Thursday 25 April 2019

A Comedy On This Day: Home To Roost - Bad Apples (26 April 1985)



 Perhaps the most undistinguished series that Eric Chappell wrote and yet his own personal favourite. I suppose that might be because (IIRC) it’s the only one that really deals with parents and children (something almost entirely absent from Rising Damp, The Bounder, Only When I Laugh, Duty Free, etc.). The first half of this second episode is exactly as you remember it being, with John Thaw's father nagging Reece Dinsdale's feckless son in unsurprising exchanges to little comic result.

 Things perk up considerably after the break when Henry takes Matthew to his old grammar school in the hope of enrolling him, and they encounter one of his old teachers, now the cane-wielding headmaster - a unique (surviving) sitcom appearance for Alfred Burke. He would have been about 65 when he recorded this, and his voice is just starting to get hoarser, bringing an interesting doomy cadence to lines such as, "I take it you have no objections to corporal punishment? I cane for swearing, smoking, spitting, horseplay, slack work, bullying and slovenliness. Apart from that, we're a fairly liberal regime."

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