Thursday 4 April 2019

A Comedy On This Day: Three Piece Suite (5 April 1977)


 From the classy BBC2 Diana Rigg portmanteau sketch series...
 Come in No. 1 (Carla Lane). Rigg plays the attendant at the Ladies’ Powder Room at the Savoy Hotel. Four distressed guests lock themselves in to cubicles and, in an exercise in closed-off group counselling, the attendant mediates between them. This sort of demonstration of versatility will always please audiences who have come to admire a star, but I’d much rather have seen a Cockney char played by a better-suited actress. Also, a sketch about a woman talking to four locked doors proves visually problematic to realise, with a sequence of multi-camera close-ups of four cubicle number plates in lieu of talking heads.

 This Situation appears to have been Tina Brown’s only produced screenplay. On this evidence she was wise to concentrate on the journalism. Rigg plays George Baker’s mistress, appalled to discover that when he leaves his wife he immediately moves all of his baggage in, both physical and emotional (in the form of his mother, son and son’s ‘punk rocker’ daughter Toyah Wilcox). This very shouty sketch unwisely starts off at a hysterical pitch, and then escalates the situation far too fast, without any quieter moments of counterpoint.

 Charlotte Bingham and Terence Brady’s All In The Mind is a bit more like it, although the two preceding sketches hadn’t done much to engender a sense of goodwill in this viewer. Freddie Jones and Diana Rigg are a psychiatrist and his patient, each a rather shady character with something to hide. Hearing them expose their neuroses is funny line-by-line, although the sketch as a whole leads up to a punch line reversal of expectations that comes as no great surprise.

 The episode as a whole isn’t much of a showcase for Diana Rigg’s comic talents. She comes across as a broad and showy star performer, although none of the sketches do much to encourage a subtler reading.

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