the pattern of many of Rosenthal’s films. Narrative questions are raised and withholding the answers is the source of comedy. Here, we see a pair of young boys wrestling in the gateway of a suburban house on a wintry morning, barring the exit of a middle-aged man. In voiceover we hear a female voice reproaching him as he leaves: ‘Other husbands sleep late Sunday mornings. Not you, though. You have to be different. I don’t know what you see in it.’ The man, Eric, addresses the fighting boys in various ways, all of which they ignore: ‘Can’t you strangle each other at home? That’s why your fathers pay rates. Move! I won’t say it again. I’ll count to five ….’ Despite his authoritarian tones, Eric’s orders are ineffectual, and this encounter – which is resolved by his stepping over the garden wall instead of leaving through the gate – prepares us for his demeanour throughout the play. There follows a dissolve to a young man painting a white line on a football pitch, answering any questions we may have about Eric’s intentions on Sunday morning. The comic hook is further complicated by the revelation that Eric is not a player but the referee. At the football ground Eric tries to return a plastic ball

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Little England  39 belonging to some small boys but miskicks, inspiring them to grumble, ‘Big girl’. The camera pans across the interior of each team’s dressingroom, showing us young men changing into football kit, smoking and bantering, then finally to Eric, alone in the last room. He is shown through the changing-room’s chicken-wire window, then the camera pans to the door and dollies into the room, emphasising the fact that it has the easy access to doorways that Eric himself lacks. We see him dressed in absurd long socks and shorts, the material of which rustles audibly on the soundtrack as he performs knee-bends, then using two brushes on what is left of his hair while looking in a mirror he has brought. Both Eric’s preparation and his appearance contrast with that of the lads and the opening scenes show Eric as someone whose view of himself clashes with reality. However, the film’s denouement casts extra ironic meaning back onto this opening. It is fussy middle-aged Eric, rather than one of the young lads, who scores the only goal of Sunday’s match. The setting of the play on a Sunday inspires Eric to remind the football players of the day’s other, religious associations. ‘You’ll spend next Sunday morning in church – for the first time in your lives’, he tells two quarrelsome players. In a version of Norman and Sadie’s disenchantment with the modern world in Rosenthal’s 1975 situation comedy Sadie, It’s Cold Outside, Eric bemoans the state of football as the avatar of modern life. Indeed, we see him being approached surreptitiously by the Albion linesman Brian (Bert King) before the match, keen to curry favour with his ‘Morning, Mr Armistead’, to which Eric automatically responds, ‘I’ve brought my own lemon, thank you, and my embrocation.’ Eric is a footballer manqué, and this adds to his disenchanted view of game and life, as he argues to the Depot team captain Gordon (Gordon McCrae): eric: Why do you think I turned to refereeing? I had promise … but for the war. Accrington Stanley once wanted me for a trial, 1939. I could’ve been another Dixie Dean, they said. Once I’d filled out. gordon: Bloody wrong, then, weren’t they?

Gordon’s response implies familiarity with Accrington Stanley’s ignominious resignation from the Football Association in 1962 on the grounds of financial and sporting incompetence. When the Albion linesman tells Eric to ‘Go to hell’ Eric replies, ‘I’ve been, laddie, that’s what I’m doing here’, and he identifies the ‘patron saint of football’ as ‘Mephistopheles’ – to which Brian responds, ‘Who’s that?’. Eric’s discourse of damnation11 and redemption shows his efforts to make football worthy of being played on a Sunday and to subvert the pun in

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40  Jack Rosenthal the film’s title, which links the FA of football with the nothingness of ‘sweet Fanny Adams’. Rosenthal’s amendments to early drafts of Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. have the effect of making the football match constitute the film’s plot. This is made clear during the film, when the same intertitle informs us that this is the end of Part One and that the score is Albion 0, CWS Depot 0 – as if it were half-time and not just an advertisement break. The match is self-contained and represented without the flashbacks of, for instance, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. It possesses an almost Aristotelian unity, although the film’s running time is 40 minutes short of the hour-and-a-half of the match itself. In the first draft of the script, the action began in the ensemble mode which we will see in Rosenthal’s sitcom The Dustbinmen (1969) and in his plays about communities of working men, The Knowledge (1979) and The Chain (1984). In this draft script the Albion trainer Colin (played in the film by Duggie Brown) telephones all the players on Sunday morning, establishing cameos of each.12 The individual fates of the players are detailed throughout the match. In the televised version, apart from the teams’ respective captains, the players are identifiable only on a very limited scale. While tiny traces remain of the original structure these no longer form a part of the plot. For instance, in the televised play Stewart, the Parker Street goalkeeper (David Bradley), is visited at the net by his girlfriend Gina (Susan Littler). They argue about each other’s behaviour the night before – Gina danced too enthusiastically with Alan Potter, while Stewart eyed up a scantily dressed woman – and both apologise. Their conversation is filmed in a leisurely sequence of shot-reverse-shots occasionally interrupted by a close-up on Stewart as the ball rolls slowly into shot and towards the goal and he kicks it back onto the pitch. It is made clear that the football match is so desultory it is simply a negligible interruption to a lovers’ tiff. Just as the pair seem to be reconciled, Gina declares, ‘Thanks for some lousy times!’ and flounces away to go ‘roller-skating with Alan’. By contrast, the original script had Alan and Gina waking up in bed together at the film’s ensemble opening, and Alan guiltily trying to ingratiate himself with Stewart during the match in which he too is a player. The reduction of the plot in the televised version turns this episode from a vignette about infidelity into a teasingly fragmentary supplement to the main action. Stewart and Gina’s relationship constitutes an unexplained narrative which comically reproduces the film’s concern with fairness and organised combat. In its partial form the case of Stewart and Gina resembles that of the weeping wardrobe girl Jean in the original Ready When You Are, Mr McGill (1976), whose story is only explained and

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Little England  41 resolved in the updated 2003 version of the play – as if a postmodern fragment had been restored to somewhat unsatisfactory plenitude. Just as we never see Alan Potter in the final version of Another Sunday and Sweet F.A., so we do not see Eric’s wife Polly. In the draft screenplay the Armisteads are shown waking up together on Sunday morning and Polly’s reproaches are part of another marital mini-narrative. In the final version, Polly exists only on the soundtrack as an acousmatic voice whose origin we do not see. In a film which relies heavily on Eric’s thoughts relayed in voiceover, this makes Polly seem like another of his internalised voices rather than simply a nagging wife. The Times review of Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. takes the film to task for its cast of motley characters ‘wandering around the field’, most of whom ‘had no point of reference for their dialogue’13 as they are not involved in the football match. On the contrary, it is rather that, like the fleeting exchange between Stewart and Gina, the tangential nature of such dialogue is its point. The wanderers who appear to have least to do with the action are Gwen (Clare Kelly) and Rosie (Lynne Carol), who are walking Rosie’s chihuahua Minty around the edge of the pitch. They are not interested in the game – ‘Football’s not back already, is it?’ laments Gwen – but the dog is yet another reason why a goal isn’t scored when he chases the ball and it bounces off him. Gwen and Rosie engage in a surreal dialogue about world politics in which Gwen is excessively wellinformed due to reading the Guardian, Rosie the opposite. The women’s concerns offer a contrast to those of the men on the pitch: gwen: It’s what they call ping-pong diplomacy. That’s the expression they use. rosie: And the Russians have got the needle? gwen: Well, naturally. They’ve been daggers drawn with China ever since Khruschev denounced them at the Twenty-first Party Conference. For revisionism. rosie: For what? gwen: That’s the expression they use.

However, the notions of fair play and arbitrary contestation raised by the football match appear in the dialogue between Gwen and Rosie in another form, adding to the play’s self-conscious implication that what we are witnessing is the game of life. The camera in Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. works to endorse Eric’s fears for the fate of the modern world. In a reproach to the footballers, he observes that, ‘We live in a civilised society. Even two-year-olds know the difference between right and wrong’. This is followed by an almost inevitable cut to a close-up of one of the young boys who jeered at Eric

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42  Jack Rosenthal at the film’s opening, now acting as look-out while his friends climb on each other’s shoulders to get through the dressing-room window. Next we see a cut back to Eric, who observes, ‘We play as teams. With team-work and skill’. There follows another ironic cut to the young lads, who are indeed working together, in order to rifle the players’ wallets. While the filming of this episode comically contradicts Eric’s assertion about civilised values, his own devotion to rectitude is also undermined by televisual technique. In voice-over Eric meditates on the fact that football and society have changed. His lament that it is a ‘different game today – different world’ is apparently sparked off by two of the Albion players’ girlfriends, Denise and Shirley (Anne Kirkbride and Clare Sutcliffe), whose bare legs we see in close-up from Eric’s point-of-view. Lost in his reverie, Eric misses an incidence of handball, to the outrage of a player from the other team: steve: Where the hell were you looking?? eric: Don’t be so crude! I’m old enough to be the girl’s father! (steve stares at him, dumbfounded, not the faintest idea what he’s talking about)14

The melancholy comedy of Eric’s defensiveness about a lapse no one else has noticed is supported by the accompanying interior monologue. This reveals both a guilty conscience and Eric’s disapproval of post-1960 sexual mores, a consistent theme in characters’ dialogue in Rosenthal’s work from The Lovers to Sadie, It’s Cold Outside: eric (in voiceover): Sod him. So I happened to glance at a girl’s legs for a second. A second, that’s all. Glancing. Not chatting her up. Not climbing into bed with her … Just glancing.

Eric’s insistence on ‘respect for the laws of the game’, which involves following the ‘new gospel according to Lytham St Anne’s’, erstwhile seat of the Football League headquarters, leads to his constant mention of ‘fairness’ on the pitch. While such an insistence is represented parodically, both because Eric’s calls for fairness are constantly disregarded and because the play’s denouement reveals that he too can flout ‘the rules’ when it suits him, the concept of fairness is only emphasised by its absence. As Rosenthal observes, ‘Fairness and unfairness were (still are) are hobby-horses of mine … Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. made no bones about it’.15 The term is present as a reproach or appeal to Eric from players and trainers – ‘Be fair, ref!’, ‘Fair’s fair, ref!’ – and in Eric’s interior monologues, which we hear in voice-over while the camera stays tight on him in close-up as he performs his duties, ‘strutting, running, bending backwards, peering for offences in every tackle’:

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Little England  43 eric: Yes, lads. I know being fair isn’t fair. Any day of the week. That’s why we turn out on Sundays – hoping it will be. It never is, but we hope. The beauty of football, they used to call it.

Eric’s much-vaunted fairness is given its most stringent test at the match’s end. In keeping with the low standard of play throughout the match – an offside goal is disallowed, while the ball has variously flown over the goal, bounced off the crossbar, or rolled harmlessly towards the goalkeeper on numerous occasions, with the result that the score is nil-nil – we see the ball soar over the head of Freddie (Freddie Fletcher), the Albion captain, towards the goal. There are no Depot forwards in the penalty area to take the ball, so, by a mixture of instinct and accident, Eric leaps into the air and heads the ball into the net. After a moment’s stunned reflection, he walks back to the centre-spot, observing protocol by noting the goal in his book and checking the time on his watch. To the outraged Albion and jubilant Depot players, Eric insists that he is following the rules: eric: The ball was centred from the left. I ran up with play, according to my duty, the ball accidentally struck me on the head, as I endeavoured to get out of the way, and rebounded into the net. Law 9, paragraph b, a goal. freddie: You struck the bloody ball!! The ball didn’t strike you!!

This incident is represented both as the greatest wish-fulfilment Eric could have imagined, and as a challenge to his meticulous rule-keeping. We see Eric’s goal several times, filmed in different styles. It is shown once in real time and four times as an action replay, one of which appears as the final credits roll. With each action replay, Eric’s triumph and joy – and thus the questionable nature of his judgement – are made clearer. The first time we see the goal in real time it takes place in a flash, and what has happened is unclear; the audience is likely to share the rude incomprehension on the faces of the players. Clarification follows with an intertitle signalling an action replay. This transforms the amateur game mock-heroically into a world-class match, and Eric’s memory into a football legend about himself. We see Eric in slow motion through the net of the goal, as if in a positive version of our view of him through the chicken-wire of the dressing-room window, smiling beatifically as his head comes into contact with the ball. This contact is signalled visually for the remainder of the film by a large black smudge on Eric’s bald temple. On the soundtrack we hear the grumbling voices of trainers and players, while the stage direction likens Eric’s leap into the air to that of ‘a second Dixie Dean’.16 When Eric returns to the dressing-room one of the little boys who stole money from his wallet and found in it a

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44  Jack Rosenthal photograph of the footballing legend asks, ‘Are you Dizzie Dean?’ Eric’s failed past has been vindicated – even if the small boy gets Dean’s name wrong, he knows that he is ‘famous’. Eric enjoys two more flashbacks, and the audience sees his triumph again at a different angle, this time from in front of the goal. In slow motion Eric leaps into the air, scores the goal and waves his fist in triumph; the ironic motionlessness of the young players, particularly that of the Albion goalie and the captain Freddie, is emphasised by the slow-motion replay. Eric runs in slow motion out of shot, blowing his whistle for a goal, and we are left with the image of Freddie standing stock-still, apparently turned to stone. This time on the soundtrack we hear one of Chopin’s Nocturnes.17 The Nocturne has a double addressee: to Eric’s ears it is appropriate for his elegiac, harmonious goal, while for the audience the gap between music and action conveys the goal’s comic bathos. Eric’s insistence on crediting his goal precipitates a crisis in the play’s moral framework. When even Sam, the Depot trainer’s assistant, tells Eric, ‘I still think [our goal] was unfair’, Eric replies, ‘Only in the eyes of God, lad, and He’s needed new glasses for nearly two thousand years.’ Eric acknowledges the goal’s legality but not its fairness. As viewers, we are left to decide for ourselves whether Eric’s goal was justly awarded or simply an instance of dramatic irony. In the draft script, a Ulysses-like ‘man in a raincoat’ is seen on the edge of the pitch throughout the match. We learn that he is a scout from the Clapham and Wandsworth League Committee, engaged in promoting referees to higher grades of football. When the goal is allowed, the man in the raincoat acts – unnecessarily – as the audience’s guide to both football and morality. He tears up his notebook ‘in disgust and stamps off’, but Eric doesn’t care. No trace of this figure remains in the televised play. The clarity and focus of the final version of Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. in contrast to the overloaded form of the draft make it rely less on the stark comic and moral contrasts of a situation comedy, and suit it more to its slot in ITV’s Saturday Night Theatre. For instance, a joke about a black player named Enoch vanishes amid the reduction of particularity in the televised play. The setting and look of the broadcast version is that of a Manchester industrial landscape – from the pitch are visible factory chimneys, cooling towers, pylons and high-rise flats, while Eric reminds himself that many of the lads have been on the dole for months. In the draft, the play opens with a more elaborate (and costly) visual joke. We see library footage of the England football team at Heathrow getting onto a plane, followed by a bird’s-eye view of a northern city ‘shot by helicopter’. There follows a zoom onto a particular house, and the ‘music over’ is ‘replaced by the shattering noise of a jangling alarm-clock’ in the

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Little England  45 Armisteads’ bedroom. Such extreme comic contrasts in the draft and rehearsal scripts – between Enoch Powell18 and a black footballer, the England team and Eric Armistead – are abandoned for the more finely tuned comic effects of the televised play.

Mr Ellis Versus the People Both Mr Ellis Versus the People and There’ll Almost Always Be An England appeared in the Granada-produced ITV series ‘Village Hall’ (1974–75), in which a shared location was the common factor for a wide range of stories by different authors. As well as Rosenthal’s pair of plays, the hall was the setting for dramas about a harvest festival, a village auction, and a visiting dance-troupe during the series’ two seasons. As he did for The Dustbinmen and The Knowledge, Rosenthal conducted hands-on research for Mr Ellis Versus the People by spending time at Hampstead Town Hall.19 Mr Ellis Versus the People, directed by June Howson, was shown on ITV on 17 July 1974 as the first in the Village Hall series. In the play, Mr Ellis (Ron Moody) is the presiding officer at a parliamentary by­-­ election, assisted by the rule-following Mr Martin (Brian Miller) and his admirer Petula Robinson (Veronica Roberts). Rosenthal describes Mr Ellis Versus the People as a ‘(partially) romantic comedy’,20 and claims that, like Well, Thank You, Thursday (shown on London Weekend Television on 25 January 1976) about a registrar of births, marriages and deaths, and The Knowledge, about taxi-drivers, he was attracted to the dramatic potential in ‘the minutiae of specialised areas of working life’.21 However, although it was described in a review simply as ‘another hilarious winner’,22 Mr Ellis Versus the People is also about a particular notion of Britishness since it concerns the difference between the ideal of the democratic process and its reality. Like There’ll Almost Always Be An England, the plot of Mr Ellis Versus the People concerns the dismantling of illusions. In the latter, Mr Martin anticipates ‘the biggest day of his life’23 acting as a polling clerk. Not only has he memorised ‘Knight’s Handbook for Presiding Officers and Polling Clerks’, which he quotes throughout the day, but Mr Martin also places great faith in the voting system itself. His allegiance to democracy is comically juxtaposed with an almost ‘fascist’24 adherence to the rules for their own sake. In Rosenthal’s customary manner, such pretensions to grandiose or abstract ideas are subverted by everyday concreteness. Such a puncturing logic is demonstrated both by the plot itself and by individual comic details. Once inside the village hall, decked out as a

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46  Jack Rosenthal polling station, Mr Martin ‘surveys the room, bursting with pride and awe’, while Miss Robinson checks the radiators: mr martin: Can you feel it? miss robinson: Well, this one’s boiling, that’s freezing, and that’s making funny noises. mr martin: The feeling. The atmosphere. History, Tradition. Democracy, Miss Robinson. Government by the people for the people. The right of every single citizen, irrespective of …

Indeed, Miss Robinson embodies such subversion by her very presence. Mr Martin interrupts his train of thought in his speech above in order to ask why she and not ‘Miss Abbott, Libraries and Museums’, is the second polling clerk – it is apparent that Miss Robinson has engineered the situation in order to spend the day in Mr Martin’s company. In the fifteen hours during which the polling station is open, Mr Martin’s gradual disillusionment with the voting process is matched by Miss Robinson’s with him. We see a succession of cameos of voter misbehaviour, including Mr Walmsley (Frank Crompton), who tries to leave the hall without voting; Barry Ridehalgh (Richard Griffiths), who succeeds in bribing his wife to vote as he directs with the promise of a wok; Mrs Mobberley (Marjorie Sudell), who announces, ‘Conservative, please’, at the desk; and the last voter of the day, who decides who should get her vote by shutting her eyes and jabbing the ballot paper with a pencil. The voters’ observations about the process make implicit reference to the infamous hung parliament which resulted from the general election in Britain in February 1974, five months before the play was broadcast. In the play, a man with two bandaged hands has to instruct Mr Ellis how to fill in the slip on his behalf and his voting preference is for, ‘Well, none of them, by rights’; a woman unsure of the process answers Mr Ellis’s question about whom she wants to vote for with, ‘Well, they’re all the same, really, aren’t they? None of them give a bugger, deep down. Which do you think? Can you give us a hint?’; while another observes, ‘You know what I do. Vote for one lot and bet five quid on the other. Either way I’m laughing.’ The play’s voting and romance plots cross over in a scene of symbolic bathos. Mr Martin observes, ‘Everything’s under control, really. The old ballot box slowly filling. The voice of the nation quietly making itself heard … Efficiency, concentration on the job in hand’, then promptly spills his coffee over the voter register and asks Miss Robinson to take the blame. After this, their positions are reversed. Mr Martin, following the logic represented in The Lovers, is eager to regain Miss Robinson’s interest precisely because she ‘busily ignores him’. In exchange, Mr

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Little England  47 Martin becomes disillusioned with the way in which the ‘voice of the nation’ makes itself heard: mr martin: Pinching the pencils. Voting for the wrong ones. Voting for nobody. Insulting us. Throwing ballot papers out of the window. Sticking fag-ends in the ballot-box.

Indeed, the two plots of Mr Ellis Versus the People are not as distinct as they seem. The long history of British democracy is comically brought into the present, as Mr Ellis satirically refers to Mr Martin as ‘William Pitt the Younger’ while Mr Martin misreads a drunken voter’s polling card in the terms of his preoccupation: ‘Magna Carta – Sorry, Matthew Carter’. Yet in a mid-1970s political context Mr Ellis’s speech to Miss Robinson makes parliamentary democracy sound as disappointing as the era’s promises to eschew sexual repression and hypocrisy, by using the discourse of romance and elections interchangeably. This is clear in the following dialogue, in which the voter acts as a commentator on the battle taking place in both realms: mr ellis: Anyway, [Mr Martin] certainly seems a lot keener on you, now. miss robinson: Yes, that turns me off most of all … I’m emotionally immature, aren’t I, Mr Ellis? voter: How de do. Who’s winning, then? … miss robinson: I don’t know what I want! mr ellis: It’s taken the human race centuries to get that far. It’s only taken you a day.25

The play’s opening supports such a wry linking of relationships and politics. Several of Rosenthal’s plays, including Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. and the 1973 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill, begin with the trope of an alarm-clock sounding the beginning of a day and of the drama itself. This is repeated in Mr Ellis Versus the People in the opening credit sequence. Suburban greenery, accompanied by the sound of rain and birdsong, is made individual by a pan of streets and gardens followed by a close-up on the leaded window of a modest post-war house, its pink curtains closed. As the following dialogue sounds out, the characters invisible behind the curtains, we see the actors’ names under the window in the manner of the credits for Coronation Street in the early 1960s, in which the camera lingered on the door of each family: mrs ellis: What about tonight? mr ellis: Wendy, I am not bandying words with you at twenty past six in the morning! Where’s my socks? mrs ellis: You’ll be late.

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48  Jack Rosenthal mr ellis: I’ve brought you a cup of tea. mrs ellis: What about tonight?

The discussion concludes with the sound of Mrs Ellis smashing the tea-cup as she gets no answer to her question. The camera slowly zooms onto the window as the curtains are drawn back by Mr Ellis. In the manner of a theatrical drama, the play now begins. Our own questions about this cold opening are satisfied when we learn that Mrs Ellis was referring to the Lord Mayor’s post-election party, which Mr Ellis has always refused to attend. What we heard was not simply a marital squabble about an evening out, but an instance of the political turned personal. At the film’s end, Mr Ellis decides for the first time to attend the party, but, following the logic he outlined to Miss Robinson, Mrs Ellis is now reluctant, and we hear a repetition of the opening dialogue but this time Mr and Mrs Ellis express exactly the opposite view: mr ellis: I was thinking of you. mrs ellis: You weren’t. I’m not even dressed for it. mr ellis: I’m not bandying words with you after a hard day’s … mrs ellis: It’s you that starts. mr ellis: It isn’t. mrs ellis: Yes, it is. The music fades up.

In this way, the to-and-fro of sexual relationships is placed in explicit and satirical parallel with the cyclical nature of election results, supporting Mr Martin’s exasperated remark: ‘We’re supposed to be the most politically sophisticated society in the world! All they’ve to do is identify themselves, place a bloody cross on a piece of bloody paper, stick it in a bloody box and go home! And they can’t!’ In Mr Ellis Versus the People, minutiae take precedence over any sense of political theory or distinctions. We hear nothing about the three political parties’ respective candidates or their agendas, even from Mr Martin, whose interest is purely structural and careerist; nor do we learn who has won the election. In a subplot, the poll observers from the three main parties who spend the day together outside the voting station find only common ground. In a joke about such indistinguishability, each observer speaks in tones of received pronunciation in contrast to the other characters’ Mancunian accents, the Conservative Mrs Clegg (Joy Stewart) only slightly more cut-glass than the others. There is implicit comic consonance here with the play’s contemporary context. The general election of February 1974 resulted in a hung parliament and was to be followed by a second election in October of

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Little England  49 the same year, in which Harold Wilson’s Labour party gained a tiny majority of three seats. Mrs Clegg’s offer of sandwiches is accepted by the Labour observer Mrs Barber (Madge Hindle) when they turn out to be ham and chutney rather than the expected ‘smoked salmon and caviar’. The three women exchange the kind of tales about oil prices – ‘the Arabs had us over a barrel’ – and shortages of toilet rolls that also feature in 1975’s Sadie, It’s Cold Outside. The day ends with their agreeing to meet on Friday at the Kardomah for an outing to see The Exorcist (William Friedkin 1973). In this way the subject of Mr Ellis Versus the People is metonymic of Rosenthal’s drama more generally. Political and historical material appears in the form of small-scale comic details which may be class-based, such as the poll observers’ sandwich fillings, or topical, such as shortages of consumer goods in the mid1970s. As in the case of the representation of post-war imperialism in There’ll Almost Always Be An England, the comedy operates in terms of small details rather than a fully fledged ideological framework. Even the venerable history of British parliamentary democracy is reduced to a series of comic signifiers. As he struggles to open it, Mr Ellis notes of the battered ballot-box, ‘Moses brought the tablets down Mount Sinai in these, you know. And they were rusted to hell then’ – yet the ballot box is collected at the end of the day by a dustman; while a bust of Disraeli in the hall serves as a hat-stand for Mr Ellis’s trilby. And, finally, voters are not exempt from responsibility for the parliamentary stalemate of the mid-1970s, as Mr Ellis puts it: ‘governments get the electorate they deserve’.

There’ll Almost Always be an England There’ll Almost Always be an England was directed by Quentin Lawrence for Granada and shown on ITV on 30 July 1974; it was nominated for the Writers’ Guild Best Play Award of that year. In the play, the inhabitants of Quigley Street in the suburbs of Manchester are evacuated from their houses because of a leak in the gas main and have to spend the night in the village hall. This is the dramatic pretext for an ensemble drama involving the exposure of neighbours’ rivalries and enmity, as well as secret crushes and jealousies.26 As Richard Last put it in a review, Rosenthal’s ‘observation of private behaviour exposed to public view was brilliant’.27 For instance, Mrs Lund’s advice to her husband Gilbert, ‘better not snuggle up tonight, what with everybody – better lie as far apart as possible’, is juxtaposed with the following exchange between the less happily married Shanklys:

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50  Jack Rosenthal mrs shankly: Alec … cuddle up a bit – we’d better. mr shankly: What the hell for? mrs shankly: Just for tonight. We don’t want everybody talking.

Last added, ‘Mr Rosenthal did a hilarious demolition job on the notion that the British enjoy a communal crisis’,28 and the play is indeed characterised by comically clashing discourses of Britishness. Paramount among these discourses, in true Rosenthal fashion, is that of class. Neighbours’ views of one another’s class identity and pretensions are signified from the outset in the mise-en-scène, as we see the belongings people bring with them to the hall despite the policeman’s (Michael Melia) warning to bring ‘no valuables’. What people do bring are not just valuables but personal synecdoches: Mr Lund (Peter Pratt) has a barometer, the teenage Annabel Shankly (Tiffany Kinney) a pair of ice-skates, Mr Joyce (Bernard Hepton) a portrait of the Queen. The nouveau-riche insurance salesman Selwyn Stringer (David Swift) has golf-clubs and a huge, wheezing St Bernard dog, who is swiftly dispatched to the policestation for the night. Selwyn’s wife Pamela (Stella Moray) has brought with her a porcelain ornament, of which her neighbour Olive Lund (Dilys Laye) sourly observes, ‘She brought the biggest Capo di Monte she could lay her hands on’. This china figure demonstrates with comic exactitude the reification of relationships between people following Karl Marx’s classic observation that under capitalism, ‘social relations have assumed the semblance of a relation between things’.29 In the case of the feud between Mrs Stringer and Mrs Lund, it is rather that social relations are determined by a thing. Both women value the Capo di Monte figure precisely because it is purely ornamental. As Marx puts it in Das Kapital, ‘The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use value.’30 Mrs Lund, by contrast to Mrs Stringer, brought to the hall an item with use value – a vacuum cleaner – which is shown but never mentioned. Mrs Lund’s hostility to Mrs Stringer evaporates only when Mr Joyce accidentally breaks off the figurine’s head and it no longer constitutes an object of envy. As if acknowledging the damage to its aesthetic value and to Mrs Stringer’s feelings – ‘It was a work of art, really; all your things are beautiful’ – Mrs Lund sympathises with her neighbour and a reconciliation between the two women is effected. Mrs Lund’s observation, ‘Not everyone shares our sense of values’, is true in a sense she does not intend. However, following the discovery of a ‘Made in Hong Kong’ label on the base of the ornament, relations between the women break down irretrievably. Mrs Lund’s angry reaction to this discovery is an over-determined one. The figurine’s commodity value depended on the ‘authentic’, Italian labour invested in it; made elsewhere, it does not constitute a worthy signifier of class aspiration. Georg

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Little England  51 Lukàcs argues that ‘commodity fetishism is a specific problem of our age, the age of modern capitalism’31 – the age in which Rosenthal’s play is set and the object of its satire. As Mrs Lund insists of Mrs Stringer’s ornament, denigrating mass production in preference to artisanship, ‘She can get another gross of them at Woolworths.’ The comic meaning of this episode for the audience is similarly over-determined. While the joke against both Mrs Lund and Mrs Stringer is the tasteless nature of Capo di Monte figurines, whether authentic or fake, the detail about goods manufactured overseas has a bitter resonance in the context of mid1970s recession, inflation and decline in traditional manufacturing. As an apparent counter to the bathetic identification of Britishness with the tiniest signifiers of class distinction is the figure of Mr Joyce (Bernard Hepton). Mr Joyce, who says of the gas leak, ‘I was the bod who reported it. Not that I’m expecting a medal, of course’, rises to the challenge of the village hall evacuation with officious cheer as if it were 1940 – the year the song ‘There’ll Always be an England’,32 whose title the play’s ironically misquotes, was released. The song appears both intraand extra-diegetically throughout. Mr Joyce whistles it, and is silenced only by Mr Shankly shouting, ‘Want some birdseed, Mr Joyce?’ Shankly himself satirically sings the opening lines: There’ll always be an England While there’s a country lane …

Shankly aggressively offers a different signature tune for Mr Joyce: ‘“When the Lights Go On Again All Over the World”: how’s that?’ Shankly cites this 1943 American number one, which looked forward to an end to the blackout, in a satirical reference to Mr Joyce’s habit of turning on the lights during the night to make announcements; as with Shankly’s reference to birdseed, we see the reduction of wartime morale-boosting to self-aggrandisement on Mr Joyce’s part and petty irritation on Mr Shankly’s. ‘There’ll Always be an England’ is heard again at the film’s end on the soundtrack, as an ironic accompaniment to a final instance of Mr Joyce’s misinterpretation of what is happening around him. Had Mr Shankly continued to sing the wartime song, its sobering relevance to 1974 would have been evident in such sentiments as, ‘Red, white and blue, what does it mean to you? … The Empire too, we can depend on you.’ There is further irony here about the fake Capo di Monte figure, which emanated from a Hong Kong that, as a British Crown Colony in 1974, was an economically crucial remnant of the Empire and, unlike Britain, a major source of exports.33 While Mr Powell, who finds the incriminating label on the ornament, exclaims, ‘Clever, these Chinese’, Mrs Stringer observes, ‘There’s nothing wrong

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52  Jack Rosenthal with Hong Kong – they’re British.’ Goods from the rump of Empire clearly have a greater ‘mystical’ value than those from the Far East. Mr Joyce invokes the discourse of the war – ‘We’re all in this together; makes it that much easier to grin and bear it’ – but Mr Shankly ripostes with the logic of contemporary realism: It’s no easier at all, Mr Joyce: if we weren’t all in it together there’d be nothing to grin and bear. We wouldn’t be bloody here – we’d be in our own bloody beds fast a-bloody-sleep.

Mr Joyce is confusing his personal situation with a wish to return to an apparently more community-minded era. While Mrs Cox interprets Mr Joyce’s insistence that he is ‘hellish busy’ to mean he is ‘very lonely’, Mr Shankly tells the latter, ‘Was your journey really necessary? Yours was. It’s the greatest night of your life. Better than a George Formby film at the Regal and a spam sandwich when you get home.’ Indeed, the play as a whole represents a diminishment of the Blitz spirit into mid-1970s individualism, as in Sadie, It’s Cold Outside, although without endorsing nostalgia for the earlier era. Like other Rosenthal characters, including Lilly in Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar, who was never in the Wrens despite her frequent invocation of her experiences there, and Tommy in P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang (1982), who was a deserter but claimed to have spent the war ‘spilling blood and guts all over Africa and France and the sodding Rhineland’, Mr Joyce’s relation to the war is a fantasied one. A slow zoom into close-up on Mr Joyce’s stricken face accompanies the schoolgirl Annabel’s out-of-shot observation that ‘Mr Joyce’ was also the real name of Lord Haw Haw, the wartime traitor; this is followed by a fade to black and the stage direction describes Mr Joyce as, ‘very close to tears’.34 Mr Joyce symbolises a Britain trapped in the past of its ‘finest hour’, a country as heedless of contemporary realities such as the Renaissance Manufacturing Company in Hong Kong as Mr Joyce is of what is really happening among the Quigley Street evacuees. Mr Shankly refers to Mr Joyce as Henry Kissinger, invoking a contemporary and less glorious political reality of the kind Gwen and Rosie were concerned with in Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. in their discussion of hostile relations between Russia and China. Indeed, Rosenthal originally wrote a quite different ending for the play, which he describes as ‘deliberately cynical, sour’, in which everyone leaves the village hall to return home, only to be greeted by a massive gas explosion. As is clear from the rehearsal script, Mr Joyce’s rendition of ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ is violently interrupted: Suddenly there’s a shattering explosion in the distance … followed quickly by another, then another, then by the sound of crumbling masonry. Everyone

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Little England  53 stands transfixed – looking in the same direction. A long silence, held in wideshot, as we hear the jangling bells of fire-engines racing to what’s left of Quigley St.35

Such a ‘sour’ dénouement gives the evening’s events an entirely different meaning in retrospect, appearing to vindicate not only Mr Joyce’s invocation of wartime emergency, but also Mrs Lund’s fear that the experience may be ‘punishment’ for having the living-room redecorated. Rosenthal explains that for the pragmatic reasons of an industrial dispute the film had to end precisely at nine o’clock, allowing no extra time for the planned ending.36 Despite the missing ‘pessimistic and unpatriotic’ coda to the play, it is surprising that what remains delighted the Daily Express, as Rosenthal notes.37 From the opening shot, which shows the film’s title over a close-up of cigarette-butts being swept off the village hall floor, the audience is given to understand that this is a satirical vision of England. Individuals’ utterances may begin with metaphysical intent but are undercut by reversion to the concrete detail of trivia or self-interest. This pattern characterises an ironic quick cut from a shot of Mr Joyce remarking, ‘Quigley Street is in Britain; and the British know a thing or two about sacrifices’, to Mrs Stringer, who claims that she cannot sleep without her ‘goosefeather and terylene duvet’ and ‘feels naked’ without her Teasmade. At the film’s end, the audience witnesses a summative discord between soundtrack and image. We hear ‘There’ll Always be an England’ extra-diegetically while Mr Joyce sums up the experience for Mr Whalley, the cantakerous caretaker. As Mr Joyce speaks, the characters who personify his remarks in quite a different sense from his interpretation walk into shot: mr joyce: Not that it’ll ever be quite the same again … mr whalley: What, the hall? mr joyce: Hm? No, I meant my lot – us. We’re just that little bit different now [we see Mr Heseltine smile at Mrs Cox – Mr Joyce obliviously interrupted their embrace in the kitchen] … an experience like that … we’ll never be quite the same as we were, I don’t suppose. We’re closer now, I think [we see Mrs Lund and Mrs Stringer, glaring at each other] … more mutual respect, comradeship, more tolerant … [we see teenager Gary Heseltine (Keith Chegwin) staring at Annabel Shankly, his ardour returned now that she has her make-up and hairpiece back on] … more willing to listen … that’s what pulls us through in the end.

This monologue concludes the play’s comic process of revealing small-scale personal dramas within the public discourse of communal ­endeavour.

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54  Jack Rosenthal Conclusion The plays in this chapter formed part of what Rosenthal calls his ‘writing storm’38 of the 1960s and 1970s, and of Granada’s heyday. Richard Last, in his review of There’ll Almost Always Be an England, notes that Granada maintained a ‘seemingly effortless, apparently inexhaustible superiority over all comers in the series drama field’.39 In this comment Last highlights an apparent contradiction in Granada’s production policy. Although, as Philip Purser argues, Granada emulated an American model in its focus on series and serials at the expense of the single play, the ‘dramatic collages’ of its drama anthology series, as well as its rare single dramas, were notably if briefly successful.40 Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar offers a mixture of realism and fantasy, in a smaller-scale version of the same combination in Billy Liar (John Schlesinger 1963). Its comic experimentation takes place both intra- and extra-diegetically, the double casting of Yootha Joyce as both Edgar’s girlfriends falling into the latter category. Its Englishness is a matter of mise-en-scène and plot, since it is implied that the stifling morality to which Edgar subjects himself is the product of his background. The film’s opening has an ironic resolution, as we learn that Lilly was never in the Wrens, and may not have experienced the divinely sanctioned affair she describes. In Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. the draft versions of the screenplay show the metamorphosis of an ensemble comedy about a football match, in which goals are scored and players are individualised, into one about a single character set against a general ensemble. This tension between individual and collective characterises all of Rosenthal’s ‘Little England’ plays. Despite the homely credit sequence of the Village Hall series, with its jaunty signature tune – by Derek Hilton, who also composed the music for The Lovers and Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar – and watercolour of a village hall, Rosenthal’s two plays for this series offer a view of mid-1970s Britain and its individualist inhabitants which is surprisingly sour, to repeat his own term. Mr Ellis Versus the People represents an extreme case of individual versus collective, as its title shows. Although men work in teams in The Dustbinmen and groups of people dine out together in Spaghetti TwoStep (directed by David Cunliffe for Yorkshire Television and shown on 27 February 1977), none of Rosenthal’s ensemble films is about pulling together – the drama lies in discord. In There’ll Almost Always Be an England it is the female characters who are associated with the play’s discourse of a lost Empire, while the men are more concerned with the war and the way in which it should be remembered. This gender division is partly the result of the association of the Empire with the production of consumer goods. While Mrs Lund

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Little England  55 looks down on Hong Kong as a source of such goods, she is entranced by Mrs Stringer’s loving description of the lace doily on which the fake Capo di Monte ornament once stood in her window: ‘Cyprus lace. From Cyprus’. In contrast to Hong Kong, Cyprus had ceased to be a British Crown Colony in 1960. A combination of ethnic snobbery at Hong Kong’s expense, and the fact that Cyprus’s link with Britain was sufficiently distant in 1974, means that as an origin Cyprus conveys only authenticity. There is irony here as 1974 also saw the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and the beginning of quite different associations with the island. However, it is Mr Stringer who demands why his morning cup of tea is taking so long: ‘Where’s that tea coming from? Ceylon?’ Ceylon had gained its independence from Britain in 1948, and changed its name to Sri Lanka in 1972, but Mr Stringer reminds us that the tea it produces retains the anachronistic British name. It is as if post-imperial history is only seen in terms of the remnants of its consumer provision, while more recent events in the history of former colonies are ignored. This is exemplified in a third, more hyperbolically humorous moment, when Mrs Lund complains that the village hall toilet hasn’t seen a ‘packet of Flash since Mafeking was relieved’ – an incident which took place during the Second Boer War on 17 May 1900 and marked a great victory for the British. Here, the pun on ‘relieved’ follows the comic pattern of all the plays in this chapter: the self-important, systematic, or abstract, whether this is British imperial or parliamentary history, romantic love, or one man’s dreams of being a second Dixie Dean, is shown to have a local and reduced meaning in a newly ‘little’ Britain.

Notes 1 See for instance John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–63, London: BFI 1986; Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI 1992. 2 Even Edgar’s communist leanings are represented as part of his personal malaise; for instance, a late addition to the script in Rosenthal’s hand (in italics here) has Edgar address the kettle as he makes his father’s morning tea thus: ‘Boil, you rotten capitalist pig!’ (Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, Special Collections, Western Bank Library, University of Sheffield, YOUR/1). 3 The play’s origins lie partly in the figure of Rosenthal’s student girlfriend Wendy, whose Roman Catholic refusal of pre-marital sex makes an implicit appearance in The Lovers and an explicit one in Bye, Bye, Baby. Edgar recites to Trevor the tale of believing Pope Pius XII’s hiccups were due to his liaison with Basil Ormerod’s Catholic sister. See Jack Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal: A Life in Six Acts, London: Robson Books 2005, p. 78, for the factual version of this anecdote. 4 William Blake’s 1804 poem was set to music by C. Hubert H. Parry in 1916 and is best known in this form. 5 Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, YOUR/1. 6 Joyce assumed a variant on this role of the sexually inappropriate woman in her

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56  Jack Rosenthal other work from the same era, including the situation comedy Me Mammy (BBC1 1968–71), in which she played the girlfriend of a Catholic mother’s-boy (Milo O’Shea). She went on to sitcom fame as the man-hungry Mildred Roper in Man About the House (Thames Television 1973–76) and its spin-off, George and Mildred (Thames Television 1976–79). 7 In the script, this sound-effect is described as ‘a clear, ringing “Ping” noise’, Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, YOUR/1. 8 The notion was typified by Piri Halasz’s article ‘You can walk across it on the grass’, Time 15 April 1966, in which she wrote, ‘London swings. It is the scene.’ The original cover article can be viewed in Time’s online archive at www.time. com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,835349,00.html, visited 26.4.07; see also Murphy’s discussion of ‘swinging London’ in contemporary film, Sixties British Cinema, p. 139. 9 This saying is most commonly attributed to the Quaker William Penn (1644–1718), founder of what became the State of Pennsylvania. By contrast to Edgar and Mrs Bewley, Trevor describes the saying as ‘pure unadulterated tripe – black tripe at that’. 10 Chris Dunkley, ‘Another Sunday and Sweet F.A.’, The Times 10 January 1972. 11 This effect is increased by a change in the rehearsal script (Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, ANOT/2, October 1971), where ‘Genghis Khan’ is altered in Rosenthal’s hand to ‘Mephistopheles’. 12 All references to the draft script of Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. are from the Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, ANOT/1. 13 Dunkley, ‘Another Sunday and Sweet F.A.’. 14 All stage directions quoted are from the first draft, ANOT/1, undated but catalogued as probably 1971. 15 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 182. 16 William Ralph Dean (1907–80) was a footballer legendary for the record-breaking number of goals he scored for his team. The photograph of him that Eric carries in his wallet bears the legend, ‘Everton and England’. 17 It is Chopin’s Nocturne no. 2 in E flat, op. 9 no. 2. 18 Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, in which he warned fellow Conservatives of the dangers to Britain of continued immigration from the Commonwealth, was delivered in Birmingham in 1968, four years before the transmission of Another Sunday. The day after the speech Edward Heath sacked Powell from the Shadow Cabinet, where he was Shadow Secretary of State for Defence, and Powell’s political career was effectively over. 19 Maureen Lipman, personal communication, 2.9.07. 20 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 205. 21 ‘Introduction: In Conversation with Jack Rosenthal’, in Jack Rosenthal, P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang and Other TV Plays, ed. Alison Leake, London: Longman 1984, p. v. 22 Mary Duffy, ‘This winner gets my vote’, Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, MREL/a. 23 All stage directions quoted are from Rosenthal, P’tang Yang Kipperbang and Other TV Plays, ed. Alison Leake. 24 Veronica Roberts, interview with the author, 12.6.07. 25 The link between politics and romance was made even clearer in a speech by Mr Ellis in the draft and published script which was cut from the televised version: ‘We weigh up the parties. They woo us. Lie to us. Give us the Oh-Be-Joyful. Promise us the moon. And we fall for one of them. And the minute we do – what do they do? Break their promises. And what do we do? Grumble, and flirt with the other party at Municipal Elections to make them jealous.’

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Little England  57 26 This dramatic trope first appeared in episode 16 of Coronation Street (9 February 1961), written by Tony Warren, when all the inhabitants of the Street were evacuated to the Mission Hall because of a gas leak. The trope’s dramatic potential obviously pleased Rosenthal, as it appears again in The Dustbinmen in an episode where Team 3 and Bloody Delilah are stranded overnight at work because of fog. 27 Richard Last, ‘Another bullseye by Bernstein’s boys’, Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, THEA/a. 28 Last, ‘Another bullseye by Bernstein’s boys’. 29 Karl Marx, ‘Commodities and Money’, Das Kapital vol. 1, trans. E and C. Paul, London: Everyman 1972 [1867], p. 45. 30 Ibid., p. 72. 31 Georg Lukàcs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone, London: Merlin Press 1971 [1923], p. 84. 32 ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ was composed by Ross Parker and Harry ParDavis, the lyrics by Hugh Charles; its most famous version was sung by Vera Lynn. 33 See Jon Halliday, ‘Hong Kong: Britain’s Chinese Colony’, New Left Review I/87–88, September/December 1974, for a contemporary critique of Britain’s record in Hong Kong. The former colony was handed back to China in 1997. 34 Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, THEA/1, August 1974, p. 36. 35 Ibid., p. 79. 36 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 211. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., p. 203. 39 Last, ‘Another bullseye by Bernstein’s boys’. 40 Philip Purser, ‘Granada drama from 1956’, in John Finch, ed., Granada Television: The First Generation, Manchester: Manchester University Press 2003, p. 119.

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Men at work

3

The Dustbinmen (1969–70), The Knowledge (1979) and London’s Burning (1986) Each of The Dustbinmen, The Knowledge and London’s Burning has an ensemble format in which we witness relationships between working men – and sometimes women. Dramatic tension is derived from the hierarchy within which the men work. The plot arises in The Dustbinmen and London’s Burning from the nature of the job, which involves interaction with the community at large. While rubbish-collection makes for comedy, plots about firefighting are more generically mixed and tend to tragicomedy. Although Charles Clover claims of London’s Burning that it is one of Rosenthal’s ‘Jack Does …’ films, in which an institution rather than character is under scrutiny,1 none of these films is primarily documentary in form. Rather, each deploys a precise and accurate backdrop of factual detail and – particularly in London’s Burning – setting, as a way of generating both character and narrative. On the other hand, for none of the three films is the profession represented simply a pretext for situation comedy, as it is in, for instance, Taxi. Rosenthal co-wrote half of the twenty-six episodes of this situation comedy with Harry Driver for its second series in 1964. Here, the profession of taxi-driver is little more than a device to enable the central characters – notably Sid James as cabby Sid Stone – to encounter members of the public, and its specific detail does not inform the plot as it does in The Knowledge. It was the dramatic opportunities afforded by the profession itself which attracted Rosenthal to taxi-driving and firefighting. The Dustbinmen, which is of an earlier era, places least reliance on the details of the men’s work, but even in this case the plot arises from elements of union meetings, committee elections and work schedules.

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Men at work  59 The Dustbinmen The Dustbinmen was one of ITV’s popular situation comedies, produced, like The Lovers, in the wake of the first revision of the commercial franchises in 1968 to rival the sitcoms broadcast on the BBC. The pilot for the series, entitled There’s a Hole in Your Dustbin, Delilah, was directed by Michael Apted. It was shown on Granada TV on 30 September 1968 as one of a group of seven single plays under the title ‘The System’, and was Rosenthal’s first 90-minute television film. The film was so popular that a comedy series was commissioned and broadcast for two years from 1969, at the time of a long-lasting dustmen’s strike in Britain, for which Rosenthal was at first both writer and producer. The series, directed by Les Chatfield, was number one in the audience ratings for all of its first six episodes – an unprecedented event in British televisual history. For the second series in 1970, Rosenthal gave up the role of producer although he continued to act as scriptwriter, and then left altogether to concentrate on his new comedy series The Lovers. A third and final series was created without him in 1970. Rosenthal undertook for the original film the kind of hands-on research that characterises all his ‘communities of men’ writing. Rosenthal worked in Salford for a week as a dustbinman, and although he claims that none of the incidents of this time made its way into the film or the series, he was influenced by such details as the men’s use of nicknames and their clothing. For the series, the actors also accompanied refuse men on their routes to learn, for instance, how they lifted and carried the bins.2 The pilot There’s a Hole in Your Dustbin, Delilah sets up many of the features of the series. Four dustbinmen work for the Corporation Cleansing Department in Salford, under the inspector they nickname ‘Bloody Delilah’. In the pilot, as in many of the episodes, the men are drawn together in opposition to Delilah; at other points in the series, episodes centre on an individual from Team 3 and place him at odds with the others. Both the film and the series draw on the late-1960s vogue for gritty, down-to-earth situation comedy. The BBC’s Please, Sir, which focused on the tribulations of an inexperienced teacher (John Alderton) at Fenn Street Secondary Modern, ran from 1968 to 1971; while ITV’s Till Death Us Do Part, featuring the foul-mouthed Alf Garnett (Warren Mitchell), began in 1966 and ran for nearly a decade. Like the latter, The Dustbinmen was subject to Mary Whitehouse’s Clean Up Television campaign of 1964, which was succeeded by the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association in the following year, and the effects of the campaign are perceptible in the series itself and in alterations to the rehearsal scripts for the series.3

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60  Jack Rosenthal The pilot There’s a Hole in Your Dustbin, Delilah was filmed in 16mm black and white film. Its mise-en-scène is characterised by a mixture of comically bleak exterior scenes – of back-to-back houses with housewives dressed in aprons and turbans awaiting the refuse collection, pub yards, figures dwarfed by acres of refuse at rubbish tips, as well as brutalist 1960s architecture – and static interior scenes, typically fourshots of the men arguing in the cabin of ‘Thunderbird 3’, as the dustcart is satirically known. In the film, where the camera-work is more adventurous than in the series, we often see the men in the cab in deep focus shots through a side-window, while in the series they are usually shown face-on. A running joke in the series is Winston’s (Graham Haberfield) ability to tell what is happening in a football match simply by listening to the crowd’s roar. However, the joke is more metafictional than this, as the low production values of both film and series are conveyed by the fact that we never see even the kind of library footage of football games that is used to show cricket in P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang. Winston’s skill does double duty as a character trait and a wry acknowledgement of studio-bound television filming. The Dustbinmen series falls into the category of ‘ensemble’ sitcom, in which there is no individual focus on a comic actor and monologues are rare. Instead, ‘character cameos are played in sequence’,4 and this is prepared for in the film. The men themselves include the team leader Cheese and Egg Petty (Jack MacGowran in the film; Bryan Pringle in the series), so called because his initials are C.E. and ‘Church of England would be a bit of a liberty, wouldn’t it?’ Another of the men is Winston, a fanatical supporter of Manchester City whose behaviour verges on that of a hooligan – a pointed joke by United devotee Rosenthal. Then there is Eric (Henry Livings in the film, the Welsh Tim Wylton in the series), the ‘dim-wit’ who lives with his mother and insists in malapropism to the lads, ‘I know you think I’m a bit numb …’ Finally, there is Heavy Breathing (Harold Innocent in the film), who is a rather unlikely ladies’ man. Innocent’s Heavy Breathing is a portly and rather camp individual – he calls the coal merchant ‘beloved’ – who wears overalls and a woolly hat. His sometime girlfriend, Mrs 6 Shakespeare Street (Priscilla Morgan), unexpectedly observes, ‘That pom-pom on your hat could drive a girl to oriental frenzy!’ Innocent’s Heavy Breathing is a contrast to the more conventionally dashing Trevor Bannister, who took over the role for the series and was invited to play the cheekily caustic Mr Lucas in the BBC1 sitcom Are You Being Served? (1972–85) on the strength of his performance in The Dustbinmen. Bloody Delilah is played in the film by Frank Windsor as an eager career-manager who the lads manage to blackmail into giving them extra beer money. In the

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Men at work  61 series, John Woodvine’s Delilah is a jovial but status-conscious former dustman, succeeded by Brian Wilde’s fussy desk-clerk. Following the lead of the sitcom Steptoe and Son which began in 1962, both the play and the series rely on actors rather than comedians for their cast.5 In a piece of inspired casting, MacGowran, who had played Clov in the first English-language production of Endgame in London in 1964,6 brings to the part of Cheese and Egg a lugubrious humour not dissimilar to that of Beckett’s tramps and characters who dwell among dustbins and ashes. Indeed, the film’s dialogue has an absurdist quality which also characterises that of the series. Although Rosenthal does not mention Beckett’s work as an influence, despite being a life-long fan of Joyce, the dialogue in all of his plays bears signs of a Beckettian combination of the everyday and the existential, relying on smart repartee, puns and submerged quotation: cheese & egg: My many years as sidesman of Chad Street Congregational Church have taught me one thing about people what appear to be bastards. eric: Yes? cheese & egg: They are bastards.

When the lads question Heavy Breathing about his philandering, he replies pompously, in a reference to Keats’s Endymion which Winston appears to recognise: heavy breathing: I go in search of beauty. eric: Oh – in what respect? heavy breathing: Beauty is a thing of beauty … winston: What is it that’s a joy forever? eric: Me mam – when she gets her telly.

In Beckett’s play Endgame of 1957, there is a similar instance of classical literature – in this case, the reproach King Belshazzar suffered in the Bible for profanity – comically juxtaposed with everyday discourse: clov: I look at the wall. hamm: The wall! And what do you see on your wall? Mene, mene? Naked bodies?

In the series, by contrast, Bannister’s Heavy Breathing is an homme fatal as if in compensation for being the least literate of all the men. There’s a Hole in Your Dustbin, Delilah equally depends on absurd wordplay in which metaphors turn out to be real. The film opens on a scene of a man – whom we learn to be Cheese and Egg – rollerskating down an urban road. From his point of view as if from a ‘skating shot’ we see other dustbinmen walking to work. Cheese and Egg rollerskates into

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62  Jack Rosenthal the Cleansing Corporation Depot, and we then see the opening credits. This is a visual pun, as Eric reveals when shouting to his mother, who remains invisible throughout the film and series, as he leaves for work: ‘As Cheese and Egg would say, best get me skates on.’ The plot of There’s a Hole in Your Dustbin, Delilah relies on a double bluff, raising questions about gender and class for comic effect. The lads, along with the audience, suspect Bloody Delilah of conducting an affair with publican’s wife Mrs Pride of Jutland (Marjie Lawrence), and hope to blackmail him into letting them leave work early on Mondays. However, it emerges that, instead, Mrs Pride of Jutland is a hairdresser manqué who tints Delilah’s hair black every week. The scene in which this is revealed is one of ‘innocent innuendo’ which clearly draws upon the situation-comedy trope of the double entendre but reverses it. A similar instance of innocent innuendo appears at the end of Willy Russell’s 1980 play Educating Rita, where former hairdresser Rita addresses her Open University tutor: ‘I never thought there was anythin’ I could give you. But there is. Come here, Frank’ – whereupon she proceeds to trim his hair. In The Dustbinmen during an early scene crucial to the wrongfooting of the audience, Bloody Delilah comes away from a telephone conversation with Mrs Pride of Jutland and regards himself in the mirror in his office to pat his hair. This looks like the gesture of someone anticipating a romantic liaison, but is in fact entirely narcissistic – Delilah is anticipating the improvement of his appearance. This revelation matches the pattern of romantic humour not only in the film and The Dustbinmen series, but in The Lovers as well. What appears to relate to sexual activity often culminates in an ‘innocent reveal’ relating to something else. This self-consciously follows yet thwarts the 1960s trend for introducing sexual material at every conceivable moment. Yet at the same time, as in Sadie, It’s Cold Outside, The Dustbinmen pits sexual or permissive humour against that of prudery, as Delilah puts it, ‘I am not a libertine! In the Gladstone Terrace Owner-Occupiers’ Debating Society I voted against the permissive society!’ In other words, the humour of Rosenthal’s sitcom both relies upon and subverts the double entendre. Romance itself is unromantic: Heavy Breathing is a ‘reluctant Romeo’7 in the film, whose efforts to evade Mrs 6 Shakespeare Street are met with her ‘You just can’t take no for an answer!’ This trope is elaborated upon in The Dustbinmen series where we learn that Heavy Breathing is so named because he has been ‘a sex symbol since primary school’ and is always ‘out of breath, trying to escape’. Similarly, in the series Winston’s girlfriend Naomi (Paula Wilcox, who then starred in The Lovers) has to contend with his one-track mind – he is devoted to football. It is Naomi who tries to persuade Winston off his track:

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Men at work  63 winston: You probably thought Bobby Moore was playing a bit square at first – but he was only trying to overlap with his full-backs. … naomi: Sorry about this skirt. It always rides up when I sit down. (She makes half-hearted attempts to pull it down, then hopefully:) Bringing out the beast in you … winston: Couple of weeks in City reserves’d do Peters no harm …

The rapacity of women versus the reluctance of men is a staple sitcom joke. However, in There’s A Hole in Your Dustbin, Delilah gender itself is represented comically. Bloody Delilah’s hair is incongruously black and luxuriant, causing Cheese and Egg to nickname him: cheese & egg: From the Bible! … Delilah! She was another black-haired … (he’s about to say ‘bastard’, but changes it) … beauty … eric: It was Samson! With all the head of hair. (Cheese & Egg looks across at the inspector) cheese & egg: She looks more like a Bloody Delilah to me!

Throughout, Cheese and Egg refers to Delilah as ‘she’; and Delilah himself has gone to great lengths to conceal the hair-tinting, including leaving his previous job when he was rumbled, because he sees it as demeaningly feminising: ‘it’s like fellers’ corsets – not a thing you like to –’. A running joke throughout Rosenthal’s plays is that of male cameraderie being mistaken for romantic love, although the comedy always defuses that possibility. Class and work-relations are at the root of this apparent gender confusion. Delilah’s status as inspector makes him a ‘she’ to Cheese and Egg: ‘she’s a very unhappy man’, as he confusingly puts it. Bloody Delilah as portrayed by John Woodvine in the series has been elevated to an office-job from his origins as a binman, and is shown in episode one of the second series to be no longer capable of the hard work required. During the episode in which Team 3 and the inspector are trapped overnight at work by fog, the men insist that Delilah is ‘only our gaffer when we’re working’: his class status does not automatically give him the power he enjoys at work. In turn, Woodvine’s Delilah comically misrecognises work-related ruses as sexual ones because of his relatively elevated class position. In the first episode of the series, Bloody Delilah can only understand the men’s sudden friendliness towards him in parodically romantic terms. When Heavy Breathing claims that he wants to be the inspector’s ‘mate’, Delilah demands, ‘You mean, marry me?’ Delilah is blind to the men’s real concern, which is to ensure he is sufficiently content not to give them a hard time at work. Indeed, the important relationships represented in The Dustbinmen are all ‘between men’ and follow the pattern of homosocial desire identified in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s eponymous book. Winston is more

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64  Jack Rosenthal emotionally engaged with football and other male fans than with his girlfriend Naomi, while Cheese and Egg’s wife and Bloody Delilah’s lady-friend exist only at the end of a telephone. The invisible presence of these women reassures the dustbinmen and the audience that, despite the ‘potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual’ behaviour,8 the lads’ banter and fierce involvement with each other falls towards the former end of the continuum. However, while Sedgwick analyses the intersection of class and homosocial behaviour in literary texts, she does not consider work-relations of the kind represented in The Dustbinmen. Although we see domestic settings while the men collect refuse, their own are never represented. Instead, the dustbinmen have their own work-based familial structures. We never hear or see Eric’s mother, but Cheese and Egg addresses him with parental affection as ‘Eric, my flower’. Cheese and Egg’s barely concealed resentment at Bloody Delilah’s authority has an Oedipal as well as a class-based dimension, and underlies his failed effort to supplant the inspector when the latter is away on a training course. On that occasion Cheese and Egg dresses in the patriarchal and managerial uniform of suit and tie – and bowler hat, a step further than Bloody Delilah – and lays down the law of the father with parodic severity, alienating the workforce. Class difference is the central comic dynamic of The Dustbinmen, both within each episode and in the way the relationship between characters and audience is constructed. The laughter track heard throughout the series draws attention to the characters’ own failure to find the comedy amusing, particularly where they are its butt. In the slightly uncomfortable episode four of series two, Heavy Breathing decides to better himself after meeting a Latin-spouting schoolfriend who has made his fortune as a sales rep dealing in plastic ducks. Heavy Breathing enrols in a night-class offering private tuition in ‘Elocution, Tap-Dancing and GCE’, and his inability to read aloud or identify the grammatical subject in the sentence, ‘The dustman empties the rubbish’, is all presented comically. Inevitably the night-class teacher Miss Potter, as if the gender roles were reversed, cries, ‘in a passionate frenzy’, ‘Mr Breathing – I don’t care about your ignorance!’, and throws him onto the desk. Sedgwick argues that the distinction between literacy and illiteracy, that ‘great evidence of class and control’, divides the social world ‘into two as absolutely as gender does’.9 It is true that the semi-literate Heavy Breathing’s status as an almost universal object of sexual adoration has the ironic effect of feminising him in a particular way: he is valued solely for his appearance and his only sexual actions are evasive. Once more, class and gender are shown to be intertwined. Heavy Breathing

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Men at work  65 is disconcerted by a wealthy woman, Mrs Green Gables, who seems indifferent to his charms, so that to the lads’ astonishment he does take romantic action. He empties her bin wearing his Carnaby Street gear and resorts finally to removing his shirt in front of her. The higher class standing of the indifferent woman increases Heavy Breathing’s mortification. Sedgwick argues, in a discussion of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, that ‘only an aristocratic [or, in this case, middleclass] woman seems able to express reproach, severity, or sexual refusal’, while, on the other hand, ‘the only question between [Heavy Breathing] and working-class women is whether he will succumb to temptation’.10 The punchline of this apparently class-based narrative in The Dustbinmen returns to sexual relations since it turns out that the wealthy woman is attracted to Eric’s ‘Pekingese eyes and floppy ears’ rather than to Heavy Breathing. Like illiteracy, class identity follows not just the pattern but the reality of gender difference. While only a high class standing can provide a woman with the power to refuse, refusal itself feminises a male subject. Marjorie Garber argues in her Vested Interests that literary or filmic representations of crossdressing may ‘indicate a category crisis elsewhere’ in the text. Although Heavy Breathing’s ‘crossdressing’ takes place at the level of gender role rather than clothing, in this episode it does function as a ‘displacement from the axis of class’, in Garber’s phrase.11 It seems that the woman is indifferent because of her class standing. The joke resolution of her preference for Eric – which comes to nothing and is never referred to again – demonstrates another aptitude of the middle-class woman, to add to Sedgwick’s list: that of sexual initiative. The ‘crisis’ here is the unexplained and disruptive presence of an apparently single woman of high social standing – from ‘the posh avenue’, as the stage direction has it – in a working-class area. Implicit reference is made throughout The Dustbinmen to Mary Whitehouse’s Clean Up Television campaign, which was directed principally against television drama such as The Dustbinmen. Whitehouse objected to ‘coarseness’ of language as much as its content, as her campaign against Till Death Us Do Part showed.12 Indeed, in one episode of the latter Alf Garnett is shown reading with great approval a book which is clearly Whitehouse’s 1966 Cleaning-Up TV – it ends up being burned in the grate.13 Whitehouse famously enlisted Malcolm Muggeridge to her cause, and he declared at the Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association annual convention of 1967 that, ‘if Till Death Us Do Part is life, I cannot see that there would be anything to do but commit suicide’.14 By reason of his association with the Clean Up TV campaign Muggeridge makes some joke appearances in The Dustbinmen, in particular the following.

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66  Jack Rosenthal Dustbinmen clock in by calling their names to Bloody Delilah as they pass his office window: 1st man: Malcolm. Number 4 gang. 2nd man: Muggeridge. Number 5 gang. No relation.

The dustbinmen use their own imprecations to avoid the kind to which Whitehouse objected: No pigging swearing! You great stumour! You great buttock! You know I bruise easy! Bog off!

In her autobiography Who Does She Think She Is, Whitehouse asked rhetorically, ‘Now, thanks to Till Death, the word “Bloody” is in such common usage that we must … take leave to question whether the programme showed up the “essential futility of the swearing habit” or actually established it?’15 In such a climate, self-conscious jokes about swearing which is either anticipated or avoided have a double address in The Dustbinmen. For instance, the lads hesitate over the word ‘bastion’, and Cheese and Egg looks forward to Winston’s win on a football-match bet: cheese & egg: Three minutes to go. Then either we’re in the money or Winston’s deeper in the – (Naomi flashes a look at him to see if he’s going to say something obscene) – mire.

Invented imprecations and substitutes of this kind show ‘the speaker’s inventiveness’, in Henry Raynor’s words, rather than an urge ‘to humiliate or offend’.16 Not all instances of Mary Whitehouse’s least favourite word have been deleted from The Dustbinmen, however, as shown by Bloody Delilah’s plea for respect for his status: ‘Lads! Lads! You’re not at the London School of Eco-bloody-nomics!’, not to mention his own nickname. The rehearsal scripts for the pilot and all episodes of the series have been amended in Rosenthal’s hand at the last minute to reduce the number of particular epithets. Most alterations occur in the scripts for series two, as Whitehouse’s campaign gathered momentum. For instance, ‘bloody’ is deleted or changed to ‘pigging’ – to preserve ‘the rhythm of the line’, as Rosenthal put it17 – on at least fourteen occasions in episode five. Underlying the coarseness of language is another pun, as Cheese and Egg says about Heavy Breathing’s nightclasses: ‘I think he’s given up filth and taken up something disgusting!’ ‘Filth’ throughout the film and the series has an obstinately material meaning.

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Men at work  67 The Knowledge The Knowledge was first shown on Thames Television on 27 December 1979, and was nominated for the British Academy Best Play Award and the Prix Italia for that year. It was produced by Verity Lambert of Euston Films and was that company’s last single play. The play was based on an original idea by Bob Brooks, an American director of television commercials, who went on to direct it.18 Rosenthal’s research for the film involved accompanying taxi-drivers around London, for which the cabbies awarded him an honorary Green Badge. The Knowledge was received with critical delight, such as Herbert Kretzmer’s description of it as ‘an event in the TV calendar’ from an ‘unstoppable author’.19 When The Knowledge was shown again in 1995 as part of a Channel Four Thames Television tribute evening, Geoffrey Phillips described it in glowing terms as a ‘masterpiece’ which ‘stands head and shoulders’ above the evening’s other offerings, concluding his review by claiming it as ‘certainly’ the ‘best TV play Britain has ever produced’.20 While this is perhaps a hyperbolic estimate, the film has a loyal following by reason of its focus on the closed world of London taxi-drivers, and because of its cast, which includes Nigel Hawthorne giving a ‘delicious performance’,21 Maureen Lipman cast self-consciously against type, and small roles for actors such as Gary Holton who went on to greater fame in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet in the 1980s. Thames Television was London’s ITV broadcasting company from 1968 until it lost the franchise to Carlton Television in 1992. Its famous ident, consisting of an image of London’s skyline – featuring St Paul’s Cathedral, Tower Bridge and Westminster – almost blends into the miseen-scène and plot of Rosenthal’s film. In The Knowledge London appears in a great range of shot constructions. It is shown from above, in streetlevel tracking shots, and from a raised vantage-point: the film opens and closes with expansive aerial shots of London, shows the trainee cabbies in a wide variety of London settings as they practise their routes, and forms the backdrop to Chris (Mick Ford) and Janet (Kim Taylforth) discussing their relationship on the balcony of her high-rise council flat in Stepney. London’s streets and how they link up constitute a central element of the film’s plot and its dialogue, since dramatic tension depends on the four main characters’ progress towards acquiring the cabby’s ‘Knowledge of London’. As is customary in Rosenthal’s plays, The Knowledge opens enigmatically so that information about its setting has to be pieced together by the viewer. The film’s establishing shot is one of a café in north London. The camera pans around the café’s interior, alighting and focusing upon a group of three men drinking tea and peering anxiously at booklets, to

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68  Jack Rosenthal the accompaniment of a soundtrack consisting of the noises of a cash register and crockery banging. The first lines of dialogue that we hear turn out to be typical of the film, but are initially mysterious: harry: French Embassy to Fulham Cemetery. cliff (his mind blank with fear): What? harry: What do you mean, ‘What’? cliff: French where? harry: Embassy. cliff: Oh. (Tortured pause) Which cemetery? harry: You idle sod! You haven’t learned it! (Jeers and catcalls from the others.)22

At this point Chris and his girlfriend Janet enter the café and Chris’s question acts as our own: ‘What are they on about?’ We learn that the three men are ‘Knowledge boys’ testing each other on routes, or ‘runs’, through London in preparation for one of their many examinations, or ‘appearances’, at the hands of ‘them sadists up the road’ at the Metropolitan Police Public Carriage Office. We see the film’s credits only after this prefatory scene. The Knowledge follows the fortunes of a group of ten prospective London taxi-drivers, including two black characters and a ‘Knowledge girl’, Miss Stavely (Philippa Howell). However, in contrast to London’s Burning, where the presence of black and female characters is central to the plot, in The Knowledge the focus is on four white working-class men and their relationships with each other and with their wives and girlfriends. Chris is the youngest and most fearful of the trainees, and acts as the film’s narrator; Gordon Weller (Michael Elphick) is the ‘uncouth’23 serial adulterer, a stock Rosenthal character and equivalent to Heavy Breathing in The Dustbinmen or Paul in The Chain; Ted ­Margolies ­(Jonathan Lynn) is the scion of a dynasty of Jewish cabbies; while the oldest character, ‘Titanic’ Walters (David Ryall), so nicknamed because he is a ‘disaster’, proceeds chaotically towards the goal of the cabby’s Green Badge on an ancient bicycle he can hardly ride. For each man, the notion of ‘knowledge’ deliberately and comically transcends the 468 taxi-runs they must learn. Rosenthal describes his realisation that there was a second crucial element to a story about London cabbies: ‘It was to people the story with characters who, in doing the Knowledge, would achieve some glimmering of self-knowledge.’24 The audience’s knowledge is also tested by its having to decode the increasingly eccentric behaviour of the Knowledge examiner, Mr Burgess (Nigel Hawthorne). Burgess embodies Rosenthal’s customary interest in power relations and authority in the workplace, seen elsewhere in the men’s rebellious attitude towards Bloody Delilah in The

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Men at work  69 Dustbinmen, and Leo’s resentment of the class traitor Officer Skinner in Bye, Bye, Baby. In the published script, Burgess is described as a ‘big and very intimidating’ ex-policeman, but Hawthorne’s portrayal is more subtle than this. His Burgess is a physically slight bureaucrat with a toothbrush moustache and an effective line in mocking sarcasm. Burgess glories in his nickname of ‘the Vampire’ and although he explains to Gordon that his various ruses during appearances – which Gordon describes as ‘shouting, bawling, needling, whispering, cracking on you’re deaf’ – are designed to give the novices practice in dealing with difficult fares, they still come across as unmotivated intimidation. Burgess explains one of his ruses in the terms of a visual joke. As in the case of Cheese and Egg’s skates in There’s a Hole in Your Bucket, Delilah, a turn of phrase is represented visually in the mise-en-scène. In what is probably The Knowledge’s most celebrated scene, Chris sits dressed in his best clothes opposite Mr Burgess during an appearance. In exaggerated close-up, Burgess proceeds to insert a Vicks nasal inhaler up one nostril and carries on as if nothing is amiss. Burgess tests Chris on runs – inhaler still in place – by speaking alternately in a very loud and a very quiet voice, and in Yorkshire and American accents; he performs star jumps, then laughs uncontrollably – until Chris joins in, whereupon he asks, stony-faced, ‘Is something amusing you, Mr Matthews?’ The scene concludes with Burgess inserting a second Vicks inhaler up his other nostril. Chris, at his wits’ end, can only stare – ‘a broken man’, as the stage direction has it. This surreal behaviour has its apparently rational explanation, as Burgess later reveals to Gordon: burgess: Compared to people, the Knowledge is a piece of marzipan. They mumble. They can’t hear you. They don’t know where they want to go. They get up both your nostrils.

The Knowledge’s opening café scene does not simply gloss the meaning of the film’s title, but establishes its central thematic thread – the role and importance of dialogue itself. The relationships of the central characters with their wives and with each other are defined in terms of dialogue. Lilian Walters (June Watson) has not spoken to her husband Titanic since their honeymoon seventeen years earlier, while the latter is grateful for a conversation with Ted Margolies even though it consists only of misunderstandings: ‘Don’t often get the chance of a good discussion. Swapping points of view, pros and cons and that …’. Later, on the way to Gordon Weller’s house for afternoon tea, Janet asks Chris whether Gordon and Brenda (Maureen Lipman) own their house, if they have ‘kiddies’, and whether they are ‘happy or what’. Chris answers ‘Dunno’ each time, and the dialogue concludes,

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70  Jack Rosenthal janet: Don’t you lot ever talk to each other? chris: ’Course we do. janet: What about?

It is not only the case that the men do talk to each other, and that Chris knows full well that the philandering Gordon’s attitude to his wife is, ‘Ignorance is bliss, Christopher – know what I mean? My Brenda’s highly blissful about the whole thing.’ More than this, the answer to Janet’s final question is provided by an abrupt cut from the shot of her riding pillion on Chris’s moped, to a close-up of Gordon animatedly discussing runs in his living-room with the other Knowledge boys while their womenfolk sit in silence at the other side of the room. The cost of the quest for the Knowledge is made visually and aurally apparent. As she and Chris leave the Wellers’, Janet makes clear that the difference in kinds of dialogue is a sign that their relationship cannot continue: janet: I don’t think I’ve heard you talk since the night I met you. The Ilford Tiffany. (Beat) Not to me, anyway.

It is as if a version of homosocial ‘knowledge’ has overtaken the apprentice cabbies, as we saw in the case of The Dustbinmen, and this is made apparent here in the position of the characters in the Wellers’ front room and in terms of who talks to whom. The scene in the Wellers’ living-room also emphasises the deliberately disjunctive casting of Maureen Lipman as Brenda Weller. Gordon’s claim that doing the Knowledge will take up his evenings provokes in Brenda a lament which reveals the very particular working-class interests she will have to forfeit: brenda: My wrestling! And my drag acts at the White Lion! And my mail-order! And my odd chicken-in-the-bleedin’ basket!

Brenda recites the Lord’s Prayer while Gordon undergoes his first appearance. In the scene which takes place in her living-room, she sits glaring furiously at the assembled Knowledge boys, including her unfaithful husband. She is resplendent in a blonde hairdo, wears a crucifix round her neck, and eventually puts down one of many cigarettes to scream piercingly in frustration. At the film’s end while the closing credits roll, we see Gordon return home to find Brenda in bed with another man. All of these details are comically at odds with Lipman’s persona, both personal and professional. From 1979 to 1981 Lipman starred in the popular ITV comedy series Agony as a cosmopolitan Jewish agony aunt, and was already well known as the happily married spouse of Rosenthal and mother of their two children. Indeed, Brenda is implicitly contrasted with Ted’s Jewish wife Val (Lesley Joseph), whom she sits next to in

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Men at work  71 her living-room during the ill-fated tea-party. In The Knowledge Joseph’s persona and the character she plays are much more closely linked.25 Although London is an indispensable element of the film’s mise-enscène, its geography appears as much within the dialogue as in the location shots. The first run in the trainee cabby’s guide, the Blue Book, is described by the examiner Mr Burgess: burgess: Run number 1 on page 1 is Manor House Station to Gibson Square … Not that anyone has ever wanted to go from Manor House to Gibson Square. But you’ve got to know how to.

Such a remark is clearly asking for the dramatic response it receives at the film’s end, nearly three years later, when Chris has been awarded the fully-fledged cabby’s Green Badge. His fare is a businessman wearing pinstripes and bowler hat: man: I’m picking someone up at Manor House. From there we want Gibson Square. chris: Manor House to Gibson Square? You’re joking! man: Don’t get awkward with me, son. I’ll have your bloody number!

Humour here depends precisely on the migration of geography from Blue Book to the streets themselves, and from the signifiers of dialogue to the signifieds of the mise-en-scène. This kind of slippage is commonplace in the Knowledge boys’ dialogue, as Chris makes clear when complaining about a pain in his shoulder:26 ‘Gordon thought it was a touch of lumbago from being on the moped in the rain. During List 9 – Bedford Square to Sussex Square, Porchester Square to Princes Gate  …’. Here, the printed list of runs has assumed a geographical reality of its own, so much so that lumbago can result from it. London streets undergo another transformation in the dialogue between Chris and Burgess during one of the former’s appearances. Chris is answering a run: chris: Left by … um … what’s it. burgess: And what’s ‘what’s-it’? chris: Um … where d’you call it … Maltesers … Not Maltesers. Liquorice All-sorts. (Burgess stares at him) burgess: What? chris: Liquorice All-sorts … Bassetts … Barretts … Barretts of Wimpole Street … That’s it. Left Wimpole Street.

The comedy here derives from Chris’s transformation of practically based knowledge into that of dialogue’s word association. Nancy BanksSmith points out that in general the dialogue in The Knowledge – which

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72  Jack Rosenthal features Rosenthal’s trademark non-sequiturs and ‘surreal squiffiness’ – is particularly appropriate in a film about cabbies, for whom life is indeed ‘one long series of glancing encounters, near misses and candid, if uncharitable, exchanges of views’.27

London’s Burning London’s Burning was commissioned by Linda Agran of Euston Films, and she took it with her in a move to London Weekend Television. It was broadcast on 7 December 1986. London’s Burning was a self-contained pilot for the extremely popular drama series of the same name, which ran from 1988 to 2002, gaining audiences of 18 million at its peak. Although some of the cast stayed on for the series and the film’s director, Les Blair, also directed some of the episodes, Rosenthal was not involved in it. His film – which itself gained 12 million viewers – is about the ten members of the Blue Watch Fire Brigade in east London, and alternates the comedy of their relationships with darker episodes about their job. London’s Burning was received with critical acclaim. The Sunday Times reviewer declared that Rosenthal was ‘on excellent form’, the film’s ending was described as ‘one of the most shattering I can remember on television’, and the absence of any previous television drama about the fire service was judged to be ‘splendidly rectified’ by Rosenthal’s film.28 John Walsh in the Independent claimed that, ‘this wildly funny, adventurous and moving play was one of the big events of the year’s TV’.29 It was nominated for a British Academy Best Play Award in 1987. Rosenthal was drawn to the fire service as a subject for a play because of its combination of particular dramatic and political opportunities. In 1978 he met firefighter Les Murphy, the future husband of the family’s au pair, who regaled Rosenthal with anecdotes from his work. These included details of emergency call-outs, or ‘shouts’, as well as accounts of the ‘wheezes’, or practical jokes, the firefighters engaged in for distraction. Rosenthal kept a supplementary list of such stories, as well as notes about further developments for the series. None of these extra stories – perhaps mercifully – made their way into the finished film. They include an ‘Old woman refusing to miss TV soap during fire’, and ‘Inflatable doll under bed in fire. Man heartbroken. Lads club up to buy him one.’30 As with The Knowledge, Rosenthal’s approach to the topic was accretive. He was initially attracted by the firefighters’ ‘uniquely dramatic’ world of ‘clashing opposites’, in which ‘tragedy and farce, heroism and silliness’ coexist.31 To these elements, which arose from the firefighting job itself, in London’s Burning Rosenthal added

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Men at work  73 two others: the dramatic device of a female firefighter joining the ‘stridently, jealously-macho world’32 of the Watch, and a historical background based on the Broadwater Farm riot. The real-life riot took place on 6 October 1985 in Tottenham, north London, and was the result of strained relations between police and the mainly black inhabitants of a socially deprived estate. The riot culminated in the murder of PC Keith Blakelock as he tried to assist firemen who were under attack. Rosenthal was struck by the irony of firemen being attacked because, to ‘the hard men of the ghetto’, a fireman’s uniform ‘represented the same badge of Authority as a policeman’s’.33 London’s Burning has the cold open customary in Rosenthal’s work. We see a close-up of a scruffily dressed young black boy hitting a Coke can with a brick on dusty ground – this is an image based on one from Oxfam’s early-1980s campaign about famine in Africa which showed a little boy in just the same posture, playing with a pebble. The camera then pulls back to reveal that the boy in London’s Burning is in the middle of a British inner-city estate rather than the Ethiopian no-man’s-land the scene seemed to show. The film’s credits appear over shots of the rundown streets of the ‘dilapidated concrete ghetto in inner London’ where the little boy lives. The polemical nature of this opening, implying that deprivation is not just a third-world issue, gives it an ominous feeling. This feeling is not dissipated by the more familiar scenes that follow. The scene shifts abruptly from life in the estate, cutting into a song being played by a band at the local Community Hall, to a contrastingly ‘salubrious’ house. Here we see Vaseline (Mark Arden) working in a huge garden, watched over by the middle-class Mrs Grant (Hetty Baynes). This is the more familiar Rosenthal territory of comic class difference, given a sexualised slant here to fit with Vaseline’s role as the film’s serial husband. His nickname refers to the fact that he is a bit slippery. Mrs Grant’s received pronunciation is exaggerated almost to the point of caricature in contrast to Vaseline’s estuary accent. Rather than being simply the ‘middle-aged lady of the house’, as the stage direction has it, she is alluringly dressed in a tight white dress and high heels, and asks Vaseline – who is bare-chested – pointedly about his forthcoming wedding. Like Mrs Green Gables in The Dustbinmen, it appears that her elevated class status gives Mrs Grant the ability to toy with and reject any intimacy with Vaseline, whom she fails to pay the £1 she owes. Their relationship is summed up thus: mrs grant: Rubbish! vaseline: Who is? (She points to the mound of garden rubbish, still smouldering.)

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74  Jack Rosenthal As we see, Mrs Grant gives Vaseline orders which he interprets as disparaging. He also fails to extinguish the smouldering rubbish. The plot itself ‘smoulders’ at this point, since later in the day the fire-brigade is called to extinguish a fire blazing in Mrs Grant’s garden shed. Although comic irony, not to mention a public-service warning, is implicit in the firefighter Vaseline helping to put out a fire he caused, there is also a hint here at an unconsciously violent class warfare, a more extreme kind of which underlies the racial violence to come. The film’s initial alternation of scenes which appear to be contrasting – such as that between the inner-city estate and Mrs Grant’s house – actually implies connection between different kinds of disaffection and deprivation.34 The irony identified by Rosenthal, that firemen may be as associated with repressive authority as the police, is dramatised in London’s Burning in the film’s plot and in its mise-en-scène. Our introduction to the firefighters of the film, such as Vaseline, is gradual and anonymous. This is also the way in which we encounter the young black man known as ‘Ethnic’ (Gary McDonald) by his colleagues, all of whom have work nicknames. Ethnic lives in the inner-city estate on which the film opens. He carries his work clothes in a bag which is searched both by the local ‘hard men’, two Rastafarians and a white man, who are suspicious about his job, and by the police, who do not believe he has one. While the hard men do not recognise Ethnic’s clothes as a uniform, the policemen’s attitude changes when they do – ‘Sorry about that, mate. Just doing our job. Good lad’ – thus sending on the wrong track the audience’s quest to be sure what Ethnic’s job actually is. Equally, in the mise-en-scène we first encounter other members of the film’s dramatis personae wearing unidentified uniforms complete with the blue shirt and epaulettes of ‘authority’. It is as if we are made to experience the ease with which firefighters may be confused with the ‘pre-Scarman slobs’35 who are the policemen of the film. Further, the audience is led to consider why certain characters in uniform attract less sympathy than others. It is not until we see the firefighters mustered for a duty-watch at Blackwall Fire Station in the film’s fourteenth scene, attired in familiar yellow helmets, yellow leggings, and black firemen’s tunics, that we can be entirely sure what the men’s job is. In contrast to what becomes of Ethnic, the story of Josie Ingham (Katharine Rogers), the female firefighter, acts as light relief since hers is a narrative with an upward sweep. The film’s opening scenes establish the exclusively masculine world of the firefighters, complete with off-colour puns at Ethnic’s expense, practical jokes played on the public, and Vaseline continuing to chew gum as he eats his dinner. Josie’s reception takes place in an environment where Station Officer Tate

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Men at work  75 (James Marcus) and Sub-Officer Hallam (Sean Blowers) have just had the following exchange: hallam: Have you ever worked with one before? tate: In my day we joined the Brigade to get away from them. Like the Foreign Legion but handier for White Hart Lane.

Although Freud argues that a woman is always the butt of a sexual joke,36 here the humour of a joke about gender relations works at the expense of the men uttering the words. Indeed, as the representation of a joke it is set up to do so. The unprecedented nature of the new firefighter is only hinted at in this dialogue between Hallam and Tate, in a comic version of the concealment of the men’s profession at the film’s beginning. When Josie – whom the men find it hard to nickname – does arrive, she is greeted by a spectrum of uncertain reactions, including having a door held open for her on the way to a shout, making the men self-conscious about their ribaldry and soft-porn-watching, being asked to scrounge cups of tea during a firefighting exercise, and is hailed by a member of the public: ‘’Scuse me, son.’ Josie’s speech to the men, on her first night in the firefighters’ dormitory, appears to address their clichéd responses to her but raises others in turn: josie (sighs, resignedly): Okay. Here we go. One – I’m not a dyke. Two – I’m not a women’s libber. Three – I’m not a nymphomaniac. Four – I’m not an alien from Outer Space. (The men risk tiny glances at each other.) … There’s only one difference between you and me – and that’s what you’re no doubt holding in your hands under your blanket. So it’s only a little difference, innit. And sod all to do with putting out fires.

This speech has a double addressee, since it reassures the audience as well as the men that Josie is ‘bloody good at fighting fires’ but ‘the rest of the time [she] does the stuff other women do’. Neither is being asked to accept anything out of the ordinary. Josie’s remark, ‘I’m not a women’s libber’, seems not to be a knowing citation on her part of the well-known disavowal, although within the context of the play it may be heard as such by the audience. Josie is akin to the strong working women of Rosenthal’s other mid-1980s play, The Chain (1985), whose ineffectual male partners indulge nonetheless in gender patronage. Josie’s husband of five months, Gerry (Eric Deacon), is unemployed – he counters Josie’s stories of life in the fire service with satirical mention of the Job Centre and describes himself as a ‘fireman’s wife’. Lack of work and its homosocial opportunities leads to the feminisation of this male character. The final element in Rosenthal’s accretive approach to writing

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76  Jack Rosenthal London’s Burning was his choice of a ‘fictional centre’37 for the factual structure of the film. The character of Ethnic constitutes such a centre. His role is an overdetermined one which makes him ‘the pivot of extremes and colliding opposites’38 from which the film is constructed. Ethnic is the only black firefighter in the Blue Watch, and one of the only young black men from his estate with a job. He is thus not only an outsider in both parts of his life, but eventually experiences impossibly conflicting loyalties to, in Rosenthal’s words, ‘his ghetto community and to his fellow-firefighters’.39 In this sense Ethnic is akin to a figure from a Hegelian tragedy who, like the eponymous heroine of Sophocles’ play Antigone, experiences a conflict between incompatible moral actions. As Rosenthal puts it, that is why, ‘at the end of the film, [Ethnic] dies’. On the night of the riot in the ‘ghetto’ where he lives, Ethnic is ‘almost in tears’ as he witnesses scenes of violence until he is spurred into action by seeing policemen beating a young black man, and, moments later, his firefighter colleague Charisma (Gerard Horan) being attacked by black youths. After brief hesitation, Ethnic goes to the rescue of the fireman. This decision is rewarded by a cry of ‘Traitor!’ and some of the estate’s youths drop a concrete paving-stone onto Ethnic from a walkway. We see the paving-stone fall in slow motion from Ethnic’s point of view; then follows a cut away from Ethnic’s viewpoint, both to show his prostrate body and to signify his death. Charisma rushes to his side and we see a shot-reverse-shot sequence between his face and Ethnic’s – but as Ethnic’s eyes are closed he cannot return Charisma’s look within the sequence, televisually signifying his death. Several of the reviews of London’s Burning described both its plot and the style in which it is filmed as documentary drama. As it was billed as a fiction film, this was seen as a mark of failure. John Walsh argued that the director Les Blair’s ‘cinéma vérité action-filming’ counterpointed Rosenthal’s ‘pub-vérité dialogue’, but at the expense of ‘psychological accuracy or moral analysis’.40 An anonymous preview in the Independent argued that Blair’s ‘unstructured’ filmic style in combination with Rosenthal’s script resulted in a film that falls uncomfortably ‘between a drama and a documentary’.41 It is true that the background to London’s Burning was thoroughly researched in Rosenthal’s inimitable way. He accompanied on their shouts the firefighters of Hornsey Fire Station, and also ‘the Fire Brigade’s elite team at Shaftesbury Avenue’; he interviewed other firefighters and some inhabitants of Broadwater Farm, and was ‘gobsmacked’ to witness ‘the antics of my fellow members of the public at each “incident”’.42 Such ‘antics’ appear in the film in the form of a man asking about a reward for reporting a fire; and a woman complaining about the water tracked through a friend’s house by fire-

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Men at work  77 fighters. The film’s mise-en-scène benefits from being filmed in Dockhead Fire Station near London Bridge – for the series which followed, only the exterior of the fire station was used and a special set was built for interior scenes. The actors underwent training for their roles at the London Fire Brigade School in Southwark.43 However, although London’s Burning includes two ‘spectacular set-pieces’, in Herbert Kretzmer’s words,44 namely the death of a baby in a house fire and the street riot at the film’s end, it does not conform to a definition of drama documentary or cinéma vérité. Dave Robinson, in the BFI’s online journal Screenonline, defines ‘drama documentary’ as a hybrid genre consisting of ‘programmes which are largely dramas, but have documentary value in terms of research and are shot in a style influenced by documentary’.45 Although London’s Burning may appear to fit such a definition, it has no pretensions to documentary status. Rather, fiction has priority. The film makes reference to actual events which have been changed to fit the dramatic imperatives of the film. For instance, as we have seen, the real-life murder of PC Blakelock during a riot has been transformed into the death of a black firefighter living on the estate in question. What has been altered is more significant than what has been retained. London’s Burning does not, in other words, aim to give a dramatic account of specific events in the manner of a television play such as Hillsborough (ITV 5 December 1996), which was a dramatisation of the football stadium disaster for investigatory purposes. Rosenthal’s film is significant not for its relationship to a particular historical event nor because it accurately represents the Fire Brigade, but for its fictional construction and its basis in such dramatic genres as tragicomedy. While the producer Peter Knight noted that actors not known for television work were chosen to increase the ‘documentary feel’ of the film,46 all of the cast were professional actors – Katharine Rogers and James Hazeldine had backgrounds in the RSC. Like cinéma vérité, drama documentary is characterised by particular filmic techniques which may include the use of hand-held cameras, placing people in everyday situations, and by the presence of authentic or realistic dialogue and action. However, these techniques are the constructed ones of a particular aesthetic and while some of them feature in London’s Burning, they do so for fictional purposes. Handheld cameras are used occasionally in London’s Burning, for instance in the scene of a house-fire in which a baby is killed, but as this is evidence of choice of technique it indicates fictionality. This is different from the effect of hand-held cameras in a ‘mockumentary’ series such as BBC4’s The Thick of It (2005), where the technique is used to support

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78  Jack Rosenthal the satirical nature of the programme through an exaggerated mimicry of documentary. During the house-fire scene in London’s Burning we accompany the firefighters into a blazing bedroom and witness the rescue of two small children, which gives the impression of documentary but could only be shown within the scope of fiction. In the same scene, water from a fireman’s hose splashes onto the camera lens. The effect of this is not to persuade viewers that they are watching a documentary or news report, in which such an occurrence might take place accidentally. Rather, it is a self-conscious imitation of such a style to make fictional events seem more realistic. As John Caughie describes it, ‘the appearance in the fiction of the documentary look, easily visible but unsteady and apparently unpremeditated, establishes the impression of a basis of unproblematic fact’ (my emphasis).47 During the housefire scene we also glimpse, as if by chance, a school sign situated near the burning house. Caughie argues that ‘the documentary look finds its consistency in the rhetoric of the “unplanned” or “unpremeditated” shot’ of this kind.48 Yet the impression of spontaneity is annulled almost at once. When we see the school sign for a second time, it is clear that this is not an accidental but a carefully placed signifier of tragic irony. The sign cautions motorists to beware of school-children playing in the street, yet a child has died in its own home as a result of adult carelessness. The street sign acts as a signifier of the realist fiction genre of London’s Burning. Finally, it is significant that although members of the London Fire Service took issue with particular ways of representing the firefighters in London’s Burning, Rosenthal’s own lament about the film’s final version concerned its fictional coherence. In an article entitled ‘Fuming’, Avril Connard lists the reservations of the Dockhead firefighters when they saw the film that had been made on their premises.49 They insisted that in fire-station life the informal rule is ‘no birds, blue films or booze’; they took exception to the idea that a woman could ‘hold down a job in the service’, although in 1986 there were 21 women firefighters in London; and they objected to the ‘false impression’ given of an actionpacked life in the service. Most troubling of all to the fire station’s boss, the Assistant District Officer, was the implication of partisan behaviour on the part of firefighters during the riot, where they are seen ‘in a head-on confrontation with black youths on a slum estate’.50 As we have learned, it was precisely Rosenthal’s particular interest in the factual detail of firefighters being unwillingly drawn into confrontation which inspired the plot of London’s Burning. LWT also received a letter from the London Fire and Civil Defence Authority, drawing attention to two much more specific details which

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Men at work  79 51

caused them concern. In her dormitory speech to the lads, Josie claimed, ‘I’m in the job because I like it. I’m not clever enough to be a nurse or a secretary. But … I’m bloody good at fighting fires.’ The LFCDA objected to the implication that no training or specific knowledge is required to be a firefighter. However, as is also the case with the legal objections to some of the characters in Bye, Bye, Baby, Josie’s utterance reveals more about her character than it does about the fire service. As with her ‘I’m not a women’s libber’ statement, Josie is disavowing the skill and knowledge she proceeds to demonstrate throughout the film – in order to reassure the men who are her audience that they have nothing to fear from a working woman. The LFCDA also objected to Bayleaf’s (James Hazeldine) ‘attack’ on the mother of the dead child in the house-fire episode, claiming that this went against the ‘fully professional’ ethos of the fire service. However, Bayleaf’s furious reaction to the mother, who was out dancing while her children were at home alone, is more revealing about his status as a fictional character than it is about a documentary representation of the fire service. We learn that Bayleaf’s wife recently left him and took their child with her, explaining his extreme response. After the child’s death in the fire, Josie urges him to make known to the lads his own loss: ‘At least your kid’s alive. It’s all that matters in the end. Everything else is bonus.’ Both the details to which the LFCDA objected emphasise anew the fact that London’s Burning is fiction and not documentary drama – rather than being a comment on the fire service, each point serves to illustrate character. Far from losing a focus on psychology through verisimilitude, the film establishes psychology’s presence by such means. Indeed, it is a mark of its success that the film was taken to be the documentary drama whose techniques it imitated. Rosenthal describes how well he got on with the director of London’s Burning, Les Blair, despite colleagues’ predictions – until he saw the final version of the film. Rosenthal discovered that Blair had failed to shoot what Rosenthal considered ‘one of the most crucial scenes in the film – and maybe its whole raison d’être’.52 The scene in question appears in the published screenplay but not the televised film. After Ethnic has extinguished the fire deliberately started at his home, his mother Beatrice has a conversation with friends at the Community Hall in which they discuss the estate’s problems: the unpredictable behaviour of the police, local people’s irrational resentment of firemen, and the lack of jobs for young people. Like a Greek chorus, an elderly man predicts the film’s denouement: elderly man: You stick a bunch of rats in a cage, good rats, bad rats, they got nothin’ to eat, what gonna happen den? They go crazy, they eat

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80  Jack Rosenthal each other… Or maybe … they chew through de bars with their sharp white teeth. And what den? Hold for a long bleak moment.53

Although Rosenthal regretted its absence, the prolepsis and the overt articulation of the film’s themes and plot-lines in the conversation between Beatrice and her friends constitutes unnecessary explicitness – but for fictive rather than factual reasons. Instead of the elderly man’s commentary, in the televised version there is a cut without transition, in the manner of the film as a whole, to a comic scene in which Charisma explains snooker techniques to Josie. Indeed, some of the film’s most effective scenes consist not of such explicatory dialogue but of silence – in the fire station after the child’s death, and at Ethnic’s parents’ flat after his death.

Conclusion Rosenthal’s interest in writing about groups of men working together is evident throughout his career. An early example is the episode ‘Being Nice to Bootsie’ (ITV 1963) which he co-wrote with Harry Driver for the popular series Bootsie and Snudge. The series’ duo consisted of the recently demobbed Bootsie, a handyman (Alfie Bass), and SergeantMajor Snudge, a porter (Bill Fraser). They worked in the Imperial, a gentlemen’s club in Pall Mall, and the series concerns their relationship with each other and with the two other club employees, the secretary (Robert Dorning) and waiter (Clive Dunn). The material here relies heavily on the humour of slapstick and farce. In the plays I have discussed in this chapter, changes in terms of genre, style and tone are clear in each decade, moving away from slapstick towards naturalistic drama. Humour in The Dustbinmen in the 1960s relies on the characters’ manic aggression and unwitting word-play, while the subjectmatter draws on class, gender, and the dustbinmen’s bleak attitude to their ‘chosen profession’, as Bloody Delilah puts it. Although we see them at work, some episodes take place entirely in the inspector’s office and one in a hospital ward, emphasising the fact that the real focus of the series is on the relationships between characters. In The Knowledge of the 1970s, the representation of the profession of cabby is more detailed in both mise-en-scène and plot, but once more the focus is on relationships between the trainee taxi-drivers and the play’s authority figure, examiner Mr Burgess. In the 1980s, London’s Burning is ‘deliberately’54 less comic than The Knowledge, and the characters here are the most realistic of all the

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Men at work  81 films about ‘communities of men’. Although relationships between the firemen, and with the rookie female firefighter, are still of importance, the plot-device of the antagonistic superior is less so – Station Officer Tate is a background figure, preferring to work in his office on a matchstick replica of Alexandra Palace than to take issue with his staff. The firefighters’ relationship with the outside world is more crucial than in any of the previous films, providing not just the narrative twists offered by the housewives in The Dustbinmen or the Knowledge boys’ partners in The Knowledge, but a fully fledged and politicised setting. The generic and stylistic distance covered between The Dustbinmen and London’s Burning is summarised by the difference between references to television itself. Many of Rosenthal’s plays include such comically metafictional references, culminating in the two versions of his industry satire Ready When You Are, Mr McGill. In The Dustbinmen Eric announces, ‘My mam enjoyed watching fellers in their underpants … The Olympics. On television. She enjoyed it so much she’s considering buying a licence.’ In London’s Burning, marijuana is delivered to The Pusher and his cronies on the estate in the back of a television set and the police try to find out who has received the delivery. A young woman retorts, ‘If I could afford a licence I’d get a telly, all right?’ Both references, in programmes shown on commercial channels, are made with an antiBBC slant as it is they who collect the fee. While Eric’s remark draws on surreal detail to support a joke about optional television licence-fees, the young woman in London’s Burning is too poor to watch the very film in which she appears.

Notes 1 Charles Clover, ‘Jack joins the Fire Brigade’, Daily Telegraph 8 December 1986. 2 See Keith Macdonald, ‘The man who found laughs in dustbins’, Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, DUST/a:1; and anonymous feature, ‘The Dustbinmen’, the Weekly News 25 October 1969. 3 Rehearsal scripts held in the Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, DUST/1–3. All stage directions quoted are from these scripts. 4 Barry Curtis, ‘Aspects of sitcom’, in Jim Cook, ed., Television Sitcom, London: BFI 1981, p. 9. 5 In their biography of Tony Hancock, Freddie Hancock and David Nathan point out that as early as 1957 Hancock aimed for greater reality in Hancock’s Half Hour (a BBC radio series from 1954 and from 1956 to 1961 also a BBC television series) by aiming to ‘stop using comedians and comic actors and get straight actors to play the supporting roles’, quoted in Curtis, ‘Aspects of sitcom’, p. 6. 6 See Jordan R. Young, The Beckett Actor: Jack MacGowran, Beginning to End, London: Moonstone Press 1988. MacGowran staged a one-man show, ‘Jack MacGowran in the Works of Samuel Beckett’, between 1970 and 1972. 7 Jack Rosenthal, quoted in ‘The Dustbinmen’, anonymous feature the Weekly News.

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82  Jack Rosenthal 8 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men, New York: Columbia University Press 1985, p. 1. 9 Ibid., p. 166. 10 Ibid., p. 78. 11 Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests, London: Routledge 1992, p. 17. 12 See Max Caulfield, Mary Whitehouse, London: Mowbrays 1975, pp. 81, 89. 13 Whitehouse recounts this detail with relish in her A Most Dangerous Woman?, London: Lion 1982, p. 59. 14 Muggeridge’s speech is quoted in full in Appendix I, Mary Whitehouse, Who Does She Think She Is?, London: New English Library 1971, pp. 174–6: 174. 15 Ibid., p. 71. 16 Henry Raynor, ‘Enjoyably derisive’, The Times 1 October 1968. 17 Jack Rosenthal, quoted in Macdonald, ‘The man who found laughs in dustbins’. 18 See the producer Christopher Neame’s account of the commissioning process in his A Take on British TV Drama: Stories from the Golden Years, Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press 2004, pp. 22–3. 19 Herbert Kretzmer, ‘Fare game for a good laugh’, Daily Mail 28 December 1979, p. 21. 20 Geoffrey Phillips, ‘Getting the cabbie habit’, Evening Standard 4 August 1995, p. 39. 21 Ibid. 22 All stage directions quoted are from Jack Rosenthal, ‘The Chain’ with ‘The Knowledge’ and ‘Ready When You Are, Mr McGill’, London: Faber 1984. 23 Kretzmer, ‘Fare game’. 24 Rosenthal, ‘The Chain’, p. xiii. 25 Joseph and Lipman are comically conflated in the first episode of Barry Grossman’s Radio 4 drama series, The Attractive Young Rabbi (broadcast November 1999) into a composite famous female Jewish ‘entertainer’: on the opening night of a new Reform synagogue, a talk is given by one Maureen Joseph. 26 Nick in Moving Story suffers from the same complaint, brought on not by his job moving furniture but by his impending wedding; in Chris’s case, it is a sign of his increasing distance from Janet. 27 Nancy Banks-Smith, ‘The Knowledge’, Guardian, 28 December 1979. 28 Television preview, Sunday Times 7 December 1986; Paul Donovan, ‘Great highs and lows’, Today 8 December 1986; Frank Granville Barker, ‘Moving targets in the firing line’, Television Today 11 December 1986. 29 John Walsh, ‘Hosing down comedy’, the Independent 8 December 1986. 30 Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, LOND/a:1. 31 Jack Rosenthal, Introduction, London’s Burning: The screenplay of the original film of London’s Burning, London: Robson Books 1989, p. 10. All stage directions quoted are from this source. 32 Ibid., p. 11. 33 Ibid., p. 12. 34 This is even clearer in a series of scenes in the published script which are not in the televised film, where the firefighter Bayleaf’s adventures as a painter and decorator are crosscut with the activities of the Aerosol Kid spraying graffiti on the walls of the estate. Only the latter remain in the film. 35 Donovan, ‘Great highs and lows’. Herbert Kretzmer complained about the same – clearly dramatic – stereotyping of the police, ‘Life in the firing line’, Daily Mail 8 December 1986. The Scarman Report, to which Donovan implicitly refers, was commissioned after the Brixton Riots of April 1981, which it attributed to social deprivation among local ethnic minorities and loss of confidence in the police and their methods of policing. The Report was followed by the Police and Criminal

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Men at work  83 Evidence Act of 1984 which established new codes of police practice. 36 Sigmund Freud, ‘Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious’ (1905), The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press 1960, vol. 8, pp. 97–101. 37 Rosenthal, Introduction, London’s Burning, p. 12. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Walsh, ‘Hosing down comedy’. 41 ‘Between two fires’, the Independent 6 December 1986. 42 Rosenthal, ‘Introduction’, London’s Burning, p. 12. 43 See Chris Hutchins, ‘Playing with fire’, You 7 December 1986, and Steve Clarke, ‘In the heat of the moment’, Evening Standard 5 December 1986. 44 Kretzmer, ‘Life in the firing line’. 45 Dave Robinson, ‘Drama Documentary’, www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/1103146/ index.html, visited 22.1.07 46 Quoted in Geoff Tibballs, London’s Burning: Behind the Scenes with London’s Favourite Firefighters, London: Boxtree 1992, p. 12. 47 John Caughie, ‘Progressive Television and Documentary Drama’, in Tony Bennett et al., eds, Popular Television and Film, London: BFI 1981, p. 343. 48 Ibid., p. 344. 49 Avril Connard, ‘Fuming: firefighters pour cold water on their image as hedonistic heroes’, Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, LOND/c. A Fire Brigade adviser, Nobby Clark, was present during the filming of London’s Burning and the series. 50 Connard, ‘Fuming’. 51 Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, LOND/b:1. 52 Jack Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal: A Life in Six Acts, London: Robson Books 2005, p. 332. 53 Rosenthal, London’s Burning, pp. 106–8. The scene is also reproduced in Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, pp. 332–4. 54 Jack Rosenthal, quoted in Steve Clarke, ‘In the heat of the moment’ .

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Love stories

4

The Lovers (1970), Sadie, It’s Cold Outside (1975) and Wide-Eyed and Legless (1993) The two situation comedies and one play analysed in this chapter are about love, romance and marriage. The generic differences between The Lovers and Sadie, It’s Cold Outside on the one hand, and Wide-Eyed and Legless on the other, are matched by the different kinds of relationship represented in each. The comically unresolved courtship of the young protagonists in The Lovers, set at a moment at the end of the 1960s when it seemed that ‘the Permissive Society’ had arrived but that the phrase ‘always referred to other people’,1 is succeeded in Sadie, It’s Cold Outside by a comic portrait of middle-aged jadedness also suited to its historical setting in the mid-1970s. Wide-Eyed and Legless is more naturalistic, in keeping with its basis on a ‘true story’ and with Rosenthal’s late televisual style. The sexual relationship here is a solid and long-standing one placed under intolerable strain. As a result, the film’s humour operates both intra- and extra-diegetically, for the audience’s sake and as a way for the married protagonists to relate to each other.

The Lovers The Lovers was a Granada comedy series of six episodes broadcast in 1970, written and produced by Jack Rosenthal and directed by Michael Apted. Rosenthal won the Writers’ Guild Best Comedy Series Award in 1971 for The Lovers and the series was so popular that a second one followed a year later, but by this time Rosenthal was no longer involved. Geoffrey Lancashire, a colleague of Rosenthal’s on Coronation Street and also his landlord for five years, wrote the scripts for the second series, while Les Chatfield directed. Rosenthal returned to write the screenplay for the 1973 feature film The Lovers!, directed by Herbert Wise. The series made stars of its little-known leads, Richard Beckinsale and Paula

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Love stories  85 Wilcox. Beckinsale’s role won him the award of Best TV Newcomer for 1971, and he went on to act in Rising Damp (ITV) and Porridge (BBC1) between 1974 and 1977, while Wilcox appeared in Man About the House (ITV) between 1973 and 1976. The title of The Lovers is ironic. Courting Mancunian couple Geoffrey Scrimgeour (Richard Beckinsale) and Beryl Battersby (Paula Wilcox) are youthful novices, as suggested by the series logo of Cupid wearing an L-plate in place of a figleaf. The irony is also directed at audience expectations, since the title might suggest a narrative akin to D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover – the ban on which was lifted in 1960 – but offering instead one about the failure to become lovers. In this way, the series is both about a time of social change at the end of the 1960s, as the dialogue and details of its mise-en-scène reveal, and is also a metafictional commentary on the kind of material that could be represented on television at that time. Geoffrey and Beryl talk a great deal about what form their relationship should take, rather than acting it out. Indeed, Rosenthal had imagined that the characters would spend the whole series sitting on Beryl’s mother’s settee, and ‘talk their way through each episode’.2 The action in the broadcast version of The Lovers does leave Mrs Battersby’s front room in every episode, unlike that in The Royle Family, to which Rosenthal compares his series.3 However, the production values for The Lovers remain low, in true sitcom style. All the supposedly exterior scenes, for instance those which take place in a back garden or at the bus stop, are clearly studio sets. This imparts an appropriately claustrophobic atmosphere to the locations of the couple’s relationship. Despite, and because of, all their talking, what we see of Beryl and Geoffrey’s relationship is extremely modest and chaste. While Beryl accuses Geoffrey of thinking only of ‘Percy Filth’, he claims that she is obsessed with marriage; yet Geoffrey rebuffs Beryl if she becomes amorous, and when Geoffrey seems to be on the brink of proposing marriage to Beryl, she takes fright. Even when Beryl appears to want to relax her strict moral standards, the dual constriction of televisual codes and the young people’s own fears is represented by literal intrusions, in the form of Beryl’s mother at home or a group of vicars getting into their train-carriage at Oldham, which prevent anything untoward occurring. As the series production notes have it, ‘The battle of Geoffrey and Beryl is the battle of the sexes in 1970.’4 The form this ‘battle’ takes is of anxieties which Beryl and Geoffrey turn out to share, represented by a crosscutting of scenes to highlight comically the similarities between apparently diametrically opposed positions. The first episode of the series establishes this pattern.

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86  Jack Rosenthal Although they are in the same scene, we are introduced to Geoffrey and Beryl alternately. Each is following while pretending to ignore the other. In voiceover, Geoffrey declares that Beryl is ‘about as sexy as Malcolm Muggeridge’, while Beryl stares intently into a shop window advertising a brass band concert and claims that, ‘It’s one of my interests.’ Their enactment of disavowal in parallel is followed by a simultaneous outburst of feeling. Geoffrey cries, ‘aloud, abruptly, in an agony of frustration’,5 ‘God – I want to rape her!’ while Beryl declares, ‘aloud, frustratedly’, her wish: ‘Oh, God – I want to nibble his ear-lobes!’ The effect here is to show the young people’s unanimity, but the jarring phraseology of Geoffrey’s outburst makes the series seem even more dated than does the couple’s sexual reticence. It also emphasises the absence of a vocabulary in which Geoffrey might express his wishes. A woman passing by with two small children ‘recoils at his outburst in fear’, and Geoffrey attempts to explain away his behaviour: geoffrey: It’s a song. I was singing. The words of it. Not often heard. On account of it being banned. By the BBC. Not surprising, with words like that.

Although this constitutes an apparent recognition of the enormity of what Geoffrey has said, the passing woman (Alison King) is a dramatic trope who appears in several episodes at crucial moments in the couple’s courtship and recoils regardless of what they are doing; here, her fear of Geoffrey is followed by an even more extreme reaction to Beryl’s much more acceptable outburst: ‘She recoils with even greater shock’. For good measure, Geoffrey’s speech includes an arch reference to the BBC’s ethos, metafictionally implying that the very sitcom in which he appears might not have been suitable for broadcast on the public channel. Such a pattern of literal and symbolic crosscutting is repeated during this first episode, when Beryl argues that the pair must ‘arrive at an understanding’ about their ‘conflicting ambitions in life’. If Geoffrey gives up ‘grabbing my moving parts’, she will stop ‘accidentally breaking my heel every time we accidentally pass a jeweller’s window’. Beryl voices the paradox of the series: beryl: I only don’t want you because I want you. geoffrey: Pardon? beryl: Percy Filth. For that matter, you only want to because you don’t want to.

Beryl follows this up with an explanation for Geoffrey’s failure to understand, using an adjective associated with stereotypical femininity: ‘Because you’re a man, you see. You’re so illogical.’ The first episode’s habit of revealing surprisingly complementary ‘ambitions’ reappears in

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Love stories  87 televisual terms at its end. We see Beryl in bed, ‘bitterly’ declaring a pretended gladness that Geoffrey says he doesn’t fancy her. Instead, she kisses a photograph of Paul McCartney, who stands for her suppressed sexual feelings. There follows a dissolve from a shot of her bedspread to Geoffrey, also in bed – the dissolve itself conveys the similarity of their positions. He equally ‘bitterly’ announces how glad he is that Beryl claims she doesn’t want to marry him. He then proposes marriage to a life-size photograph of Brigitte Bardot, who symbolises Geoffrey’s unarticulated wish to get married. This may be a ‘battle of the sexes’, but it is one conducted in parallel. In the series production notes, Rosenthal writes that, ‘Each episode of [Geoffrey and Beryl’s] bitter-sweet conflict focuses on a different aspect of boy-girl conflict’, and each disagreement takes the form of positions which appear conflicting but actually cross over. The series’ second episode poses the question ‘who is going to wear the trousers?’6 Here Beryl dominatingly insists that Geoffrey should dominate her. This plot-line may appear to be one calculated to upset twenty-first-century sensibilities once more. However, it does lay bare the ludic and reversible nature of such power-relations: beryl: Geoffrey, you’ve to dominate me. That’s what all girls want. geoffrey: Oh. beryl: So will you? geoffrey: Alright. beryl (thrilled to bits): Promise? geoffrey: If you say so. beryl (deflated): Oh, God.

However, the couple’s apparently contradictory dialogue about who is to take charge both subverts any clear notion of ‘domination’, and symbolises contemporary anxieties about women’s liberation and women’s role in the workplace. The year 1970, when The Lovers was broadcast, saw the first British conference of the Women’s Liberation Movement. In the same year the Secretary of State for Employment, Barbara Castle, introduced the Equal Pay Bill, which was enacted in 1975 along with the Sex Discrimination Act. In The Lovers, it appears that the anxieties are Beryl’s, as if she wishes to return to an earlier notion of gender relations. But when Geoffrey does try to control events Beryl reacts with shock: ‘That’s you being very rude and silly and your tie doesn’t go with your shirt.’ This time it is Geoffrey who spells out the paradox in such behaviour: geoffrey: All I want to be is unselfish and understanding and con­siderate to you. I’d be very masterful at not being masterful.

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88  Jack Rosenthal beryl (not understanding at all): I see. geoffrey: That means I’d only be dominating you when I gave way to you. And that’s still you dominating me.

While waiting for Beryl outside a café and fearing he has gone too far in his masquerade as a dominator, Geoffrey glances into the window of a smutty bookshop which is plastered with pin-ups. At first this seems to be the clichéd refuge of a man faced with feminine power – to subject the female body to a dominating look, as Geoffrey’s voiceover affirms: ‘Plenty more birds like Beryl. Only more so.’ The camera cuts between his pleased face and the pin-ups to back up his next remark: ‘A lot more so. All eager to bask beneath my gaze.’ One of the images Geoffrey gazes at is the cover of John Cleland’s 1750 novel Fanny Hill, about the eponymous heroine’s sexual adventures. The reissue of this text in the 1960s was taken by observers to suggest an end to the very concept of obscenity. A Supreme Court judgement permitted its publication by Putnam’s in the USA in 1966, overturning a restraining order against the publisher. Yet as Geoffrey gazes at the pin-ups his look is returned not by compliant women but by a glare from the unprepossessing bookshop-owner, who slams down the blind and cuts off Geoffrey’s view. The blind over the bookshop window symbolises the fact that although Geoffrey is allowed a glimpse at it, he is excluded – and has excluded himself – from the ‘permissive society’. As Geoffrey puts it to Beryl on their first date, ‘Beryl, we live in a permissive society!’, to which she replies, ‘Not on this street, we don’t.’ The comedy of each episode of The Lovers depends not only on apparently opposed positions turning out to be very similar, but on reversals of what seem to be absolute world views. When Beryl persuades ­Geoffrey to visit the newly married Appletons, a combination of the advice given by Sandra (Maureen Lipman) not to get married, and the boorish behaviour of Neville (John Flanagan), makes her so wary of Geoffrey on the journey home that she reacts with panic to his almost proposing marriage. Such an apparently radical reversal of the couple’s usual roles is symbolised by their exchanging reading-matter. On the train journey to Rochdale, Beryl reads the magazine Nova while Geoffrey is absorbed in Playboy. On the return trip to Altrincham, the final scene opens on a close-up of the cover of Nova. The camera pans upwards to reveal that it is Geoffrey who is reading it while Beryl reads Playboy, a naked ‘Playboy playmate’ clearly visible on the cover. This exchange of magazines is not only a visual joke about apparent role-reversal, but once more introduces into the mise-en-scène details connoting the ‘sexual revolution’ while also questioning and satirising it. The couple’s reading-matter is much more revolutionary than their behaviour. The women’s magazine Nova

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Love stories  89 was published in Britain from 1965 to 1975, and was well known for its iconoclastic editorial policy as well as its high-quality format – Susan Sontag, and the photographer Helmut Newton, were regular contributors. Linda Grant describes Nova as a precursor to Cosmopolitan in its advocacy of ‘a radical restructuring of the lives of middle-class women’ and its address to ‘the streamlined lover and her no-nonsense attitude to the sexual act’.7 In this sense, it is no more appropriate for Beryl to be reading Nova than for Geoffrey to do so; as he puts it of the magazine, ‘Everyone in there’ll be doing it.’ The audience is meant to take Nova as the female equivalent of Playboy, since the latter is at least as synecdochic of the era. The popularity and fame of Hugh Hefner’s publishing and entertainment empire signified not so much a change in sexual behaviour in the 1960s as increased boldness about publicising and articulating such issues8 – in a perfect instance of Michel Foucault’s notion of the ‘history of sexuality’ proceeding in terms of discourses about it rather than activities.9 Indeed, The Lovers as a whole is based on a joke that could be viewed in these Foucauldian terms. As we have come to expect of the series, in between reading their magazines on the train Geoffrey and Beryl debate a topic yet never take any action as a result of their discussion. The first words of the episode are, geoffrey (hurt): Why not, Beryl? beryl: Because. geoffrey: No one would see us, Beryl. beryl: What if 38 bishops got on at Oldham?

The notion of sexual activity is omnipresent during the couple’s journey – and indeed in the series as a whole – through its absence, and the comedy here depends on the subject under discussion not even needing to be named. During their day at the Appletons’, Geoffrey and Beryl are exposed to an unexpected and parodic role reversal. Neville didn’t ‘get in a man’ to decorate what Beryl calls the ‘love-nest’, but a woman – Sandra. The gardening was ‘too much for any man’, so Sandra did it. Sandra addresses Beryl as if she were Geoffrey: ‘I bet you couldn’t keep your hands off him on the train … but whatever you do, promise me you won’t marry him!’ In a parallel scene Neville addresses Geoffrey as if he were Beryl: ‘You know, and I know, deep down, you’re looking for a wife … All men are. That’s why you play the field. Only you kid yourself it’s the other way round.’ The advice given by the Appletons resembles a liberationist credo in which women can act as men and vice versa, not to mention reversing centuries of stereotyping marriage-hungry women. But in fact it is based on an exaggeratedly comic view of the gulf between

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90  Jack Rosenthal ‘marriage in theory and in practice’10 and to whose advantage it operates. Beryl’s initial giggling deferral to the men as ‘lords and masters’ turns into a tearful reaction to Neville ordering Sandra about; and her anxiety about women’s work leads her to deny to Geoffrey on the way home any interest in cooking, decorating, or gardening. Even Beryl’s mother Mrs Battersby (Joan Scott) is subject to such an interplay of stereotype and realism – in terms of both her opinions and how the audience sees her. Mrs Battersby attends a lampshade-making class and dresses in a 1950s style, but reads Jane’s World Railways in bed11 and ‘has a thing’ about Patrick Moore. The superimposition of a late1960s ethos and that of an earlier era in the person of Mrs Battersby is presented as a televisual joke when we see her hemming a skirt at the beginning of an episode. She asks Beryl how many inches above the knee the hem should go, and when Beryl answers ‘five’ Mrs Battersby insists, ‘Right. Four.’ Alternating close-ups of the two women’s faces convey the fact that it isn’t Beryl’s but her own skirt that Mrs Battersby is shortening – rather than protecting her daughter, Mrs Battersby is flaunting herself. As she says, in a way that subverts the significance of the sexual revolution, ‘In my day, a boy climbed mountains and swam oceans for a girl. But everything’s changed since decimals came in.’ Although Mrs Battersby acts as the guardian of her daughter’s honour by ‘banging “Onward Christian Soldiers” on the ceiling’ with her shoe when the couple are alone together, she also pushes Beryl towards Geoffrey by advising her to play games other than Scrabble with him. These conflicting imperatives are made clear in Mrs Battersby’s inability to name them: ‘I’m not saying you should … you know … Just that you mustn’t be too … you know … (Niggled) I don’t mean permissive permissive!’ Geoffrey’s equivalent to Mrs Battersby is his work colleague Roland (Robin Nedwell). We witness Roland’s advice about love in scenes which are crosscut with and echo the dialogue in the scenes between Beryl and Mrs Battersby. While the latter urges her daughter to act romantically up to an indefinable boundary, Roland counsels Geoffrey to act indifferently towards a girl from night-school who fancies him: ‘Remember what Venus had tattooed on her chest: “What we can’t have, we want. What we can, we don’t.”’ Both Mrs Battersby and Roland resemble latter-day versions of Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse, dispensing romantic advice which backfires. While Geoffrey announces to his horrified night-school admirer, ‘I don’t fancy you, you know. In which case you probably fancy me. In which case, as you’re probably dying to have your way with me, your place or mine?’, Beryl so alarms Geoffrey by a display of passion that she complains of his reluctance, ‘You only

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Love stories  91 fancy me when I say no!’ Venus’s motto turns out to be as appropriate to him as it is to her. Geoffrey and Beryl’s uncertain confrontations with notions of permissiveness are perfectly suited to the serial format of sitcom, since the possible resolutions of indulging in ‘Percy Filth’ or getting married are always deferred.12 As Mick Eaton argues in his ‘typology of situation comedy’, a series like The Lovers depends on ‘an idea that is capable of reproduction’ yet ‘its basic parameters’ continue ‘without narrative progress from week to week’.13 The series’ structural and narrative crossovers and reversals suggest equality in the treatment of the young couple. But it is impossible not to detect in Geoffrey’s exasperated description of his and Beryl’s ‘beautiful platonic friendship’ a foretaste of other withholding women in Rosenthal’s canon, for instance, the impossibly Catholic Penny in Bye, Bye, Baby and her real-life original, Rosenthal’s student girlfriend Wendy, who was ‘so Roman Catholic she reckoned platonic friendship was excessively sexual’.14 In Beryl’s case, it is not religion but an old-fashioned propriety that dictates her behaviour. In general The Lovers represents a running joke at the expense of the era’s notions of the permissive society. Rather than taking advantage of permissiveness, Beryl and Geoffrey simply worry about it. Even the notion of the ‘battle of the sexes’ is comically reduced to a parlour game. ‘Girls know better than to play games with me’, boasts Geoffrey to Roland in the office. This is followed by a quick cut to a new scene and a close-up of Mrs Battersby, who is indeed playing a game with him – Scrabble. On the other hand, competitive sport constitutes a refuge from romance. In Rosenthal’s plays cricket represents hopeless aspiration, for instance in P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang, while football represents a self-contained and unromantic masculinity. Beryl describes Geoffrey as having moved ‘straight from Stanley Matthews to Brigitte Bardot overnight’, and reversion to pre-pubescence often accompanies his invocation of football, for instance during the couple’s visit to the Appletons: neville: Well? When’s the happy day? geoffrey (freezes): You mean the date of the next World Cup? 1974, Munich ... beryl: He means us, Geoffrey! geoffrey: But you don’t play football!

It is not just that football, and in particular England’s failure in the 1970 World Cup, is a subject enlisted by Geoffrey throughout the series at awkward moments as a cover-up, for instance when Mrs Battersby comes upon the couple in an embrace. Football also substitutes for romance.

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92  Jack Rosenthal After he and Beryl have temporarily split up, Geoffrey alarms a woman at the bus-stop by his heavy sighs, and horrifies her by addressing her aloud to the effect that ‘time’s a great healer’. When the woman has fled to a taxi, we learn that Beryl is the last thing on his mind: ‘Funny old world. I bet we’d have beaten Brazil in the final if we’d have beaten Italy – if we’d beaten Germany.’ The comic confounding of audience expectations at this point emphasises what is the real object of ­Geoffrey’s affections.

Sadie, It’s Cold Outside Sadie, It’s Cold Outside was a situation comedy of six episodes broadcast on Thames Television in 1975. The first two episodes were produced and directed by Les Chatfield, who had directed The Dustbinmen and The Lovers; the last four by Mike Vardy. Sadie, It’s Cold Outside consisted of only one series, perhaps because of its apparently happily resolved final episode. It has not remained in the public imagination, unlike milder and less challenging sitcoms about married life such as Terry and June (BBC1 1979–1987).15 Sadie, It’s Cold Outside was, however, received on its release by critics as ‘the most interesting situation comedy for a long time’.16 Rosenthal’s loyal fan, the Daily Mail’s television critic Shaun Usher, described it enthusiastically as being ‘as real as a rates demand and as fantastic as Tom and Jerry’.17 While Stanley Reynolds of The Times judged Sadie, It’s Cold Outside ‘the ultimate situation comedy’ because of its televisual target, he added that it is ‘too real’ for genuine humour.18 It is as if the strengths of Sadie, It’s Cold Outside can also be viewed as weaknesses. The sitcom is about a forty-something married couple, Norman Potter (Bernard Hepton) and his wife Sadie (Rosemary Leach). It concerns the Potters’ efforts to make sense of life amid ‘the sheer second-rateness and bloody rudeness of the outside world’, as Usher has it.19 The reference to Tom and Jerry in Usher’s review is not as idiosyncratic as it seems. Although the sitcom’s title sounds like an address by Norman to Sadie about the demerits of the outside world, it is Sadie to whom life and her marriage seem particularly unsatisfactory. The very title of the sitcom is ironic, as a reference to the popular duet Baby, It’s Cold Outside20 in which a man is trying to persuade a woman to stay with him at the end of an evening, and she is tempted to do so because of the weather – in Rosenthal’s version, in Norman’s half of the ‘duet’ he is simply concerned with his anxieties. ‘Inside’ is a place of dull entrapment for Sadie, not of seduction. While their conflict is not as violent as Tom and Jerry’s, Norman and Sadie are at odds until the

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Love stories  93 series’ final episode. Their dialogue consists of speeches unanswered, unheeded and ignored, such as the following: sadie: If you find my head stuck in the oven with your supper, your supper’ll be the one with the pyrex lid. norman: Fair enough, dear. So long as you feel better.

While Norman is bored without realising it – he is disconsolate when not at work, and watches television all evening – his wife suffers from a version of the ‘problem with no name’ that Betty Friedan identified in the 1960s, and which Sadie calls ‘bad nerves’. Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique opens with a description of the ‘problem’: Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – ‘Is this all?’21

Sadie, a decade on, lives out a comic British version of Friedan’s ‘problem’ of frustrated aspiration. She blurts out to Norman that she is lonely; she forgets to include food in her grocery shopping and offers him mashed Brillo pads and tinfoil; she claims that ‘the cooker talks about me behind my back’; and she ‘weeps on Wednesdays at This is Your Life’ – as she puts it, ‘That’s just it! It is my bloody life, isn’t it!’ Sadie, It’s Cold Outside is the 1970s counterpart of The Lovers in refracting social and political anxiety through a sexual relationship. The changes to which the Potters react are economic and political as well as social, although Sadie remarks upon the difference between the early 1950s, when she met Norman, and the present, with its legacy of 1960s permissiveness: ‘Courting meant holding hands in those days – anything more and you’d been married six months.’ The series was aired between April and June 1975, at a time of turbulent national and world events. The Potters make frequent mention of shortages following ‘the Arabs quadrupling the price of oil’, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. There were two elections in Britain in 1974, prompted by the widespread strikes of that year. In Sadie, It’s Cold Outside there are comic versions of such events. Norman is sacked, after a strike at Filbert’s Components where he works is seized upon as an excuse for a general downing of tools, as Norman reads out from the paper: Following a lightning walk-out at Filbert’s Components Ltd, 4000 men have been laid off at Fords of Dagenham, 6000 at Vauxhalls and 12,000 at Leyland. The AEU and ETU are threatening an all-out stoppage in sympathy; and the CBI and TUC are to have immediate, urgent discus-

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94  Jack Rosenthal sions with the Prime Minister a fortnight on Thursday if the strike is still on … Farmers naturally predict a serious shortage of turnips.

The second general election of 1974 resulted in a narrow win for Labour under Harold Wilson, and the replacement of Conservative leader Edward Heath by Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, in its critical focus on individualism and the loss of social fabric represented by ‘good manners’, Sadie, It’s Cold Outside offers an uncanny prolepsis of the Thatcher years. On the other hand, as the historian Kenneth O. Morgan argues, the irony of the mid-1970s was that despite Britain’s monetary and political problems the population was ‘thriving’. Morgan mentions in particular the country’s increasing number of home-owners during this period, and the Potters fit into such a category of the surprisingly well-off.22 In Sadie, It’s Cold Outside Norman is a storeroom assistant and the Potters are lower-middle-class inhabitants of NW9, an area of London comprising West Hendon and Kingsbury just up the road from the Willesden-based Green family in Bar Mitzvah Boy. The Potters do not run a car although they have a washing machine; their upwardly mobile daughter Marilyn, whose husband works for ICI, owns a freezer ‘twice the size of our kitchen’. Indeed, it is precisely the profit to be had from selling their house that persuades Norman to go along with Sadie’s plan to move – although her reason is rather the subjective one of, ‘for something to do!’ It is ironic that against the turbulent political background of the mid1970s Norman is represented as supine. His interest in Harold Wilson is limited to using the prime minister’s surname as a mnemonic for a couple who are actually called Callaghan. Norman’s inertia is shown by his passive consumption of the news. Sadie refuses to bring him the Sunday papers in bed since she already knows what his responses will be – ‘“Tut, tut, tut … Disgrace … should think so … one in the eye for Kissinger … Gross National Product”’ – and when Norman eventually reads them he says just what she predicted. Similar habits are shown by the protagonist Wally (George Cole) in Rosenthal’s play A Day to Remember (Channel Four 1986), in which Wally meaninglessly repeats the news items he reads in the paper – but Wally is suffering from short-term memory loss after a stroke. The similarity between the two conditions works to Norman’s disadvantage. Wally shares with Norman an interest in minute gradations of time passing, and an inability to remember what has just happened: norman: Have I had my breakfast? … My mind’s gone blank.

Likewise, Wally can only tell if he’s had breakfast by the ‘circumstantial evidence’ of his empty cup. In Norman’s case, however, it is not a

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Love stories  95 medical condition but deadening routine which makes him forget. The ironic resemblance between the two men is emphasised even metafictionally by the casting of A Day to Remember, in which Rosemary Leach plays Wally’s wife Hilda. Norman had a sharper focus on life in the past, like Wally before his stroke. As Sadie tells another couple, Bob (Tony Melody) and Linda (Sheila Ballantine), who knew Norman in his revolutionary youth, ‘he threw a packet of Phyllosan at Keith Joseph the other day’. But Joseph23 was on the television and Norman missed. Norman’s youthful convictions have petered out into a life of work as a storeroom assistant and television addict at home – his political and sexual inertia overlap. Sadie reminds Norman, ‘You used to have such big plans when we were courting’, to which he responds, ‘I did those on my honeymoon.’ This is not just a double entendre intended to introduce into the dialogue sexual content where it is least expected. Rather, it reveals Norman’s loss of ‘energy’ in general. On the first morning of his unemployment Norman gets up at the usual time: norman: There was nothing to do in bed. sadie: I could’ve stayed in bed with you. norman: Then we’d both have had nothing to do.

This contrasts with The Lovers, where ‘the high drama of courtship’ constitutes the romantic comedy and it is the man who deplores his partner’s lack of interest in sexual love. In Sadie, It’s Cold Outside, as a domestic sitcom which explores what follows courtship,24 particularly for the woman, it is the other way round. Norman no longer has any grandiose romantic or political plans. In the series’ opening episode where we are introduced to Sadie and Norman in turn, we see Norman in big close-up as the announcer (Peter Hawkins) claims, ‘Norman was special. A man of destiny. One thing he’d never be was one of the crowd.’ The camera pulls back to reveal that throughout the close-up Norman has been in the midst of a huge crowd of workers leaving a factory at the end of the day. The credit sequence for every episode of Sadie, It’s Cold Outside emphasises the cold world rather than the personal element of the Potters’ existential plight. Norman and Sadie are in a suburban highstreet trying to cross the street by a zebra crossing. Cars screech to a halt and their drivers – to whom Norman touches his cap – yell abuse. The couple gingerly sally forth but are driven back by people crossing in the other direction. Sadie is knocked over and her shopping is trampled underfoot before Norman can retrieve it. They try once more to cross the road but the cars abruptly set off – and the credits end. Norman and

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96  Jack Rosenthal Sadie never reach the other side. It is significant that the credit sequence shows the Potters shopping, in one of the rare instances of their being outside the house together. The sequence prepares the audience for the ‘rudeness’ and ‘second-rateness’ with which the Potters are confronted throughout the series, revealed most starkly through consumer relations. In the first episode of the series, Sadie’s ‘Good afternoon’ addressed to a gum-chewing supermarket cashier (Lesley Joseph) meets with the response, ‘Well, I don’t get paid to get insulted. If you’ve any complaints see the manager when he’s back from Tenerife.’ The fact that this is not just individual but endemic rudeness is confirmed during the rest of the series. A small boy (Michael McVey) who knocks at the Potters’ door wanting a bob-a-job fails to acknowledge Norman’s ‘Good morning’, and is prompted by Sadie’s reproaches to ask, ‘Is she an immigrant or something?’ Consumer goods also fail the test. Norman’s new suit falls to pieces before he wears it because ‘man-made fibres are made by machines’. The Potters’ plumber arrives at the house in a Ferrari he is about to trade in for a new model, then proceeds to spend five hours at their house without completing the job he began two years earlier, and charges them by the hour. The recession, inflation and decline of traditional manufacturing in the 1970s appear here dramatised in sitcom form. When Norman is dismissed from his job he observes brightly to Sadie that he has got back from his pension fund ‘nearly as much as I paid in’. The individuals he and Sadie encounter are shown only to be concerned with their own interests and not with either service or work; what they produce is artificial and shoddy, or they are away on extended holidays. In the writer Tom Wolfe’s phrase, the 1970s was the ‘Me Decade’,25 or, as Sadie frequently observes, ‘The world has gone mad.’ The third element of modern life to be satirised in Sadie, It’s Cold Outside, as well as personal and political malaise, is the role of television. As in The Royle Family, the Potters’ set inhabits the foreground of every shot of their living-room, with Norman facing it – except in the first episode, in which Sadie has cut off the mains plug with scissors – while the reverse shot, as in The Royle Family, is almost invariably withheld so that we cannot see the screen. Rather, television has migrated into the film’s dialogue where it polarises the couple’s responses to each other. Sadie asks, Norman, is this what it’s all about? Shopping, cleaning, sleeping with my leg in an elastic bandage and waiting to say ‘Altogether now, sing up!’ There must be something else in life apart from Max Bygraves!

Norman claims that there are ‘thousands’ of other things in life, then

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Love stories  97 can only suggest, ‘well, there’s BBC2, but you’ve cut the bloody plug off, haven’t you!’ Satire directed by a sitcom at its own medium follows a standard trope in much television comedy and Rosenthal’s writing in particular. The object of critique is simultaneously its substance. This is especially the case in Rosenthal’s late rewrite of Ready When You Are, Mr McGill (2005), where satire about televisual production pervades every aspect of the film – which still depends on a television audience for its effect. Sadie, It’s Cold Outside can only function as a satire through taking for granted its audience’s familiarity with the details of the television at which it pokes fun. In a scene in a doctor’s waiting-room, the patients talk only about what they have recently watched until Sadie screams, ‘All everybody talks about is television!’ Yet the humour of the scene depends on viewers’ media literacy, including, for instance, familiarity with such figures as Cilla Black, Michael Parkinson and Russell Harty, as well as their ability to laugh at the absurdity of possessing such literacy. Of an argument over the house-sale, Sadie predicts that Norman is going to ‘start talking in your Robin Day voice’, to which Norman replies, in just such a voice, ‘pompously, officiously’, ‘Not at all.’ This exchange relies upon the same combination of referential and satirical reference to television, since the more he denies it, the more Norman resembles the television interviewer. Sadie’s lament, ‘I’m sick of comedy series about middle-aged couples!’, reveals the series’ selfconsciousness about its status as both an instance and a critique of television. Sadie’s tour de force speech to her doctor begins, I’m a sick woman. I’m sick of the pound in my pocket going into the shopkeeper’s pocket. I’m sick of everyone trying to con us that 10p is worth a shilling – and it’s not, it’s worth two. I’m sick of … general elections, Brian Clough, and Sir Keith Joseph looking at you sideways because he thinks it makes him look more sincere.

Sadie’s speech is the only instance in the series which attracts applause, audible on the laughter track, from the studio audience. This is because her list moves through apparent non-sequiturs about topical economic woes, to political, sporting and televisual malaise,26 suggesting a nationwide ‘sickness’. The comic representation of reversed gender roles in Sadie, It’s Cold Outside matches that in The Lovers, although now the focus is on work and marriage rather than courtship. In the final episode of Sadie, It’s Cold Outside, we see quick cuts between scenes of Norman opening a brown envelope at work – which he believes may contain notice of a promotion – and Sadie at home preparing to ring a ‘Lonely Housewives’ Phone-in’ on the radio. Their simultaneous cries of, ‘I’m redundant!’

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98  Jack Rosenthal are juxtaposed in the last two shots of this sequence, as Norman learns he has lost his job and Sadie that she got the phone number wrong. The similarity between the Potters’ ‘redundant’ roles after Norman is given the sack is comically revealed. In episode four we see Sadie make a trip to the launderette. The scene opens with a close-up of a whirling washing-machine and then a reverse-shot of three women watching it. Sadie’s efforts to make the conversation she craves are met with rudeness and she leaves without doing her laundry. The implication is clear that watching a washing-machine is equivalent to watching television in being no less interesting, and in encouraging passivity and lack of social graces. After Norman has lost his job, Sadie sends him to the launderette in exasperation at his constant, timetable-bereft question, ‘What time is it?’ The scene of Norman’s arrival at the launderette opens with another, almost identical close-up shot of a revolving washing-machine. Three men are watching it, and they chorus to Norman, ‘What time is it?’ This apparently bleak swapping of gender-roles, in which it seems that Norman will be as bored as Sadie and spend his time with other unemployed men, has a comically upbeat conclusion. Sadie’s failed call to the radio phone-in results instead in her being hired as a receptionist at the ‘Saudi Arabian English Bowler Hat Company’, for which at £40 per week she is paid more than Norman used to earn.27 Norman befriends the men at the launderette and their new timetable consists of helping each other with the shopping and housework, followed by ‘dominoes, gin rummy and dirty books’. Norman declares his intention to sell the television and buy a beach-buggy. The critic Terry Lovell identifies reversal as one of the most common features of the hybridly styled sitcom, like Sadie, It’s Cold Outside, which falls between ‘the social realism of Solo and the farce of Fawlty Towers’.28 Such reversal can focus on power relations or, even more commonly, sex and gender. For instance, the trope of ‘job switching’ between male and female characters that we see in Sadie, It’s Cold Outside was also the subject of an episode of I Love Lucy in 1952. If the final episode of Sadie, It’s Cold Outside is a homage to the American sitcom, it is clearly an updated 1970s version. In ‘Job Switching’, the exchange takes place because Ricky (Desi Arnaz) wants to teach spendthrift Lucy (Lucille Ball) a lesson in valuing money she has earned. However, while Ricky creates disaster at home in the kitchen trying to cook a chicken, Lucy causes chaos at Kramer’s Kandy Kitchen on the chocolate conveyor-belt and has to leave the factory. Ricky and Lucy decide to return to their usual roles.29 This is not the conclusion of Sadie, It’s Cold Outside. Indeed, a speech by Norman in the rehearsal script about his inability to make a meal was cut from the broadcast version,30 reducing our perception of

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Love stories  99 his domestic failures. Rather, reversal seems to cure the Potters’ woes. Norman doesn’t mind Sadie sitting in his seat at the breakfast-table and ignoring him in preference for the newspaper, as he used to do to her; he is dressed up in a bow-tie and without his usual cardigan for a game of darts at the launderette. The fictive optimism of this narrative device is laid bare in the concluding dialogue, which takes place as the Potters leave the house: sadie (worried, frightened): I think we’re in danger of living happily ever after. norman (bravely reassuring): Don’t worry, Sadie. This is England: something will turn up.

Indeed, it could be argued that the conclusion to Sadie, It’s Cold Outside responds to the existential fear of the series’ title. Apart from the credit sequence, we almost never see the Potters away from home together until the very end. As in Luis Buñuel’s film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), it is as if they are stuck in the house and cannot leave. As Sadie says to Norman’s school-friend Bob, they haven’t had an evening out ‘since we lost the door-key one afternoon and couldn’t get in’. Sadie responds with excited disbelief to Norman’s suggestion that they could go out dancing at Biba’s Rainbow Room: ‘Out?? Outside?? Out of the house??’ In this way Sadie, It’s Cold Outside is the complementary opposite of The Lovers, in which the couple return from an evening out to argue on the doorstep over whether Geoffrey should come in. The various stages of romantic life are represented by the different meanings of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. Mick Eaton argues that this spatial contrast is a common structuring device in television situation comedy and cites the case of convict Fletch’s (Ronnie Barker) efforts to escape prison in Porridge (BBC1 1974–77) and then to adjust to the outside world after being released on parole in Going Straight (BBC1 1978). In Eaton’s words, every situation … needs to have a fairly rigid inside/outside dichotomy which operates across the levels of characters, stock-sets, use of filmfootage … as opposed to studio video-filming, and so on.31

In Sadie, It’s Cold Outside this dichotomy structures the narrative to such an extent that once Norman and Sadie have ventured into the outside world together, the series ends. What Eaton calls the ­‘boundaried setting’ of the home within which the Potters are ‘stuck with each other’32 has been disrupted – as it never is, for example, in Steptoe and Son (BBC1 1962–1974), where Harold constantly tries and fails to leave the ragand-bone yard and his father Albert. In early episodes of Sadie, It’s Cold Outside, the Potters seem similarly trapped. For instance, it seems that

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100  Jack Rosenthal Norman and Sadie will go out dancing at the Palais with Bob and his wife Linda. Bob observes with unwitting irony, ‘If [Norman’s] anything like he was in them days, I bet he’s never in!’ The dashing of Sadie’s hopes on this occasion is represented televisually. We see a scene of ‘scores of couples having a wonderful time’ in a dance-hall – then the camera pulls back to show that we are watching the television screen in the Potter’s living-room, in front of which Norman has fallen asleep. In this instance, the television itself represents the ‘insideness’ that so oppresses Sadie. As with situation comedy in general, it is hard to pin down the ideological orientation of Sadie, It’s Cold Outside. This problem is typified starkly by Till Death Us Do Part (BBC 1965–75), in which Alf Garnett (Warren Mitchell) became a ‘national hero’33 on the strength of his ranting chauvinism. However, Garnett is not presented for applause but for laughter, as the mouthpiece of highly comic parodies of contemporary political debates. The same could be said of the Potters, whose stated views and mishaps are a parodic version of the excessively fearful, nostalgic and conservative, and are the source of the series’ comedy. In this way, the structure of Sadie, It’s Cold Outside almost metafictionally deploys sitcom’s ‘exposure of contradictions and conflict between the two orders of society which it references – the normative and the typical’,34 that is, what should be the case and what actually is. Some of the Potters’ sentiments even resemble those in the infamous speech given at Edgbaston in 1974 by Sir Keith Joseph – a figure constantly evoked in Sadie, It’s Cold Outside – which concluded: Are we to move towards moral decline reflected and intensified by economic decline, by the corrosive effects of inflation? Or can we remoralise our national life, of which the economy is an integral part? It is up to us, to people like you and me.35

On the other hand, Joseph is lampooned by the characters in the sitcom whenever he is mentioned, and the causes of the Potters’ disquiet – sharkish estate agents, doctors ‘who think they’re the Pope’, the gentrification of working-class housing – are not confined to those of Joseph’s ilk. As several commentators argue, the longevity of the sitcom as a genre depends on its ideological flexibility.36 Janet Woollacott claims that such flexibility is the result of the sitcom’s direct address to and inscription of an audience, in its use of realistic settings and a laughter-track. Many sitcoms represent the clashing discourses of their era but offer no clear resolution to the battle. As Woollacott concludes, ‘any judgement about [the sitcom’s] ideological subversion or incorporation can only be made in relation to the analysis of … viewing formations over time’.37

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Love stories  101 From the vantage-point of a twenty-first century viewing formation, the class and gender politics of Sadie, It’s Cold Outside are more radical than those of its contemporaries. For instance, in Happy Ever After (BBC1 1974–78), the precursor to Terry and June, the married protagonists are comfortably middle-class. In the episode ‘Foster Parents’, broadcast on 9 September 1976, we learn that Terry is an ‘Area Sales Manager’ who earns ‘a pretty good whack’. He and his wife June go out for dinner without troubling themselves about whether they are in- or outside, and spend £14 – nearly a third of Sadie’s new monthly wage. June is unproblematically nostalgic about the children who have flown the nest, in contrast to Sadie, It’s Cold Outside, where Norman can never remember who ‘Marilyn’ is – she is his daughter – and Sadie inquires of their grandson, ‘Has little Gavin stopped swearing at play school?’ There is scant mention in Happy Ever After of political issues or the outside world; for its unchallenging humour and conforming resolutely to the reassuring ‘problem/resolution format’38 of sitcom, its successor Terry and June came to act as the butt of ‘alternative comedians’ in the 1980s.39 By contrast, the representation of Sadie as a suffering housewife – who is a precursor in terms of voice and hairstyle to Sybil Fawlty, doyenne of the more overtly farcical sitcom Fawlty Towers – places Sadie, It’s Cold Outside generically closer to melodrama than sitcom since it shows ‘the woman rather than the male [to be] the victim of marriage and domesticity’.40 Although we do not see Sadie and Norman living happily ever after, the sitcom form is disrupted by their job switching; this is in contrast to No Place Like Home (BBC1 1984–87), in which discontented housewife Beryl (Patricia Garwood) gets a job one week which is never referred to again in subsequent episodes.41

Wide-Eyed and Legless Rosenthal’s screenplay for the film Wide-Eyed and Legless was based on two autobiographical books by Deric Longden, Diana’s Story and Lost for Words.42 Longden describes how Rosenthal, his ‘number one hero’, rang him to claim Diana’s Story as one of the best books he had read in ten years. Rosenthal began work on the screenplay a week later.43 It is easy to see what drew Rosenthal to Longden’s books, which are memoirs of family life and married love, subject to intolerable pressures and relieved only by wry humour. Rosenthal’s trademark domestically surreal style is given the extra challenge of representing paralysing illness. The film was directed by Richard Loncraine, who went on to direct Richard III (1995), and was shown on BBC1 on 5 September 1993.

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102  Jack Rosenthal Wide-Eyed and Legless was nominated for two BAFTAs the following year in the categories of Best Play and, for Julie Walters, Best Actress. WideEyed and Legless was released in the USA as a feature film, renamed The Wedding Gift, in 1994. Wide-Eyed and Legless concerns the undiagnosed illness afflicting Diana Longden: she is almost completely paralysed and in excruciating pain, her hands bunch up into fists and she suffers frequent blackouts. Many of the symptoms necessarily exist only in the dialogue and not in the mise-en-scène, or are signified by props such as Diana’s handbraces. At the Hallamshire Hospital Deric offers to ‘save you a bit of time’ by summarising Diana’s condition for an inexperienced doctor reading Diana’s file for the first time, and the summary is addressed to the audience as well. The illness is not identified until the film’s end, when we learn from an intertitle that Diana is believed to have suffered from an extreme form of ME, a condition which was unfamiliar in 1985 when she died. However, the film is not so much about the nature of Diana’s illness as it is about the strength of the relationship between Diana (Julie Walters) and Deric (Jim Broadbent), which enables them to face the challenge of living as patient and carer. As the Longdens’ son Nick (Andrew Lancel) puts it to his sister Sally (Anastasia Mulrooney), who worries that Deric will assist Diana’s suicide, ‘He worships her, you nutter!’ The film’s American title, The Wedding Gift, emphasises a particular gesture of love Diana makes towards Deric at the film’s end. By contrast, the British title refers to Diana’s view of herself. She hears Andy Fairweather-Low’s 1975 hit ‘Wide-Eyed and Legless’ on the radio in an early scene and calls it ‘my song’. Wide-Eyed and Legless opens, as is customary in Rosenthal’s plays, in a deliberately disorientating media res. Here, however, the disorientating effects extend to the soundtrack and cinematography as well as the narrative. The first thing we see, before the credits or any establishing shot, is a close-up reflection of a man’s hands and neck as he adjusts his tie in the mirror and we hear his voice, which fades in and out of earshot: deric: I mean look at it from the tie’s point of view. Poor old soul. Stuck in a drawer with seven odd cufflinks…

There follows a cut to a bathroom scene. There is an uneven, tilted panning shot of bath-taps and bath paraphernalia from the point of view of someone in the bath, accompanied by the sound of taps dripping. This implies that the muffled sound of Deric’s voice is due to this invisible person’s point-of-hearing. We cut back to Deric in the bedroom, whose face we cannot see but whose neck is visible as he continues, his voice

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Love stories  103 still muted, ‘Then all of a sudden, [the tie] gets yanked out and twisted around a scraggy neck.’ He then adds questioningly, ‘Diana? You’re not laughing’, using a phrase that we hear at different points during the film and which signifies a change in the couple’s usual register. Here, such a change hints at a danger that the camera confirms – there is a cut back to the bathroom scene but the point-of-view sinks under the bath-water and the screen fades to black. All of a sudden we hear in clear, no longer muffled tones Deric’s shocked exclamation, ‘Jesus!’ The blackness is abruptly dispelled and we see Deric pull Diana out of the bath-water. Instead of point-of-view shots and a subjective soundtrack, events are now presented by an omniscient camera. For the first time both protagonists are shown in a medium-shot, and it is as if the safety of Diana’s rescue is associated with the restoration of continuity editing. Because of the visual techniques used in this opening scene, the audience knows the answer to Diana’s question, ‘Did I black out?’: we have seen the blackness. The mysterious and frightening nature of Diana’s condition is televisually conveyed here. The film’s initial scene also foreshadows the ending, which is not, as a Washington Post review put it, for ‘the emotionally faint-hearted’.44 At the film’s end, Diana suffers another blackout and slips under the bath-water but Deric cannot revive her. The reliance in the final scene on Deric’s viewpoint – we only see what he sees: Diana’s empty bed and then her body under the water – in contrast to the use of Diana’s viewpoint in the opening succeeds in conveying visually the extinction of her consciousness. If Wide-Eyed and Legless is a genre film about illness, which American reviewers compared to Lorenzo’s Oil (George Miller 1992) and Shadowlands (Richard Attenborough 1993),45 then its narrative is comfortlessly concluded without a farewell scene or miracle cure. The opening scene also serves to establish the bond between the Longdens. As Diana coughs herself back into consciousness she observes to her soaked husband, ‘Made a right pig’s ear of your tie, haven’t you?’ This is typical of the couple’s efforts to approach traumatic events with everyday but subversive banter. The claustrophobic opening scene is followed by the delayed establishing shot, of Deric’s Citroen Safari driving along a scenic road in the Derbyshire Peak District from the Longdens’ home in Matlock towards Sheffield. There is irony in the contrast between this natural beauty and the conversation the couple have in the car about Andy Fairweather-Low’s song: diana: I’d like you to play this at my funeral. deric: I don’t trust you. You’d sit up and start singing. diana (soberly): D’you think many people’ll come to it? deric: Not with your voice.46

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104  Jack Rosenthal The trademark everyday-surreal dialogue of Rosenthal’s plays has acquired an extra dimension of deathliness, just as Andy FairweatherLow’s song about alcoholism has been transformed into one about paralysis. The dialogue between Deric and Diana frequently has a theatrical quality, blurring the boundary between intra- and extra-diegetic self-consciousness. It also reveals the deliberate and strategic nature of their good humour, as in the following exchange after Diana has suffered a convulsion in hospital: diana: Go and have a smoke. deric: I don’t want one … He kisses her. She flutters her eyelashes, mock-coyly. diana: Go and have a beer, then. deric: I don’t want a beer either. diana: And screw one of the nurses. deric: Oh, all right, then. diana: Only one, though. You’ve a train to catch.47

As Julie Walters observes in an interview, the role of Diana was a hard one to act because the character is constantly ‘trying to suppress her emotions’.48 In the first example quoted above, it is Deric whose anxieties about Diana are hidden beneath humour – he answers her ‘sober’ question with deliberate facetiousness; while in the hospital dialogue Diana deflects concern about the future and dependence on her husband through a surreal joke. It is only when each is alone that Diana and Deric’s façades crumble. Diana weeps when she can’t open a thermos flask by herself, and Deric runs his car off the road while on a solo trip. The structure of the film itself sometimes replicates the dialogue’s bittersweet humour. The Longdens’ son Nick advises the mail-reading postman (Graham Turner) to ‘get your leg bitten off, like a proper postman’. While the line is still echoing in our minds, there is a cut to a shot of Diana’s legs as Deric struggles to dress her in tights, about which she observes, ‘Better at pulling them off, aren’t you, love?’ The horror of her condition is conveyed by the juxtaposition of the joking violence of Nick’s phrase and the reality of her helplessness. In another instance, we see sewing-machines at Deric’s lingerie factory working furiously to fulfil an unexpected Christmas order. This is followed by a cut to Diana at home alone in bed, struggling with embroidery and crying in frustration that she no longer has the strength to sew, which was ‘the only thing I were ever any good at’. The link implied here between the failing factory and Diana’s failing health represents in visual terms the multiple pressures afflicting Deric and prepares for his breakdown, which occurs as he drives to deliver the Christmas order. Deric Longden is the first-person narrator of the memoirs Diana’s

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Love stories  105 Story and Lost for Words, and this is preserved in televisual terms in Wide-Eyed and Legless. Deric’s role is necessarily more active than Diana’s, and we see him in a variety of settings, including his lingerie factory and at literary events. By contrast, Diana is often shot from above in a static position as she lies in bed or sits in a wheelchair. Apart from the opening scene’s point-of-view shots and subjective soundtrack, and a dollying ‘wheelchair shot’ from her viewpoint as Diana speeds out of the Hallamshire Hospital in fury at yet another failed diagnosis, any technical point of view in the film belongs to Deric. For instance, Deric suffers from guilt-induced hallucinations after meeting and being attracted to the novelist Aileen Armitage (Sian Thomas) at a literary luncheon. While Diana dozes in the Citroen after a shopping trip, Deric sees a skip labelled Harrogate – where Aileen lives – and this is the trigger for a disconcerting vision of Aileen in place of his wife asleep in the passenger-seat. Soon afterwards, the import of the hallucinations pushes Deric to breaking-point. In Longden’s memoir Diana’s Story the night of his breakdown is related in a mixture of first- and third-person narrative to convey his alienation,49 and the film is able to reproduce this perfectly through a mixture of point-of-view and omniscient shots. As Deric drives to Bradford alone, we see a close-up of his frozen face through the car windscreen, and on the soundtrack hear the choral music that Aileen plays at home while she writes. We then see from Deric’s viewpoint another hallucination of Aileen in the passenger-seat. Weeping, Deric drives his car off the road. This time the hallucination signifies the possibility of Diana’s absence as much as Deric’s attraction to Aileen. It is not just the camera-work that reveals how much Wide-Eyed and Legless is ‘Deric’s story’. The plot development in the film concerning Deric’s attraction to Aileen Armitage – whom, we learn at the film’s end, he married in 1990 – appears only in Lost for Words and not Diana’s Story, although it took place during Diana’s lifetime. In Wide-Eyed and Legless, to Deric’s consternation, Diana suggests a trip to meet Aileen: diana: Anyway, a girl likes to size up the opposition. She waits for him to laugh. He doesn’t. diana: Well, laugh! He does so – but not with his eyes.

Diana’s phrase, ‘Well, laugh!’ signals the failure at this point of the Longdens’ avoidance strategies. However, while Deric insists to Aileen on his love for Diana, Diana secretly meets Aileen and plans to have Deric marry the other woman after her death – particularly, it is implied, if Diana decides to take her own life. The notion of such an arranged

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106  Jack Rosenthal marriage is introduced in humorous terms. At the tea-shop where they first meet, Diana and Aileen learn that there is only one scone left and chorus in unison, ‘We’ll share!’ Diana’s plan is presented as a profound expression of marital love, as Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat argue in the section of their website entitled ‘Spiritually Literate Films’.50 The American title for Wide-Eyed and Legless, The Wedding Gift, places the film’s entire moral and narrative weight on this element of the plot. While the ‘wedding’ refers to Deric’s future rather than to the ‘wideeyed’ past, the ‘gift’ refers to Diana’s selfless wish. It also refers, less abstractly, to a bikini that Deric bought for Diana just before she became ill and which Diana instructs him to pass on to Aileen with a note: The girl in the shop said it’d fit me like a second skin. Which is why I want you to have it. To be my second skin. … Now put your bikini on and let Deric chuck you in the deep end. Love, Diana.

Like Deric’s constant reminders to Aileen that he could not love anyone more than Diana, the incident of the bikini strikes a slightly uncomfortable note – explicable partly as we see these events only through Deric’s eyes. The notion of Wide-Eyed and Legless as Deric’s story is supported by the presence of his mother (Thora Hird), showing him as a carer to yet another person. Much of the material about Annie Longden derives from Lost for Words, which concerns the time after Diana’s death but has been transposed backwards in time in Rosenthal’s screenplay.51 Mrs Longden Senior is a source of light relief in the film by virtue of her illogical utterances and outlandish behaviour. As Longden puts it, whenever Diana’s fate became too bleak during the writing of his memoir, ‘at that point I would bring my mother into the story’.52 It is as if Rosenthal’s signature everyday-surreal dialogue and non-sequiturs have become a character trait, as Mrs Longden’s observations suggest: mother: Mrs Gandhi popped her clogs in India. I used to like her dad. He got an Oscar. mother: You’re nearer to God in a garden than you are anywhere where you’re not in a garden.

Mrs Longden’s discourse resembles that of Wally in Rosenthal’s A Day to Remember, a portrait of stroke-related short-term memory loss that was based on the writer’s father-in-law Maurice Lipman.53 In Diana’s Story Longden simply describes his mother as increasingly ‘delightful and eccentric’ in her old age,54 and we see this eccentricity in the film in such habits of hers as dialling a telephone number without picking up the receiver, giving her cat a daily wash at the kitchen sink, and weeding

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Love stories  107 the garden while lying on an ironing board. The film critic Roger Ebert argues that Mrs Longden ‘has become senile in a suspiciously screenwriterishly way, and makes dotty comments that are too good to be true’,55 which suggests once more that even the most authentic material in Wide-Eyed and Legless has a theatrical quality. The tragedy of Diana’s story is played out through Deric’s viewpoint under cover of the details and strategic humour of everyday life. The relegation of diagnosis to an intertitle at the film’s end emphasises the fact that it is Diana and Deric’s relationship – or, more metafictionally, their dialogue – rather than the specificity of illness that is at stake.

Conclusion Since the plays in this chapter are about romance, they are also about gender relations and the representation of women. In each, the central female character is in her own way an ‘unruly’ figure of the kind described by sitcom critics as ‘excessive’ in behaviour and opinion, rejecting a life of domesticity and good motherhood.56 Although the sitcom heroines of The Lovers and Sadie, It’s Cold Outside are not as knowing or as radical as this makes them sound, they do exhibit a comic ambivalence about their roles. Beryl’s refusal to indulge in ‘Percy Filth’ with her boyfriend Geoffrey is linked to her fear of what she sees of married life, despite her insistence that it is her goal. Sadie, as a version of Beryl twenty years on, chafes under the definition of gender-roles offered by her husband Norman: norman: I have to go to work, Sadie … there’s only me left fulfilling the social contract. And you have to cook, clean and talk to yourself.

The comic irony here is that Norman appears to endorse the nature of his and Sadie’s life together but speaks in terms of its failings. The ‘social contract’ refers to the agreement against wage-claims brokered with trades unions and used as an electioneering slogan by the Wilson government elected in February 1974. Norman implies that he has no choice but to work without even the option to strike, while Sadie must be alone. In contrast to the sitcom’s usual repetitive, unprogressive narrative form, the Potters’ dilemma is resolved by the simple means of their roles being reversed, in a way impossible either narratively or structurally for Beryl and Geoffrey. Indeed, if it is true that ‘the function of late [and early] 70s sitcom is to smooth and negotiate the tensions set up by changes in sexual politics’,57 then the negotiation takes place to opposite effect in these two examples. While the audience may be

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108  Jack Rosenthal reassured by The Lovers that despite the much-vaunted 1960s ‘permissiveness’ sexual mores have not much changed, Sadie, It’s Cold Outside shows its audience that it is precisely fear of such change that can be a debilitating condition. Wide-Eyed and Legless offers a different representation of female ‘unruliness’. Diana Longden’s humour is anarchic, whether directed against her illness and the doctors who fail to diagnose it, or forming the substance of the dialogue with her husband Deric. The knowing nature of the comic dialogue in Wide-Eyed and Legless distinguishes it from that in the two sitcoms, where the humour is ‘found’ rather than ‘constructed’.58 In these sitcoms, characters only occasionally attempt what Norman in Sadie, It’s Cold Outside calls an ‘early morning witticism’ – for the most part, they do not make jokes but are unwittingly funny within a comic context. The ‘situation’ in Wide-Eyed and Legless, however, is not funny. Diana reserves choice and action for herself, not so much by contemplating suicide, over which she and Deric argue, but by appearing to choose the woman who will succeed her once Deric is a widower. As in the two sitcoms, there is gender-role reversal in Wide-Eyed and Legless.59 Here, however, it arises from the specific situation facing the Longdens rather than comic ideological conflict. Deric is perforce the carer for his wife and mother, and when Diana hears that the woman he has met at a literary lunch is blind, she can only laugh and observe, ‘You do pick ’em.’ Deric finds his role hard to shake off, as we see when Aileen suggests a cup of tea and he automatically makes for the kitchen. When he drops Aileen at home after their first meeting, Deric’s question, ‘Can you manage?’ meets the reply, ‘I have until now’ – it is up to her to convert his carer’s concern for her blindness into an existential or romantic interest. Although many of Rosenthal’s plays focus on male characters at turning-points in their lives – including adolescent rites of passage in P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang and Bar Mitzvah Boy, young adulthood in Bye, Bye, Baby, work in The Knowledge and The Chain – we see here in these plays about romance the continuation of his Coronation Street writing of the 1960s, in which the protagonists are strong and unruly women.

Notes 1 Production Notes for The Lovers, Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, LOVE/a:1, p. 2. 2 Jack Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal: A Life in Six Acts, London: Robson Books 2005, p. 189.

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Love stories  109 3 Ibid. The Royle Family, also set in Manchester, was produced by Granada and shown on the BBC in three series between 1998 and 2000. The first series appeared on BBC2, the other two on BBC1, and a special episode was broadcast on BBC1 in December 2006. 4 Production Notes, p. 2. 5 All stage directions quoted are from the rehearsal scripts, Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, LOVE/1–2. 6 Production Notes, p. 2. 7 Linda Grant, Sexing the Millennium, London: HarperCollins 1993, pp. 103–5. 8 Alan Petigny, ‘Illegitimacy, postwar psychology, and the reperiodization of the sexual revolution’, Journal of Social History 38 (1) 2005, pp. 63–79: 71. 9 See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 volumes, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1988, 1990, 1998. 10 Production Notes, p. 2. 11 In the rehearsal script (LOVE/2, episode 6, p. 17), Mrs Battersby reads in bed the programme for Kenneth Tynan’s nude revue Oh Calcutta!, which opened in London in 1970. Despite many complaints and a police investigation, the revue escaped prosecution for obscenity. Although it means losing a reference to the era’s permissiveness, the change in Mrs Battersby’s reading-matter for the broadcast version reduces the obviousness of a joke about mothers participating in the ‘sexual revolution’ while their daughters do not. 12 Even Beryl and Geoffrey’s engagement, introduced in the second series by Geoffrey Lancashire, continues the narrative deferral by its on-and-off nature. 13 Mick Eaton, ‘Television situation comedy’, in Tony Bennett et al., eds., Popular Television and Film, London: BFI 1981, pp. 32, 33. 14 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 78. 15 In the BBC’s poll to determine ‘Britain’s Best Sitcom’ Terry and June is at number 73 while Sadie does not appear at all. The Dustbinmen is at 86, The Lovers 93 (www. bbc.co.uk/sitcom/winner.shtml, visited 31.3.07). 16 ‘A stamp in her navel’, anonymous review, Guardian 21 April 1975, Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, SADI/b. 17 Shaun Usher, ‘Laugh or cry, here’s the taste of truth’, Daily Mail 22 April 1975. 18 Stanley Reynolds, ‘Sadie, It’s Cold Outside’, The Times 22 April 1975. 19 Usher, ‘Laugh or cry’. 20 Baby, It’s Cold Outside was composed in 1944 by Frank Loesser and has been recorded by singers ranging from Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong to, in 1999, Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews. 21 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, New York: Dell 1974, p. 1, originally published 1963. 22 Kenneth O. Morgan, The People’s Peace: British History since 1945, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001, p. 394. 23 Sir Keith Joseph was the Conservative Secretary of State for Social Services until 1974 and then in charge of Policy and Research in Thatcher’s Shadow Cabinet. 24 Jane Feuer, ‘The unruly woman sitcom (I Love Lucy, Roseanne, Absolutely Fabulous)’, in Glen Creeber, The Television Genre Book, London: BFI 2001, p. 68. 25 Tom Wolfe, ‘The me decade and the third great awakening’, in Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux 1976. 26 The specific targets of Sadie’s lament include comedy series such as Happy Ever After (BBC1 1974–78), the precursor to Terry and June; 1970’s decimalisation, which, she implies, has devalued currency as much as the devaluation of the pound in 1967 did, despite Harold Wilson’s famous assurance that ‘the pound in your pocket’ would remain unaffected; and Brian Clough’s 44 days as Leeds United’s manager in 1974, after which he was ignominiously dismissed.

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110  Jack Rosenthal 27 According to Anthony Piepe et al., Television and the Working Class, London: Saxon House 1975, the average ‘manual’ weekly wages in 1973 for full-time male workers were £24.80 and £30.30 for ‘non-manual’ (p. 29). 28 Terry Lovell, ‘A genre of social disruption?’, in Jim Cook, ed., Television Sitcom, London: BFI 1981, p. 24. Fawlty Towers was shown on BBC2 in two series, in 1975 and 1979, while Solo (BBC1 1981–82) was a vehicle for its star Felicity Kendal, who played Gemma Palmer as a woman attempting to reinvent her life. 29 See Lovell’s discussion of an episode of George and Mildred (Thames Television 1976–79) in which the fantastical nature of any notion of gender reversal is shown by its appearance in a dream sequence (‘A genre of social disruption?’, p. 25). See also the unsuccessful Southern TV sitcom Take A Letter, Mr Jones (1981) in which John Inman played the eponymous hero, who was secretary to a female company executive. 30 Sadie is unaccountably out of the house – at her receptionist’s interview, as we discover – so Norman ruminates, ‘Now then. I did it once before – when she was in the maternity hospital … Just a knack really. I think you heat up the beans, make a slice of toast, put the beans on top, eat it’ (SAD/2 episode six, p. 41). 31 Eaton, ‘Television situation comedy’, p. 33. 32 Ibid., p. 35. 33 John Hartley, ‘Situation comedy, Part 1’, in Creeber, The Television Genre Book, p. 66. 34 Lovell, ‘A genre of social disruption?’, p. 24. 35 www.margaretthatcher.org/archive/displaydocument.asp?docid=101830, visited 3.4.07. Joseph’s speech, where he lamented the birth-rate of people in ‘social classes 4 and 5’ in such a way that it sounded as if he were advocating their sterilisation, destroyed the possibility of his becoming Conservative Party leader. In Sadie, It’s Cold Outside it is the smug and ineffectual GP who echoes Joseph’s phraseology in his remark, ‘Now, look, Mr Potter, doctors aren’t social-economic classification group 1 for nothing, you know.’ 36 Hartley, ‘Situation comedy, Part 1’, p. 70; Lovell, ‘A genre of social dispruption?’, p. 27. 37 Janet Woollacott, ‘Fictions and ideologies: the case of situation comedy’, in Tony Bennett et al., eds., Popular Culture and Social Relations, Milton Keynes: Open University Press 1986, p. 212. 38 Jane Feuer, ‘Situation comedy, Part 2’, in Creeber, The Television Genre Book, p. 69. 39 See for instance Terry and Julian (Channel Four 1992), in which Julian (Julian Clary) is Terry’s (Lee Simpson) gay lodger; June Whitfield made a guest appearance in one episode. 40 Woollacott, ‘Fictions and ideologies’, p. 211; see also Andy Medhurst and Lucy Tuck, ‘The Gender Game’, in Cook, ed., Television Sitcom, p. 52. 41 See Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik, Popular Film and Television Comedy, London: Routledge 1990, p. 237. 42 Deric Longden, Diana’s Story, London: Corgi 1993; Deric Longden, Lost for Words, London: Corgi 1998. Longden describes how Wide-Eyed and Legless was his chosen title for the memoir but Bantam, the publisher of the original 1989 version, suggested Diana’s Story instead for its simplicity (Lost for Words, p. 254). 43 Longden, Lost for Words, p. 254; Deric Longden, ‘The writer on writing’, in Jack Rosenthal, Wide-Eyed and Legless, eds Geoff Barton and Jane Christopher, London: Longman 1995, p. xiii. 44 Desson Howe, ‘The Wedding Gift’, Washington Post 5 August 1994. 45 See for instance Roger Ebert, ‘The Wedding Gift’, Chicago Sun-Times 22 July 1994; Caryn James, ‘The Wedding Gift’, New York Times, July 20 1994.

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Love stories  111 6 All stage directions quoted are from Rosenthal, Wide-Eyed and Legless. 4 47 In the published script, intended for use in schools, the dialogue here has been altered so that Diana’s phrase ‘screw one of the nurses’, as in the film and the shooting script, becomes ‘chat up’. Many, although not all, instances of swearing have also been removed – the shooting script is annotated to this effect by an editor at the publisher’s, Longman Education (Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, WIDE/5). 48 Mal Vincent, ‘Rita star challenged by role in The Wedding Gift’, The Virginian-Pilot, 24 September 1994. 49 Longden, Diana’s Story, p. 218. 50 www.spiritualityandpractice.com/about/about.php?id=11696, visited 16.3.07. 51 Lost for Words was made into a separate television film about Longden’s mother in 1999, directed by Alan J.W. Bell and starring Pete Postlethwaite as Deric and – as in Rosenthal’s film –Thora Hird as his mother. 52 Longden, ‘The writer on writing’, p. xii. 53 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, pp. 314–15. 54 Longden, Diana’s Story, p. 45. 55 Ebert, ‘The Wedding Gift’. 56 See Feuer, ‘The unruly woman sitcom’, and Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, Austin, Texas: Texas University Press, 1995. 57 Giles Oakley, ‘Yes Minister’, in Cook, Television Sitcom, p. 77. 58 Lovell, ‘A genre of social disruption?’, p. 22. 59 Longden uses the phrase in Lost for Words, p. 122.

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Structure and plot

5

Spend, Spend, Spend (1977), The Chain (1984), Moving Story (1994) and Bag Lady (1989)

In this chapter, I will analyse those of Jack Rosenthal’s plays where an unusual dramatic structure matches the plot. In Spend, Spend, Spend and The Chain, structural experimentation arises from the plays’ concern with British class formations. Class-related elements of both shocking contrast and surprising interrelation are represented at the level of form and content. Moving Story and Bag Lady are both dramatic offshoots of The Chain, in which the concern for class has been replaced by narrative self-consciousness. While Moving Story is structured fittingly as the pilot for a television comedy series, Bag Lady is a dramatic monologue fully aware of its own status as a vehicle for its star, Maureen Lipman.

Spend, Spend, Spend Spend, Spend, Spend was broadcast on 15 March 1977 as a BBC Play for Today. It gained rapturous reviews, won the British Academy Best Play Award for that year, and in 1978 was nominated for the Prix Italia. The play is based on the book, also entitled Spend, Spend, Spend,1 written by Stephen Smith and drawing on interviews he conducted with Vivian Nicholson about her life. The book is written as a first-person account of Vivian’s impoverished childhood in the mining town of Castleford, West Yorkshire, the record-breaking win of £152,319 and eight pence2 on the Pools which she shared with her husband Keith, and the problems and tragedies that followed – including Keith’s death in a car-crash and Vivian’s loss of the remaining money. In his autobiography, Rosenthal explains that he followed avidly ­Vivian’s career after sharing an office with Tony Iveson, the public

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Structure and plot  113 r­ elations man who rushed to Castleford on behalf of Littlewoods Pools on the day of the win, in order to interview Vivian and Keith and persuade them to allow publicity. Their agreeing to this publicity resulted not only in the pursuit of Vivian and her family by journalists for what was invariably mercilessly negative copy, but a flood of begging letters and hate-mail from the public. In the last scene of Rosenthal’s play, Vivian (Susan Littler) addresses the audience: ‘Did you say you like a good laugh? Here’s a good ’un for you … when we won the pools, we put a cross on the coupon for No Publicity.’ This is a cautionary note not only for the audience of the play and the public at large – whom television critic Shaun Usher describes as ‘humbugs’, James Murray as ‘the gawping nation’3 – but for Rosenthal himself. He admits that until he read Vivian’s account of her life, he too ‘believed every snide, snooty, biased word the relentless publicity said’.4 It is not just the gripping narrative trajectory of Vivian’s rags-toriches-and-back-to-rags story which inspired critics to describe Rosenthal’s play as ‘remarkable’ and ‘dazzling’.5 Rosenthal’s play is also striking for its unconventional dramatic structure. By contrast, Vivian’s book is chronological, and shows clearly by its linear form the aptness of Rosenthal’s description of the story as ‘a cautionary tale and a morality tale. It becomes a triumph of courage and survival; and the finding of a sad wisdom.’6 However, rather than following the chronological shape of biography or a ‘morality tale’, Rosenthal’s play adopts a non-chronological pattern. It crosscuts throughout between the post-Pools-win era of September 1961 onwards, and Vivian’s youth, from 1950 onwards. For instance, the play’s first two scenes are set in the Dorchester Hotel, London, on 27 September 1961, on the evening when Bruce Forsyth (whom we do not see) presented the Pools cheque to Keith (John Duttine) and Vivian. The next eight are set in Wallington Street, Castleford, in 1950 when Vivian was fourteen, and show her ‘extremely poor’ family background; we then return to the London hotel where Keith and Vivian spent the night in September 1961. The play’s two time-scales are linked by juxtaposition, and also by Vivian’s voiceover, which reveals her ‘rough-diamond barminess’, in Rosenthal’s phrase.7 The intricate yet orderly crosscutting is shown most starkly in the script running order, which gives in tabular form the details of each scene’s setting, its time, date, which characters are present, with their ages.8 Also included are details of each scene’s central props – such as Vivian’s bicycle in 1950 and her Chevrolet in 1961, and a ‘charred settee’ and ‘pram’ in 1954. Both the script running order and the mise-en-scène show Vivian’s changing hairstyles, representative of extreme temporal and emotional changes. These range from a bubble-

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114  Jack Rosenthal cut in 1952 to the ‘champagne blonde’ pink hair-do Vivian sported in 1961 on the day of the Pools win, which has been dyed blue by the time of Vivian’s return to Castleford. The contrasts in the mise-en-scène support the play’s crosscutting. This may take the form of placing past poverty and present riches in the same shot, as when we see Viv and Keith drive their new Chevrolet Impala past an electricity substation and into the narrow terraced streets of Castleford; or by juxtaposition, when there is a cut from the teenage Vivian lamenting the loss of a manicure set, which must have cost ‘all of 1/6 in Woolworths’, to Viv and Keith returning from the cheque presentation in a taxi, laden with presents for their children. The structure of Rosenthal’s play means that we see past and present in parallel, but the central event – the Pools win itself – is deferred until the play’s end, along with Vivian’s commentary about the present moment of 1976. The final words of the Pools plot, and of one of the play’s final scenes, are those of a man knocking at the Nicholsons’ door in Castleford: ‘Good afternoon, Mr Nicholson. I’m from Littlewoods Pools.’ As we have already witnessed the catastrophic effects of this moment, these words sound as if they are uttered by a harbinger of Greek tragedy announcing the inevitable. This is also the moment where the play’s two time-scales collide: the action opened in 27 September 1961 alongside 1950, and reaches 1964 alongside 20 September 1961, the day Vivian and Keith learn they have won. Sandwiched between these two moments from 1961 are the details of Vivian’s girlhood and early life and the effects of the Pools win. Rather than implying that cause, in this case extreme poverty, and effect, the destructive results of a sudden huge windfall, are clearly linked, such a structure registers extreme dramatic irony. This is not just the irony of an individual’s fall – ‘People like me aren’t much good’, as Vivian notes in a voice-over at the play’s end, ‘You know, a bit sick’ – but of the British class system itself, as she continues: Money’s a mystery to people like me – and Keith. We only understand a week’s wages at a time. Happen that’s all some folk want us to understand.

Although the play’s reliance on crosscutting means that conventional teleology is absent, some particularly crucial juxtapositions of past and present point to a less obvious but even stronger sense of inevitability. In Castleford in 1950, when Vivian is fourteen, she answers back to her father (Joe Belcher) when he takes hidden goods from her mother’s mattress in the bedroom, and he ‘promptly clouts her for her impudence’.9 At once we cut to a scene in September 1961, the night after the

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Structure and plot  115 Pools cheque has been handed to Vivian and Keith, set contrastingly in a ‘Luxury bedroom. The Grosvenor Hotel, London’. There is an ironic link between the two bedrooms, which are divided by time, geography and class, yet set side by side within the narrative. Further, there is a literal connection between the scenes in the form of a fist which reaches over these divisions. When Keith enters the room, Vivian hits him in the face. Keith’s extreme surprise – ‘What the hell’s that for??’ – registers the fact that the blow emanates from the past. It shows Vivian’s insecurity, since she is angry that Keith ogled can-can girls earlier that evening, and symbolises a link between daughter and father. He may have been ‘a full-time, fully-paid-up bastard’, as Viv puts it, but she too drinks to excess, has an unstable relationship with money, and is in the habit of destroying crockery and furniture when angered. ‘Inevitability’ of a kind other than straightforward cause and effect is implied by the play’s structure: that of class, temperament and upbringing. The crosscutting in Spend, Spend, Spend acts not only to join but to separate episodes to ironic effect. In a scene from 1954 we see Vivian waiting impatiently for Keith to attend their first tryst at the home she shares with Matthew, her husband of the time. When Matthew arrives home unexpectedly she drives him out again, exclaiming at the effort, ‘Is it worth it? Is it bloody worth it?’ At once, as if in oblique answer to Vivian’s question, there is a cut to a scene from 1961 in the post-Poolswin era. Vivian and Keith’s new house in Grange Avenue is ablaze with lights and loud with music; a doctor arrives at the door, and from his point of view we see the figure of Vivian, seriously ill, lying on the bed dressed in horn-rim glasses, false beard and football kit. The costume is a jarring outward sign of Vivian’s mental state, since she is convinced she will die as punishment for winning the Pools. The doctor’s inept diagnosis – ‘It’s shock, that’s all. State of shock. You haven’t a thing to worry about, love’ – is followed by another abrupt cut back to the budding romance between Vivian and Keith seven years earlier. Vivian in voiceover answers her own rhetorical question as we see the pair in a passionate embrace: ‘Is it worth it? I’ll say it is!’ As a result of the crosscutting, Vivian’s affirmation sounds like a reckless acceptance of everything that is to come, not just adultery with Keith. The play’s pattern of ironic juxtaposition culminates in the fast crosscutting between the evening Keith heard the football results on the television, and his death in a car-crash three years later. The sequence begins in September 1961, the time of the play’s opening, but this is Saturday a week earlier. In voiceover, Vivian describes the parlous financial state of her family of six, due to such outgoings as rent on a council house, money owed on hire purchase, and Keith’s child-support payments:

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116  Jack Rosenthal ‘And it all came out of Keith’s seven quid a week, and the tuppence ha’penny a week I earned at Ewbank’s Sweet Factory.’ Symbolic mileage is derived from a precise amount of money. Here, Vivian’s use of the phrase ‘tuppence ha’penny’ represents hyperbolically her low wages;10 but we have already heard Keith, later in time but earlier in the play, use the same phrase to opposite effect. Vivian wants to buy a Chevrolet Impala, Keith a Vauxhall, although neither can drive: keith: I’m getting a tuppence ha’penny shooting-brake! vivian: Tuppence ha’penny? keith: Well … vivian: We can afford it, man! keith: Two thousand eight hundred quid. vivian: We can afford a couple of dozen!

In both instances, ‘tuppence ha’penny’ is a misrecognition of a real amount of money – but whereas Vivian’s use of the phrase emphasised poverty, Keith’s downplays extravagance.11 More than this, it shows that spending has become divorced from work, earning or need and has taken on a life of its own. As Keith retorts to the bank manager who urges him to take up a hobby and stop spending money, echoing the phrase of Vivian’s which titles the play, ‘Spending is my bloody hobby!’ Vivian opens the sequence of scenes depicting the Pools win and Keith’s death with a voiceover: ‘I just couldn’t see no future for any of us. How life could ever be any different … If I’d had a shilling for the gas, I’d have stuck my head in the oven and got my money’s worth.’ The ironic answer to Vivian’s question about the future comes in two parts: the advent of a large amount of money outside the structures of work, and, more ominously, Keith’s car-crash. We see Vivian and Keith prepare to go out on Saturday evening, using the last of the money Vivian had put aside for glass doors in the front room, and it is as if the forces of chance give with one hand and take away with the other. Keith hears the first draw of the football results while shaving: ‘Fair start. We’ve got that bugger.’ This is followed at once by a disorientingly silent bird’s-eye shot of a crashed and smoking car, lying on its side in the verge of a road. The next scene makes clear what we have just witnessed. It is set in 1964 and consists of a slow zoom towards the crashed car, culminating in a close-up of Keith’s bloodied corpse in the driving seat, seen through the broken window. The quick succession of scenes in which Keith hears draw after draw in the football results, and in which we see the fatal carcrash and its aftermath, again points to an almost impersonal causality. Keith’s wish to win the Pools, using ‘five bob’ that could have bought ‘two loaves of bread and half a pound of sodding butter!’, as Vivian puts it, is shown to lead directly to death. It is as if class is both inescapable

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Structure and plot  117 and can have deadly consequences. Such deathliness is symbolised in the scenes where Keith hears the football results by his cutting himself shaving – always a resonant trope in Rosenthal’s plays. He first cuts himself during the second draw, where his mildly amused ‘Got that bugger an’ all!’ is followed by an exclamation of pain, and by the time of the fifth draw he is bleeding so profusely that Vivian points out he has ‘blood on your only bloody shirt’, just as he does in the fatal car-crash. As with the fist which reached across time to deliver a blow to Keith and reveal the influence of Vivian’s father on her life, here Keith’s blood is the element common to his escape from poverty and to his death. The greatest change Rosenthal has made in his play to Vivian’s biography is to reorder its plot. In other respects, he has stayed very close to the source, in terms of Vivian’s distinctive voice – in both book and play, her teenage plaits are a ‘bloody menace’ to her, Keith’s funeral was ‘like royalty’, there was ‘method in my madness’ during a particular instance of scheming – and to certain details, such as Vivian’s father eating at the mantelpiece rather than the table, his denying the existence of tenpound notes, and her searching for one of Keith’s eyelashes under the pillow after his death. A few details are omitted or their emphasis altered, including the fact that Vivian’s uncle’s two children also lived with her childhood family of five siblings, ‘everyone liked’ her ‘handsome’ father, and that Vivian had the chance to go to art school but her family would not let her take it up. Although the play’s dialogue is notable for its Yorkshire dialect, it does not use the second person singular, as the book does for reported speech. In the latter, Vivian’s father protests at not being given any of the Pools money: ‘“Thy own father! After all I’ve done for thee and how I’ve brought thee up”’, in contrast to the play: ‘I’m your bloody father! I brought you up!’ Pronouns in the play are standardised for a wide Play for Today audience. Yet the alterations to the narrative form of Vivian’s story in Rosenthal’s play are all-important. At its end, Rosenthal’s play exaggerates the irony of the double-plotting that his crosscutting has revealed. Vivian gives voice to this idea in the play’s final scene on a return visit in 1976 to the house she and Keith rented from the council in Kershaw Avenue, Castleford: I remembered everything. I thought if Motherwell had got another goal and Stockport not drawn with Oldham … we’d still be there. Happen we’d have had the front room furnished by now. With its nice glass doors. To let the sunshine in.

This counterfactual outcome to Vivian’s life is easier to credit in Rosenthal’s play than it is in Smith and Nicholson’s book.12 This is because in the play we see the poverty and the Pools plots advance in parallel as

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118  Jack Rosenthal if they were alternatives, despite our understanding that they are really successive. Teleology is subverted once more, as the audience is made aware of extreme and capricious contrasts within a single life. It is as if the crosscutting has laid bare both the violence of the class system in Britain, by contrasting abject poverty with unsatisfying abundance, and the logic of Vivian’s memory of events, including a comparison of the various parts of her life of which she concludes, I had some bad times in that street. Bloody bad. So bad I wanted to die. (A beat) They were the best times I ever had.

This is the final utterance of the play, made more conclusive and more memorable than the book’s, where Vivian concludes simply, ‘I was really sorry, I thought those were good times’.13 But the play’s crosscutting also addresses Vivian’s notoriety and the knowledge and judgement of her life after the Pools win which the audience is assumed to have. The play’s structure literally makes the audience consider the win alongside Vivian’s past, and, as Shaun Usher argues in his review of the play as a polemic on Vivian’s behalf, ‘robbed begrudgers of much to savour’.14 As Vivian concludes of her own story, ‘I understand why it went wrong; because there was no other way it could have gone.’

The Chain Like Spend, Spend, Spend, The Chain (1984) has an unorthodox dramatic and televisual form which serves most obviously to represent British class structures. The Chain was a feature film directed by Jack Gold and released in 1985, starring a variety of famous British actors, and produced by Quintet Films – a production company of which Rosenthal was a director, Gold the chairman – in association with Channel Four. It gave rise to the television film Moving Story (ITV 1994) and the ABTV/ Carlton comedy series of the same name (1994) about the exploits of a removal company. The homeless woman (Ann Tirard), whose journey through London streets we follow in The Chain, is a prototype for the heroine of Rosenthal’s television play Bag Lady (1989). On its release, The Chain was praised for its humour and strong performances. Alexander Walker claimed that ‘Its eye for social detail is practically an X-ray one’, while David Robinson called it ‘engaging, playful and original.’15 The Chain takes the form of seven individual but linked stories about people moving house in London. The ‘stupefying “chain” system’, in Rosenthal’s phrase, ‘by which we all move into our next house just as the occupiers are leaving to move into theirs’,16 is replicated in the

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Structure and plot  119 film’s structure, as we follow the characters more or less one after the other, starting with Des (Herbert Norville) leaving his mother’s house in Hackney, through a chain of other relocaters, ending up with Thomas (Leo McKern) moving out of his Knightsbridge mansion. This structure gave rise to many descriptions of the film as a ‘London La Ronde’, after Max Ophuls’s 1950 film. However, while the connections in La Ronde between characters were those of venereal disease passed from one level of the social scale to another, in The Chain it is upward mobility that is the narrative’s motivating force. Although a quest for social ascension ‘in London’s social-residential ladder’ is not what ostensibly impels each element of the chain forward, each relocater does ascend in a way possible ‘only in the finely stratified society of Britain’, as the Times reviewer put it.17 In the film each section of the chain is introduced on-screen by a superimposed caption in a particular style – daubed lettering for Hackney, curlicued for Holland Park – but the film relies on its viewers already knowing the class implications of each move: the chain stretches from Hackney to Tufnell Park to Willesden to Hammersmith to Hampstead to Holland Park to Knightsbridge – and then back to Hackney. The very last element in this chain, which makes it more of a circle, is not the result of Hackney’s gentrification but, rather, the desire of the self-made millionaire Thomas to return to his childhood home. The film’s title also refers ironically to the ‘great chain of being’ of the middle ages, which was a visual metaphor for the notion of a divinely ordained universal hierarchy, and to its contemporary form, the British class system. As in Spend, Spend, Spend, the different story-lines in The Chain are not only linked by connections between scenes. Rosenthal describes the conceit which gives a symbolic structure to the film: ‘As the original La Ronde had linked each character in its chain by Love, I chose the Seven Deadly Sins as the (literally) motivating force behind each of the seven tales.’18 The film opens on a panorama of London in early morning. As the camera pans across the skyline, starting at St Paul’s Cathedral and ending at Tower Bridge, we hear the voice of the Reverend Anthony Leonard (Bob Holness): ‘Good morning, Sodom and Gomorrah!’ The Reverend proceeds to identify one of the deadly sins with a particular area of London, and in this way we are introduced to each character: Des is ‘lustfully’ leaving Hackney for Tufnell Park to live with his girlfriend; Keith (Dennis Lawson) is ‘slothfully’ hanging out of the window of his flat smoking a cigarette before a move to Willesden which his wife has organised; Grandpa (Maurice Denham) is moving to a ‘granny’ flat with his daughter’s family in Hammersmith, motivated by ‘envy’ of a friend; Mr Thorn (Nigel Hawthorne) is moving to Hampstead and

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120  Jack Rosenthal ‘avariciously’ tears up rose bushes from the garden before he does so; Mrs Andreos (Billie Whitelaw) contemplates the photograph of her late husband, a DIY ‘glutton’ for punishment, in Hampstead; Deirdre (Judy Parfitt) in Holland Park has a new Jaguar delivered on the morning of her move for reasons of ‘pride’; and Thomas is quitting Knightsbridge for Hackney, motivated by ‘wrath’ at the diagnosis of a terminal illness. Of the day’s movers, only the homeless woman is exempt from this catalogue of sins. We see her at London Bridge as the Reverend intones, ‘Let’s make it – a day of change. A day without sin.’ At the film’s end, the last image is of the homeless woman. However, she is not in a new dwelling, like the other characters, but in a doorway wrapped in copies of The Christian Science Monitor. The visual contrast between the homeless woman and the architecture of the City and West End effects a social and moral commentary without the dialogue or narrative of the mini-plots about the seven relocaters. As Rosenthal puts it, the streets themselves, their recognisability and their look, ‘illustrate the class system of our society’,19 and to enable this the film was shot entirely on location. Such a use of location shooting allows for specifically visual jokes. As she drives away to Knightsbridge, Deirdre says of the Holland Park houses, which we see to be beautiful and pristine, ‘Looking everso-slightly shabby round here, these days, isn’t it?’ However, the framework of the seven deadly sins does not affect our viewing of the film as a whole as it does in, say, Se7en (David Fincher 1995) or The Seven Deadly Sins (Philippe de Broca and Claude Chabrol 1962), and the ‘sins’ become simply character traits and individuals’ ways of reacting to the experience of moving. It is rather the removal company which acts to unite the seven different stories in the film. Even where people are not being moved by Lasts, the removers hired by those in the middle of the chain but not by those at the poorer or richer extremes, they come into contact with them. The removal men break up an argument between Keith and his wife Carrie (Rita Wolf), advise Mr Thorn, and end up unexpectedly moving Mrs Andreos. They are also distinctive characters in their own right. Tornado (Gary Waldhorn) is a satirically named slowcoach; Paul (Tony Westrope) the ladies’ man; Nick (Bernard Hill) the dependable strong-man; and Bamber (Warren Mitchell) the ‘éminence grise of removal men’.20 In the series Moving Story ‘Bamber’ is a nickname explicitly derived from the name of Bamber Gascoigne, compère of the television quiz University Challenge (ITV 1962–87; BBC2 1994 onwards). In The Chain, rather than being a general-knowledgequiz devotee as he is in Moving Story, Bamber is revising for a philosophy evening class exam, and tries valiantly to explain to the lads the thought of Plato, Sartre and Kierkegaard by linking each to the details of

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Structure and plot  121 the removal business. Despite the drama critic Owen Dudley Edwards’s comment to the contrary in a Radio 3 discussion of the film – ‘it’s not just a question of it being funny, a removal man quoting Plato, you find yourself following the argument and being very impressed with the way in which he is making Plato significant for his own life’21 – at first there may seem to be an element of laughing at, as much as with, the removal man’s version of philosophy, engaging though the following dialogue may be: bamber: What Plato’s saying … is that there’s what’s real to us, sort of thing … and what’s sort of what’s really real … in a sort of ideal state … and that’s realler … really. Look, I’ll give you a similar – once we’ve shifted this lot to Hammersmith, them flats aren’t really real.

Later, Paul takes issue with this way of making philosophy approachable in his response to Bamber’s version of Vico’s concept of rebirth: paul: Well, that’s cobblers, innit? bamber: What is? paul: Who gets reborn? Who that we know?

The connecting function of Bamber’s philosophy is made clear at the film’s end, where the earlier gap between his character and his utterance is no longer troublesome; indeed, he acts as a chorus-figure for the film as a whole. Bamber summarises Vico: bamber: Like if you leave your doorstep and travel as far as you can, well, all you do is wind up on your own doorstep again, what you started from. tornado: What – even if you travel right round the world? bamber: Well, of course. Bound to, en’t you? World’s round, innit? What he’s getting at really, is that it takes the whole journey … all your life and that … to get to know yourself, what you’re about …

Bamber’s speech here refers to the play’s raison d’être, which is to show that moving has no meaning without self-knowledge. His philosophy evening-class revision is the dramatisation of his ‘philosophical’ frame of mind, as an early stage direction has it: ‘[Bamber] is the most patient and (as we shall see) most philosophical of men.’22 Bamber’s approach to his awkward customers is to recite ‘a little homily he’s been delivering every weekday of his life for as long as he can remember’: ‘Moving house is very upsetting. It’s a big upsetment. People get upset.’ Bamber also gives voice to the play’s symbolism when he reasons with Mrs Andreos, who has decided on the very morning not to move after all: bamber: Mrs Andreos … You mustn’t break the chain … If you don’t go, them out there have no home, the people in Holland Park can’t

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122  Jack Rosenthal move to where they’re moving to, the people where they’re moving to can’t move to where they’re moving to. Everything stops. Everyone loses thousands in deposits … Everything in chaos. Standstill. End of civilization, innit?

This is as close as anyone in the world of the film gets to acknowledging the metaphysical aspects of the enforced interconnectedness that moving entails, although Bamber takes issue with Mrs Andreos’ riposte: mrs andreos: Good. Teach them to be happy as they are. bamber: Ah, now that’s a different chain, dear. Now you’re on to human nature. That’s more in the realm of philosophical observation you’re into there … which, coincidentally enough, you Greeks started in the first place. mrs andreos: Eh? [She is Cypriot.]

As Alexander Walker points out in his review, The Chain is unmistakably set in Thatcher’s Britain, both dramatically and visually. Its representation of ‘interlocking moves up the social scale’23 could be seen as an anticipatory broadside against Margaret Thatcher’s infamous remark in a 1987 interview published in the magazine Woman’s Own that there is no such thing as society, only individuals. Yet society itself is flawed. In The Chain, we see that people are interconnected but also highly stratified. Des moves out of Hackney in an ancient Mini estate whose doors only open when kicked, while Deirdre leaves Holland Park in a new Jaguar she nicknames right away, a decision discussed by her husband Alex (John Rowe) and daughter Rosemary (Charlotte Long): rosemary: What’s she calling the new car? alex: Maggie. rosemary: After …? alex: I expect so.

We do not see the lowest end of the social spectrum, as we do in the scenes representing Vivian’s childhood as the daughter of an unemployed miner in Spend, Spend, Spend. As a review in Time Out noted of The Chain, ‘this is a cosy world of home-ownership and upward mobility, where nobody lives in a squat or council flat and the main dilemmas in life relate to the precise social nuances between Hammersmith and Hampstead.’24 It is true that, in a pointed reversal of classrelated expectations, the squatters who take over Grandpa’s granny flat have middle-class accents. Only the homeless woman represents the underbelly of middle-class aspiration. However, some of the most notorious features of Thatcher’s Britain in the mid-1980s are dramatised in the play. As a young black man sitting around apparently aimlessly with

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Structure and plot  123 bundles of goods, Des is taken in by a policeman under the ‘sus’ laws of the time. Deirdre’s husband Alex observes to his son Mark (Matthew Blakstad) that only moving to Buckingham Palace would fulfil his wife’s social aspirations, to which Mark replies, ‘Can we do that on BUPA?’ Mark’s question, however farcical, links private health-care with the idea of fantastical privilege. On the other hand, the film shows clear signs of mid-1980s progressivism. Using phraseology that sounds rather quaint in the twenty-first century, the television critic Ruth Baumgarten remarks upon the film’s ‘exceptionally nice and funny line in anti-racist and anti-sexist humour’.25 It is true that both racism and sexism are represented humorously in the film, although it is harder to discern in it a consistent polemic, particularly in relation to gender. In terms of race, Des’s middle-aged white friend Stan, who drives him and his belongings to Tufnell Park, complains about having to carry a bundle from the car: stan: Oi, Des! I’ve heard of the White Man’s bleedin’ Burden … Give us a hand to get them in, will you?

This quip does not really qualify for a postcolonial label, despite its ­reference to Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ about British imperialism, although it does imply that Stan sees an irony in his carrying for Des, a black friend. The tension between Keith and his Asian wife Carrie, which arises from his lethargy versus her energy, is given both a racial and gendered slant, as shown by their argument in front of the removal team – whom Carrie includes in ‘your lot’: keith: It’s all right for her. Her lot work like there’s no bleedin’ tomorrow. carrie: Like there is tomorrow! Working for tomorrow! keith: It’s in their blood. carrie: What’s in your blood? Your lot? You ain’t got no blood!

Although Keith and Carrie are arguing about race, their words also apply to the film’s ironic representation of gender difference. It is Carrie who drives the removal van, and calls out ‘Men at work’ as she loads it up single-handed. The conclusion to the Thorns’ story continues what Baumgarten would call the film’s anti-sexism. The fly-by-night removal company Mr Thorn engaged because they were so cheap make off with all the couple’s furniture, so the Thorns spend the first evening at their new home sitting on the floor. The last we see of them involves a mise-enscène designed to parody that of a thriller: they sit in semi-darkness to the accompaniment of an ominous soundtrack. A quick zoom to Mrs

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124  Jack Rosenthal Thorn’s (Anna Massey) expressionless face establishes an eyeline match between her gaze and her husband’s head, as he counts the rubber bands he retrieved from their Hammersmith flat earlier that day. This is followed by a close-up of Mrs Thorn’s hand as it tightens menacingly on one of her husband’s golf clubs, the only items he refused to allow to go in the removal van. Anna Massey’s fame as an actor in suspense films is also knowingly called upon here: before The Chain, she had starred in Peeping Tom (Michael Powell 1963), Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock 1973), and as Mrs Danvers in the 1979 television film of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. The biting-back of browbeaten Mrs Thorn is accomplished here without dialogue and entirely by visual means. It is perhaps the notion that there is little to distinguish The Chain as a feature film from Rosenthal’s television plays26 that inspired some critics to describe its filmic style as ‘devoid of visual interest’. Baumgarten contrasts the energy of the dialogue and performances with the ‘blankly functional’ camera of Director of Photography Wolfgang Suschitzky.27 It seems that such an estimate arises from critics’ low expectations of television’s visual style, and their assumption that The Chain was a television play manqué. In fact, the film is characterised by a number of distinctive visual tropes. For instance, several of the characters are framed by windows or look through the screens of vehicles at the world. As Des waits in Tufnell Park for his girlfriend to arrive, we are shown a close-up of a neighbour drawing her curtain aside to peer out at him. The framing of her face by scaffolding on the building is a suggestion of restriction and hostility which is confirmed by a second similar shot of the same neighbour, looking out to check on the arrival of the policeman we gather she has summoned. Alexander Walker notes the same visual motif in a scene where the removal man Paul goes to the wrong flat and tells a horrified old woman she is to move to Hammersmith: ‘[she is] trapped like a Francis Bacon spectre by Wolfgang Suschitzky’s camera behind the frosted-glass porthole on her front door’.28 When the old woman opens the door on its chain to peer out at Paul, we see a surreally truncated close-up of her face registering horror at a move she is not even making. These images of watching or looking out from an interior are fitting in a film about moving house. As Bamber says about the trauma of moving, On one hand it’s turning your animal instincts inside out – leaving the cave, right? On the other, it’s what your human instincts want, innit? – Questing the Unknown and that.

By contrast, the homeless woman is framed by public architecture. She is always introduced with a bird’s-eye-view shot, which allows the

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Structure and plot  125 a­ udience to see her movements from a great height and surrounded by the old and new buildings of the City. The second time we see the homeless woman, we look between the massive structures of a contemporary glass-fronted building and the Monument to the Great Fire of London of 1666, on which the Latin inscriptions are almost legible. It is as if the City and its history has almost obliterated any view of the homeless woman; but at the same time, the construction of the shot itself makes us anticipate her appearance before we even see her.

Moving Story Rosenthal rewrote The Chain as Moving Story in a New York setting in 1988 with a view to selling it to an American production company. The film was never made, but, in an ingenious twist on the theme of an interlinking chain, the five central female roles – ranging from ‘The Bag Lady’ to ‘Elaine, a millionairess’ – were all to have been played by Bette Midler.29 Rosenthal rewrote the film again as the British television play Moving Story, a feature-length pilot for the comedy series of that title, which was directed by Roger Bamford and Andrew Grieve and shown on ITV in May 1994.30 As the change of title suggests, the British Moving Story is not structured according to the chain of moving house; rather, as in The Dustbinmen, the focus is on a team of men working together and we see the relocaters only briefly and through the removal men’s eyes. As Mark Lewisohn puts it, the pilot and series relied on Rosenthal’s trademark narrative conceit of ‘a group of men in a van, enjoying a strange brotherhood and mixing with strangers’.31 In the pilot, Liane Bates wants to leave her husband and move away from the marital home in Kensington to Brighton to stay with her mother, but this is revealed as a ploy to gain revenge on Mr Bates. Most of the action is focused on the removal team’s journey to Kensington and the journey they then make to Brighton without her furniture. Certain plot elements from The Chain appear in exaggerated form in Moving Story. Multicultural humour is inspired by Asif (Ronny Jhutti), a young Pakistani who joins the removal team on a ‘youth training scam’, as Ken (Kenneth Colley), the manager of Elite Removals, puts it. While the removal men struggle with his name – ‘As if what? As if I care – right?’, as Adrenalin says – Asif’s girlfriend Kalsoom is shocked by his swearing and suggesting extra-marital sex after only a day in the removal men’s company. This is not cultural blending so much as a wry acknowledgement of what the white mainstream has to offer. The same is true of the meal Asif’s womenfolk prepare for him after his first day

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126  Jack Rosenthal at work. His grandmother makes a feast of several courses, despite his mother’s objections: grandma: There isn’t much. Just a little chicken biriani. mother: And tikka! And pilau! And onion bhaji! And samosas and chapati and nan and – Mother! Where’s the treat? This is what he always has! I promised him a treat tonight.

The ‘treat’ Asif requested was pizza and a Coke; but in the event Asif’s girlfriend takes him for a Chinese meal which he can’t eat after two portions of chips on Brighton seafront earlier in the day. Food is made humorously to symbolise the limitations of multiculturalism in Britain, and individuals’ eagerness to conform; but there is also a hint at a two-way process, as the menu Asif’s mother describes is just the kind of unusual ‘treat’ other young men would welcome. Class in Moving Story is a matter of occasional contrast, rather than integral to the film’s structure. Asif’s family inhabit a council flat, while Mr Bates, whose wife tries to move house without him, is a 1990s banker, dressed in a loud pinstripe suit and owner of a BMW. Glancing references are made to the much-hated poll tax of the 1990s, while the era’s yuppie-dom is symbolised by the £5 pot of tea Asif buys in a Kensington patisserie. Bamber’s efforts to improve his general knowledge are described by the lads as part of a bid to enter the BBC quiz show Mastermind, but also appear as a misguided bid for social advancement. Bamber reads the thoughts of ‘Young Peregrine’ in the morning paper: clearly Peregrine Worsthorne in the Daily Telegraph. We note the irony of Bamber’s wearing a T-shirt with the removal company name, ‘Elite’, printed on it, plus a bowler hat and white gloves – which simply signify his status as a ‘furniture man’. In general, the plot of Moving Story suffers from longueurs and lack of focus, due to its combination of a 75-minute feature length with an episodic plot of four parts (subsequent episodes in the series were 60 minutes long), as well as a complete change of cast from The Chain. Warren Clarke plays Bamber, Philip Davies is Adrenalin (a character who is a surprising combination of both Tornado’s inertia and Paul’s woman­ising), and Con O’Neill plays Nick. While The Chain was described by the Times reviewer as an ‘artificial confection made in terms of familiar realism’,32 in Moving Story neither level is particularly convincing. However, the reliance on caricature and exaggeration is better suited to a series than to a television play. As befits a pilot for a series, recognisable individual traits are established for each character, in particular ­Adrenalin’s inability to utter ‘any words till after he’s finished the sentence’, as Bamber says. This is not just a memorable verbal tic

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Structure and plot  127 but defamiliarises dialogue itself by drawing attention to the ­materiality of signs. Adrenalin defers significant or problematic meaning, for instance in the following dialogue with his wife Charlotte: bamber: Adrenalin, ring your missus. adrenalin: Lest we bloody whatsit. Forget … (on phone to Charlotte): See you tonight. (beat) ‘When?’ When I walk through the bloody whatdyoucallit, woman! He slams down the phone. Door.

The only time that Adrenalin does not produce the right word is strategic, when Nick asks him about his alleged womanising. Nick asks how the married Adrenalin meets so many women when Nick meets no one and is ‘single’, to which Adrenalin replies, ‘I think it’s a matter of whatchyoucallit.’ The missing word never follows, signifying undefinability – and contributing to one of the mysteries of the series, whether or not Adrenalin really does have girlfriends everywhere from Sheffield to Uttoxeter. The cinematography in Moving Story does make use of distinctive tropes, as in The Chain. Here, shots reflected in mirrors or screens take the place of windows in the earlier film, and assume a humorous role. Our first introduction to Bamber is a view of his face from below as it is reflected in his bathroom mirror – the angle of the shot has an ­undercutting effect, as we also realise that the chords of the heroic, apparently extra-diegetic, soundtrack is a piano concerto on Radio 3, which he proceeds to identify incorrectly. At the pilot’s end, we see Bamber in bed reflected in a triple wardrobe mirror, and once more the shot construction acts to undercut – in this case, his reading of Henri Bergson, whose words he repeats in a more open-ended version of The Chain’s Bamber citing Vico: ‘The basis of all reality is in changing and moving.’

Bag Lady The last television drama to arise from Rosenthal’s original The Chain is his 1989 play Bag Lady. This was shown as part of Maureen Lipman’s ITV series About Face – directed and co-produced by Spitting Image producer John Henderson – in which she played different characters over six episodes. Rosenthal also wrote Sleeping Sickness in the second series of About Face in 1991. Rosenthal described Bag Lady as ‘the best script I’d ever written’,33 and in several interviews given at the time Lipman

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128  Jack Rosenthal claimed it as her favourite in the series.34 Its plot and characterisation are a development of the figure of the silent homeless woman in The Chain, whose random meanderings through the West End and City of London act as a counterpoint to the upwardly mobile moves of the other characters. Rosenthal developed this character further in the unfilmed American script provisionally entitled The Chain (Moving Story), where the Bag Lady wanders the streets of Manhattan accosting passers-by in a search for missing furniture, as she puts it: ‘One of them was the bed. From Gimbels. Walnut.’ The only hint here at the intricate plot which will be developed in the British film is the Bag Lady’s observation that, ‘The stuff I had was beautiful. Mostly wedding presents ….’.35 Eventually the American Bag Lady recognises the removal company’s name on a van and finds her bed at the depot where it has been stored since 1956. This resolution, like that of the homeless woman’s wanderings in The Chain, ironises the other relocaters’ stories. As befits its place as an episode in Maureen Lipman’s series, the narrative of the British Bag Lady focuses on her character alone – the context of other people moving house is absent. Here, the Bag Lady is also searching for lost furniture, and she appears to be not just eccentric but mentally unstable: bag lady: It was wedding presents, most of it. You ask the Prime Minister. The bed-head’s walnut. Waring and Gillows. Where is the Prime Minister?

It is as if the incidental, humanising detail about the wedding presents in the American draft inspired Rosenthal to flesh out a backstory for the Bag Lady in the Lipman version. As he puts it, the audience has to ‘piece together’ the Bag Lady’s story from ‘seemingly disconnected dribs and drabs, echoes and non-sequiturs’36 – the ‘seemingly’ is significant here, as even the most apparently surreal details of her monologue, such as her conviction that the Prime Minister has her furniture, turn out to have an oblique logic. The television play Bag Lady matches form to content. However, despite what one might expect, its subject is not class so much as metafiction, despite the element of truth in Maureen Lipman’s comment that the play revealed ‘the kind of compassion which makes [Rosenthal] the truly socialist writer he is’.37 Rather, Bag Lady is about the construction and decoding of a narrative. The Bag Lady’s meanderings through central London are matched by her equally meandering memories, spoken aloud as if to herself: together, these two elements constitute the film’s plot. Throughout, the audience learns what it is that ‘dragged her from fairly normal normality to near-madness’;38 at the same time,

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Structure and plot  129 we witness her progress towards finding her lost furniture. The film links these elements in its conclusion. As the Bag Lady goes to sleep on her walnut bed in a removal company’s storage depot, she remembers a detail that has eluded her all day, the name of the ‘Polish airman’ she dated as a young woman: past and present are united. Even more metafictionally, the details of the Bag Lady’s story exist as a showcase for Lipman and her persona as an actor. She provides the Bag Lady with a harsh Humberside-accented voice, a mechanical laugh, twitches and sideways glances, and disconcerting changes of register from pleading to shouting. The Bag Lady’s ‘derangement’ is the reason her words are uttered aloud, enabling what Rosenthal describes as Lipman’s ‘virtuoso half-hour monologue’.39 Such self-referentiality is made clear too by the fact that the Bag Lady hails from Hull, as Lipman herself famously does. The Bag Lady is an actor manquée who imitates the style of other female actors such as Sybil Thorndike; and while Bag Lady was being filmed Lipman starred in Re: Joyce at London’s Fortune Theatre, a one-woman play in which she gave renditions of the actress Joyce Grenfell’s songs and sketches. The story that we do piece together is partly prompted by the Bag Lady’s encounters during her day on the streets. Queuing behind a young woman and her baby at a cash-point inspires the Bag Lady’s reminiscences about what seems to have been post-natal depression nearly thirty years earlier. She was unable to care for her daughter, Rosemary Ann, and at the same time, perhaps as a result, her husband started ‘dancing’ with her friend Marjorie. The rest of the Bag Lady’s history emerges out of order: her name was Wendy Lund, née Parker, and her father left the family when Wendy was a few months old in 1929 – making her, in the world of the film, 60 in 1989 (when Lipman was 43: her youth is often apparent through the uglification make-up40). At school Wendy was accused of ‘copying sums’ from Marjorie and as punishment prevented from taking the role of Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest. She met Wilfred, her future husband, at the Festival of Britain in 1951, having refused the advances of Stanislaw, the Polish airman, as they were not engaged, although her friend Marjorie accused her of stealing him. After the birth of their daughter Wilfred left Wendy for Marjorie, taking the child and most of the furniture with him. Marjorie had also told Wilfred about Wendy’s previous boyfriends. In her despair Wendy broke a mirror in the hall and describes herself as having had 28 years of bad luck. We gain the impression that ever since, like a peripatetic Miss Havisham, the Bag Lady has been reciting aloud bits and pieces of her story. Equally, it is as if the Bag Lady’s life-story pointedly did not take the course Maureen Lipman’s did: Wendy Parker left Hull not in

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130  Jack Rosenthal order to act and remain with a loving husband, but to tramp the streets of London alone. Once the chronology of her life and its details are clear, the Bag Lady’s unmotivated utterances seem more logical. She rummages in a litter bin and on noticing the rubbish she has thrown onto the pavement, declaims, Litter-louts. Jitter-bugs … Dirty Gertie … Flirty-flirty guys with their flirtyflirty eyes ... Jeepers, creepers, where did you get them …?

This is an almost Modernist representation of confused memory, sexual jealousy and sexual guilt, composed from rhyme, association and repetition, such as we find, for instance, in T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. The lines combine references to Wilfred dancing with ‘dirty Gertie’ Marjorie, and to the Polish airman’s ‘heavy-lidded eyes’ in the fragment of Louis Armstrong’s song ‘Jeepers, Creepers’. Just as the Bag Lady’s words make retrospective sense, so does her behaviour. She intones, ‘A haaandbaaag?’ to a delighted little girl looking after her mother’s handbag at a café, referring back not only to the first time she ‘stole’ something from Marjorie at school and was forbidden to take the role of Lady Bracknell, but also to the mysterious origins and problems with children of Wilde’s play. In the final script version of this episode in Bag Lady, the Bag Lady steals the handbag .41 In the televised version, however, it is merely a theatrical prompt and she leaves it with the young girl. This is a shift in emphasis from external to internal drama, fitting for such a self-conscious monologue. Even the Bag Lady’s conviction that the Prime Minister has her bed and the ‘pretty lamp with the tassles’ turns out to be based on the wordassociation of memory rather than a delusion. While resting in a dark alley, which symbolises her entrapment by the past, the Bag Lady sees the answer to her troubles. We are shown this first by a shot-reverse-shot sequence in which the Bag Lady’s expression changes from one of resignation – she has just muttered to herself, ‘but it’s going round in circles, really, ’cos you never find the Prime Minister’ – to revelation. She does a double-take, stares, then her lip trembles. The reverse shot, which reveals what she has seen, constitutes a cut so unexpected that it can only provoke laughter. It shows a removal lorry with the legend ‘Harold Macmillan Removals and Storage’ on its side.42 The Bag Lady finds her bed and lamp at the storage depot and is allowed by the young warehouseman to sleep there. This twist in the plot emphasises the film’s place in the recognisable Rosenthal territory of the everyday surreal. The film ends with the camera slowly pulling back from the tiny figure of the Bag Lady asleep on her bed amid acres of furniture – in a visual

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Structure and plot  131 echo of the end of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), where the camera pans around the vast expanse of possessions Kane has uselessly accumulated over a lifetime. The mood is quite different at the end of Bag Lady, however. Although the audience may suspect that her derangement preceded the loss of love and of a child that the Bag Lady recounts, the film’s end sees the conclusion of a quest and the uniting of past and present, fantasy and reality.

Conclusion In all four films – Spend, Spend, Spend, The Chain, Moving Story and Bag Lady – unusual or experimental form does double duty in complementing or even constituting the plot. Spend, Spend, Spend and The Chain are both about British class structures. While the former uses its crosscutting between past and present to reveal the abyss between poverty and wealth, even within the same individuals’ lives, The Chain’s plaited structure emphasises instead the interconnections between people at either end of the social scale. In both Moving Story and Bag Lady, class distinction and social injustice are unexplored backdrops in films which are more concerned with narrative. Moving Story is the pilot for a series and as such sets up open-ended subplots and exaggerated character traits among its dramatis personae; while Bag Lady is an interior monologue made audible which exists in order to fall silent with the completion of a quest.

Notes 1 Vivian Nicholson and Stephen Smith, Spend, Spend, Spend, London: Jonathan Cape 1977; all quotations are from this edition (those in the text as well as those in these endnotes). Vivian authorised Rosenthal’s play, and he describes meeting her several times while writing the screenplay. In 1999 Vivian’s story was made into a musical, also called Spend, Spend, Spend, starring Barbara Dickson – but the book provided the source material, and Rosenthal was not involved. 2 In an interview from 2003, Nicholson notes that ‘It’s unbelievable that I remember the exact amount we won so clearly – it was £152,300,18 [sic] shillings and eight pence. Back then, even the eight pence meant something’ (‘What happened next?’, Bulent Yusuf, the Observer, Sunday 6 July 2003). In the play, Rosenthal draws dramatic irony from the fact that Vivian spent her last eight pence the day before the win on a box of first-aid plasters. However, it is clear from contemporary publicity photographs of Keith Nicholson’s cheque that the total was 19 and not 18 shillings. 3 Shaun Usher, ‘The day humbug lost its flavour’, Daily Mail 16 March 1977, p. 27; James Murray, ‘Poor Vivian – last of the brave spenders’, Daily Express 16 March 1977.

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132  Jack Rosenthal 4 Jack Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal: A Life in Six Acts, Robson Books, London 2005, p. 228. 5 Usher, ‘The day humbug lost its flavour’; John J. O’Connor, ‘Some Lessons from the BBC’, New York Times March 15 1981, p. 25. 6 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 229. 7 Ibid., p. 231. 8 Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, SPEN/1. 9 All stage directions quoted are from Jack Rosenthal, Three Award-Winning Television Plays: Bar Mitzvah Boy, The Evacuees, Spend, Spend, Spend, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1978. 10 According to the interview with Yusuf, Vivian earned the same as Keith: £7 per week (‘What happened next?’). 11 In Smith and Nicholson’s book, £2,800 is the price of the Chevrolet, although it is ambiguously presented here. 12 By contrast, in the book when we read of Vivian’s visit to her former home – ‘this is where it all began … I thought, if we hadn’t won the Pools, we’d have been in there and we would have had the front-room furnished by now – we’d had to leave it empty because we couldn’t afford to fit it out while we were paying for the other rooms’ – the earlier period of her life is very distant in the reader’s mind. 13 Much earlier in Spend, Spend, Spend, Vivian observes of her childhood in the Castleford mining community, ‘up to date it was the best part of my life’ – Rosenthal has gathered these surprising estimates together and placed them at the play’s end for maximum dramatic irony. 14 Usher, ‘The day humbug lost its flavour’. 15 Alexander Walker, ‘Pack up your sins and move’, Evening Standard 23 May 1985, p. 31; David Robinson, ‘A review’, The Times, 24 May 1985. There were also enthusiastic reviews in the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, and Mirror. 16 Jack Rosenthal, ‘Introduction’, ‘The Chain’ with ‘The Knowledge’ and’ Ready When You Are, Mr McGill’, London: Faber 1986, p. xiv. 17 Robinson, ‘A review’. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Stage direction in Rosenthal, The Chain, p. 7; all further quotations from this edition. 21 ‘Critics’ Forum’, chaired by John Higgins, Radio 3 8 June 1985. 22 Rosenthal, The Chain, p. 7. 23 Walker, ‘Pack up your sins’. 24 Sheila Johnston, Time Out, 23–29 May 1985, p. 60. 25 Ruth Baumgarten, ‘New releases’, Time Out 23–29 May 1985. 26 See for instance the anonymous review in the Daily Mail, ‘Charm of sinners’, 24 May 1985. 27 Baumgarten, ‘New releases’. Suschitzky was the cameraman on the BBC Play for Today dramatisation of Paul Scott’s novel Staying On (1980), for which he received a BAFTA nomination, and Mike Hodges’ film Get Carter (1971). 28 Walker, ‘Pack up your sins’. 29 Two drafts of the screenplay are held in the Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, MOVI/1 and MOVI/2. 30 Rosenthal wrote the first three episodes of the ITV series, of which the pilot was the first. Thereafter it was written by Bernard Dempsey and Bill Gallagher; between 1994 and 1995 there were two series of thirteen episodes. 31 Mark Lewisohn, The Radio Times Guide to Television Comedy, London: BBC Books 1998, p. 39.

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Structure and plot  133 32 Robinson, ‘A review’. 33 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 340. 34 See for instance Graham Young, ‘”Tramp” got leper treatment’, Birmingham Evening Mail 31 August 1989. 35 Moving Story (‘The Chain’), MOV/2, p. 20. 36 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 341. 37 Maureen Lipman, Thank You for Having Me, London: Futura 1990, p. 226. 38 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 341. 39 Ibid., p. 340. 40 Lipman notes that her costume for the role took an hour and a half to apply: ‘“I was wearing padding, nine layers of clothes, a man’s dressing gown, a fleecy anorak, a plastic mac, a wig, a raincoat, false teeth, contact lenses and Rice Krispies warts, plus make-up, two pairs of socks and men’s shoes”’ (quoted in Spencer Bright, ‘A question of style’, Sunday Mirror magazine 8 October 1989). 41 Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, BAGL/5. 42 In an early draft, ‘Chamberlain’ has been altered to ‘Macmillan’s Removals’ by Rosenthal in hand, to suit better the film’s chronology: see the undated BAGL/1, Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection.

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Television satire in 1976 and 2005

6

Ready When You Are, Mr McGill

Comic self-referentiality, and satire at the expense of television, are staples of Rosenthal’s television writing throughout his career. In the situation comedy Sadie, It’s Cold Outside (1975) Sadie Potter only finds happiness at the end of six episodes when her husband Norman promises to sell the television set. In an early episode, she sits unwillingly watching a television play with her husband and daughter. We see only her astonished reactions, her face bathed in television’s unearthly blue light, since the reverse-shot to the television screen is withheld, but we learn that, as she says, ‘Now they’re taking all their clothes off! It must be a serial. (Pause). What’s on BBC?’. Norman responds, ‘This.’ The exchange hints at a truism of television history: having been set up with an obligation to ‘inform, educate and entertain’, in the words of its Royal Charter,1 the BBC’s output gradually started to resemble that of commercial television. In the first Ready When You Are, Mr McGill of 1976 schoolchildren mob the film-set looking for autographs and when they learn that an episode of an ITV series is being made, impishly shout, ‘BBC forever!’ Although the schoolchildren also appear in the 2005 version and cause a take to be abandoned, they do not bother to inquire for which channel the television play is being made: the era of simple binary rivalry has ended. Rosenthal wrote two versions of his television play Ready When You Are, Mr McGill, which were broadcast respectively by Granada on 11 January 1976, and by ITV Sky on 26 December 2005 after Rosenthal’s death. The earlier play was one of a seven-part Granada anthology called ‘Red Letter Day’, originated by Rosenthal himself, in which the common theme was an outstanding occasion in someone’s life. The first Ready When You Are, Mr McGill gained such accolades as the television critic Richard Last’s description of it as ‘a clear contender for the funniest television play of 1976, even though the year is less than a fortnight old’.2 It won a Rio Film Festival Best Play Award and was nominated for a British Academy Best Play Award. The later play, by contrast, was

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Television satire in 1976 and 2005  135 not broadcast until two years after it was made, and was then shown on an extra-terrestrial network in the graveyard slot of 11.05 pm on Boxing Day. The earlier play combines a story about an individual with a focus on what Last calls the ‘mishaps of location filming’.3 The later play has a more divided focus: on Joe McGill, the hapless extra, but also on the television industry itself. Critics of the later version saw in it darker elements than in the earlier one. Daphne Lockyer described the 2005 play as ‘a broadside against the television industry and a kind of valediction’ on Rosenthal’s part.4 Nancy Banks-Smith noted of Rosenthal’s update of the 1976 play that it ‘was still a comedy. Which, in the circumstances, is remarkable’; while Thomas Sutcliffe argued, rather more cynically, that, ‘It could probably best be filed under “Biting the Hand That Doesn’t Feed You Anymore.”’5 There are two reasons for the differences in transmission fortunes of the Mr McGill plays. First, the earlier Mr McGill was a funny and genial single play about the making of a play, broadcast at a time when audiences were accustomed to watching such fare. In 1976 alone, the year of Mr McGill, two other Rosenthal plays were broadcast: Well, Thank You, Thursday, also included in Granada’s ‘Red Letter Day’ anthology, and Bar Mitzvah Boy as a BBC Play for Today. The later Mr McGill, on the other hand, appeared at a time when the single play itself was a rarity, let alone one which implicitly criticised that very fact and the institutional reasons behind it. Second, as Maureen Lipman put it, ‘Maybe [the powers-thatbe] distrusted a drama which gives a hearty two-fingered salute to the current commissioning policies of their drama departments’.6 In both versions, the plot of Ready When You Are, Mr McGill concerns sixteen words spoken by Joe McGill, an extra in a television drama. The ‘outstanding occasion’ of the original Granada anthology is his having landed a speaking part in a play. However, a combination of repeated takes and his own exaggerated expectations cause Mr McGill to fluff his words and they are cut from the broadcast version. In his autobiography, Rosenthal describes the earlier version of the play as a product of his ‘writing storm’ of the 1970s, completed between The Evacuees and Bar Mitzvah Boy. He characterises the 1976 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill as ‘A TV film about a TV film … a satire’.7 Maureen Lipman also observes that the earlier play ‘lifted the lid on filmmaking’ by ‘removing that fourth wall’ and taking the ‘innocent’ television audiences of the 1970s ‘behind the scenes’.8 In other words, the 1976 version was a satirical metafiction, exposing the workings of television drama. By contrast, the 2005 version has extra layers of self-consciousness and the satire targets much more specific elements of television in the new millennium, particularly the control exerted over broadcasting by producers

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136  Jack Rosenthal and ­television networks. Lipman sums up the focus of the second version of the play: ‘”Jack’s thinking was that TV had become producer’s choice and star-driven. He wanted to say what this had done to writers and the quality of TV.”’9 The differences between the two versions range from changes in camera-work, characters’ names, and topical references, to details of dialogue and the roles of central characters. An examination of these differences can provide a fascinating insight into Rosenthal’s view of the changes in television production and reception over thirty years. The 1976 version of Ready When You Are, Mr McGill was commissioned by the Granada TV producer Michael Dunlop and directed by Mike Newell, who went on to such big-screen successes as Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005).10 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill was shot in Rusholme, Manchester, during March and April 1975, and the mise-en-scène is satisfyingly bleak as a result. The vagaries of the weather are prominent in both versions of the play, and take on an almost personified role in the dialogue in the earlier version, drawing attention to the fact – innovative for the 1970s – of its location shooting. As well as predictable differences between the two versions of Ready When You Are, Mr McGill – in 1976 Joe McGill plans to go and watch the episode in which he stars on his son’s colour television, while in 2005 he aims to buy a widescreen set – it is revealing to trace the origins of significant plot details in the 2005 play from tiny hints in the earlier one. This is not simply a matter of textual comparison, but is revelatory of changes in television production over three decades. Further, the later play flaunts its own status as television drama in ways that the earlier one did not, in many instances simultaneously criticising and deploying particular developments. The mise-en-scène of the later play, directed by television veteran Paul Seed, contrasts strikingly with that of the earlier one. It opens on ‘A street of desirable residences’11 (Elgin Crescent in west London) on a sunny day. Colour contrast is high, and the play’s look ironically resembles that of the type of modern, high-production-value series it is about. Rather than seeing Joe McGill memorising his lines in bed in the first scene, as we do in the earlier version, here we see the actor Amanda Holden leave one of the ‘desirable’ houses and get into a waiting car. The driver, Henry (Mike Hayley), makes constant reference to Holden’s television appearances in EastEnders and The Grimleys – although his knowledge is compromised, as she implies, by his mentioning only her earliest work. This makes clear that Holden is playing herself, and introduces a comically unstable division between Holden the actor and Holden the character. Throughout the play Holden’s star status is

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Television satire in 1976 and 2005  137 used to ironise and demystify the very notion of televisual stardom. As Maureen Lipman phrases it, ‘Amanda Holden sends herself up beautifully as TV star Amanda Holden.’12 The casting of Tom Courtenay as Joe equally ironises the televisual star system, although, unlike Holden, Courtenay is emphatically not playing himself. As the inconsequential extra he is variously referred to as ‘the old fart’, ‘Jimmy’ rather than ‘Joe’, and, finally, ‘Useless old bugger’; yet the audience knows that Courtenay has indeed been cast on account of his fame. This metafictional ploy contrasts with the filling of Joe McGill’s role in 1976, of which Lipman pithily says: ‘“The chap [Joe Black] who played Mr McGill was an extra himself, and the poor sod never worked again!”’13 When we do see Joe McGill leave the house for his day’s work in scene 10 of the later play, his conversation with the milkman includes comment on the series in which he is an extra: the milkman has never seen it, but Joe claims that it is ‘very popular with the viewing public’. This is the first hint at the play’s divided conception of contemporary television audiences. While the milkman in the earlier play simply remarked on the confusing plots of contemporary drama – ‘Has it got a beginning, a middle, and an end? … Never bloody do have, do they’14 – here it is also implied that ‘the viewing public’ is more discerning than television bosses give them credit for. They may not even be watching the very series aimed at them. This explains the change in the nature of the play being made in Ready When You Are, Mr McGill. In the 1976 version, it is a single play, a period drama set in a village in 1940, and scene 54 focuses on the budding romance between a soldier and a young woman whom we see dressed for tennis. Mr McGill’s lines, which are crucial to the plot, cast suspicion on the soldier’s admiration of this ‘prettiest girl in the village’ when he says, ‘I’ve never seen the young lady in my life before. And I’ve lived here fifty years.’ The implications of the romance gather political weight – we wonder whether the young woman might be a German spy. In the 2005 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill we see instead the filming of episode 19 in a series called Police Siren. The series is a cross between a hospital and a police drama, as the painter watching the proceedings from a nearby ladder describes it: ‘It’s some hospital-crime-thrillerpolice-mystery rubbish.’ An ambulance driver has been killed at the wheel of his vehicle, and Mr McGill, acting as a hospital porter, injects a note of mystery into the proceedings by observing, ‘I’ve never seen the young man in my life before, and I’ve worked here forty years.’ A second scene indoors is filmed in both versions of Mr McGill; in the earlier one, it concerns Bernard (William Hoyland), the male lead, calling for Betty (Marty Cruickshank) the following Saturday. In the later one, however, it

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138  Jack Rosenthal shows Amanda Holden’s character coming upon an illicit tryst between the characters played respectively by Michael (Richard Lintern), the male lead, and the extra Babs (Joanna Page). Such a plot-line satirically exemplifies the playwright David Edgar’s observation that ‘all of television drama has a natural tendency to biodegrade into soap opera’,15 as we see in this episode of Police Siren. It descends from a generic focus on solving crime to representing the private life of the police, in the opposite way to the relationship between personal and public in the earlier play. Such small alterations to the 1976 play dramatise changes in television priorities over thirty years, as the producer Roland’s speech in the 2005 play shows: ‘TV is quizzes or cooking or gardening or DIY or drama. And drama is either handcuffs or stethoscopes.’ In the later play, the handcuffs-stethoscopes hybrid is set in the grounds of an institution named The Oxley Hospital Trust, suggesting that competition and deregulation in the new millennium are features of both television culture and public health-care. The dramatis personae in the 2005 Mr McGill have proliferated to convey the fragmentation and specialisation of television production. Everyone has an assistant. The decorator, surveying the production scene, comments sardonically into his mobile phone: ‘Yeah, bloody hundreds of ’em. All stood around doing sod-all. Except for the ones sat on their arse doing sod-all. No wonder the licence fee goes up.’ In the 1976 play the joke at the expense of Unit Manager Ronnie Skidmore is the brevity of his visit to the shoot. By 2005 Skidmore has metamorphosed into two figures: Roland Henshaw (Tom Ward), the producer, and Elliot Nichols (Stephen Moore), the ‘be-suited Network Executive’. Both characters linger on the set for much of the day demanding alterations for the sake of a putative audience, as if embodying Tony Garnett’s analysis of the ‘power-shift towards the producer’ following the current separation of that role from the director’s.16 Several characters arise from small details in the first play, most notably the scriptwriter Gilbert Dean. Gilbert’s role in 2005 emerges out of an exchange in the 1976 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill between the director Phil and the assistant cameraman Geoff at the play’s end, about an unnamed and unseen writer. Phil tells Geoff he has decided to cut Mr McGill’s scene from the play and put the information into reported speech: geoff: But isn’t it the writer’s intention to –? phil (Opening one eye): Whose intention? geoff (Sorry he’s ever started): The writer’s … phil: What’s it got to do with the writer?

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Television satire in 1976 and 2005  139 This fleeting reference to an embattled relationship develops into a central element of the plot in the later play, emphasising the polarity between the creative and technical elements of television production. For instance, Phil responds to Gilbert’s wish to keep his work as he wrote it with, ‘Sorry, Gospel, not script. The Gospel according to St Gilbert’, and marvels at the sight of ‘A writer doing rewrites without a Catherine wheel up his arse’ (in fact Gilbert is writing a diary for the Guardian). The writer’s lesser status is satirically confirmed within the play when Phil transmits the recommendations of a ‘focus group’ for changes to Gilbert’s script: phil: The dialogue needs gingering up a gnat’s. That’s [Roland], not me. We have our audience to think of. The younger end. Roland thinks. gilbert: The audience want effing and blinding?? phil: Not every sentence. In moderation. P’raps slip in the odd ‘Oh, shit’, or ‘Cute arse’, or something, now and then. Just to show we’re not dinosaurs. He says.

Gilbert’s presence also represents a self-ironising gesture on Rosenthal’s part, as the latter’s attendance at the shooting of all his plays was legendary. Gilbert is played by Stephen Mangan, who was cast on the strength of his physical resemblance to Rosenthal. Mangan also played Rosenthal in a radio dramatisation of Rosenthal’s autobiography17 in which, according to Maureen Lipman, Mangan showed that he ‘understood’ Rosenthal’s ‘wry amusement and his melancholy’.18 The greatest irony against Gilbert can also be seen in metafictional terms. The episode of Police Siren which he has written is inane, to judge by the premise of the film itself, not to mention the dialogue in the seemingly endless takes of scene 23 and by Amanda Holden’s speech in the final version, which is simply a collection of police-movie clichés: amanda: Right, sunshine, the way I see it, that night you’d had it up to here with his verbals, everything went pear-shaped, you reckoned he’d lost the plot and wanted him sorted. Now forget good-cop-badcop. What I do is bad-cop-very-bad-cop. You won’t be asking for your lawyer – you’ll be screaming for your mother.

Gilbert is a figure for the contemporary television writer in general as well as a representation of Rosenthal himself. His unsympathetic demeanour complicates the play’s satirical focus, since no one – from Joe McGill to Elliot Nicholson – emerges untainted by self-delusion. However, the 2005 play’s self-referentiality is not an instance of television focusing reductively on an ‘intertextual’ rather than a social reality.19 Instead, it is an aspect of the later play’s consistent focus on the boundaries between reality and fiction – both within the world of

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140  Jack Rosenthal the play and outside it – as a way of investigating the social and cultural changes within television production. In his introduction to the screenplay of the 1976 version, Rosenthal refers to the making of a ‘film within a film’ as a ‘Chinese Box made of mirrors’, and this effect continues to be strategically ‘confusing’ for viewers of the final product.20 In both plays, Phil glances at a pair of women watching the proceedings and frets that, ‘They look too much like extras’, until Geoff points out that they are not the ‘gossiping housewives’ of the script but ‘two housewives who happen to be gossiping’. The central episode of both plays is the confrontation between Phil and Mr McGill, and again this takes place in terms of an opposition between fiction and reality. In the later version, Mr McGill loses his nerve in take 13 and after much aggressive insistence by Phil, utters his words correctly but with a delivery that is ‘rigid, parrotlike and completely unnatural’, ruining the take. Phil berates Mr McGill cruelly, agitating the older man into an outburst against acting itself: joe (exploding): This isn’t real life, lad! It’s pretend! It’s all pretend! You’re pretending! The whole damn-fool film’s pretending! A long pause. Everyone around is embarrassed. phil (gently): Real life is how well we pretend, isn’t it, sir? You, me. Everybody in the world. A helpless pause.

Although Joe’s words do represent a corrective to the over-valuation of the television world by its inhabitants, not only has he himself been guilty of ‘pretending’ in various ways during the day, but he has it the wrong way round: Ready When You Are, Mr McGill shows that there is, if anything, too much hard-headed realism in television circles. In 1976, we never see the fruits of Phil’s threat to ‘cut the Old Man in the Street completely’. The 2005 play, however, concludes with a scene six months later in which Joe and Nancy McGill watch episode 19 of Police Siren – from which Joe’s lines have been cut. In the episode, Joe approaches the ambulance, then the action shifts abruptly to scene 24, showing Amanda Holden in a police station. This represents Phil’s choice of revenge over technology: Kelly (Sally Phillips), the script supervisor, points out that he can ‘re-voice’ Mr McGill in the dub, to which Phil sharply replies, ‘Can but won’t.’ Phil acts as if he were bound by the constraints of the earliest, least filmic television productions which were broadcast live and possessed no leeway for the post-production manipulation of sound.21 The ending of the 2005 version is preceded by a surreal scene in which ‘Young Mal and the Yobs’, who disrupted the process of filming until Young Mal began to make his own film of events, also watch Police Siren episode 19. Their verdict is that it is a ‘Load of cobblers’ since ‘nothing happens’, and they prefer to watch

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Television satire in 1976 and 2005  141 the video footage that Young Mal took of the Unit Base. As if in protest at what the stage direction describes as ‘disjointed, badly framed, outof-focus shots of total banality and pointlessness of crew members’, the television blows up. In this way, the 2005 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill delivers a double blow, against both formulaic drama – Young Mal and his cohort are supposed to be its intended audience – and a version of reality TV which Young Mal describes with enthusiasm: ‘I mean, this is what you call telly, innit? Real people. Doing real fucking stuff’. An uncertainty about terminology which remains in Rosenthal’s stage direction neatly summarises the symbolic nature of Young Mal’s television-set, which has given way under the pressure of competing demands: ‘the TV screen explodes (implodes?)’. While the scriptwriter Gilbert represents a commitment to the exigencies of art – or at least to his own script – the director Phil’s cynicism is the result of having to go along with executive decisions despite his ‘scorn’ for them, as the following exchange between him and Kelly shows: phil: That’s how you get a BAFTA nomination. For doing crap well. kelly: And you’ve had two.

In the 1976 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill, Phil was played by the young Jack Shepherd, aged thirty-six at the time in contrast to Bill Nighy’s fifty-four-year-old director in 2005, whose character has undergone darkening as well as ageing. The younger Phil is simply afflicted by tiredness, cold and ennui after two weeks’ shooting, rather than the older one’s career-long disenchantment with the industry in which he works. While the first Phil stamps his foot because of pins and needles, the second one does so because of an impending hip replacement; the force of a passer-by’s remark, made in both plays, that the director is the ‘half-dead one’ who ‘thinks he’s God’, is thus quite different in each. In the 2005 version, in contrast to their subordinate Phil, Roland and Elliot are shown to be entirely reconciled to their roles. Roland accepts a backhander of food from the location chef, which the latter describes to his disapproving assistant as, ‘Producer’s perks. So we get hired on his next film’ – an indication of the casualisation of labour in the industry. Elliot is so keen to keep on the right side of the ‘lovely leading lady’ Amanda Holden that he offers to assert his authority on her behalf by saying of Phil, ‘Would you like me to fire him or anything? … If you do, consider it done – he’ll be back flogging the Big Issue in Piccadilly by three o’clock.’ Roland and Elliot share a vision of contemporary television which they express in counterpointed dialogue to would-be scriptwriter Ted, the on-set rigger:

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142  Jack Rosenthal roland: Sod the story. Who are the stars? The big names? … elliot: Stars, police and doctors. roland: And shagging. elliot: And shagging.

The role of the contemporary television audience, on whose behalf Roland and Elliot allegedly speak, is debated throughout the later Mr McGill. The television crew disparage the very people for whom they are making the series, ranging from Geoff, who says of the ‘yobs’ hanging round the set, ‘I think they’re what’s known in the trade as “Our Audience”’, to Elliot, whose recommendation for a combination of stars ‘and shagging’ as the ideal television product emerges from his sarcastic mantra, ‘Never underestimate the intelligence of the viewing public.’ Ted’s idea for a play about bridge-building engineer brothers is dismissed out of hand by Phil, Roland and Elliot as ‘a bit too avantgarde’. Yet, as well as Mr McGill’s milkman, we hear some passers-by assert their own preferences as an audience when they recognise the series being made: first housewife: Oh, right. Rubbish, isn’t it? second housewife: What isn’t?

The decorator, who paints a wall during the course of the day, says to someone on his mobile phone, ‘The Amanda Whatsername one. No, I don’t think David Jason’s even in it. Pauline Quirke, neither. Peculiar, that, isn’t it? You’d think one of ’em would be. P’raps they’re on holiday.’ Rather than swallowing uncritically the diet of stars offered on television, here the decorator recognises the ‘peculiarity’ of a drama with only one recognisable actor in it. Another passer-by reacts in similar fashion: first woman: (peering at Michael): Isn’t that whasisname? He’s been in something.

Although it is as if star aura is a recognisable end in itself, even when divorced from matters of quality or the star’s name, such dialogue suggests that audiences see through this. Further, Bruno (Ben Whishaw), the Third Assistant Director – whose role is that of general dogsbody and provider of the director’s food – acts as a personification of one of Elliot’s truisms about contemporary television. Bruno is described as, ‘about 21, the most naïve and ineffectual chatter-up of girls in history’, and we see him make advances to almost every female member of the television crew which are so transparent that he puts off everyone he approaches. However, it turns out that Bruno is a very attentive watcher of television rather than a serial stalker, as a conversation with Kelly reveals:

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Television satire in 1976 and 2005  143 kelly: You don’t ask [girls] for sex upfront. bruno: (puzzled) You do. kelly: You don’t, Bruno. bruno: They do on the telly. All the time. In every episode of everything. ‘Morning, pleased to meet you, fancy a quick shag?’ ‘Certainly, I’ll just get my knickers off …’

Bruno’s first attempt after the discussion with Kelly not only succeeds, but disproves her advice, when he asks out Maggie, the assistant to the Wardrobe Mistress. Maggie’s incipient or actual tears have been the subject of concern throughout the day’s filming, and eventually it emerges that they were caused by an apparently unreciprocated interest in Bruno. This scene provides an answer of sorts to an unresolved plotline from the 1976 play, in which Jean, the Wardrobe Girl, Maggie’s equivalent, is on the verge of tears or engaged in ‘helpless sobbing’ on each of the few occasions we see her. The reason is never made clear and Jean’s grief seems existential, as this exchange suggests: (terry starts the [car] engine. And jean starts crying. terry hears her, and swivels round, apprehensively.) terry: What’s happened? shirley: (Drily) Nothing. (The car drives off, jean sobbing her heart out.)

The script for the later Mr McGill includes a coda, which was not filmed, showing Maggie, six months pregnant, settling down with Bruno at their flat to watch the broadcast of Police Siren, episode 19. Even in its truncated form in the televised play, the overly neat resolution to Bruno’s lovelorn behaviour and Maggie’s apparently unmotivated weeping reveals how it substitutes satire for the surrealism of the earlier play. The later Ready When You Are, Mr McGill both shows and resolves matters where the earlier one was content to leave them open, as shown by the concluding dialogue from 1976 between Phil, Geoff and the cameraman Don: ext. camera car. evening As it drives away from us … phil: (Voice over) There’s nothing at the end of it all, anyway, is there? don: (Voice over) Not a lot. geoff: (Voice over, confused) At the end of what?

This is a tongue-in-cheek existentialism which likens the end of a play to the end of life itself – and emphasises the non-specific nature of the earlier play’s satire. The more experimental nature of the earlier Ready When You Are, Mr McGill is clearest in its style of camera-work. The opening scene is not reassuringly recognisable, as is that of Amanda Holden leaving her

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144  Jack Rosenthal London house on a sunny day in 2005, but humorously disorienting. We see the outlines of bodies in bed in a darkened room, hear the ticking of a clock and a voiceover which intones, ‘I’ve never seen the young lady in my life before. And I’ve lived here fifty years’, as Joe McGill practises his lines. Shots throughout the film are frequently composed in a crowded and jumbled manner. The central characters in a particular sequence may be shot between other characters’ shoulders, stand still while blurred figures walk past in the foreground, or are shot in deep focus to show the crowding of one character by several others; characters’ faces are obscured by pieces of film equipment or even the caterer’s kettle. While this kind of composition emphasises the chaotic and unsystematic nature of the day’s filming, it also brings particular relationships to the fore. In 1976, the director Phil and the Floor Manager Terry (Mark Wing-Davey) are of a different generation and class from Don (Stanley Lebor), the cameraman, and Kenneth (Fred Feast), the sound-recordist, both of whom are older and their Lancashire accents more pronounced. Phil and Terry wear, respectively, a parka and a long afghan coat, emphasising their vogueishness and youth; bad feeling develops between Phil and Don over the latter’s high standards – ‘I refuse to shoot it. I just refuse. I’m sorry, I refuse’, he says as the sky darkens – and between Phil and Kenneth because Phil values only the film’s visuals, as the following dialogue shows: kenneth: It was good for me. phil: (Turning): Eh? kenneth: It was good for sound. phil: (Couldn’t care less) Oh. Fine.

These tensions are symbolised by a shot in which we see a close-up of Phil’s hands and an eye as he melodramatically squares up for the day’s set-up – behind his hands are visible, in deep focus, the sceptical and grinning faces of Don and Kenneth. Pattern is valued in the earlier film over narrative, for instance in the case of the decorator, whose persona is not developed as it is in 2005 – in 1976 he does not speak, let alone act as a chorus on a ladder, and the close-ups are not of his face but of his hand, briskly painting. It is not the decorator’s character that is revealed here, but a smart visual joke about watching paint dry. The later Mr McGill is in many ways a richer film than the earlier one. It features complex layers of self-referentiality and satire, and its more diverse cast is orchestrated with both attention to detail and a sharp sense of overall plot. Yet the simplicity of the earlier play is sacrificed in the person of Joe McGill himself: it seems clear from the outset of the 2005 version, when we see Amanda Holden in the first scene and

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Television satire in 1976 and 2005  145 then learn what kind of a venture is being filmed, that he cannot hope to compete. By 2005, Mr McGill has become much more of an extra than he was in 1976, where the scene he stars in is crucial to a whole play, not just to an episode in a series.

Notes 1 See Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History, London: BFI 2003, p. 10. 2 Richard Last, ‘Clear contender for the year’s funniest play’, Daily Telegraph 12 January 1976. 3 Ibid. 4 Daphne Lockyer, ‘At the dying of the light’, ‘The Knowledge’, The Times 24 December 2005–6 January 2006, p. 41. 5 Nancy Banks-Smith, ‘Last night’s TV’, Guardian 30 December 2005; Thomas Sutcliffe, ‘Boxing Day’s TV: Soft hands soothe Hardy’, Independent 27 December 2005. While judging Rosenthal’s play to be ‘funny and entertaining’, Sutcliffe contrasts Mr McGill unfavourably with Ricky Gervais’s 2005 BBC2 series Extras, although the two have elements in common, most notably the conceit of a star playing a parody of him- or herself. 6 Maureen Lipman, ‘Femail on Sunday’, the Mail on Sunday, 18 December 2005, p.  26. 7 Jack Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal: A Life in Six Acts, London: Robson Books 2005, p. 216. 8 Maureen Lipman, ‘Postscript’, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 371. 9 Maureen Lipman, quoted in Michael Osborn, ‘Dramatist Rosenthal’s final act’, www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4535820.stm, visited 13.6.06. 10 Four Weddings was produced by Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, founders of the independent production company Working Title Films which invited Rosenthal to remake Ready When You Are, Mr McGill. 11 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill, Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, Shooting Script 2002, READ/2, sc. 1. All further quotations of stage directions are from this script. Quotations of stage directions from 1976 are from Jack Rosenthal, ‘The Chain’ with ‘The Knowledge’ and ‘Ready When You Are, Mr McGill’, London: Faber 1986. 12 Lipman, ‘Femail’. 13 Quoted in Osborn, ‘Dramatist Rosenthal’s final act’. In fact Joe Black appeared in six other episodes of various television dramas, including a second role as ‘Old Man’, before his death in 1999. 14 These lines appear in both versions of Mr McGill. 15 David Edgar, ‘Playing shops, shopping plays: the effect of the internal market on television drama’, in Jonathan Bignell et al., eds, British Television Drama: Past and Future, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2000, p. 77. 16 Tony Garnett, ‘Contexts’, in Bignell et al., British Television Drama, p. 13. 17 Jack Rosenthal’s Last Act, adapted by Amy Rosenthal, BBC Radio 4 July 2006. 18 Maureen Lipman, ‘Keeping it in the family’, Radio Times magazine 15–21 July 2006, p. 21. Mangan also took the semi-autobiographical role of Roy Palfrey in Rosenthal’s play Tortoise, adapted by Amy Rosenthal, BBC Radio 4 December 2007. 19 ‘Editors’ Introduction to Part 1’, Bignell et al., British Television Drama, p. 40.

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146  Jack Rosenthal 0 Jack Rosenthal, ‘Introduction’, ‘The Chain’, p. xii. 2 21 See ‘Introduction’ to George Brandt, ed., British Television Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981, p. 11.

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Versions of autobiography

7

P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang (1982), Bye, Bye, Baby (1992), Eskimo Day (1996) and Cold Enough for Snow (1997) Many of Jack Rosenthal’s television plays contain autobiographical elements, particularly the early films The Evacuees (1975) and P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang (1982). Bye, Bye Baby (1992) was described on its release as the third in an informal trilogy consisting of these plays, and was followed ten years later by two further autobiographically based films, Eskimo Day (1996) and its sequel, Cold Enough for Snow (1997). Rosenthal writes in a distinctive way about each play in the ‘trilogy’ in his autobiography, By Jack Rosenthal, to suggest a close but not exact relation between fact and fiction. Rather than describing the context of writing the plays, as he usually does, Rosenthal actually substitutes extracts from The Evacuees, P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang and Bye, Bye, Baby for autobiography. This means that The Evacuees is described in the section of By Jack Rosenthal relating to 1943, P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang 1945, and Bye, Bye, Baby 1955, rather than in that section of the autobiography devoted to the time of writing. In each case, Rosenthal emphasises the links between life and art: he introduces the protagonist of The Evacuees as ‘Danny (i.e. Jack)’, of P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang as ‘Alan Duckworth (i.e. me)’, and of Bye, Bye, Baby as ‘Leo (Jack)’.1 This is the case even though the autobiographical and dramatic material does not always match up. By contrast, Rosenthal refers in a different way to characters who bear a more distant relation to himself, emphasising their fictionality. For instance, Graham in A Day to Remember (1986) is ‘the fictional Jack’, while Harold, in Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976), is ‘a fictional gutanashomma version of Jack’.2 In each instance, although least so in the case of Graham, who unfairly vents his frustration at his amnesiac father-in-law, the Jack figure is vulnerable and mishap-prone and his personal struggles are the source of comedy. In this way he is a British version of the shlemiel, the hapless but clever Jewish fool.

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148  Jack Rosenthal P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang was broadcast on 3 November 1982, on the second night of Channel Four’s existence, as the opening film in a series entitled ‘First Love’ for which Rosenthal was also the script editor. It was commissioned by David Puttnam, who produced the series as a first venture into television after the success of his Oscar-winning production, the film Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson 1981), and was directed by Michael Apted. The film was enthusiastically received, and has since gained a reputation as a classic work about adolescence – to the extent that the script is often set as a GCSE text in Britain, and studied by pupils of around the same age as the characters in it.3 P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang was nominated for a BAFTA award as Best Single Play of 1982. The ‘substantially autobiographical’4 elements of the film are made clear by Rosenthal, and also metafictionally within the film itself. In P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang we follow the fortunes of fourteen-year-old schoolboy Alan Duckworth (John Albasiny) during the summer term of 1948. Alan’s world revolves around his hope that England will win the Ashes, his trust in post-war peace and progress, and his wish to kiss his classmate Ann (Abigail Cruttenden). By the play’s end, each dream has been punctured in a confrontation with reality. Although the setting of Alan’s grammar school is not the same as Rosenthal’s – the film was made in Wimbledon, London, and several of the pupils have London accents, while Rosenthal’s alma mater was Colne Grammar School in Lancashire – and Alan is not Jewish nor quite the right age,5 in his autobiography Rosenthal places side-by-side the description of his schoolboy self with extracts from the film to convey its closeness to his experience. His own ‘golden Ann’6 was Morton, rather than the film’s Lawton, while his inspirational English teacher Terry Land appears as the film’s rather less inspiring Miss Land (Alison Steadman). The film’s title derives from the password used by Alan and his friends, delivered with a ‘sort of rickety salute’ and followed by a ‘hoarse moan’: ‘P’tang, yang, kipperbang, uuuh!’ The password’s reallife origins are not explained in the film, perhaps because of their local meaning and the fact that Alan prefers cricket to football. Rosenthal gives its etymology, based on the name of Burnley FC outside-left Peter Kippax, whose name entertained Rosenthal and his school-friends as much as his dribbling: So ‘Peter Kippax’ became ‘P’Tang Kipper’, which became ‘P’Tang, Yang Kipper’, which became ‘P’Tang, Yang, Kipperbang’, which finally became our password and eventually the no doubt mystifying title of one of my TV screenplays.7

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Versions of autobiography  149 Indeed, on its film release in the USA in 1984 P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang was renamed Kipperbang: Praying for a Kiss, in testimony to the original’s ‘mystifying’ title. Retaining this real-life password in a film which does not reproduce the details that gave rise to it is symbolic of Rosenthal’s mode of autobiographical writing: a telling detail supersedes documentary. The film’s structure and shot construction emphasise the conflict throughout the film between dream and reality. The opening credits play over a crumpled, old-fashioned sepia photograph of a school class, labelled ‘Form 4b, 1948’, revealing that this is a film about memory and the past. The photograph gradually turns black and white, and uncrumples to become an image rather than an object as the past becomes the present. The camera zooms slowly in on Alan’s face, emphasising that it is his past we will see. This is followed by a full-colour close-up of Alan asleep in bed, which is disorientatingly accompanied by John Arlott’s commentary on the 1948 Test Series between England and Australia. Throughout the film, Arlott transforms Alan’s state of mind into the elements of a cricket game through a commentary which, although voiced by the man himself, clearly originates in Alan’s imagination. We cut to library footage of the Australian cricketers Sid Barnes and Arthur Morris batting to applause. Superimposed over this footage is a Hollywood-style headshot of a young woman (we learn that this is Ann), followed by one of Alan. As they move together to kiss, cricketers are disconcertingly visible in the background between their heads, ‘nearing the climax’ of the match. Just as Alan and Ann’s lips are about to touch, we hear, mother: Alan! Ten past eight! What are you doing up there?

Alan’s mother is out of sight here, yet audible, as she is throughout the film, as a counterpart to the voiceover of John Arlott which accompanies Alan’s activities. However, although the sound of her voice serves to disrupt a dream, Alan’s mother is less real than the imaginary cricket commentary. We learn even less of Alan’s father – rather, an idealised paternal role is shared between Arlott and the school groundsman, Tommy (Garry Cooper). The mother’s interruption is followed by a stylised close-up of a cricket ball knocking apart three stumps, and a quick cut to another full-colour shot of Alan lying in a dishevelled bed, his dream literally shattered. In testimony to the unreality of his mother’s world, Alan does not bother to reply to her summons or her offers of breakfast, but begins an address to God. Alan’s dream resembles the sequence designed by John Ferren for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), where

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150  Jack Rosenthal Scottie (James Stewart) dreams about Madeleine (Kim Novak). Both dreams are inspired by love for an unattainable blonde woman, and both mix together stylised graphics with still photography and moving images. Neither dreamer gets what he thinks he wants. The opening of P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang thus presents the viewer with a sequence using a variety of documentary and fictional elements, conveying Alan’s preference for seeing reality in dreamlike terms. As Ann sternly informs him, ‘Real men don’t mess about dreaming.’ David Morrison, in the British Film Institute’s journal Screenonline, argues that, ‘The device of John Arlot’s [sic] voiceover cricket commentary, reflecting Alan’s hopes and moods, feels contrived, despite the suggestion of adolescent imagination.’8 Morrison claims that the cricketing references are mainly used as ‘thematic reinforcement’, rather than being central to the film’s plot. On the contrary, I would argue, Arlott’s commentary condenses several elements of the film into a single device. Throughout Rosenthal’s work, cricket represents fantastical aspiration. In the first episode of the 1975 comedy series Sadie, It’s Cold Outside an announcer’s voice introduces Norman by recalling his days courting Sadie: ‘he’d hold her hand and whisper what he was going to do when he grew up. Open the batting for England, harness the power of the sun, lead the workers to revolution … unite the whole of mankind in brotherhood and love – and be a millionaire.’ In P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang, placing images of romance and cricket in the same shot in the opening dream shows the nature of Alan’s version of unrealistic aspiration, and that he confuses the two realms. For instance, Alan asks the groundsman Tommy, who is worried that he has got his secret girlfriend Miss Land ‘into trouble’, if it is ‘the Australians winning the test’ that is upsetting him. When praying to God to arrange that he may kiss Ann, Alan suggests ‘early next week at the latest, weather permitting’, as if he were arranging a sporting fixture. Equally, the presence of Arlott’s voice in the film draws attention to the gap between the moment of its broadcast in 1982, two years after Arlott’s retirement from radio cricket commentary, with that of its setting in 1948, two years after his first such broadcast. Arlott’s acousmatic presence – we hear his voice but see him only once, in the library footage – is knowingly anachronistic. It draws before it was established on a reputation built up over four decades, for poetic commentary delivered in a Hampshire burr often referred to as ‘the sound of summer’. However, as this is a film about a transitional stage in life, like Bar Mitzvah Boy and the autobiographical films analysed in this chapter, Alan gradually becomes aware of the limitations of his cricket-related dreams. After a conversation about girls with Tommy, Alan says

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Versions of autobiography  151 i­ nsincerely, ‘Anyway, I don’t bother, myself. I’ve got my cricket.’ Alan himself only enters Arlott’s commentary, as ‘the last England batsman’, when he tries to take action in relation to Ann: ‘Can this young warrior – striding out, stiffening his slender neck – can he change the course of Destiny? Well, now’s his big chance.’ Here, Arlott refers back to Alan’s description of his lack of physical charms, in an unexpectedly eloquent speech addressed to Tommy: ‘My skin’s very thin and red, like transparent, with chewed-up nails … and my neck, that’s thin as well.’ Arlott’s transformation of ‘thin’ into ‘slender’ doesn’t convince Alan, however, as that night he prays to God to let him kiss Ann ‘on the lips’ and to ‘thicken my neck out’. Arlott not only transforms the events of Alan’s life into cricket imagery, but does so in a mixture of discourses – those appropriate to the game, and the voices that address Alan throughout the day. After Alan follows Ann home and fails even to talk to her, Arlott announces, ‘And Duckworth, bat between his legs, looks as though he’s trying to pretend he’s not even there. He’s a bit of a lolloper, this boy. He lollops.’ The origin of Arlott’s distinctive description becomes clear when Miss Land later berates Alan in terms which are obviously her stock-in-trade: ‘You’re a weed and a mess and a lolloper. You lollop.’ At the last minute, Alan declines to kiss Ann when given the chance to do so in the school play. He does so because of a sudden awareness that dreams can never live up to reality since ‘kids kid themselves’, and this realisation signals the end of the cricket-commentary device. Arlott’s narration finally divorces itself from romance as he utters the last words on Alan’s metaphorical winning run: ‘I’ll wager the entire nation rises to its feet in homage to Quack-Quack Duckworth. Who went to the wicket a boy … and came back a man.’ Alan’s manliness derives partly from the realisation that he does not want to kiss Ann after all, but also from learning that his hero, the ironically named Tommy, was a deserter and not a soldier during the war, and accepting that England will lose at cricket to Australia. In a final draft of the screenplay for P’tang Yang Kipperbang, and in the novel, Alan explains himself to Ann – who then does kiss him on the lips in farewell.9 In the film, this has been altered to a chaste kiss on the cheek. Although an apparently small change, this crucially preserves Alan’s wish as something which can only exist in the realm of fantasy. Several of Rosenthal’s plays which focus on a single male protagonist hint at some kind of writerly or dramatic future for the central character. Eliot in Bar Mitzvah Boy constantly watches and eavesdrops on his family, and mentally relives their dialogue during the synagogue service; while Danny in The Evacuees uses the game ‘Silly Story’ to tell the true story of his treatment at the hands of Mrs Graham. In P’tang

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152  Jack Rosenthal Yang, Kipperbang, Alan finally tells Ann of his feelings in just such a way: alan: I don’t expect I’ll ever kiss you now in my whole life. Or take you to the pictures. Or marry you … But I’ll never forget you. And how you made me feel. Even when I’m 50 or something.

This is a self-referential joke on the writer’s part, signalling once more the film’s autobiographical origins, as Rosenthal was 51 when P’tang was broadcast. The playwright has returned to the past to add this prediction to it.

Bye, Bye, Baby Bye, Bye, Baby was shown on 3 November 1994 on Channel Four, directed by Edward Bennett and produced by Paravision Films. It won the Prix Europa Best Film Award for 1992/93 and the Writers’ Guild Best Play Award for 1993. Bye, Bye, Baby was originally commissioned by BBC 1 but, after a year’s indecision, was not completed by them for reasons of cost.10 The film is about Rosenthal’s spell of National Service between 1952 and 1955 as a Special Coder in the Navy, when he logged and recorded what he describes as ‘Russian naval messages through a welter of Polish weather forecasts, atmospherics, interference and Eartha Kitt’.11 Rosenthal spent the time in Portsmouth and Cuxhaven, Germany – the latter is identified only as ‘Northern Germany’ in the film. Although it could be described as one of Rosenthal’s ‘community of men’ films, Bye, Bye, Baby also shows Leo Wiseman being drawn into conflicts about class, religion and romance. Ben Chaplin, the British actor whose first major role was as Leo in Bye, Bye Baby, comments on his anxieties about acting in a semi-autobiographical production: For a start I’m not Jewish, nor am I from Manchester – as Jack Rosenthal is. But when I told him this, he just laughed and said that this was two things in my favour.

Chaplin was reassured to learn that he was not expected ‘to impersonate Jack Rosenthal, but to play Leo’.12 In other words, the play’s focus on an individual and its factual basis gives it the appearance and structure of autobiography – although there are scenes which take place outside the purview of Leo’s knowledge – but it is presented as fiction. The film’s title sums up this duality, signalling that it is a farewell to youth, but also that it is an aesthetically structured film representing in televisual terms the workings of memory. This is clear in two ways: first, Bye,

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Versions of autobiography  153 Bye, Baby is the title of a song by Marilyn Monroe,13 and her acousmatic ­presence – as in the case of John Arlott in P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang, we hear her voice (spoken by Liza Ross) but do not see its bodily origin – as a mentor for Leo is a consistent trope. Such a trope is clearly a retrospective, fictive device. Secondly, the film has the dual temporal structure which characterises several of Rosenthal’s works. It shifts between Leo’s last night on watch in 1955 and scenes from the previous two years, with some flashbacks to earlier scenes, including Leo’s wartime childhood and his university years. In a note on the final draft of the screenplay, Rosenthal distinguishes between autobiography and fiction by placing the terms that might characterise the former in quotation marks: Note: Most of the narrative is in flash-backs. These are ‘memories’ which surface during Leo’s last night on Watch.   To distinguish this last Watch from past ‘remembered’ scenes in the watchroom, all the last night’s scene-headings read as follows: INT. NAVAL BASE. WATCHROOM. (1955) THE LAST NIGHT.14

The difference between subjective memory and the more objective representation of the past through filmic and televisual effect is acknowledged here. However, unlike Spend, Spend, Spend, for instance, there is no ironic juxtaposition of time-scales, except that we see Leo grow up during the course of the film and imagine him to be looking back during his last night as a coder. We do not see Leo in later life, and the film’s conclusion is open-ended: he returns to Manchester, where we see him vanish into a crowd of people symbolising the future, and Marilyn Monroe signs off in Russian: marilyn (voice over): Ya Marilyn. This is Marilyn. Ya tebya looblio. I love you. Preeom. Over and out.

Throughout Bye, Bye, Baby Leo recalls – or, as Rosenthal would say, the narrative flashes back to – a seminar at university where the tutor, Professor Radcliffe (John Hart Dyke), argued that life and art are both motivated by the ‘appearance’ and ‘reality of opposites’: professor radcliffe: Conflict of opposites. Reconciliation of opposites. The story of everyone’s life.

Leo’s girlfriend Penny (Maria Redmond), of whose real-life counterpart, Wendy, Rosenthal acidly notes that she was ‘so Roman Catholic she reckoned platonic friendship was excessively sexual’,15 whispers to him, ‘Does he mean us?’ The answer to this almost metafictional question is ‘yes’, since the ‘conflict’ between amorous Leo and cautious Penny is only resolved when Penny meets someone else, for whom she too ‘feels on fire’.

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154  Jack Rosenthal All Leo’s certainties are disrupted during Bye, Bye, Baby, most s­ trikingly those about class. As Petty Officer Swift (Geoffrey Hutchings) tells the new Special Coder recruits on their first day, in a version of Professor Radcliffe’s argument, ‘the only way to get on in the Andrew [navy] is to mix’. Such mixing takes place not just socially but in terms of class position. For instance, the ‘aristo-tramp’ Hyphenated (Robert Portal), nicknamed thus in tribute to his double-barrelled surname, Quilter-Smythe, organises a strike and agrees that he is, as Skinner (Colin Tierney) puts it, ‘a bit of a bolshy on the quiet’: hyphenated: The first requirement of the English gentleman. How do you think we keep you Bolshies in your place?

Skinner himself is promoted to the rank of officer, forgets his civvystreet role as vice-chairman of the Labour League of Youth, Birkenhead Branch, and demands to be called ‘sir’ rather than ‘oppo’16 by his former equals. In this way he resembles the more farcical case of Cheese and Egg in The Dustbinmen, whose power goes to his head when the manager asks him to stand in for a day. Leo’s instinctive antipathy to the middleclass Channing (Jason Flemyng) is shown to rest on covert envy, which similarly tends towards ‘reconciliation’. Leo gives ‘St John Channing’ as his name to a young German woman, while Channing announces to Leo when drunk: channing: I envy your lot. Say what you like, act how you like. You don’t have to act at all. You don’t have to crack on you’re anything …

The last ‘conflict’ that Leo sees to a kind of resolution is historical. The flashbacks to his childhood in Manchester during the war show the bombing of a hospital in Elizabeth Street and the death of his father in action, and prepare the audience for Leo’s anti-German outbursts. He will accept Skinner’s order to hurry up in the form of ‘chop, chop’ but not the German ‘schnell’; announces in a Hamburg bar that, ‘the only Krauts I’m honoured to meet are dead ones’; and when the coders are sent to Germany he remarks on the landscape, leo: Almost like the natural habitat of real human beings, in a way … Same trees, same grass … Could fool anybody, couldn’t it?

The ‘conflict of opposites’ in this case is starkly dramatised by means of a marriage proposal Leo receives from Anna (Tushka Bergen), a young German woman who wants a new passport. Instead of marital reconciliation, however, their encounter ends in a screaming match about which side caused more destruction during the war. Leo’s personal conflict over the war is stilled only when he is forced to recognise loss on the

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Versions of autobiography  155 other side. Leo turns an English lesson with German schoolgirls into an opportunity to interrogate them: leo (to emma): What did your father do in the war, little girl? emma: Bitte? leo: What did your father do in the war? emma (a beat – then simply): Er starb. He died. (beat) Have I said correctly?

Leo is ‘poleaxed by the opposite half of the truth’ on hearing Emma’s news. Reconciliation is effected here with what might strike the audience as a surprising suddenness and speed, prompting Marilyn to comment in voiceover, ‘And good old Professor Radcliffe rested his case.’ Emma (Viola Scheffel) concludes this incident by continuing the vein of halfacknowledged symbolism, in asking Leo if he has any children himself and insisting – in an ironic echo of Eliot Green’s vow in Bar Mitzvah Boy, and John Arlott’s final words on Alan Duckworth – that he too is ‘a man’. The conflictual ‘baby’ of the film’s title is on his way out. Leo concludes by observing in exasperation that none of the ‘opposites’ is as he thought: leo: And Germany are the goodies. The Russians were the heroes, now they’re the villains marching down the Mall in submarines. One day Hyphenated’ll blow up the House of Parliament … where Skinner’ll be leader of the Tory Party. Our girlfriends are some other bugger’s girlfriend … and Channing isn’t Channing. Good old Professor Rad­cliffe.

Throughout Bye, Bye Baby, episodes set at different historical moments are separated or linked by particular televisual techniques, in Rosenthal’s customary style. Sound-mixes between scenes symbolise temporal mixing, while dissolves represent contrasts across time and the work of memory. Leo’s reminiscences during the film are sparked off by his picking up Marilyn Monroe’s song ‘Bye, Bye, Baby’ on the watchroom radio and, by association, recalling his farewell to Penny. The radio as an apparatus is symbolic of memory, as we see when the flashback to Penny cuts abruptly back to the watchroom, and the music ends: leo: (muttering) Pissnooks! Lost her!

Leo has lost the signal, Monroe’s voice, and, as we are to learn, Penny herself. It is hard to judge the autobiographical quotient of material in Bye, Bye Baby in any literal sense. While certain episodes stand in for their non-fiction equivalents in Jack Rosenthal’s autobiography, some details – such as the death of Leo’s father in action – are entirely fictional, and

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156  Jack Rosenthal there are others in By Jack Rosenthal that are not represented in the film. This suggests a selectivity and patterning common to autobiographical fiction. Among the fan-mail that Rosenthal received about the film are letters from viewers who were also Navy Special Coders, some of whom had served alongside Rosenthal, commenting on its accuracy. One such correspondent observes that the coders’ shirts are too blue, but that the film represents faithfully the extreme cold of the winter 1953–54. The letter concludes, ‘Are you in fact still at liberty? I expect to hear news of your arrest at any moment following this monumental breach of national security.’17 This letter highlights the fact that Bye, Bye, Baby, a fictional film, strove for accuracy in terms of period and detail – the production company employed a naval consultant and another who had been through National Service in the mid-1950s, while Rosenthal himself drew upon, for instance, a Dictionary of Dockyard Language, a naval ‘Drinks Guide to Kiel’, and material on Russian phrases which he had kept since 1955.18 Yet, ironically, it was on the grounds of its attention to period detail that the film was judged by lawyers to be a potential security risk which a production company’s insurers might not want to take on. Although Rosenthal himself was no longer bound in 1992 by the Official Secrets Act he had signed on the completion of his National Service, lawyers were cautious about ‘damaging’ breaches of national security and about libel writs if individuals in the play were recognisable. The legal interpretations and questions about the script read like those of a rather literal-minded critic. Some of the characters are said to be ‘depicted in a defamatory way’ – including Skinner the class traitor, and Hyphenated the black market dealer.19 A view of this kind ignores the fictive nature of the film, including the fact that we see all the characters through Leo’s eyes, and that their character traits exist to exemplify the plot’s emphasis on the ‘conflict and reconciliation of opposites’. As the director Edward Bennett aptly puts it, ‘what is so magical about [Rosenthal’s] work – what he is famous for – is the way the characters are slightly heightened’.20 However, the translation of legal concerns into televisual commentary is at times intrepretatively fascinating. The lawyers recommend that the actor playing Channing not be made up to look too handsome, as the real-life person of whom he is ‘reminiscent’ was known to be very good-looking. As this advice seems not to have been followed – and Jason Flemyng’s later roles include the dashing Alec D’Urberville, in a 1998 television production of Tess of the D’Urbervilles – it emphasises an element of masculine rivalry in Leo’s apparently classbased feud. Skinner’s real-life original was a Liverpudlian, as he is in the film; while the lawyers recommend that his accent be changed to avoid identification, they add that, ‘it is important from the point of view of

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Versions of autobiography  157 the screenplay that he should be some form of “gritty Northerner” … for example … a Geordie’. While one might regret the use of inverted commas here, it is indeed preferable for dramatic reasons of conflict and contrast that Skinner should not speak in the received pronunciation of Hyphenated and Channing. Finally, the man for whom Penny leaves Leo was, in real life, in the RAF, and the lawyers recommend that this detail be altered. In the televised version, Penny describes her new love thus: You remember Godfrey Lambert? He graduated in French with a First (or a ‘premier’, as he calls it – he has this really potty sense of humour) … Well, I bumped into him at Christmas on Deansgate just outside the John Rylands Library. We were going to the same carol service. He’s staying on for his MA – big swot! – So he’s here all the time …

The clever revelation in this letter of Penny’s ‘prim’, ‘humourless’ and ‘tactless’ demeanour – in the words of the legal close reading – and Godfrey’s suitability for her is increased by the loss of the RAF detail. While Leo is in the navy, Godfrey is simply a ‘big swot’.

Eskimo Day and Cold Enough for Snow Eskimo Day is about two families at different ends of the social spectrum, and their teenage children – Neil Whittle is the son of a car mechanic from Blackburn, while Pippa Lloyd’s father owns a ‘financial services’ company in Cheltenham. The families meet when the teenagers are being interviewed at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and both sets of parents have to confront the impending loss of their children. In Cold Enough for Snow, Neil and Pippa are students at Exeter University while their parents respond to the absence of their offpsring in a variety of ways: Neil’s father has a breakdown, while Pippa’s mother embarks on an affair. As Maureen Lipman puts it, the plays ‘tapped into an unexplored seam: the empty nest syndrome’.21 Critics and viewers responded well to the films’ representation of this new seam, praising the ‘magnificent cast’ – Eskimo Day included Alec Guinness in his last role – while describing Rosenthal as ‘our greatest craftsman of darkedged comedy’, and ‘the last of the great TV writers of the 1960s and 70s to really deliver the goods’.22 One reviewer claimed that news of a new Rosenthal film was ‘just as splendid’ as the discovery of Comet Hyakutake,23 which was visible in northern skies in early 1996. There are over 70 fan letters from viewers of Eskimo Day, including accolades from Stephen Fry and Patrick Marber, in the Maureen Lipman Papers

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158  Jack Rosenthal Collection; while the Radio Times received what its editor Nicholas Brett called a ‘flood’ of letters, ‘all of them complimentary’, the week after the film was broadcast.24 Eskimo Day was nominated for a BBC Comedy Award in 1996, Cold Enough for Snow for a BAFTA in 1997. The autobiographical impulse behind the two films is well documented, although neither is as literally based on fact as Bye, Bye, Baby. In an interview, Rosenthal describes ‘the numb feeling’ he experienced when his children went to university, one to Manchester and the other to Cambridge: ‘After twenty years in a close, loving group, I was suddenly at home on my own and felt as empty as the house.’25 In his Radio 4 Desert Island Discs broadcast, Rosenthal acknowledged the ‘depression’ he experienced after his children left home, and that writing plays about it was a therapeutic experience.26 The mode of these two ‘empty nest’ plays is not Rosenthal’s customary everyday surrealism, but rather one of psychological exaggeration. As Rosenthal put it, he aimed to capture the ‘heightened atmosphere’ of life changing when children leave home,27 and this is accomplished by means of dialogue and televisual technique. Realism is not lost, however, as Cristina Odone in a review of Cold Enough for Snow pointed out of the plays’ everyday central symbols: ‘a college prospectus signalled a new dawn and a snowfall became the symbol of a man’s despair’.28 In a subplot about child–parent relationships in Eskimo Day, the Queens’ interviewer is Simon Poole (James Fleet) whose father James (Alec Guinness), a retired academic, is also being interviewed – for a place in sheltered housing. In an ironic version of the scenes we witnessed at the outset of Eskimo Day between Neil and Pippa and their respective parents, Poole chides his father about how to dress for the interview and suggests that he may have to answer the very questions Poole has been asking the candidates. The subplot is knitted into the main drama even more symbolically than this, however. We see Poole attempt to interview Miss Bodley (Cheryl Fergison), who has been struck dumb with fear. He asks for a concrete example from T.S. Eliot’s poetry, finally suggesting ‘Prufrock’ – a poem which includes the lines, I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

As Nancy Banks-Smith points out, the joke here is that Poole’s father himself is ‘old and ironic and wears his shoelaces undone’. During his father’s interview, Poole finally recognises that the sheltered housing is unsuitable for his father – ‘No bingo at all, then?’ is the latter’s final ironic question – and that old age isn’t simply a poetic image. BanksSmith also highlights the satire implicit in naming ‘the mindless hell

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Versions of autobiography  159 hole’ where James Poole is interviewed ‘Carlton Sheltered Homes’,29 after the ITV commissioning company. Carlton, a new company which ousted Thames Television in 1992, produced the comedy series Moving Story, which Mark Lawson calls a ‘plonkier’ version of Rosenthal’s The Chain,30 and is widely seen to typify the effects of deregulation following the 1990 Broadcasting Act. The mode of exaggerated realism which these details suggest is manifest throughout both films. Eskimo Day opens in a way reminiscent of the 1976 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill, on a bedroom scene where two people are about to be woken up by an alarm clock. This both symbolises the awakening of a narrative, and sets up a mystery. The Whittle parents talk about an impending event – Bevis (David Ross) says, ‘We needed us sleep, an’ all. Today of all days’ – and we only learn what he means several scenes into the film, when a bus with ‘Cambridge’ on its side pulls away from Victoria Coach Station. It is the day of Neil Whittle’s (Benedict Sandiford) interview. The humour of this revelation manages to be both bathetic and significant. Such a combination is characteristic of other scenes in which overblown behaviour expresses real emotion, such as one in which Harriet Lloyd (Anna Carteret) prays in a Cambridge church for her daughter Pippa: ‘Please let the interviewers look kindly upon her countenance and cause her to pass’; while in Cold Enough for Snow Hugh Lloyd (Tom Wilkinson) invites a lecturer for a game of golf and lets the latter win, to try and find out how Pippa is doing – only to discover that the lecturer doesn’t teach first-year students. Pippa (Laura Howard) herself voices a corrective to such behaviour: ‘I just wish they’d get a life. Instead of mine.’ The opposite of this kind of exaggeration characterises the conclusion of Eskimo Day. Here, it is not the actions of characters but tele­ visual technique that conveys disorientation and loss, as Shani (Maureen Lipman) watches Neil wave goodbye before he goes to his last interview. He is filmed in slow motion, as if from Shani’s viewpoint, and while the mise-en-scène darkens dramatically behind the adults who gaze after their retreating children, their faces remain brightly lit. The four parents are shot with a dizzyingly fast 360-degree pan, to the accompaniment of nondiegetic choral music by Thomas Tallis, as they try to make sense of what is happening. Afterwards, as the Whittles and Lloyds sit together waiting for their children, Shani reveals the meaning of the films’ titles:31 It’s the Eskimos, i’n’t it? That when they get old and no use to no-one no more, they just quietly sling their hook and toddle off into the snow.

Similarly, during Bevis’s breakdown in Cold Enough for Snow emotion is not subordinate to but outstrips its symbolic representation. In these

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160  Jack Rosenthal scenes we see Bevis wash his oily hands with Swarfega while looking at his face in a very fractured mirror; sit framed by coils of rusty wire in an abandoned car; and we see his face blurred through a rainy car windscreen. These visual symbols of self-doubt are accompanied by a monologue, partly dialogue and partly voiceover, which rivals that in Bag Lady for its Modernist representation of mental disintegration and fear of mortality: bevis: All gone. Dim and distant. All forgotten. Them little kiddies in Warrington. The poor buggers on the Ferry with the water coming in. Each day remembered that bit less. Then, one day, not at all. Falklands War – what Falklands War?

Bevis implicitly links Neil’s departure with historical examples of violent death – two young boys were killed by an IRA bomb in Warrington in 1993, while the Herald of Free Enterprise ferry capsized in the Channel in 1987, killing 193 people; and he likens the oblivion that follows even such atrocities as these to the pointlessness of his own life. The class difference in the two films exists not only for the purposes of comic contrast – when they are on holiday in Amsterdam, Neil and Pippa pass a film-poster for Romeo and Juliet, in an exaggerated reference to the forces which might keep them apart – but to emphasise the commonality of the theme of parental loss. The comedy of class difference is clearest in dialogue between the two fathers. Bevis is mystified by Hugh’s questions: hugh: You a Cambridge man? bevis: Blackburn. Blackburn, Lancs.

but gets his own back by changing the subject: bevis: Who do you support, then? hugh: Charities, you mean? bevis: Football. What football team?

While Hugh pretends to support Cambridge United, who Bevis reveals have been relegated to the Third Division, the latter is loyal to Blackburn Rovers: ‘The cream. Premiership champions.’ In relation to a hierarchy outside that of class, Bevis can triumph. Moreover, Bevis’s credentials are genuine, unlike Hugh’s. Hugh’s claim that Pippa is being interviewed at his own alma mater, Queens’, is revealed as a lie – à la Jeffrey Archer, he did not attend Cambridge at all. Class-based humour, and in particular class difference, is a staple feature of Rosenthal’s work from the 1960s onwards. By the mid-1990s, when Eskimo Day and Cold Enough for Snow were broadcast, class is represented as a matter of accent and region as much as earning-power.

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Versions of autobiography  161 The films’ mise-en-scène emphasises class difference, by presenting comically contrasting establishing shots during the opening credits. We see Blackburn Rovers football ground, followed by the Lloyds’ mockTudor villa with a Jaguar parked in the drive; there follow swift cuts between an image of cyclists outside Queens’ College in Cambridge, then a cramped terrace of houses – one of which is the Whittles’ – on a steep street with a view of a northern industrial landscape. The film’s title is superimposed over the industrial landscape, with its cooling towers, chimneys, gasometer and countryside beyond. The credit ‘By Jack Rosenthal’ is then superimposed over a close-up of the gasometer, shot from below. This has the effect of allying Rosenthal with a ‘gritty Northernness’, to repeat the phrase, in ways which have subtle consequences for our approach to the films. The style of the gasometer shot is repeated throughout Eskimo Day and its sequel, implying comparison between different institutions. The gatehouse of Queens’ College is shot in close-up with a downward pan, a movement opposite to that of the earlier shot and underlining an opposite effect: while the looming gasometer was presented comically, the gatehouse represents history, aspiration and privilege. In Cold Enough for Snow, when Shani goes to Blackburn College to see if the parents ‘can learn from Neil’ by enrolling on a course, the Victorian entrance is shot in just the same way as Queens’, with a downward pan. The repeated shot, which reveals the similarities between the two red-brick, crenellated structures, sums up in a literal manner the aspiration with which Shani views the college. Class difference in the films also complicates an autobiographical reading, as it is hard to identify Rosenthal completely with either father, or indeed with anyone else. Features of Rosenthal’s biography are distributed between different characters. It is Neil who recites to Pippa Rosenthal’s recipe for making chips – on Desert Island Discs Rosenthal described himself as ‘the best chip-maker, probably on earth’ – and Neil is, like Rosenthal, the first in his family to go to university. Bevis Whittle is a working man of northern origins whose sanity is saved only by writing a dissertation on Premiership referees for an evening class, all of which hints knowingly at the biography of Manchester United fan Rosenthal. However, the middle-class Hugh Lloyd sets up a branch of his company in Exeter to be near his daughter and takes her out for dinner once a week, just as Lipman notes that during her daughter’s Freshers’ week at Manchester University ‘Amy was dining nightly with her dad at the Midland Hotel.’32 Indeed, Rosenthal’s own trajectory from the son of working-class Mancunians to north London playwright is ironised in the difference between the two male leads in these films.

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162  Jack Rosenthal As in Bag Lady and The Knowledge, Maureen Lipman’s presence adds a self-conscious element to the fiction, although Lipman’s persona is so strong that this sometimes takes place in a disruptive way. It is hard to credit Shani as portrayed by Lipman as a Lancashire lass who works in a dry cleaners and utters such remarks as, ‘Nowt no surer’ and ‘It’s summat I say.’33 Both Eskimo Day and its sequel Cold Enough for Snow were BBC films, Rosenthal’s first for a decade. However, Rosenthal took such exception to their scheduling – Eskimo Day was broadcast on Good Friday 1996, Cold Enough on New Year’s Eve 1997 – and the inevitably low audience numbers which resulted that he withdrew from any future BBC projects. Rosenthal had envisaged not just a single sequel to Eskimo Day but a whole series, ‘a vast television drama about education, a Glittering Prizes for the nineties’34 – however, this was not to be. Reviewers of Cold Enough for Snow picked up on this possibility by expressing the hope that ‘Perhaps Rosenthal is writing a soap with a new episode every 12 months’ and ‘there might be a series in it yet’.35 Mark Lawson cites Rosenthal’s observation that, due to changes in television commissioning, ‘every completed production is, whatever the seniority of the writer, effectively a pilot, its reviews and ratings measured before another commission is given’.36 The two films do not only represent updated versions for the 1990s of Rosenthal’s perennial interests, in class, coming-of-age, familial relationships and autobiography. The way in which they were commissioned and broadcast, even as ‘single plays’ appropriate to earlier decades, is also typical of that era. It is no coincidence that the next – and last – play Rosenthal wrote was an update of his television industry satire Ready When You Are, Mr McGill (1976 and 2005), produced for ITV by an independent production company.

Conclusion Autobiographical impulses for Rosenthal’s plays take a variety of forms. These range from what amounts to research – consulting the au pair’s firefighter boyfriend about his job for London’s Burning – to work based on knowledge of a whole community, as in Bar Mitzvah Boy.37 The presence of a self-consciously styled protagonist who is an equivalent for Rosenthal makes certain films, such as P’tang Yang Kipperbang and Bye, Bye, Baby, autobiographically based in a more conventional way. Eskimo Day and Cold Enough for Snow have plots based on what their producer, Ann Scott, called ‘the crucial milestones in people’s lives’,38 and this makes many of Rosenthal’s films at once autobiographically specific yet

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Versions of autobiography  163 symbolically general. It is not only Eliot Green in Bar Mitzvah Boy who might hope that, as he puts it in his speech at the dinner-dance, ‘they will say of me, as Antony did of Brutus in Act 5, scene 5, line 73, “This was a man.”’

Notes 1 Jack Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal: A Life in Six Acts, London: Robson Books 2005, pp. 36, 54, 83. 2 Ibid., pp. 314, 132 respectively. ‘Gutanashomma’ is Yiddish for ‘a good soul’, ‘a well-meaning person’, often spelt ‘gutte neshumah’. 3 Jack Rosenthal, ‘P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang’ and Other TV Plays, ed. Alison Leake, London: Longman 2004 [1984]. All stage directions quoted are from this edition. See also First Love, London: Fontana Lions 1984, a collection of novelised versions of all four films in the Channel Four series, by Jack Rosenthal, Julie Welch, Noella Smith and June Roberts. 4 Rosenthal, ‘Introduction: In conversation with Jack Rosenthal’, ‘P’tang Yang, Kipperbang’, p. v. 5 Rosenthal was 17 in 1948. 6 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 53. 7 Ibid. Maureen Lipman describes the alternative titles Rosenthal apparently considered for the film, including In the Belly of the Spider – after a symbolic incident in which Alan steps on a spider and it gives birth to hundreds of baby spiders (Something to Fall Back On, London: Robson Books 1987, pp. 179–80). 8 www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/507334/index.html, visited 18.12.06. Other criticisms might be made of the film instead, for instance its fond representation of schoolboys combining idealisation of their classmates with prurience about prostitutes. 9 Second draft February 1982, Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, P’TAN/1, p.  70; and Rosenthal et al., First Love, p. 49. 10 See the producer Christopher Neame’s account of slim-budget filming for Channel Four, including setting the German train scenes on the Nene Valley Railway, and Hamburg’s Reeperbahn in a Pinewood studio, A Take on British TV Drama: Stories from the Golden Years, Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press 2004, pp. 122–4. 11 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 94. 12 Quoted in Production Notes, Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, BYEB i:6 p. 2. 13 Monroe and Tommy Noonan perform the song in the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks 1953); it was written by Leo Robin and Jule Styne – the latter went on to write the lyrics for the ill-fated musical of Rosenthal’s Bar Mitzvah Boy in 1987. 14 Bye, Bye, Baby, final draft October 1991, BYEB/8, p. i; all further stage directions are quoted from this manuscript. No televisual equivalent for these headings, such as intertitles, appears in the televised version, and indeed is not needed. In the script, Leo is described as bearded during the last watch and clean-shaven in the past, but again this visual distinction is unnecessary and is not used in the televised play. 15 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 78. 16 ‘Oppo’ means ‘close friend’, from ‘opposite number’, appropriately enough (B.H. Patterson, A Dictionary of Dockyard Language, Portsmouth Royal Dockyard Historical Society 1984, BYEB/a:6).

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164  Jack Rosenthal 17 Letters in BYEB/j. 18 BYEB/a. 19 Letter in BYEB/h: l. 20 Production Notes, BYEB/i:6, p. 3. 21 Maureen Lipman, ‘Postcript’, Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 374. 22 Peter Paterson, ‘Love is put to the next’, Daily Mail 1 January 1998; ‘Critics’ Choice’, Sunday Times 21 December 1997; Jay Rayner, the Observer 28 December 1997. 23 Geoffrey Phillips, ‘Growing, going, gone’, Evening Standard 4 April 1996. 24 Nicholas Brett, Letters Page, Radio Times 4–10 May 1996. 25 Hilary Kingsley, ‘Empty home, empty heart’, Sunday Mirror 28 December 1997, p. 25. 26 Desert Island Discs Radio 4 1998, repeated 4 June 2004. 27 Production Notes, Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, ESK1/:b:1. 28 Cristina Odone, ‘Such sweet sorrow amid the snow’, Daily Telegraph 1 January 1998 29 Nancy Banks-Smith, ‘Muffin! Muffin!’, the Guardian 6 April 1996. 30 Mark Lawson, ‘Jack on the box’, the Guardian 2 April 1996. 31 In the USA, Eskimo Day was broadcast on PBS’s Masterpiece Theater on 19 May 1996, renamed Interview Day. Although Shani’s exposition of the film’s title was thought by some critics to be labouring the point, several of the British viewers who wrote letters to Rosenthal remained mystified by it. 32 Lipman, ‘Postscript’, p. 374. 33 Several reviewers and many viewers’ letters did, however, single out Lipman’s performances for praise, in particular the denouement to Eskimo Day where she is the first to articulate the parents’ loss; for instance, Victoria Coren praised Lipman’s ‘consummate physical performance’, ‘Leaping from the cradle to the pulpit’, Daily Telegraph 5 April 1996. 34 Lawson, ‘Jack on the box’. 35 ‘Critics’ Choice’, Sunday Times 21 December 1997; ‘TV Choice’, Independent on Saturday 27 December 1997. 36 Lawson, ‘Jack on the box’. 37 Rosenthal notes that Bar Mitzvah Boy is not autobiographical ‘other than in feeling … a sort of wish-fulfilment in hindsight’ (‘Introduction’, ‘P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang’, p. vi). 38 Production Notes.

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Anglo-Jewish plays

8

The Evacuees (1975) and Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976) In the Timeshift documentary Jack Rosenthal, broadcast on BBC1, 30 September 2004, four months after Rosenthal’s death, Jonathan Lynn argued that Rosenthal’s personal identifications were threefold: northern, working-class and Jewish. In this chapter I will explore the third of these elements. There are Jewish incidents and characters in many of Rosenthal’s television plays. These sometimes exist at the level of small details – a removal man bringing Miss Shepherd her long-awaited desk in Well, Thank You, Thursday (1975) shouts ‘Mazeltov!’ as he puts down his burden – simply to imply the presence of Jewish supporting roles. Elsewhere, such references produce a humorous clash between Jewish and gentile life. In an episode of The Dustbinmen (1969–70) the lads complain in such terms about Winston’s excessive speed at the wheel of Thunderbird 3 in the streets of Salford: cheese & egg: He nearly drove us down the aisle of the Great United Synagogue! eric: I nearly got bar mitzvahed!

The humour here relies on the supposed incompatibility of the naïf Eric’s Welshness with Jewish religious allegiance. A third way in which Jewish characters exist in Rosenthal’s drama is more developed and self-sustaining. Here, the humour depends on typical or stereotypical Jewish traits. In The Knowledge (1979), Ted Margolies’ success and failure are both due to his Jewishness. Although he gains his cabby’s Green Badge in a record thirteen-and-a-quarter months, Ted loses it the same day because he cannot hold his drink. Following a particular image of Jewish masculinity, Ted’s cleverness is undone by his lack of manliness.1 In Bye, Bye, Baby (1992) Leo Wiseman’s Jewishness also performs a narrative function in placing him at odds with his Catholic girlfriend – not least by making him forfeit a Christmas leave during

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166  Jack Rosenthal which she meets another man ‘going to the same carol service’, as she puts it. Leo’s Jewishness is also the obstacle to his bidding farewell to his childhood self and becoming a man, which he eventually achieves by abandoning kneejerk hostility to Germans. Although the Jewish worlds shown in Rosenthal’s plays are usually self-contained, there are some representations of gentile reactions to Jewishness. In The Knowledge, Gordon asks, ‘what’s Jewish for “champagne”?’ when Ted gets his Green Badge; while Mr Burgess is ensnared by his own ploy during one of Ted’s appearances. Rather than disconcerting Ted in the way he might be disconcerted by a fare, Mr Burgess himself is caught out: burgess: How do you feel about the Jewish fraternity? (ted boggles at him.) ted: The what?? (burgess glances down at Ted’s file.) burgess: Oh, as you were. You’re … er, Mr Margolies, aren’t you?

Such moments of gentile unfamiliarity and incomprehension may constitute what the critic Artur Sandauer calls ‘allosemitism’. This is defined by Zygmunt Bauman as ‘the practice of setting the Jews apart as people radically different from all the others’, whether in a positive or negative way.2 However, this is as far as Rosenthal strays into representations of antisemitism. Rather, gentile responses to Jewishness share in his plays’ customary everyday–surreal illogic, as we see in the following interview of Leo by Lieutenant Commander Gray in Bye, Bye, Baby: gray: Now what mob are you? Church of Turkey? leo: Jewish, sir. gray: That the mob that don’t eat spam on Fridays? leo: That’s the Catholics, sir. gray: Ah. So you’re the ones who don’t have Christmas, correct? leo: Yes, sir.

Even this dialogue is characterised by a strategically allosemitic ignorance rather than any kind of antisemitism, as Gray’s questions are directed towards having Leo stay on to guard the naval base during his Christmas leave. Bye, Bye, Baby includes the most sustained narrative about Jewishness in all of Rosenthal’s plays apart from The Evacuees and Bar Mitzvah Boy as it concerns Leo’s realisation that, in Rosenthal’s words, he is ‘just about the only Jew in the Navy (which not only gives him problems, it gives the Navy its biggest challenge since the Spanish Armada)’.3 In Bye, Bye, Baby just before Christmas every religious denomination is summoned in turn to be dismissed for the holidays. However, there is no cohort of Jews. Left alone on the parade-ground, Leo acts as his

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Anglo-Jewish plays  167 own officer, issuing orders in an unlikely cockney–Yiddish accent and leaping to obey them: leo: Yiddels, back to the mess already, quvick march! Von, two, von, two, shoulders back, right veel …

Leo is neither the kind of Jew nor the kind of naval officer he acts out here, as an actual drill sergeant reminds him by stopping the performance with an inadvertently apposite insult: ‘Oi, you! Bacon-bollocks! Halt!’ Yet it is class rather than religion that furnishes the central ideological and dramatic tension in Bye, Bye, Baby, perhaps because Leo is older than the protagonists of Rosenthal’s plays with a ‘Jewish theme’, as he put it.4 It is as if Jewishness, out of the triad of Rosenthal’s identityformations mentioned by Jonathan Lynn, is associated with youth while class takes over along with the world of work in adulthood. When Leo’s middle-class navy foe Channing drunkenly reveals his envy of ‘your lot’, he is referring to Leo’s working-class standing rather than his Jewishness – although it is ambiguous enough a statement that the Jewish Chronicle reviewer described Channing as ‘the resident anti-Semite’.5 There is no evidence for such an estimate, only for Channing’s class patronage. The ‘blending’6 of Britishness and Jewishness in Bye, Bye, Baby, of which this ambiguity is a part, is associated with the war, which makes the two states hard to distinguish. The eight-year-old Leo hears his mother lamenting the German bombing of Manchester’s Jewish hospital and he asks why a factory was not the target: ‘Was it because the hospital was Jewish? Or because we’re British? Mam? Which was it?’ Leo’s father serves in the British army but gives his patriotism a Jewish flavour by suggesting in Yiddish that Hitler get a punch in the nose, while measuring time according to the gentile calendar: leo’s father: It’ll be over by Christmas, when we’ve given Adolf a ribe in schnuck, eh?

The representations of Jewishness in Bar Mitzvah Boy and The ­ vacuees are different from these fleeting references, cameos and E subplots because they are more sustained, and because the dramatic and televisual techniques in both plays are unprecedented ones – not just within Rosenthal’s oeuvre, but in British-Jewish literature more broadly, since they represent Jewish life in British terms. There are hints at this innovative representational practice in The Knowledge. Ted explains to the other would-be cabbies his almost teetotal ways: he has ‘one small egg-flip at Christmas, tops’. A supposedly typical Jewish distaste for alcohol is expressed in the emphatically British terms of a

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168  Jack Rosenthal sickly-sweet, old-fashioned Christmassy drink. Its social and gendered meaning is shown elsewhere in Rosenthal’s writing. Beryl in The Lovers (1970) drank so many egg-flips at an end-of-year office party that she confessed into a dictaphone to ambitions of ‘Percy Filth’ towards Paul McCartney.7 After Ted has been undone by celebratory champagne and lost his taxi-driver’s licence, his colleague Chris tells us in voiceover that ‘[Ted’s] dad started saying Jewish prayers for the dead, ’cos he tried to get a job in a minicab office’. Here, it is the British hierarchy of licensed cabby over minicab-driver which is expressed in Jewish terms – it is as if Ted has married out by attempting to drive a minicab, the locus classicus for Jewish parents acting as if their offspring have died. It is precisely this combination of specific British class-related details with Jewish practice that constitutes in sustained form the dramatic comedy of The Evacuees and Bar Mitzvah Boy.

The Evacuees The Evacuees was Rosenthal’s third play for the BBC and his second Play for Today. It was the first full-length project of its director, Alan Parker, who went on to direct Bugsy Malone (1976), another film about children. Although Rosenthal’s change of allegiance from Granada to the BBC was dictated by pragmatic concerns, it marks a shift in his work from the sitcoms and individual social comedies that he had written before 1975 for ITV, to a more reflective, realist and often ‘personal’8 drama. Rosenthal describes how, just as The Evacuees was about to go into production at Granada, its estimated cost of £45,000 was judged too high and it was abandoned. Rosenthal sold the play instead to the BBC, who proceeded to shoot it for double Granada’s budget.9 The Evacuees was broadcast on 5 March 1975, and was very well received. It won several of the year’s industry awards: International Emmy Best Play Award, British Academy Best Play Award, Broadcasting Press Guild Play Award and the Jerusalem Festival Special Award. The Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection holds 38 letters written in tribute by viewers – there is none of the negativity we shall see on the part of Bar Mitzvah Boy’s viewers – including encomia from Wolf Mankowitz, Jeremy Isaacs and Anthony Andrews.10 The structure of The Evacuees resembles the interleaving of different time-scales in Spend, Spend, Spend (1977), but in The Evacuees the scenes which are crosscut together are geographically rather than temporally contrasted. Manchester is set against Blackpool, home against evacuation. The Evacuees is Rosenthal’s ‘half-and-half’11 fact and fiction

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Anglo-Jewish plays  169 account of the evacuation he and his older brother David underwent at the beginning of the Second World War. Their fictional counterparts, eight-year-old Danny Miller (Gary Carp) and his ten-year-old brother Neville (Steven Serember), are evacuated from Manchester to Lytham St Anne’s, near Blackpool. They spend nearly a year with foster-parents Mr and Mrs Graham (Ivor Roberts and Margery Mason) before letting their mother Sarah (Maureen Lipman, ‘playing her future mother-inlaw’12) know they are unhappy and want to come home. The film opens with an establishing shot of a northern industrial suburb, complete with cobbled streets, brick terraced houses and factory chimney in the distance. Rosenthal’s name as writer, along with the other credits, rolls over this scene, presenting visually an association between his writing and working-class northern milieux – one begun with Coronation Street in the 1960s, then The Dustbinmen and The Lovers, and continued here with the BBC. Such an association is confirmed as a caption appears telling us that this is ‘Manchester, 1 September 1939’. We hear in voiceover a schoolteacher, Mr Goldstone (Ian East), reciting the roll-call of his class – ‘Aaron … Abrams … Cohen J. … Cohen L. … Cohen S.’ – thus further identifying the scene’s setting as Cheetham Hill, the old Jewish quarter of Manchester. This is contrasted with the establishing shot of the ostensibly more attractive Blackpool, to where the boys of Derby Street School are evacuated on the day war is declared. We see a grassy headland and the sea beyond, while the boys in silhouette scamper along behind Mr Goldstone – but the visual reminder of the Pied Piper strikes an ominous note. In fact the contrast between the two locations works against expectations, since Manchester for all its apparent bleakness is home, seaside Blackpool is exile. The play’s opening scene sets up another contrast. The first person we see is Grandma (Margery Withers), making her way through the side-streets. She bursts into the classroom of her grandson Danny, hugs her ‘little tatele’ in front of his schoolmates, then thrusts upon him a bag of fried fish. This behaviour is implicitly contrasted with that of Danny and Neville’s foster-mother Mrs Graham, who insists on discipline and ‘respect’ from the children. She gives them a single cold pork sausage each for dinner on the evening of their arrival. We hear Grandma’s excessive discourse, as she accuses Mr Goldstone of permitting the evacuation of her grandson: Every Friday, a lifetime, I chop and fry gefilte fish. … Only this Friday, how? With tears, eppas? And not from the onions – from the heart. A baby they take – may they lig in dred. A baby goes to the war – that’s a teacher? That’s in library books?

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170  Jack Rosenthal This representation of a Jewish grandmother differs starkly from that of gentile mother-figure Mrs Graham and her discourse, when the latter responds to Neville’s request for something other than a pork sausage to eat: mrs graham: Neville. One thing I shall not entertain. And that’s impertinence. Mr Graham and I like little boys who are grateful for being taken off the streets and given a home.

While Grandma is working-class and speaks with emotive Yiddish inflection, Mrs Graham is Protestant and middle-class and speaks with clipped formality. While Grandma reproaches those who seek to harm her grandson, Mrs Graham reproaches the boys themselves. The class difference between the households is summarised when Mrs Graham insists that Danny and Neville have a ‘nice hot bath’ on their arrival at her house, unmoved by their protest that they had one last Sunday. The mise-en-scène also makes clear the class difference between the Grahams’ comfortable suburban villa and the Millers’ small, dark brick terrace. Yet cutting between the two households works again to the advantage of the ostensibly less attractive setting. On their first evening at the Grahams’, the boys discover that their hosts have a Victorian attitude towards children and that they are to stand at the table to eat while the adults sit. The scene cuts to a close-up of a pair of empty chairs, then a pan of a diningtable reveals that we are back at the Millers’ house in Manchester, where the family are forlornly eating their dinner. The empty chairs symbolise the Millers’ unhappiness at the boys’ absence as well as a different attitude to child-rearing. Crosscutting works the other way round after the boys have left the Grahams’ and returned home. The Millers celebrate the first night of Chanukah by ‘dancing a wild conga’13 around the living-room, singing the festival’s song ‘Ma’oz tsur’ – a song known as ‘Rock of Ages’ praising God for saving the Israelites from their Biblical foes, culminating in the Syrian Greeks of the post-Biblical Chanukah story. The boys squabble about who is to answer their father’s (Ray Mort) question – ‘Now you know why we’re doing this, don’t you?’ – until the lighting of the Chanukah candles is interrupted by an air-raid siren. There follows a multiply ironic cut back to the Grahams’ house. It was to evade just such air-raids that the boys were evacuated, yet their return home to Manchester is represented as an escape. This is shown in stark visual terms in another pair of scenes which shows the transition from Blackpool to Manchester. There is a dissolve from Mrs Graham’s horrorstruck face as she realises the boys are leaving, to paintings hanging on a bedroom wall – then the camera pulls back to reveal that the house

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Anglo-Jewish plays  171 is a bombed-out ruin back in a Manchester street entirely composed of devastated terraces. Yet, viewed from above in a crane shot, Sarah and her sons are running happily up the street swinging their luggage to the accompaniment of the extra-diegetic song ‘Everything is Ticketty Boo’. The scene at the Grahams’ after the boys’ departure is at odds with that at the Millers’ in terms of both mise-en-scène and soundtrack. Mrs Graham is clearing out the boys’ bedroom, which is bare, dark and silent. Her meditation on why Danny and Neville were convinced that she hated them contrasts painfully with what we have just seen of parental love enacted in the celebration of Chanukah: mrs graham: I taught them respect, yes. Agreed. To respect their elders and betters. I wouldn’t say that was cruel. mr graham: Only way really. mrs graham: I’d say that was love. That’s the word I’d give it. (Pause) Her love isn’t love at all. Too much love …

In this pair of crosscut scenes, contrasting the Millers’ living-room with the Grahams in the boys’ empty bedroom, the Chanukah celebration itself acts as a commentary on the boys’ experience. It is only partly with comic exaggeration that Neville’s summary of the festival’s origins also refers to the boys’ return home to Manchester: neville: The festival of Chanukah is to commemorate the return of the Israelites to the Temple, after forty years in the wilderness.

Indeed, Neville’s speech forms part of the play’s contrast not only of home and love with ‘wilderness’ and coldness, but of Jewish with gentile life. Jewishness and gentility are sometimes combined in The Evacuees with the effect that, in David Ruderman’s phrase, Jewishness is reformulated in an English key.14 For instance, the Millers’ singing the Chanukah song ‘Ma’oz tsur’ concludes with just such a reformulation when a rhyme between Hebrew and English constitutes the final couplet: all: Ma’oz tsur y’shuosee – (Then even more loudly) the cat’s in the cupboard and he can’t see me!!!

Such blending fits with the tune’s origin as a Hebraised version of a medieval German folk-song. In this particular blend it is English which literally has the last word, but in Bar Mitzvah Boy, as we will see, it is the other way round: it is Englishness which is reformulated in a Jewish key. While Bar Mitzvah Boy shows both the English language and British social formations being made to take account of Hebrew, Yiddish and Jewish practice, in The Evacuees, by contrast, Jewish and gentile or English life are more often represented separately or as if at odds. The

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172  Jack Rosenthal Blackpool housewife (Marjorie Sudell) who reluctantly agrees to take in an evacuee is introduced to her new charge by Mr Goldstone: mr goldstone (while writing down the woman’s address on his clipboard): This is Cyril Winkler. third housewife (to winkler): That’s a funny name, isn’t it? mr goldstone: Say yes. winkler: Yes.

It is clear that the housewife finds the boy’s surname and not his English first name worthy of remark. This incident prepares the audience for the reception given to Danny and Neville at their foster-home. The Grahams insist that the boys eat their cold pork sausages, which are shown several times in misshapen close-up: danny: We’ve never had pork sausage, Mrs Graham. We’re not allowed it. mr graham (with consummate wisdom): How do you know you don’t like it, then, eh? Mmmm? Can’t answer that one, can you? Eh, boys? Blinded by science, eh?

Neville tries to mitigate the effects of eating non-kosher food by reciting a Hebrew prayer and putting a hand on his head in place of a headcovering; Danny copies him, pretending ‘he’s scratching his head’ and coughing when Mrs Graham catches his eye. This incident bypasses any suggestion of allosemitism on the Grahams’ part, because, as in the case of Cyril Winkler’s foster-mother, it depends not on the construction but on the denial or misrecognition of otherness. The Grahams show no sign of understanding the reason for the boys’ reluctance to eat pork – Mr Graham’s riposte is irrelevant to Danny and Neville’s concerns – and never acknowledge their charges’ Jewishness. Yet the boys are aware of their hosts’ difference, and use Jewish ritual as a defence against it. Unlike Bar Mitzvah Boy, The Evacuees is set in the past, which has implications for both its mise-en-scène and its genre. The mise-en-scène was praised in reviews for its accuracy, while in a letter to Rosenthal the playwright Michael Frayn argued that such accuracy was instrumental in making this a play not just reliant upon but about memory: In fact it didn’t seem like a play – it seemed as if you were creating the past actually out of itself. So that it was only afterwards that one thought: But how could they get children to act as well as that? How could they film a bombed street in 1975? How could they find a complete station and train in the livery of LMS? I’m not Jewish and I wasn’t evacuated … but it seemed almost as if the things in your play had come out of some buried part of my own memory.15

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Anglo-Jewish plays  173 Frayn’s questions about the detail of the production and mise-en-scène are readily answered. The child actors were chosen by the producer Mark Shivas and the director Alan Parker from local Jewish schools, rather than stage schools,16 while the location for the film, a slum on the outskirts of Manchester, was in the process of being demolished; as Henry Fenwick put it in a Radio Times article about the making of the film, ‘the crew is one step ahead of the demolition squad’.17 The LMS steam locomotive and carriages belonged to a local enthusiasts’ society,18 and the station scenes were filmed at Keighley, ‘one of a small handful of stations [still] equipped with 1939 trains and gauges’ in the mid1970s, standing in for Manchester’s Victoria Station.19 For Frayn, the meticulous accuracy of the mise-en-scène in recreating wartime Britain – although reviewers and correspondents debated the presence of the boy’s fair-isle jumpers20 – supports The Evacuees’ status as a memory play. The soundtrack too uses authentic radio broadcasts ranging from speeches by Hitler, Chamberlain and Churchill, to the radio serial ITMA and popular songs. When Danny and Neville and their schoolfriend Sidney Zuckerman (Paul Besterman) make a doomed attempt to escape back to Manchester on roller-skates, their progress is accompanied by ‘The Devil’s Gallop’ theme-tune from the radio serial Dick Barton. Yet this apparent fidelity to authentic detail is misleading, since the tune exists in the non-diegetic soundtrack at a point in the future. Dick Barton was first aired in 1946, several years after the events of the play. Such anachronism represents an adult looking back with hindsight at a younger self, who, in a parodic version of the serial’s eponymous hero, viewed himself as a private eye searching out Nazi sympathisers and spies. In other words, the play offers a mixture of accuracy in terms of period detail with the possible inaccuracy of memory. For instance, we see the evacuees on their arrival in St Anne’s being offered to householders who had no idea they were coming. The following comically reveals that this resulted in an ‘auction’:21 mr goldstone: They’re all very clean. third housewife: Go on, then, I’ll try one. … That one. mr goldstone: Sorry, he’s one of a pair. … Can I interest you in one of the others, perhaps? third housewife: He’ll do.

Rosenthal describes his memory of this ‘cattle market’, as the stage direction has it, in several different interviews,22 but admits that other sources, including ‘ex-evacuation officers’, have denied that it can be accurate.23 Such an impression clearly exists also for dramatic reasons,

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174  Jack Rosenthal to support the impersonal and haphazard experience of evacuation. As befits a memory play, The Evacuees is characterised by the interplay of adult retrospection and child’s-eye-view. This is clear in the representation of evacuation as a cattle market, and particularly in the figure of Mrs Graham. While it is tempting to subscribe to the view of Zuckerman, who announces, as the brothers enter the Graham house for the first time, ‘I bet she’s a witch. Any money’, the representation of this troubled individual is characterised by ‘unusual sympathy’.24 In a review of the play, Carol Allen describes the ‘moving’ nature of Mrs Graham’s ‘slowly dawning agony when she realises how much the boys hate and fear her’.25 Such a ‘sympathetic’, or pitying, view is conveyed by the glances of characters in the play. Mr Graham sees his wife hold Danny’s jacket tenderly against her cheek and looks quickly away; Sarah notices Mrs Graham smoothing Neville’s hair in a ‘maternal’ way but pretends she has not. In her final speech to her husband, it appears that Mrs Graham’s childlessness motivated not only harshness but also unrealistic love for the boys, whom she had asked to adopt formally: mrs graham (fighting the tears): I had to try and make them forget her, Gordon, hadn’t I? (He looks at her uneasily) mr graham: Their own mother? mrs graham: I was their mother! (A silence. They stand helplessly looking at each other.)

Danny’s revelation to his mother of Mrs Graham’s behaviour during a game of ‘Silly Story’, a version of Consequences, also depends on a child’s-eye view. In a night-time prayer, Danny asks God to ensure that Hitler should ‘die slowly with toothache and horrible gashes’, then adds, ‘And the same goes for Mrs Graham. Only double.’ In the game, Sarah reads out what he has written: She is dead cruel to us. She steals your letters and whatever you send us. She makes us clean and polish the house every day, and gives us rotten dinners. She hates us. And we hate her back. All this is secret. We want to come home.

Danny’s youthful inference of hatred on Mrs Graham’s part is balanced in dramatic terms by the scene between Mr and Mrs Graham that we witness after the boys’ departure. This represents an adult view of events since it takes place outside the boys’ viewpoint. As Rosenthal, speaking in the third person as the implied playwright, put it, ‘The woman really wanted to adopt the kids, which must have meant she loved them. But she showed it in a very – different – way.’26 The scene at the Grahams’ offers an alternative and adult understanding of her behaviour, for

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Anglo-Jewish plays  175 instance ‘stealing’ Sarah’s letters and food-parcels to the boys, motivated partly by her wanting them to forget their mother. There is also a metafictional aspect to Danny’s written revelation. While his childlike version may be a ‘silly story’, Jack Rosenthal, Danny’s real-life adult counterpart, has made something rather different out of the experience, not least by giving it a mixed perspective. Neville teases his serious younger brother, who is scared to fight an older boy, by predicting that he is ‘going to be a rabbi, aren’t you, Danny?’ Danny hurls himself on his brother, ‘raining ineffectual punches’, at which Neville adds, in a self-conscious joke about the future of the ‘little rabbi’, ‘What sort of job’s that for a Yiddishe boy?’ Becoming a writer was clearly much more suitable. The film does not end with the ‘neat conclusion’27 of Mrs Graham’s comeuppance and the boys’ return to Manchester. The Chanukah episode which contrasted so starkly with life at the Grahams’ concludes ominously. Danny stays up late to light all the Chanukah candles, without waiting for the eighth night of the festival to do so. He goes to bed and the candles fall over and set fire to the living-room. Danny’s motivations are mysterious. Jane Humber wonders if the episode represents ‘a child’s attempt to purify the home, after the indignities the brothers had endured’,28 and it does seem that he is motivated by a wish to commemorate all the days of the Chanukah miracle at once and reassure himself about the possibility of divine intervention. At the same time, Danny is gaining revenge on his brother. It was Neville who answered their father’s question about the meaning of Chanukah, despite Danny’s wish to do so. Neville recites loudly, to drown Danny out: ‘In the Temple there was only enough oil in the lamp to last for one day. But God worked a miracle and it burned for eight days instead.’ Danny gabbles hastily at the end, ‘So we light a candle each night, till they’re all lit! Amen. (He pulls his tongue at Neville.) Clever dick!’ Danny has put his own words about the candles into practice for Oedipal reasons. The fire is the conclusion of such a process. In Blackpool Neville shows Danny a photograph of a 1940s pin-up torn from a magazine, which he keeps hidden in the pages of the Hotspur, representing the emergence of puberty from boyhood. Danny is puzzled and unimpressed: ‘It’s a lady in a bathing costume.’ It is clear that the pin-up represents a maternal as well as a sexual figure for Neville; after one of Sarah’s visits to Blackpool he looks at the photograph and then, for the first time, cries in bed. Two years later back in Manchester it is the younger boy who has the pin-up, now very dog-eared and creased, representing Danny’s growing up. As Danny says to a boy evacuated to Manchester from London, ‘I used to be an evacuee when I was a kid.’ Despite the play’s title, evacuation is not the central metaphor of the Bildungsroman which constitutes The

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176  Jack Rosenthal Evacuees; rather, it is the more Jewish notion of return, from exile or evacuation, that encapsulates growing up.

Bar Mitzvah Boy Bar Mitzvah Boy was first shown on 14 September 1976, opening a new season of BBC Plays for Today. It won the BAFTA Award for Best Single Play and the Broadcasting Press Guild Best Play Award, and is one of Rosenthal’s best-known works. Indeed, it was so popular that a British musical version of it was staged in 1978, an American one in 1987. Neither musical was a success, and Rosenthal wrote a play, Smash!, about the difficult process of transforming a critically acclaimed play into another medium in which it is a flop.29 Bar Mitzvah Boy is about thirteen-year-old Eliot Green (Jeremy Steyn), the ‘boy’ of the title who is about to become a man. Eliot takes the meaning of the ceremony ‘very literally’, in Rosenthal’s words,30 and bolts from the synagogue in protest at the disappointing models of Jewish manhood he sees around him. Despite its setting, the play is not autobiographical. As Rosenthal put it of his own bar mitzvah, there was ‘no party, no presents, no play in it at all’.31 He even claimed that Jewishness was only incidental to the plot of Bar Mitzvah Boy: ‘”The original idea had nothing specifically to do with Jews.”’32 Rosenthal saw the play more as a parable about intellectual awakening set against a Jewish backdrop,33 and it is in this context that we can view its distinctive blend of Britishness and Jewishness. The ‘cold open’ to Bar Mitzvah Boy constitutes less of a comic hook than that in several of Rosenthal’s ITV plays, such as The Knowledge, or London’s Burning (1986). Indeed, here it is not so much that the play opens in media res, with a comically revelatory effect when we realise what the puzzling details mean. Rather, it is the very subject of the play that needs decoding, and this is the source of its comedy. Eliot Green is on his way home from school with his friends Squidge (Mark Herman) and the non-Jewish Denise (Kim Clifford): eliot: You know what tomorrow is, don’t you? … Only the day that marks my passage, isn’t it! … denise: What’s he mean? ‘Marks his passage’? Is it rude? squidge: It’s something Jewish. What Jewish boys do. You wouldn’t understand. denise (suspicious): It sounds rude.34

It is not Jewishness which is shown to be unfamiliar or funny here, but non-Jewish responses to it. We could even argue that from this point on in Bar Mitzvah Boy, in order to understand the plot and the

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Anglo-Jewish plays  177 play’s humour, the audience is constructed as if it were Jewish. After this opening, the film adopts the strategy of not translating its characters’ dialogue or actions. Viewers are given only contextual help in understanding the meaning of the Hebrew and Yiddish phrases used by the characters. These include ‘worsht’, ‘ganzy macher’, and ‘tallis bag’, among many others, not to mention the significance of a bar mitzvah itself. This lack of translation is partly the effect of dramatic form, which has no narrator, although substitutes could clearly have been found within the dialogue. Rather than offering translation, it is Jewish ‘foreignness’ which is presented as the norm. Indeed, such foreignness is familiarised by its hybrid form in the play. Throughout Bar Mitzvah Boy, Rosenthal gives a Jewish content to British social structures. Paramount among these is class. The Green parents, Victor (Bernard Spear) and Rita (Maria Charles), reminisce about their early days in working-class, East End Bethnal Green, but have risen to the ranks of the lower-middle-class in Willesden, north London. Victor is a taxi-driver who pays rent on the family home, and a Labour party member. The film makes the family’s class standing clear in the detail of its mise-en-scène, where we see spotless but shabby interiors, and Rita’s clothing, including much fake fur and a cataloguebought fake crocodile handbag. Rita’s dialogue unites Englishness and Jewishness by using Yiddish words to express sentiments typical of both the British petit-bourgeoisie and a Jewish mother. She describes the cost of the dinner-dance in this way: rita: A hundred and seventeen guests at £7.50 a head. Or £7.50 a tochass, depending which way you look at it. If you’re wondering where the money’s coming from – so am I. And that’s without lemon sorbet.

Later, Rita describes herself in the synagogue: ‘With an apricot ruched hat on, kvelling!’ Her Yiddish phrases and speech patterns serve to express a British class-related attitude: that is, a lower-middle-class concern with aspiration to a middle-class lifestyle, made clear in the details of the lemon sorbet and using the vocabulary of a catalogue to describe her hat. The details of the Greens’ British class standing are those of a specifically Jewish experience. In his history The Jews of Britain: 1656 to 2000, Todd Endelman argues that ‘group mobility’, as we see it in the Greens’ case, may be ‘most un-English’ – but it is characteristic of Jews in England.35 One sign of this mobility in Bar Mitzvah Boy is the generational shift and diversification of routes upward, ranging from Victor, who as a taxi-driver is self-employed, to his prospective son-in-law Harold (Jonathan Lynn), who is an accountant working for a company.

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178  Jack Rosenthal Endelman adds that British-Jewish prosperity has brought about a migration to the suburbs characterised by ‘materialistic triumphalism’ and a ‘shift rightwards in politics’.36 In Rosenthal’s play, Eliot’s parents have an enthusiastic interest in the material realm, while Eliot’s rebellion against their lower-middle-class concern with ‘status’ and ‘propriety’37 takes the specifically Jewish form of insisting on the religious nature of his bar mitzvah. At Friday night dinner, Eliot’s head is framed between the Sabbath candles on a sideboard behind the dinner-table, as a symbol of his concern for the religious observance that his family overlooks. Eliot’s father Victor laments his daughter’s boyfriend Harold’s support for the Conservative Party, again in terms which give British political formations a Jewish content: victor: He [Harold] beats me altogether. A Yiddishe feller. When I was a lad, they gave you your Labour Party membership card the minute you were circumcised. Give you with one hand, take away with the other …

As Victor acknowledges, Labour party membership had assumed an almost convenantal inevitability for British Jews – until their circumstances changed. In fact, it seems that there was nothing particularly Jewish about British socialism. Rather, British political parties simply reflect how good it is for the Jews. Such ‘materialism’ is represented visually throughout Bar Mitzvah Boy. Victor and Rita are comically exaggerated Jewish parents because the play gives us Eliot’s view of them. This is made clear in the stylised scene in which Eliot recites the ten commandments to his sister Lesley (Adrienne Posta), who is ostensibly testing him for the following day – when he reveals that the commandments don’t form a part of his bar mitzvah service, she demands, ‘What the hell did you learn them for, then?’ Eliot’s utterance of the second commandment acts as a voiceover for an otherwise silent sequence showing Rita at the hairdresser’s. While Eliot recites, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image’, Rita looks worriedly at her reflection in the mirror as Sylvia adds to her hair the last of a ‘forest of tinfoil spikes’. While Eliot’s voice on the soundtrack recites the rest of the second commandment – ‘For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children … and showing lovingkindness to the thousandth generation, unto them that love me and keep my commandments’ – we see his father Victor at the barber’s, looking pensively at himself in the mirror as Solly (Harry Landis) trims his hair. Here we witness a clash, although not one between Jewish and gentile discourses, as is often the case in dramatic representations

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Anglo-Jewish plays  179 38

of Jewish characters. Rather, the clash takes place between different kinds of Jewishness. Although Eliot cannot literally see his parents, this scene is a televisual representation of his thoughts about them, represented by the disjunction between image and soundtrack. Rita is concerned only with objects and appearances, while Victor transgresses against Jewish law by not observing the Sabbath, as we shall see. Eliot’s viewpoint is not the only means by which we view the Green family, since there are other moments where events take place out of his range of vision and earshot – in the parents’ bedroom, for instance – and Eliot is not the implied arbiter. As the play progresses, we see both the aptness and the extremity of Eliot’s judgements. He takes his parents to task for the very shortcomings implied in the mirror scenes. To his mother’s insistence that he get a haircut, Eliot retorts, ‘I thought it was a bar mitzvah tomorrow! … The Torah doesn’t mention it’s a hairdressing contest!’ When Victor reassures Rita he has filled the car with petrol for the following day, Eliot responds, ‘I thought we weren’t supposed to drive on the Sabbath … I thought that was covered by the Fourth Commandment: remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy.’ There is a comic distance in these scenes between Eliot and the audience, even though we recognise the source of his disquiet and his parents do not. As Rosenthal comments, ‘a thirteen-year-old is, after all, thirteen. The age when he knows everything and no one else knows anything. Particularly his parents.’39 It is this distance that saves the play from relying on a stereotypical or negative view of irreligious materialism among British Jewry40 – a distance that was overlooked by some of the audience members who wrote to Rosenthal in 1976 after Bar Mitzvah Boy was broadcast. While many selfidentified non-Jewish viewers were charmed by what they saw, Jewish ones were not. One complained that Jewish lives were presented with ‘vulgarity’ and that ‘bad ideas’ might be put into the minds of ‘younger boys who are going to get Bar Mitzvah’.41 Clearly such ‘hurt and offence’, as another letter-writer put it, is the result of confusing representation and reality, and was an effect that Rosenthal sought: Before I ever started writing [Bar Mitzvah Boy], I mentioned the idea to Valerie Hyams, an old school pal of Maureen’s from Hull. She was horrified. Scandalised. Almost traumatised. Disgusted. A boy running out of his bar mitzvah? Unheard of. She felt sick at the thought. Terrific. The next day I picked up my pen and started.42

Hyams’ reaction points to a particular construction of Jews as unquestioningly loyal to group practice, as well as a repugnance at representations of non-conformity, which is borne out by the viewer correspondence

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180  Jack Rosenthal Rosenthal received about the play. Indeed, the plot shows what might be considered a British-style rebellion being acted out in Jewish terms. Rosenthal’s comments here make clear the fact that his reliance on the ‘horror’ and ‘trauma’ the plot of Bar Mitzvah Boy would inspire among particular viewers was to increase the dramatic effect of Eliot’s actions. The confusion between the realms of drama and reality, as evidenced in the letters Rosenthal received, even appears in a review of the play in a Jewish newspaper, in which the anonymous reviewer describes Rita ‘ringing the caterer on the morning of the bar-mitzvah’, and the scene with the barber ‘engaged in a game of cards in the back’ of his shop on the Sabbath, as ‘contradictions’43 – as if these were factual errors rather than instances of dramatic irony. It is not only Eliot’s point of view but also his point-of-hearing that is foregrounded throughout the film as a site of judgement. At Friday night dinner Eliot is engaged in listening, not speaking, to the extent that his father sarcastically calls him ‘blabbermouth’. After dinner there are frequent cuts between Eliot’s family – Victor and Harold, arguing about politics, and Lesley and Rita, in the parents’ bedroom, arguing about clothes for the following day – and Eliot in his bedroom. The very fact that Eliot closes his Hebrew books and instead listens to the disagreements represents his negative estimate of his family’s behaviour. His silence is judgmental. Once more, televisual technique symbolises Eliot’s inner state and points towards the play’s crisis. On many occasions in the play we see not the face of a particular speaker but rather the listening Eliot’s meaningfully deadpan expression, for instance on Friday night when Harold praises the dinner to excess – ‘A banquet. Straight up. Tremendous’ – and when Rita suddenly throws down her knife and fork and cries out the names of guests who haven’t RSVP’ed: ‘Stan and Dora Clyne!’ The play does not rely on dialogue to represent Eliot’s state of mind or to prepare the audience for his act of rebellion; indeed, Victoria Radin describes Eliot as an ‘almost wordless portrait’.44 Rather, his thoughts are implied. For instance, Eliot’s grandfather, Chaim Wax (Cyril Shaps), arrives on Friday evening and recites his trademark saying: grandad: If the kids are happy, you’re happy. If you’re happy, I’m happy. If you’re all happy, thank God, I’m the happiest man in the world. It’s my happiness – what should I do, cry?

But we do not see Grandad speak as he is out of shot. Instead, we see Eliot as he ‘mouths … in perfect mime’ his grandfather’s words, conveying with economy Eliot’s opinion of this unthinkingly repeated faux folkwisdom.

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Anglo-Jewish plays  181 The culmination of Eliot’s watching and listening is his fleeing the synagogue during his bar mitzvah service. While Eliot waits to be called to the bimah, and we see his male relations participating in the service, the characteristic utterances of his family, as we have already heard them in the play so far, run through his mind alongside his memory of Rabbi Sherman’s (Jack Lynn) instructions. As each utterance sounds out in voiceover, the camera focuses in close-up on the face of its speaker, now glowing with pride, to emphasise both Eliot’s idea of his family’s real motivations, and to foreshadow the shock of his actions. These are the voices that we hear as they sound out in Eliot’s mind: Well, I hope you’re not just going to rattle it off like that! People’ll be watching you! … I’ll put a new crease in your dad’s trousers … It’ll make ashenblotty of the seating plan! He’s a doctor, he expects it … It’s already costing me three insurance policies! …If I don’t do the worrying, who will? … Young man! Bar mitzvah boy! You’re not coming to sit on your Zaidy’s knee? … May I eat without hearing seating-plans and menus and caterers and do we tip the rabbi, and what if it rains … And then you’ll sing in loud, clear Hebrew everything you’ve learned – that’s your big moment, Eliot.

It is this crucial interior ‘microdialogue’, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s term,45 which spurs on Eliot to flee the synagogue. The internalised voices of each family member clash with that of Rabbi Sherman – the last voice to sound out in Eliot’s memory – producing a conflict which Eliot finds irresolvable. The ‘big moment’ to which the Rabbi refers has an ironic double meaning, as events turn out. We could even see the play as a whole as akin to the ‘thoroughly dialogised interior monologue’ Bakhtin describes in his analysis of Raskolnikov from Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. It is literally the voices of the day which drive Eliot from the synagogue, as if, like Raskolnikov, all the ‘major characters’ of the play were ‘reflected in his consciousness’.46 The play’s resolution also relies on an apparently religious plot-line which exists rather for dramatic effect. After Eliot has bolted from the synagogue, a series of scenes reveals his family’s distraught reactions crosscut with Lesley’s interrogation of her brother in Jackson Street Playground. The crosscutting emphasises the incompatible world-views of Eliot and his parents – only Lesley can move from home to his territory of playground – and the effects of Eliot’s behaviour. While Rita is beside herself at the notion of 117 guests arriving at the dinner-dance at which there is no bar mitzvah boy, Eliot informs Lesley that he couldn’t go ahead and become a man, like his male relations, because ‘they’re not men’. This address to Lesley, like his dinner-dance speech, is one that Eliot has thought out ‘many times before’, as if it were an alternative

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182  Jack Rosenthal version. Eliot begins his analysis of his male relations by observing, ‘If [Dad] was my age and behaved like he does, he’d get a clip round the ear. Dad’s a big spoilt kid, Lesley … He doesn’t care tuppence what other people want. That’s ignorant, really, in a grown man’; ‘Harold does everything that everybody wants. That’s even worse. He’s scared not to. He’s scared all the time’; ‘Grandad wants everybody to think the world of him just because he’s Grandad. Just because he’s there. Like babies do.’ Eliot gives here an uncannily accurate description of some varieties of stereotypically flawed Jewish masculinity. His father is touchy and emotive; Harold is effete and timid; his grandfather is an infantile narcissist. In other words, they are all versions in Eliot’s eyes of the stock nineteenth- and twentieth-century images of the ‘feminised Jew’ described by the critic Sander Gilman. Victor is a particularly over-determined figure, who seems to be afflicted with what Freud called ‘Jewish psychosis’ and its marked ‘argumentativeness’,47 as well as suffering from the ‘excitability’ of male Jewish hysteria.48 It is as if Eliot recognises how out-of-place he would be as a character in an old-fashioned or allosemitic representation of Jews. To prove to Lesley that he wasn’t motivated by fear of forgetting the Hebrew, Eliot insists that he could recite his portion of the Torah ‘standing on my head’ – and proceeds to do just that. The arresting image of Eliot dressed in his Burton’s velvet bar mitzvah suit reciting his portion while upside-down is an extension of the visual puns in The Dustbinmen and The Knowledge, where turns of phrase are represented in the mise-en-scène. Here, however, this visual joke is crucial to the plot. Rabbi Sherman, upon hearing of Eliot’s feat, declares him to be bar mitzvah anyway, in an instance of latter-day Talmudic judgement, as he has indeed recited the whole of his Torah portion even if not in the synagogue. In this sense Jewish religious authority allies itself with youthful rebellion against adult materialism. Lesley performs her own version of interpreting events back to front, by claiming to her parents that Eliot worried he couldn’t be ‘the sort of man you’d expect him to be’. Yet her remark that Eliot was concerned that he couldn’t be a man like his grandfather, father and Harold has its own ironic truth. Lesley’s ploy produces the greatest challenge to Eliot’s ‘expressionless’, silent demeanour, as Victor declares to his son, ‘To you I seem like a God. A hero. It’s only natural ….’ In this way, Eliot’s parents are brought back from the brink of terrible narrative punishment for their irreligious behaviour, and the dinnerdance goes ahead. But, as might be imagined, the Jewish viewers who disapproved of the play’s central twist – after all the build-up, Eliot walks out of his bar mitzvah service – were no happier with this ­resolution.

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Anglo-Jewish plays  183 One correspondent wrote that, ‘The story line showing the boy leaving the Synagogue and the Rabbi condoning the act embarrassed me greatly’, and went on to question the grounds on which the rabbi declared Eliot to be bar mitzvah. Another writer contrasted Bar Mitzvah Boy negatively with The Evacuees, and claimed that the former ‘hurt and offended’ all Jewish viewers: ‘I have never known a barmitzvah like what you presented’, as they are usually conducted, in contrast to that in the play, ‘in the most decorous manner and with great dignity’.49 It is as if anything other than a documentary representation would be considered inappropriate. Bar Mitzvah Boy ends with Eliot’s dinner-dance speech. The first time we hear Eliot’s speech when he practises it in his bedroom it is its ageappropriate language that is most striking. Eliot combines formality with schoolboy errors and emphases: ‘[Rabbi Sherman] has been no end of a tower of strength in no uncertain terms’; ‘Thank you for the wonderful presents you have bestowed on me of which I am extremely grateful for’ (Eliot uses the word ‘bestowed’ four times); and he provides the exact act, scene and line reference for his quotation from Julius Caesar: ‘This was a Man’. The second time we hear Eliot’s speech, at the dinnerdance itself, the irony is not directed at Eliot on the basis of his speech’s form, but rather at its audience. We are now aware that despite what he says in his speech, Eliot precisely does not intend to ‘follow [his] dear father’s example’, nor ‘that of my dear grandfather’ or ‘that of my sister Lesley’s boyfriend Harold’, even if he does go on to live his life ‘with truth, industry and selfless devotion according to the moral teachings of the Talmud’. Eliot’s concluding ‘Thank you’ – the last words of the film – is not only ironic but has a double addressee. It is directed at both the dinner-dance guests and the viewers of Rosenthal’s television play. This address challenges the television audience to dissociate itself from the audience within the play, who do not know what has taken place either at the level of plot or in enabling Eliot to consider himself ‘grown up’. Most of the members of the public who wrote to Rosenthal about his play were unable thus to disassociate themselves from the world of the play. As Sarah Segrue puts it, ‘Those who criticised it were in a way like the parents – concerned with the superficiality of the occasion.’50 The Jewish letter-writers were afflicted by ‘hurt’ and ‘embarrassment’ in the absence of positive images of Jews, while the non-Jewish ones equally responded to representation as if it were reality, but with quaint enthusiasm, as in the following: ‘I don’t suppose you would know of a real-life Bar Mitzvah that I could attend … I have always been interested in anything Jewish but I have no Jewish friends at present.’ Another correspondent urged Rosenthal to ‘continue to make more films on the

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184  Jack Rosenthal Jewish Way of Life bringing us the gentiles closer to you. I am a great admirer of your people, so family conscious and loyal to each other.’ The last estimate ignores the evidence of the play itself, in contrast to one of the Jewish correspondents who, in complaining about the Greens’ unfamilial ‘constant bickering and back-biting’,51 over-valued the play’s evidence. Both views continue the confusion of drama with documentary. While gentile enthusiasm constitutes one kind of allosemitism, the play’s critics manifest a specifically Jewish allosemitism in their reluctance to see Jewishness represented with any kind of imaginative leeway. At the play’s end we see the dancing begin and the chatter from the dinner-dance continues over a cut to a very different scene as the credits roll. The camera tracks across a darkened living-room, past such objects as Sabbath candlesticks, a pot-plant, and bar mitzvah greetings cards, to a close-up of Eliot’s bar mitzvah photograph on the mantelpiece. The camera rests on the spotlit photograph and we hear applause from the dinner-dance. Here, realism and symbolism coexist. This scene is for the audience’s eyes only, and does not appear to take place in real time or space. The focus on Eliot’s portrait, in which – the image of a perfect and untroubled bar mitzvah boy – he wears yarmulke and tallis and holds an open book, is both a comic resolution and an ironic coda to the play. The humour and suspense of Bar Mitzvah Boy have depended throughout on Eliot’s impassive and enigmatic demeanour and it is with this image of him that we are left.

Conclusion The two plays in this chapter represent elements of Anglo-Jewish life using different techniques. While The Evacuees presents Jewishness and Englishness separately, Bar Mitzvah Boy derives its comedy from a British–Jewish synthesis. This difference is partly due to dramatic imperatives. As its title suggests, The Evacuees is about urban Jewish life as it is forced into interaction with a more rural gentile world. The schoolteacher Mr Goldstone tells his charges that most of their fosterparents won’t be Jewish but it will not be a sin to eat non-kosher food because of the war – yet having to eat pork becomes a symbol of exile for Danny and Neville. Bar Mitzvah Boy is set within a more self-contained world, in which the only interaction with non-Jews takes place in Eliot’s conversations with Denise, and one in which Jewishness and Britishness are in any case more ‘blended’. Such blending takes place at the level of class and social formations. At the dinner-dance Cliff Richard’s

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Anglo-Jewish plays  185 hit ‘Congratulations’ accompanies the entry of Eliot and his parents into the dance-hall, rather than ‘Sholem Aleichem’ as in the stage direction. ‘Congratulations’ is a typically British song by a notoriously Christian performer, one which came second in the Eurovision Song Contest of 1968. Enlisting it for a bar mitzvah in preference to the Hebrew song that traditionally greets the Sabbath constitutes a stark instance of the play’s ‘Jewishing’ of Englishness, to amend David Ruderman’s phrase.52 The dialogic representation of Jewish life in Britain in Rosenthal’s plays arises necessarily from the diasporic nature of the community. Voices are characterised by the accents of at least two cultures. Once more the particular form such dialogism takes has a dramatic purpose. Despite their immersion in Jewish concerns, such that Eliot’s bar mitzvah is ‘the biggest day of their lives’, Rita and Victor Green are not represented in terms of the traditional diasporic trope of interest in events in Israel or a relation to a metaphorical promised land.53 Rather, the Greens are exclusively concerned with British life. The topical details which always characterise Rosenthal’s plays appear here in reduced form, as befits a Play for Today – there are fleeting references to such phenomena as McAlpine’s construction company, Pan’s People from Top of the Pops, and the strikes of the mid-1970s. In this way Bar Mitzvah Boy contrasts with Rosenthal’s sitcom Sadie, It’s Cold Outside, broadcast a year earlier, in which omnipresent topicality is both crucial to its humour and inevitably constitutes an element of its ephemerality. Sadie, It’s Cold Outside includes numerous satirical comments about the Conservative politician Sir Keith Joseph, and implicit references to the Yom Kippur War of 1973 in relation to ‘the Arabs quadrupling the price of oil’. On the other hand, a caustic comment about Keith Joseph in the script of Bar Mitzvah Boy does not appear in the televised play, while central contemporary events in the Middle East are conspicuous by their absence. No mention is made of the Yom Kippur War, or the Israel Defence Force’s raid on a hijacked aeroplane at Entebbe in 1976, nor the United Nations resolution of 1973 stating that ‘Zionism is a form of racism.’ Israel is mentioned only once in Bar Mitzvah Boy, when Victor is indignant at Rita’s idea of giving flowers to the rabbi’s wife: ‘Certainly give her a bouquet! Give everybody a bouquet! Plant trees for them in Israel!’ This represents not a typically diasporic but a thoroughly blended lower-middle-class Anglo-Jewishness, in the form of Victor’s parsimony clashing with Rita’s concern to do the right thing. Unlike Rosenthal’s later play Bye, Bye, Baby, where class and Jewishness are represented in separate realms, in Bar Mitzvah Boy the details of the Greens’ class standing are those of a specifically Jewish history. In The Evacuees, Anglo-Jewish life is at a different formative moment

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186  Jack Rosenthal thirty years earlier. Although Grandpa Wax in Bar Mitzvah Boy is called ‘Zaidy’ by his grandchildren and speaks with Yiddish inflections – ‘Bless his little pipick!’ (navel), he cries to Eliot – there is not the same sense of recent immigration as there is with Grandma in The Evacuees. She speaks a fully fledged Yiddish and attracts Danny’s tearful anger during an air-raid for ‘spouting German’, to which she replies that ‘All the Yiddishe talk Yiddish – that’s why they’re Yiddishe.’ Such an outdated notion of Jewishness accompanies Grandma’s other habits of lighting the Sabbath candles with covered head and spitting three times against bad luck. In this way some elements of Jewishness in The Evacuees are represented without significant dialogic engagement with Englishness. The culmination of this takes place in the Millers’ cellar during an airraid. Sarah refuses Grandma’s offer of chicken soup, and is confused when her mother-in-law produces a pan: sarah: You won’t take no for an answer, will you! grandma: It’s a different pan, what you talk? This one’s milkadicky.

Grandma proceeds to put the pan on her head as a helmet. The joke here relies on Grandma’s adherence to kosher food laws about separating milk and meat. The fleishedik pan for meat is in use for the chicken soup, so she has to use the milchedik one, meant for dairy, as her headgear. So little dialogic engagement does this incident have with Englishness that it is in danger of losing its audience, however successfully constructed that audience may be as Jewish-identified.54 However, in general Rosenthal’s Anglo-Jewish plays reverse the historian Colin Richmond’s remark that Englishness is always equated with non-Jewishness.55 Instead, Rosenthal shows that Englishness may be expressed as Jewishness.

Notes 1 As Sander Gilman argues, according to the myth of Jewish intellectual superiority ‘intelligence compensates for Jewish physical inferiority’ (Smart Jews, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1996, p. 179). 2 Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern’, in Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus, eds, Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’, Cambridge: Polity Press 1998, p. 143. 3 Bye, Bye, Baby Story Outline, Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, BYEB/b:4, p. 1. 4 Quoted in Madeleine Kingsley, ‘“I had thought of calling the play I am a Fountain Pen”’, Radio Times 11 September 1976. Rosenthal adds defensively, ‘I hope people won’t think I’m returning to a hobby-horse’ in following The Evacuees with Bar Mitzvah Boy. 5 David Sonin, ‘Growing up is so very hard to do’, Jewish Chronicle 8 November 1992.

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Anglo-Jewish plays  187 6 See the Introduction to Sheila Spector’s edited volume, British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2002, p. 2. 7 Indeed, the drink was changed by Rosenthal in the rehearsal script by hand at a late stage from ‘shandy’ to ‘egg flip’, while ‘tight’ became ‘tiddly’, to add humorous but crucially girlish specificity to Beryl’s confession of carnal thoughts. 8 Jack Rosenthal, quoted in Henry Fenwick, ‘The war that Jack relived’, Radio Times 27 February 1975. 9 Jack Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal: A Life in Six Acts, London: Robson Books 2005, pp. 215–16. 10 EVAC/a. 11 Rosenthal, quoted in Fenwick, ‘The war that Jack relived’. 12 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 35. 13 All stage directions quoted are from Jack Rosenthal, Three Award-Winning Television Plays: Bar Mitzvah Boy, The Evacuees, Spend, Spend, Spend, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1978. 14 David Ruderman, Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2000. 15 Michael Frayn, letter of 9 March 1975, Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, EVAC/a. 16 Carol Allen, ‘Another enjoyable piece of nostalgia’, Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, EVAC/b. 17 Fenwick, ‘The war that Jack relived’, p. 17. 18 Robert Wilson, ‘On the day war broke out’, Daily Express 4 September 1974. 19 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 215. 20 Allen, ‘Another enjoyable piece of nostalgia’, cites the Fair Isle jumpers worn by all the children as markers of ‘faithful research’ into boys’ wardrobes of the 1930s, while a member of the public wrote to Rosenthal to note that these jumpers were too much in evidence for the time (EVAC/a). 21 Rosenthal, quoted in Fenwick, ‘The war that Jack relived’. 22 Wilson, ‘On the day war broke out’; Fenwick, ‘The war that Jack relived’. 23 Kingsley, ‘“I had thought of calling the play I am a Fountain Pen”’. Reviewers were also sceptical: Benny Green in the Jewish Chronicle describes Rosenthal’s representation of the Miller boys’ plight as ‘gilding the lily’ of the evacuation experience (‘Love not war’, 14 March 1975). 24 Fenwick, ‘The war that Jack relived’. 25 Allen, ‘Another enjoyable piece of nostalgia’. 26 Rosenthal quoted in Fenwick, ‘The war that Jack relived’. 27 Sergio Angelini, ‘The Evacuees’, Screenonline www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/ 1129198/index.html, visited 27.4.07. 28 Jane Humber, ‘Many truths in TV play’, Drama Scripts Collection, EVAC/b. 29 Smash! was staged at the Richmond Theatre, London, in 1981. See also my ‘”It’ll make ashenblotty of the seating plan!”: British-Jewishness in Jack Rosenthal’s Bar Mitzvah Boy’, Jewish Culture and History, 8 (2) autumn 2006, pp. 1–28. 30 Quoted in Kingsley, ‘”I had thought of calling the play I am a Fountain Pen”’. 31 Jack the Lad (Randall Wright), Omnibus, BBC 1 23 June 1997. 32 Quoted in ‘Heathman’s Diary’, Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, BARB/b 1976. 33 ‘Introduction: in conversation with Jack Rosenthal’, Jack Rosenthal, P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang and Other TV Plays, ed. Alison Leake, London: Longman 2004 [1984], p. vi. 34 All stage directions quoted are from Rosenthal, Three Award-Winning Television Plays. Denise seems to be anticipating the double entendre in the title of the television presenter Julian Clary’s autobiography, A Young Man’s Passage (London:

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188  Jack Rosenthal Ebury Press 2005). 35 Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000, Berkeley: University of California Press 2002, p. 258. 36 Ibid., pp. 229–41. 37 Rita Felski, ‘Nothing to declare: identity, shame, and the lower middle class’, PMLA 115 (January 2000), pp. 33–46: 40. 38 See for instance Mary O’Malley’s Play for Today Oy Vey Maria (1977), about a mixed marriage between Catholic and Jew; while the eponymous hero of Bernard Kops’s Play for Today Moss (1975) is an East End miser. 39 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 217. 40 See Bryan Cheyette, ‘Introduction’, Contemporary Jewish Writing in Britain and Ireland: An Anthology, London: Peter Halban 1998, on ‘the assumption that Jews were profoundly materialist and outside the pantheon of culture’ (p. xvi). 41 See the 60 letters in the Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, BARB/a; all quotations are from this source. 42 Rosenthal, By Jack Rosenthal, p. 221. 43 FH, ‘Not the shool but the dinner dance’, BARB/b. 44 Victoria Radin, ‘Everything bar the mitzva’, Jewish Chronicle 17 September 1976. 45 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984, p. 74. 46 Ibid. 47 Quoted in Sander Gilman, The Case of Sigmund Freud, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1993, p. 88. 48 Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body, New York: Routledge 1991, pp. 62–3. 49 All quotations from BARB/a. 50 Sarah Segrue, MA dissertation ‘A consideration of Jack Rosenthal’s approach to television writing’, May 1979, Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, 2/11/1, p. 10. Segrue cites an interview she conducted with Rosenthal. 51 All quotations from BARB/a. 52 Ruderman, Jewish Enlightenment, p. 240, on the ‘Englishing’ of Jewishness. 53 For an instance of this diasporic trope see Mike Leigh’s 2005 play Two Thousand Years, which portrays British Jews almost entirely in terms of their relationship to Israel; and Bryan Cheyette, ‘”Ineffable and usable”: towards a diasporic BritishJewish writing’, Textual Practice 10 (2) 1996, pp. 295–313. 54 See Humber, ‘Many truths in TV play’, who implicitly views this incident as an example of what Henry Bial calls ‘double coding’: ‘How many Gentile viewers, I wonder, got the joke about the grandmother sticking her head in the milk-only saucepan?’ Bial describes double coding in relation to Fiddler on the Roof as the offer of two different messages, one to Jewish and one to non-Jewish audience members, and The Evacuees strays near to such double coding at this moment (Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2005, p. 3). 55 Colin Richmond, ‘Englishness and Medieval Anglo-Jewry’, in Tony Kushner, ed., The Jewish Heritage in British History: Englishness and Jewishness, London: Frank Cass 1992, p. 56.

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Appendix: list of television programmes

Original television plays and films And for My Next Trick, BBC 2 Thirty Minute Theatre, tx. 3 April 1972 Another Sunday and Sweet F.A., dir. Michael Apted, Granada, tx. 9 January 1972 Auntie’s Niece, dir. John Gorrie, BBC 1, tx. 2 March 1977 Bag Lady, dir. John Henderson, Central TV/Thames, tx. 11 December 1989 Bar Mitzvah Boy, dir. Michael Tuchner, BBC1 Play for Today, tx. 14 September 1976 Big Sid, dir. Les Chatfield, Granada, tx. 18 January 1975 Bye, Bye, Baby, dir. Edward Bennett, Channel Four, tx. 3 November 1992 The Chain, dir. Jack Gold, Quintet/Film Four International, Channel Four 1984 Cold Enough for Snow, dir. Piers Haggard, BBC 1, tx. 31 December 1997 Compensation Alice, dir. Patrick Dromgoole, ABC TV, tx. 1 July 1967 A Day to Remember, dir. Pedr James, Channel Four, tx. 21 December 1986 Eskimo Day, dir. Piers Haggard, BBC 1, tx. 5 April 1996 The Evacuees, dir. Alan Parker, BBC 1 Play for Today, tx. 5 March 1975 Fools on the Hill, dir. David Giles, BBC, tx. 27 October 1986 Green Rub, dir. Howard Baker, Granada, tx. 22 November 1963 Hot Fat, dir. Derek Bennett, BBC 1 Play for Today, tx. 21 February 1974 The Knowledge, dir. Bob Brooks, Euston Films/ITV, tx. 27 December 1979 London’s Burning, dir. Les Blair, LWT, tx. 7 December 1986 Mr Ellis Versus the People, dir. June Howson, Granada, tx. 16 July 1974 Moving Story, dir. Roger Bamford and Andrew Grieve, ABTV/Carlton tx. 26 May 1994 The Night Before the Morning After, dir. Kim Mills, ABC TV, tx. 2 April 1966 Pie in the Sky, dir. Claude Whatham, Granada, tx. 8 November 1963 Polly Put the Kettle On, dir. Michael Lindsay-Hogg, LWT, tx. 23 June 1974 P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang, dir. Michael Apted, Channel Four, tx. 3 November 1982 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill, dir. Mike Newell, Granada, tx. 11 January 1976

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190  Appendix: list of television programmes Ready When You Are, Mr McGill, dir. Paul Seed, WTTV/SKY/ITV, tx. 26 December 2005 Sleeping Sickness, dir. John Henderson, Central TV/Thames, tx. 11 February 1991 Spaghetti Two-Step, dir. David Cunliffe, Yorkshire TV, tx. 18 January 1977 Spend, Spend, Spend, dir. John Goldschmidt, BBC 1 Play for Today, tx. 15 March 1977 There’ll Almost Always Be an England, dir. Quentin Lawrence, Granada, tx. 30 July 1974 There’s a Hole in Your Dustbin, Delilah, dir. Michael Apted, Granada, tx. 30 September 1968 Well, Thank You, Thursday, dir. Brian Mills, Granada, tx. 25 January 1976 Wide-Eyed and Legless, dir. Richard Loncraine, BBC 1, tx. 5 September 1993 Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar, dir. Michael Apted, Granada, tx. 9 December 1968

Adaptations of plays and fiction And a Nightingale Sang, dir. Robert Knights, Tyne-Tees, tx. 17 April 1989, original play by C.P. Taylor The Devil’s Lieutenant, dir. John Goldschmidt, Channel Four, tx. 11 January 1984, original novel by Maria Fagyas Hindle Wakes, dir. June Howson and Laurence Olivier, Granada, tx. 19 December 1976, original play by Stanley Houghton Lucky Jim, dir. Robin Shepperd, ITV, tx. 11 April 2003, original novel by Kingsley Amis Mrs Capper’s Birthday, dir. Michael Ockrent, BBC, tx. 17 November 1985, original short story by Noël Coward

Original comedy series The Bulldog Breed, Granada 1962, 1 series The Dustbinmen, Granada 1969–70, 3 series The Lovers, Granada 1970–71, 2 series Sadie, It’s Cold Outside, Thames 1975, 1 series

Drama series originated London’s Burning, LWT 1988–2002 Moving Story, ABTV/Carlton 1994–95 Red Letter Day, Granada 1976

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Appendix: list of television programmes  191 Contributions to other series The Army Game, Granada 1963, 1 episode Bootsie and Snudge, Granada 1960–74, 4 episodes Comedy Playhouse BBC 1963, 3 episodes (The Chars; Picture of Innocence, with Harry Driver; On the Knocker) Coronation Street, Granada 1961–69, 129 episodes The Duchess of Duke Street, BBC 1976–77, 2 episodes Mrs Thursday, ATV 1966, 2 episodes The Odd Man, Granada 1963, 2 episodes Pardon the Expression, Granada 1965, 4 episodes Taxi!, BBC 1964, 20 episodes That Was the Week that Was, BBC 1962, first series The Verdict is Yours, Granada 1963, 2 episodes The Villains, Granada 1964, 2 episodes

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Select bibliography

Ang, Ien, Watching Dallas: Television and the Melodramatic Imagination, London: Routledge 1985 Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984 Barnett, Steve, and Emily Seymour, ‘A Shrinking Iceberg Travelling South’: Charting Trends in British Television, London: Campaign for Quality Television 1999 Bauman, Zygmunt, ‘Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern’, in Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus, eds, Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’, Cambridge: Polity Press 1998 Bignell, Jonathan, Stephen Lacey and Madeleine Macmurraugh-Kavanagh, eds, British Television Drama: Past and Future, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2000 Brandt, George, ed., British Television Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981 Brandt, George, British Television Drama in the 1980s, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993 Brunsdon, Charlotte, ‘Crossroads: notes on soap opera’, Screen 22 (4) 1981, pp. 32–7 Caughie, John, ‘Progressive television and documentary drama’, in Tony Bennett, Susan Boyd-Bowman, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott, eds, Popular Television and Film, London: BFI 1981 ——, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000 Caulfield, Max, Mary Whitehouse, London and Oxford: Mowbrays 1975 Cheyette, Bryan, ‘“Ineffable and usable”: towards a diasporic British-Jewish writing’, Textual Practice 10 (2) 1996, pp. 295–313 Cook, Jim, ed., Television Sitcom, London: BFI 1981 Cooke, Lez, British Television Drama: A History, London: BFI 2003 Creeber, Glen, Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen, London: BFI 2004 Dyer, Richard, Christine Geraghty, Marion Jordan, Terry Lovell, Richard Paterson and John Stewart, Coronation Street, London: BFI 1981

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Select bibliography  193 Dyer, Richard, Terry Lovell and Jean McCrindle, ‘Soap opera and women’, in Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan, eds, Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader, London: Arnold 1997 Eaton, Mick, ‘Television Situation Comedy’, in Tony Bennett, Susan BoydBowman, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott, eds, Popular Television and Film, London: BFI 1981 Endelman, Todd M., The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000, Berkeley: University of California Press 2002 Felski, Rita, ‘Nothing to declare: identity, shame, and the lower middle class’, PMLA 115 (January 2000), pp. 33–46 Feuer, Jane, ‘Melodrama, serial form and television today’, Screen 25 (1) 1984, pp. 4–17 Finch, John, ed., Granada Television: The First Generation, Manchester: Manchester University Press 2003 Gilman, Sander, The Case of Sigmund Freud, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1993 Gilman, Sander, The Jew’s Body, New York: Routledge 1991 ——, Smart Jews, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1996 Hoggart, Richard, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, with Specific Reference to Publications and Entertainment, London: Chatto & Windus 1957 Kay, Graeme, ed., Coronation Street: Celebrating Thirty Years, London: Boxtree 1990 Kuhn, Annette, ‘Women’s genres’, Screen 25 (1) 1984, pp. 18–28 Lawson, Mark, ‘Jack Rosenthal’, www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/cinema/features/ rosenthal-lawson.shtml Leigh, Mike, Two Thousand Years, London: Faber 2006 Lewisohn, Mark, The Radio Times Guide to Television Comedy, London: BBC Books 1998 Lipman, Maureen, Thank You for Having Me, London: Futura 1990 Little, Daran, The Coronation Street Story, London: Boxtree 1995 Longden, Deric, Diana’s Story, London: Corgi 1993 ——, Lost for Words, London: Corgi 1998 Murphy, Robert, Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI 1992 Neale, Steve, and Frank Krutnik, Popular Film and Television Comedy, London: Routledge 1990 Neame, Christopher, A Take on British TV Drama: Stories from the Golden Years, Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press 2004 Nicholson, Vivian, and Stephen Smith, Spend, Spend, Spend, London: Jonathan Cape 1977 Nown, Graham, Coronation Street: Twenty-Five Years, 1960–1985, London: Ward Lock 1985 Piepe, Anthony, Miles Emerson and Judy Lannon, Television and the Working Class, London: Saxon House 1975 Richmond, Colin, ‘Englishness and medieval Anglo-Jewry’, in Tony Kushner, ed., The Jewish Heritage in British History: Englishness and Jewishness, London: Frank Cass 1992

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194  Select bibliography Rowe, Kathleen, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press 1995 Ruderman, David, Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2000 Shubik, Irene, Play for Today: The Evolution of Television Drama, second edition, Manchester: Manchester University Press 2000 Spector, Sheila, ed., British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2002 Tibballs, Geoff, London’s Burning: Behind the Scenes with London’s Favourite Firefighters, London: Boxtree 1992 Vice, Sue, ‘“It’ll make ashenblotty of the seating plan!”: British-Jewishness in Jack Rosenthal’s Bar Mitzvah Boy’, Jewish Culture and History, 8 (2) autumn 2006, pp. 1–28 Warren, Tony, I Was Ena Sharples’ Father, London: Duckworth 1969 Whitehouse, Mary, A Most Dangerous Woman?, London: Lion 1982 ——, Who Does She Think She Is?, London: New English Library 1971 Woollacott, Janet, ‘Fictions and ideologies: the case of situation comedy’, in Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott, eds, Popular Culture and Social Relations, Milton Keynes: Open University Press 1986 Young, Jordan R., The Beckett Actor: Jack MacGowran, Beginning to End, London: Moonstone Press 1988

Documentary television films about Jack Rosenthal Jack the Lad, dir. Randall Wright, ITV Omnibus tx. 23 June 1997 Jack Rosenthal: The Voice of Television Drama, BBC 4 Timeshift, dir. Jo Shinner, tx. 15 March 2005

Radio broadcasts Rosenthal, Amy, adaptor, Jack Rosenthal’s Last Act, BBC Radio 4 July 2006 Rosenthal, Amy, adaptor, Tortoise, BBC Radio 4 December 2007 Rosenthal, Jack, Desert Island Discs interview, BBC Radio 4 1998, repeated 4 June 2004

Works by Jack Rosenthal (i) Books, screenplays and articles Rosenthal, Jack, Another Sunday and Sweet F.A., in The Television Dramatists, selected and introduced by Robert Muller, London: Paul Elek 1973

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Select bibliography  195 ——, By Jack Rosenthal: A Life in Six Acts, London: Robson Books 2005 ——, ‘The Chain’ with ‘The Knowledge’ and ‘Ready When You Are, Mr McGill’, London: Faber 1984 ——,‘P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang’, in First Love, London: Fontana Lions 1984, novelised versions of the films in the Channel Four series, by Jack Rosenthal, Julie Welch, Noella Smith and June Roberts ——, London’s Burning: The Screenplay of the Original Film of London’s Burning, London: Robson Books 1989 ——, ‘My First Script’, The Author, 109 (3) autumn 1998, p. 101 ——, P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang and Other TV Plays, ed. Alison Leake, London: Longman 1984 ——, Three Award-Winning Television Plays: Bar Mitzvah Boy, The Evacuees, Spend, Spend, Spend, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1978 ——, Wide-Eyed and Legless, eds Geoff Barton and Jane Christopher, London: Longman 1995

(ii) Feature films Captain Jack, Robert Young 1997, Viva/Granada Films The Chain, Jack Gold 1985, Rank/Quintet The Lovers!, Herbert Wise 1973, British Lion The Lucky Star, Max Fischer 1981, Caneuram P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang, Michael Apted 1982, Enigma/Goldcrest The Wedding Gift (Wide-Eyed and Legless in the UK), Richard Loncraine 1994, Island World/Miramax Yentl, with Barbra Streisand, 1983, UA/MGM

(iii) Theatre Bar Mitzvah Boy, musical, Her Majesty’s Theatre 1978 Bar Mitzvah Boy, musical, 92nd St Y, New York, 1987 Dear Anyone, musical, Cambridge Theatre 1983 Dreyfus, translation of Jean-Claude Grumberg’s play, Tricycle Theatre 2000 Our Gracie, Oldham Coliseum 1984 Smash!, Richmond Theatre 1981

(iv) Archives Maureen Lipman Papers, Special Collections, Western Bank Library, University of Sheffield Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, Special Collections, Western Bank Library, University of Sheffield

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Index

Agran, Linda, 72 Albasiny, John, 148 Alberge, Betty, 24 Alexander, Jean, 25 Allen, Carol, 174 Allen, Woody, 5 allosemitism, 166, 184 And for My Next Trick, 2 Andrews, Anthony, 168 Another Sunday and Sweet F.A., 3, 4, 33, 38–45, 47, 52, 54 antisemitism, 166 Apted, Michael, 34, 38, 59, 84, 148 Arden, Mark, 73 Are You Being Served?, 60 Arlott, John, 149–51, 153, 155 Armchair Theatre, ITV, 5 Armitage, Aileen, 105 Armstrong, Louis, 130 Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, 67 Austen, Jane, 7, 90 autobiography, 25, 147–64 passim, 158, 162–3, 164 n. 37, 168–9, 174–6 The Avengers, 2 Bag Lady, 6, 118, 127–31, 160, 162 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 181, 185, 186 Banks-Smith, Nancy, 71, 135, 158–9 Bannister, Trevor, 7, 60, 61 Bar Mitzvah Boy, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12 n. 3, 18, 29, 94, 108, 135, 147, 150,

Vice_12_Index.indd 197

151, 155, 162, 163, 165, 168, 171, 172, 176–86; musical, 176 Bass, Alfie, 80 Bauman, Zygmunt, 166 BBC, 3, 5, 37, 86, 97, 134, 162, 168 Beckett, Samuel, 11; Endgame, 61 Beckinsale, Richard, 1, 16, 64–5 Baker, Howard, 16 Barker, Ronnie, 99 Belcher, Joe, 114 Bennett, Alan, 10, 11; The History Boys, 11 Bennett, Edward, 152, 156 Best, George, 10 The Best, 10 Besterman, Paul, 173 Betjeman, John, 14 Bignell, Jonathan, 6 Billy Liar, 54 Black, Joe, 137 Black and White, 10 Blackadder, 9 Blackpool, 15, 16–21, 22, 27, 28, 30 n. 11, 169 Blair, Les, 72, 76, 79 Blake, William, ‘Jerusalem’, 34–5 Bleasdale, Alan, 5, 10; Boys from the Blackstuff, 6 Bootsie and Snudge, 80 Bradshaw, Peter, 11 Brandt, George, 12 n. 17 Britishness, see Englishness Broadbent, Jim, 102

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198  Index Broadcasting Act, 1990, 6 Brooks, Bob, 67 Brown, Duggie, 40 Brunsdon, Charlotte, 19 Bryant, Margot, 20 The Bulldog Breed, 15 Bye, Bye, Baby, 3, 4, 6, 18, 29, 69, 79, 91, 147, 152–7, 165–7, 185 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 11 Carlton TV, 67, 118, 159 Carol, Lynne, 20, 41 Carp, Gary, 169 Carson, Violet, 14, 30 n. 11 Carteret, Anna, 159 Castle, Barbara, 87 Caughie, John, 12 n. 27, 78 The Chain, 6, 9, 10, 19, 40, 75, 108, 118–25, 127 Channel Four, 2, 67, 148, 152 Chaplin, Ben, 152 Charles, Maria, 9, 11, 177 The Chars, 5 Chatfield, Les, 59, 84, 92 Chegwin, Keith, 53 Chopin, Frédéric, 44 Citizen Kane, 131 Clarke, Warren, 126 Clary, Julian, 110 n. 39, 187 n. 34 class, 7, 9, 17–19, 24–6, 29, 64–5, 74, 112, 116, 118–22, 126, 128, 131, 157, 160–1, 165, 167, 169–70 Cleland, John, Fanny Hill, 88 Clifford, Kim, 176 Clover, Charles, 58 Coffey, Denise, 35 Cold Enough for Snow, 6–7, 157–62 Cole, George, 94 Colne, Lancashire, 6, 34–6, 148 Cooper, Garry, 149 Cooper, Gary, 27 Cope, Kenneth, 17 Coronation Street, 1, 2, 4, 11, 14–32, 47, 169 Courtenay, Tom, 8, 137 Creeber, Glen, 12 n. 17

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cricket, 91, 150–1; see also Arlott, John Crossroads, 19 Crow, Angela, 4 Cruttenden, Alison, 148 Danby, John, 3 Davies, Philip, 126 A Day to Remember, 94–5, 106, 147 Dean, Dixie, 39, 43–4, 55, 56 n. 16 Denham, Maurice, 119 Derbyshire, Eileen, 14 Desert Island Discs, 158, 161 Dickens, Charles, 14, 129 The Discreet Charm of the ­Bourgeoisie, 99 Dorning, Robert, 80 drama documentary, 29, 75–80 Driver, Harry, 5, 25, 27, 58 Dunkley, Chris, 7 Dunn, Clive, 80 The Dustbinmen, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 19, 28, 29, 40, 45, 58, 59–66, 69, 70, 73, 80, 81, 92, 125, 154, 165, 169, 182 Duttine, John, 4, 113 EastEnders, 136 Eaton, Mick, 91, 99 Ebert, Roger, 107 Eckersley, Peter, 11, 13 n. 25, 25 Educating Rita, 62 Eliot, T.S., The Waste Land, 130; ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, 158 Elphick, Michael, 68 Endelman, Todd, 177–8 Englishness, Britishness, 2, 33–57; and Jewishness, 5, 165–86 Eskimo Day, 6, 8, 9, 11, 29, 157–62 The Evacuees, 2, 3, 5, 8, 20, 29, 35, 135, 151, 165, 168–76, 183, 185–6 Extras, 8, 145 n. 5 ‘everyday surrealism’, 10, 11, 101, 104, 130, 158

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Index  199 Faith, Adam, 28 The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, 6 Fawlty Towers, 98, 101 Feast, Fred, 144 Finch, John, 15, 21, 25 Fischer, Max, 5 Fleet, James, 158 Flemyng, Jason, 154, 156 Fletcher, Freddie, 43 football, 8, 33, 38–45, 48, 91, 117, 148, 160; Brian Clough, 97; Manchester City, 8, 60; Manchester United, 60, 161 see also Dixie Dean, Peter Kippax Ford, Mick, 67 Forsyth, Bruce, 28, 113 Fraser, Bill, 80 Frayn, Michael, 172–3 Freud, Sigmund, 75 Friedan, Betty, 93 Fry, Stephen, 157 Gaitskell, Hugh, 28 Garber, Marjorie, 65 George and Mildred, 56 n. 6, 110 n. 29 Geraghty, Christine, 15 German, Germany, 20, 154–5, 167 Gervais, Ricky, 8, 11 Gilman, Sander, 182 Going Straight, 99 Gold, Jack, 1 golden age, 1, 6, 134–46 passim Granada, 2, 4, 14, 15, 19, 29, 38, 49, 54, 59, 84, 134, 136, 168 Grant, Linda, 89 Griffiths, Richard, 1, 20, 46 Guinness, Alec, 1, 157, 158 Haberfield, Graham, 8, 60 Hancock, Sheila, 1 Hancock, Tony, 81 n. 5 Happy Ever After, 101 Hare, David, 5 Hargreaves, Christine, 14

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Harty, Russell, 14, 97 Hattersley, Roy, 14 Hawthorne, Nigel, 1, 67, 68, 119 Hazeldine, James, 77, 79 Heath, Edward, 29, 94 Hepton, Bernard, 50, 92 Herman, Mark, 176 Hill, Bernard, 120 Hillsborough, 77 Hilton, Derek, 54 Hitler, Adolf, 34, 167, 173, 174 Hoggart, Richard, 17–18 Holden, Amanda, 1, 136–46 passim Hong Kong, 51–2, 55 Horan, Gerard, 76 Hot Fat, 24 Howard, Laura, 159 Howarth, Jack, 14 Howson, June, 45 Humber, Jane, 175, 188 n. 54 I Love Lucy, 98 Innocent, Harold, 60 Interview Day, 164 Isaacs, Jeremy, 168 ITV, 5, 6, 17, 37, 59, 162 ITV Playhouse, 5, 34 Jack the Lad, documentary, 3 Jack Rosenthal, documentary, 165 Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, 10, 168 James, Sid, 58 Jews, Jewishness, 2, 29, 70–1, 165–88; Israel and disapora, 185; see also allosemitism, antisemitism, Englishness Joseph, Sir Keith, 95, 97, 100, 110 n. 35, 185 Joseph, Lesley, 70, 82 n. 25, 96 Joyce, James, 3, 11; Exiles, 3; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 12 n. 7 Joyce, Yootha, 35–6, 54, 110 n. 29 Keats, John, Endymion, 11, 27, 61

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200  Index Kipling, Rudyard, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, 123 Kippax, Peter, 148 Kipperbang: Praying for a Kiss, 149 Kissinger, Henry, 52, 94 The Knowledge, 1, 6, 10, 40, 45, 58, 67–72, 80, 81, 108, 162, 165–8, 176, 182 Knights, L.C., 3 Kops, Bernard, Moss, 188 n. 38 Kretzmer, Herbert, 67, 77 Lambert, Verity, 67 Lancashire, Geoffrey, 2, 11, 84 Landis, Harry, 178 Last, Richard, 49–50 Lawrence, D.H., Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 85 Lawrence, Quentin, 49 Lawson, Dennis, 119 Lawson, Mark, 5, 10, 159, 162 Leach, Rosemary, 92, 95 Lebor, Stanley, 144 Leigh, Mike, 5, 12 n. 15, 188 n. 53 Leslie, Arthur, 17 Lewisohn, Mark, 125 Lipman, Maureen, 1, 5, 67, 70, 82 n. 25, 88, 112, 127–31, 135–8, 157, 159, 161–2, 163 n. 7, 169, 179 Lister, Renny, 17 Littler, Susan, 4, 40, 113 Liverpool, 6, 156 Livings, Henry, 60 Loncraine, Richard, 101 Longden, Deric, 5, 101, 104–5 London, 5, 36, 67–72, 113, 115, 118–25, 136, 148, 161 London Weekend Television, 72, 78 London’s Burning, 2, 8, 29, 68, 72–80, 162, 176 The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, 33, 40 Lovell, Terry, 98, 110 n. 29 The Lovers, 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 16, 26, 27, 35, 42, 46, 54, 59, 62,

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84–92, 93, 95, 97, 99, 107–8, 168, 169 The Lovers!, feature film, 84 Lowe, Arthur, 14 Lowrie, Philip, 18 The Lucky Star, 5 Lukàcs, Georg, 51 Lynch, Alfred, 34 Lynn, Jack, 181 Lynn, Jonathan, 68, 165, 167, 177 Lytham St Anne’s, 42, 168–76 passim McCartney, Paul, 87, 168 McCrae, Gordon, 39 McDonald, Gary, 74 MacGowran, Jack, 60, 61 McKern, Leo, 118 McMaster, Christopher, 21 Macmillan, Harold, 130 Maiden, 10 Man About the House, 56 n. 6, 85 Manchester, 3, 5, 18, 44, 85, 136, 153, 154, 158, 161, 167, 168–76 passim Mangan, Stephen, 139, 145 n. 18 Mankowitz, Wolf, 168 Marber, Patrick, 157 Marx, Groucho, 11 Marx, Karl, 50 Mason, Margery, 169 Massey, Anna, 123 Mastermind, 126 Mercer, David, 11 Midler, Bette, 125 Miller, Brian, 45 Mitchell, Warren, 59, 100, 120 Monroe, Marilyn, 152–3, 155 Moody, Ron, 1, 9, 45 Mort, Ray, 170 Moss, Jennifer, 21 Moving Story, 125–7 Mr Ellis Versus the People, 9, 21, 29, 30, 33, 45–9 Muggeridge, Malcolm, 65–6, 86

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Index  201 navy, 20, 29, 152–7 passim Neame, Christopher, 163 n. 10 Nedwell, Robin, 90 Newell, Mike, 136 Nicholson, Keith, 112–18 Nicholson, Vivian, 5, 112–18 Nighy, Bill, 141 No Place Like Home, 101 Norville, Herbert, 119 Nova magazine, 88–9 Odone, Cristina, 158 The Office, 8 O’Malley, Mary, Oy Vey Maria, 188 n. 38 On the Knocker, 5 Parfitt, Judy, 120 Parker, Alan, 1, 168, 173 Phillips, Sally, 140 Phoenix, Pat, 15 Pilkington Committee Report, 2 Pinter, Harold, 11 Play for Today, BBC, 5, 24, 117, 135, 168, 176, 185 Playboy, 88–9 Please, Sir, 59 Polly Put the Kettle On, 8 Porridge, 85, 99 Posta, Adrienne, 178 Potter, Dennis, 5, 10, 11 Powell, Enoch, 45, 56 n. 18 Powell, Vince, 11, 25 Pringle, Bryan, 19, 60 The Prisoner, 2 P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang, 6, 8, 11, 20, 22, 24, 25, 29, 60, 91, 108, 148–52, 162 Purser, Philip, 27, 54 Puttnam, David, 148 Quintet Films, 118 Radcliffe, Daniel, 11 Radin, Victoria, 180 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill,

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1976 and 2005, 6, 7, 9, 11, 22, 25, 40, 47, 97, 134–46, 159, 162 Redmond, Maria, 153 Reid, Anne, 17 Richard, Cliff, ‘Congratulations’, 184–5 Richmond, Colin, 186 Roache, William, 17 Roberts, Veronica, 45 Rogers, Katharine, 74, 75 La Ronde, 119 Room at the Top, 33 Rose, Adele, 27–9 passim Rosenthal, David, 169 Rosenthal, Leah, 2–3 Rosenthal, Sam, 2–3 Ross, David, 159 The Royle Family, 11, 85, 96 Ruderman, David, 171, 185 Sadie, It’s Cold Outside, 5, 11, 19, 25, 26, 39, 42, 49, 52, 84, 92–101, 107–8, 150, 185 Salford, 6, 59, 165 Sandauer, Artur, 166 Sandiford, Benedict, 159 satire, 25, 47–8, 78, 97, 134 Saturday Night Theatre, ITV, 38 Scanlon, Hugh, 29 Scott, Ann, 162 Scott, Joan, 90 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 63–5 Seed, Paul, 136 Segrue, Sarah, 183 Serember, Steven, 169 serial drama, 2, 134–46 passim Shakespeare, William, Julius Caesar, 183 Shaps, Cyril, 180 Sheffield, 3, 4, 102, 103 Shepherd, Jack, 11, 141 Shivas, Mark, 173 Simon, Neil, 5 single play, the, 2, 33, 134–46 passim

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202  Index situation comedy, 5, 10, 26, 59, 91, 97–8 Sky TV, 2, 134 Sleeping Sickness, 127 Smith, Stephen, 112, 117 soap opera, 2 see also Coronation Street Solo, 98 Spaghetti Two-Step, 24, 54 Spear, Bernard, 177 Spear, Eric, 21–2, 31 n. 22 Speed, Doris, 11, 20 Spend, Spend, Spend, 4, 5, 10, 24, 112–18, 119, 122, 153 Spitting Image, 127 Steadman, Alison, 148 Steptoe and Son, 61, 99 Streisand, Barbra, 10 Steyn, Jeremy, 176 Sudell, Marjorie, 46, 172 Suschitzky, Wolfgang, 124 Swift, David, 4, 38, 50 Taylforth, Kim, 67 Television Act, 1964, 2 Terry and Julian, 110 n. 39 Terry and June, 92, 101 Thames Television, 67, 92, 159 That Was the Week, That Was, 5 Thatcher, Margaret, 6, 94, 122 There’ll Almost Always Be an England, 33, 45, 49–53, 54 There’s a Hole in Your Dustbin, Delilah, 5, 59, 60–3, 69 The Thick of It, 77 This is Your Life, 93 Thomas, Sian, 105 Till Death Us Do Part, 59, 65, 100 Tortoise, 145 n. 18 Tynan, Kenneth, O Calcutta!, 109 n. 11 University Challenge, 120 Usher, Shaun, 92, 112, 118

Vice_12_Index.indd 202

Vardy, Mike, 92 Vertigo, 149–50 Vico, Giambattista, 10, 121, 127 Vietnam war, 28 Walker, Alexander, 118, 122, 124 Walters, Julie, 102, 104 Warren, Tony, 4, 11, 15, 18, 25–8, 29 Warwick, Richard, 34 The Wedding Gift, 102, 106 Wednesday Play, 5 Weiland, Paul, Sixty-Six, 11 Well, Thank You, Thursday, 29, 45, 135, 165 Whishaw, Ben, 1, 11, 142 Whitehouse, Mary, Clean Up Television, 59, 65; National Viewers’ and Listeners’ ­Association, 37; Who Does She Think She Is, 66 Whitelaw, Billie, 120 Wide-Eyed and Legless, 4, 5, 84, 101–7, 108 Wilcox, Paula, 1, 62, 85 Wilde, Oscar, The Importance of Being Earnest, 129, 130 Wilkinson, Tom, 7, 159 Wilson, Harold, 94, 107 Windsor, Frank, 60 Wing-Davey, Mark, 144 Wise, Herbert, 84 Withers, Margery, 169 Wolf, Rita, 120 Wolfe, Tom, 96 Woodvine, John, 61, 63 Wylton, Tim, 60 Youens, Bernard, 25 Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar, 3, 6, 24, 33, 34–8, 52, 54 Zinneman, Fred, High Noon, 27

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