Thursday 13 June 2019

A Comedy On This Day: You're Only Young Twice - Who's Calling? (14 June 1979)


 Cissie receives an obscene phone call. In order to make Miss Milton believe Cissie's story, Flora persuades the handyman to make a similar phone call to Miss Milton. I'm sorry, run that by me again? This series has some of the most hare-brained will-this-do? plotting that I've seen in any sitcom.

 I'm not particularly drawn towards edgy, 'dark', comedy but this is one storyline that would be considerably improved by full consideration of its unsettling implications. It only took a minute or so of watching this for me to start daydreaming about how it might be done. An old lady in second childhood answers the obscene caller in innocence and finds herself deriving pleasure from the experience - as realised by Samuel Beckett in the style of Krapp's Last Tape, say. A forceful old lady gets a handyman to making an obscene phone call against his will - that would have worked well as a sketch on Chris Morris' Blue Jam...

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