Thursday 2 May 2019

A Comedy On This Day: For The Love Of Ada - The Mortgage (3 April 1971)


 Now that their children's baby is due, Walter and Ada need to find a place of their own. The plotting of this episode is absolutely minimal, with Powell and Driver barely bothering to craft any of the reversals of expectation that any comedy scene requires to some extent. The fortune that the couple require to get their flat turns up through Ada just finding an old savings books. The subsequent disappointing reversal happens off-screen, when Walter goes to the bank - there wasn't any money in it after all, he reports.

 Strangely enough, this rudimentary plotting doesn't harm the show. Indeed, it’s actively preferable to the contrivances, coincidences and implausibilities that mar many comedies of this period. Because the programme's great strength lies in the characterisation of Walter and Ada, as realised through Irene Handl and Wilfred Pickles' unforced-feeling performances. They do feel genuinely like a actual couple, in a way that's quite rare. It doesn't really matter that the savings book story is so flimsy, because it’s how the couple respond to the disappointment that encourages viewer empathy. Really, you're happy to just watch them being themselves - the opening credits are superimposed over a studio shot of the pair on a bench reading a local newspaper together, and even without any dialogue its touching to observe them.

 Their costumes, and the way that Walter and Ada respond to each other remind me of my own (paternal) grandparents when I was a boy. They lived in Chiswick, so absolute Thames Television West London heartland... When did you stop seeing old people like them in London? That generation became thinner on the ground in the 1980s and had disappeared by the end of the century.

 Slightly disconcerting to see William Maxwell as a kindly vicar, when he went on to become Terry Sullivan's father in Brookside for many years.

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