It is ten years since Mel Smith died. This post reprints a piece I wrote for the Critical Studies In Television blog soon afterwards (but in a rather better proof-read version than the one that went up), and adds a new piece of my reflections from watching the studio recording tape of the pilot episode. Since I wrote the first piece, a DVD of Colin's Sandwich was released by Simply Media in 2014, but has long since been deleted.
1. Colin’s Sandwich (BBC 1988-90): Remembering forgotten television, remembering Mel Smith.
Starting work on the three year AHRC project ‘The History of Forgotten
TV Drama in the UK’ at Royal Holloway has led me to think a lot about to
what extent I remember television myself, and the reliability of my
memory.
A widespread false memory syndrome can afflict even ostensibly
well-remembered programmes. The experience of systematically watching
all 53 episodes of The Sweeney (ITV, Thames 1974-78), for
example, is one that often contradicts popular cultural memory of the
show. The parts of the programme that constitute what Nick Love
(director of the recent Sweeney film revival) describes as “an
iconic media brand” - the same few endlessly recycled quips and stunts
that make up the geezers-motors-and-birds cultural memory of the series -
do not constitute the majority of the programme as it actually was,
often pretty downbeat, dialectical about the purpose and value of
policing, and with a distinctively rueful feel.
If this is the case for such a well-known programme, how can we then
trust our own personal memories of the obscure and forgotten television
that we enjoyed, looked forward to seeing, cherished od memories of?
This question was in the back of my mind when a particular favourite
programme of my teenage years, the BBC2 sitcom Colin’s Sandwich
(1988-90) resurfaced on YouTube the other month, a few days after the
death of its star, Mel Smith. Although it gathered a reasonable amount
of publicity at the time of broadcast, Colin’s Sandwich is not a
programme that has passed into television history. Nobody will ever
write a Manchester University Press ‘Television Series’ monograph about
the career of its writers, Terry Kyan and Paul Smith. Unseen by myself
(or seemingly anyone else) since being repeated in 1992, I have never
subsequently heard anyone talk about it. The bits that I thought I
remembered vividly did not appear to be memories shared by anyone else,
even on Internet vintage TV forums. This obscurity has continued even
now that the programme is back in YouTube circulation (via authentic
eighties off-air VHS recordings with original BBC2 idents and
occasionally wobbly tracking) and - despite Mel Smith’s posthumously
raised profile – still only a few hundred people have watched them
online.
Mel Smith plays the everyman figure of Colin Watkins in the series, a
North London office worker in the complaints department of British Rail
with a rather arch girlfriend Jenny (Louisa Rix) – who you feel really
could be doing better than Colin – and some literary aspirations.
Smith’s lugubrious appearance, fanciful monologues of spiraling
absurdity, and the show’s shabby metropolitan setting led to much of its
initial publicity describing it as a Hancock’s Half Hour (BBC
Television, 1956-61) for the eighties. This turned out to be an unwise
strategy, as subsequent unenthused press coverage invariably then
concentrated on unfavourable comparisons to its revered antecedent.
The main reason why Colin’s Sandwich was commissioned by the BBC
appears to have been as a useful solo star vehicle for Smith, at the
time one of the BBC’s most popular comedians in partnership with Griff
Rhys Jones. Watching the show, it is almost impossible to imagine anyone
else playing Colin, but at the same time Mel Smith’s presence in every
scene does dominate the programme to a degree that threatens to
overpower it. Colin’s distinctive perception of the world and his place
within it is realised throughout the series via two particular dramatic
devices, both playing to particular strengths of the Smith persona and
performance style. Comic monologues occur frequently, increasingly
absurd rants sometimes delivered to others (occasionally - especially
during Colin’s best man speech at a wedding reception - with humiliating
consequences) and sometimes soliloquys by Colin alone in his flat.
Although these speeches always contain several really funny ideas, and
Smith is of course a very talented comic performer, they can become
repetitive, and slow down the narrative of each episode. Rather more
successful, and unexpected, is the continual use of voice-over to
represent Colin’s unspoken thoughts throughout scenes, usually unspoken
frustration and impatience, akin aurally if not visually to Channel 4’s Peep Show
(2003-2015). This bold device, hard to achieve in a sitcom recorded in
front of a live studio audience, displays Smith’s gifts for comic facial
expressions to their fullest extent, for example Colin attempting to
stifle a yawn during a protracted heart-to-heart conversation.
The second series of Colin’s Sandwich was screened in 1990 with
little fanfare, but is a noticeable step up from the first, a more
assured and emotionally mature programme that goes into unfamiliar comic
territory, particularly in its last two episodes in which Colin copes
(badly) with the death of his father, culminating in what I think is the
highlight of the series, Colin breaking down with grief on a
make-and-break French holiday with Jenny. I found the protracted eight
minute sequence of Colin making a scene in a restaurant unsettling to
watch in 1990, and am even more impressed with it after finally getting
to see it again in 2013, with the mounting sense of someone messing up a
very good thing dependent upon the patience with which the scene
develops, becoming progressively more unsettling and less funny without
breaking the viewer’s emotional engagement.
Now that Mel Smith is no longer alive, its hard not to read some
extra-textual poignancy into the character of Colin, especially as the
show is so evidently constructed as a star vehicle for him. Watching Mel
Smith appear as himself on chat shows, I always got a sense of someone
trapped in a rather tiresome star persona of gruff plain-speaking
funnyman. (A friend of mine went to a book signing for the Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book
in 1987, attended by Smith and other comedy luminaries of the time, and
noticed that every time he signed his name outrageous funnyman Mel
would say, “Good practice for wanking!” - not a particularly amusing
observation even when said just the once. When my friend reached Smith
he interrupted him and told him that he didn’t have to say it, causing
an embarrassed silence). But a cursory look into Mel Smith’s biography
reveals a considerable hinterland, working at the Royal Court Theatre as
an assistant director before turning to TV sketch comedy, and a
convincing straight role as a tough property developer in Tom Clarke’s
characteristically bleak serial Muck and Brass (Central, 1982).
Perhaps something of Smith’s own situation is worked into Colin’s
frustrated literary ambitions (which, crucially, are not delusional in
the series) and frustration with blokeish rituals. Certainly it’s a
comedy performance that still continues to make me laugh a lot, and
contains some surprising moments of grace and finesse.
As with a lot of old television, Colin’s Sandwich offers an
uneasy reintroduction to the world of the time that it was made when
watched by someone old enough to have lived then, but this impression
becomes particularly marked in a realistic comedy of the everyday. This
uncomfortable sensation isn’t just found in the surface details that you
notice (the copy of the Sun in Colin’s office bearing the headline ‘FERGIE’S DAD IN VICE SHOCK’),
but the features of everyday life that have subsequently disappeared –
being able to buy Sunday papers on Saturday nights at Central London
railway stations, the old licensing laws that Colin rails against.
Particularly notable is the amount of comic mileage extracted from
telephone technology – never mind mobile phones, the arrival of 1471 and
caller number displays on landlines would scupper several very funny
scenes in this series. But, above all, it’s the sense that Colin’s 1988
life itself, presented as humdrum and unremarkable, just wouldn’t be
possible now. He has a very steady job working for British Rail (gone by
1996), which is enough for him to have (presumably bought) a rather
nice flat for himself in Brent Cross, not a lifestyle that can easily be
achieved in London 25 years on.
This brings me to my major conclusion about Colin’s Sandwich when
seen again in my early forties. Why did I like this series so much at
the time? Part of the reason why the series had the effect it did on me
when I was a schoolboy, was that it was presenting a version of an
ordinary adult life that a middle-class Londoner like me might expect to
be living myself in a couple of decades time. It’s worrying to note
that the character of Colin is supposed to be only 35… That’s the sort
of thing that makes me feel really old. There are several occasional
moments of awkward comedy in the series – when Colin Watkins has to give
up drinking for a fortnight and is forced to endure a nightmarish works
pub crawl, or an episode when he accepts an invitation to be best man
for a workmate and rails against the ghastliness of stag nights and
wedding receptions – that struck a particular chord of emotional
recognition within me when I first watched them, empathizing most
strongly with Colin's frustrations at the impositions of rituals and
ceremonies and having to fit with a series of expectations that he can
see through, even though such experiences don’t arise in quite the same
way in your life when you’re sixteen years-old. It’s also worth noting
that I watched the programme with my parents, who both found it funny
and found Colin and Jenny sympathetic characters. Sometimes, you come
across things in fiction when you’re young that tell you exactly the
sort of person that you’re inevitably going to become, jokes that
crystalise your still nascent sense of what life is going to be like for
you. When we remember the television that we emotionally invested in,
we remember something of ourselves. Be prepared for twinges of
uncomfortable self-recognition when you watch them again after many
years.
2. Colin's Sandwich: Pilot episode studio recording tape (1987)
I got to see the studio recording tape of the 1987
Colin's Sandwich pilot, and made a few notes after watching:
Obviously I've seen both pilots and studio tapes before, but never the studio tape of a pilot, so this nascent iteration of Colin's Sandwich was highly instructive. Things I learnt were -
You would obviously commission a series of this on the strength of the
pilot. The script was almost entirely unchanged in the transmitted
version (episode one, 'Flaunt It'). I think that a few lines were
rephrased, but the only difference that I could notice was the peculiar
non-diegetic use of the sound of a submarine at the end of one scene.
Greeted with bafflement by the audience, Mel Smith even apologizes for
it at the end of the take.
The real change is in the casting. I always knew Louisa Rix was tremendously good as Jen, but you really
appreciate her qualities when she's not in it. The central question of
the programme - which I can remember talking about with my parents when
we watched it together, the sign of something that had really caught our
imaginations - is, why is she with him? Rix is very skilled at showing
how Jen and Colin have a shared comic wavelength and understanding even
when they're fighting (along with Mel Smith, of course). Frances Tomelty
(an actress with next to no sitcom experience) makes her feel like a
shrew and the freewheeling passages in the dialogue where she's as
amusing as Colin come across as vamped. Also, in the broadcast series
the old hand Micheal Medwin gave the character of the publisher a
different dynamic of being a generation older, which worked better than
the more subdued younger man cast here (David Lyon), too.
The broadcast set of Colin's flat had noticeably more character than in
this version. Cluttered bookshelves replaced tasteful prints, making
the place feel more lived in and showing Colin to be a man with a
lively, but untidy, mind.
Mel Smith came over very well as a person to me in this, engaging with
the audience at the end of takes, acknowledging and thanking the good
work done at great speed by the floor managers (watching this made me
appreciate that getting props right when setting up retakes is a really
tricky skill), supportive of Mike Grady when he keeps on getting his
lines wrong in the final (and Grady's only) scene. As well as being a
gifted, very distinctive, comic, he also gives the impression of being a
star actor whom you'd want at the head of your company.
The warm-up man (who we continually hear but never see) is Bob Mills.
If you want an insight into a working comic having to constantly step in
and then get cut off again then the gaps have some subsidiary interest.
