This first episode of the fourth and final
series doesn't auger very well for the rest of it. Its an ambitious
rise-and-fall narrative; Wolfie is presented with the opportunity to become a
star by a showbiz impresario; then learns that he's trapped in a gilded cage,
miming to other people's songs and speaking scripted lines to promote a
ghost-written autobiography; rebels by speaking with his own voice, exposing
his idiocy to the world; gets dropped, back into the Tooting gutter.
Unfortunately, this sort of story really needs the opened-out form of a film (or the scatter-gun off-the wall Goodies approach) to work that well. As it is, what we get are a succession of scenes of Wolfie and his acolytes discussing their situation, while the interesting stuff happens almost entirely off-screen. These sequences (in an open prison cell and a - rather tatty-looking - luxury hotel suite) have an oddly temporary feel to them, with the sitcom not having a permanent base at this point. One short scene in a little corner of TVC of Wolfie being interviewed by Valerie Singleton on a Nationwide-type programme is as much as we see of his brief stardom.
Unfortunately, this sort of story really needs the opened-out form of a film (or the scatter-gun off-the wall Goodies approach) to work that well. As it is, what we get are a succession of scenes of Wolfie and his acolytes discussing their situation, while the interesting stuff happens almost entirely off-screen. These sequences (in an open prison cell and a - rather tatty-looking - luxury hotel suite) have an oddly temporary feel to them, with the sitcom not having a permanent base at this point. One short scene in a little corner of TVC of Wolfie being interviewed by Valerie Singleton on a Nationwide-type programme is as much as we see of his brief stardom.
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