Monday 2 September 2019

A Comedy On This Day: I Didn't Know You Cared - A Knitter In The Family (3 September 1975)


LES: Look at it all. Gloom, muck, desolation. Ugliness.

MORT: Aye. Bloody marvellous, in't it?

 Only the second episode, and the studio audience are audibly subdued and hesitant at times. You can tell that they're trying to orient themselves around what sort of comedy this is and how it works. It has no familiar stars in it, and the rhythm and object of the jokes feels different to anything else. Peter Tinniswood was one of those writers with his own distinct idiom (none of his characters speak like people in any other programme) and I Didn't Know You Cared doesn't try to iron it out, making a virtue of this peculiarity instead. It's also very Northern/ Yorkshire and working-class, and so presumably harder for the Television Centre audience to quickly identify with.
 
 The audience become more won over by a bravura performance by Vanda Godsell as Carter's soon-to-be mother-in-law. Mrs Partington is a truly appalling woman, mean, judgemental and uninterested in others, traits that are revealed in a near-incessant monologue. Watching and understanding this character makes more sense of the rest of the world depicted in I Didn't Know You Cared, explaining why these menfolk are so gloomy and fatalistic about dealing with women.
 
 Personally, the one thing that really made me laugh in this episode was it's most extreme statement, when a despondent Uncle Mort reflects that, "Still, there's a lot to be said for death. I'll bet it's not half so boring as life."

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