From the final series of the 'trouble at mill'
soap opera parody. Made six years after the original run, for Channel Four
rather than ITV, and (from memory) not quite so good as it had been.
This kind of rather cerebral comedy is the sort of thing that wins more awards than it does hearts. It make comedy out of elaborate plotting, experimentation with wordplay and register, and ornate visual gags in which one detail in the mise en scene eventually takes over the whole frame (such as a smoking fire that turns the screen grey, or a love scene between a craftsman painting a bomb and his girlfriend which ends with both covered in paint). Without anything much for me to latch on to emotionally, I find it easier to admire than to enjoy.
The WWII plot concerns the secret construction of a submarine, planned to sink a fishing boat in the Irish Sea in order to drag Eire into the war. Its the properties especially made for this storyline that made me smile when I was watching this; a fake German lifebelt to be left at the scene of the crime bearing two big swastikas and the letters "Das Boot" in gothic script; the submarine itself, an impractically boxy-looking Meccano thing, very briefly shown in a clever cutaway that makes it look quite convincing; the vital component that the villain has removed from the submarine - an enormous brass plug with a red switch.
This kind of rather cerebral comedy is the sort of thing that wins more awards than it does hearts. It make comedy out of elaborate plotting, experimentation with wordplay and register, and ornate visual gags in which one detail in the mise en scene eventually takes over the whole frame (such as a smoking fire that turns the screen grey, or a love scene between a craftsman painting a bomb and his girlfriend which ends with both covered in paint). Without anything much for me to latch on to emotionally, I find it easier to admire than to enjoy.
The WWII plot concerns the secret construction of a submarine, planned to sink a fishing boat in the Irish Sea in order to drag Eire into the war. Its the properties especially made for this storyline that made me smile when I was watching this; a fake German lifebelt to be left at the scene of the crime bearing two big swastikas and the letters "Das Boot" in gothic script; the submarine itself, an impractically boxy-looking Meccano thing, very briefly shown in a clever cutaway that makes it look quite convincing; the vital component that the villain has removed from the submarine - an enormous brass plug with a red switch.
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