This week, Ronnie Barker is wearing a
contemporary-looking blazer in wide stripes of several pastel colours that puts
me in mind of Neapolitan ice cream. Even more bang-on mid-eighties is Elaine
Paige's performance of 'Smoke Gets In Your Eyes'. The old standard has been
arranged as a modern-sounding power ballad with emotive guitar lines and moody
'Careless Whisper'-style saxophone solos. The singer is dressed in a baggy blue
satin jacket with black satin skirt, has a voluminous Princess Diana hairstyle and
pendulous earrings and - for no good reason - sits down on a step to sing to us
against a backdrop befogged with dry ice. The performance is topped and tailed
by close-ups of the saxophone and the hands playing it in the foreground with
Paige sat in the middle distance.
There's a parody of the Private Lives balcony scene, played between two burglars rather than Elyot and Amanda, making Barker's usual puns much more interesting than usual by hearing how they fit into a Coward idiom. Also a funny scene with Barker as an impatient waiter silently clearing away Corbett's courses before he's eaten them, that I'm guessing is by David Renwick (it has the feel of One Foot In The Grave). The positive effect of these imaginative sketches is then rather offset by one unfortunate blackface gag when a passing Rasta hails Corbett, covered in soot after putting his head and hands in a fireplace. "Heey maaan!" the dreadlocked passer-by hails Corbett, slapping his outstretched hands. You feel embarrassed for the black actor.
There's a parody of the Private Lives balcony scene, played between two burglars rather than Elyot and Amanda, making Barker's usual puns much more interesting than usual by hearing how they fit into a Coward idiom. Also a funny scene with Barker as an impatient waiter silently clearing away Corbett's courses before he's eaten them, that I'm guessing is by David Renwick (it has the feel of One Foot In The Grave). The positive effect of these imaginative sketches is then rather offset by one unfortunate blackface gag when a passing Rasta hails Corbett, covered in soot after putting his head and hands in a fireplace. "Heey maaan!" the dreadlocked passer-by hails Corbett, slapping his outstretched hands. You feel embarrassed for the black actor.
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