Sweetcorn

 

 Coronation Street #1096 (19 July 1971) materialized on YouTube the other day, reminding me that something about the eighty-second domestic scene of Elsie and Alan Howard that starts at 12.15 snagged against my imagination. Indeed, when I first saw it three years ago I had to transcribe the dialogue:

ELSIE: Well, what's wrong with it?

ALAN: Oh, come on, Elsie! You know damn well, what's wrong with it -

ELSIE: I just put a bit too much water in the potato, that's all.

ALAN: It's running off the plate!

ELSIE: Well, I managed to eat mine.

ALAN: Well, I'm not going to eat it.

ELSIE: Oh? Well, we'll soon settle that, won't we?

There! I suppose you can manage to eat the sausage, can't you?

ALAN: Yes! I can manage to eat the sausage.

ELSIE: You know, I'm not a miracle worker. I can't cook you a four course lunch in the time I've got!

ALAN: I don't expect a four course lunch.

ELSIE: Well, you obviously expect more than you get. Every time I put a meal in front of you I get a long face.

ALAN: I'm just getting a bit tired of these interminable fry-ups. That's all!

ELSIE: Look, that's all I've got time for! I've only got an hour for lunch, you know!

ALAN: So it's not your fault?

ELSIE: No, it's not my fault!

What would you like me to do instead?

ALAN: Well how do I know?

ELSIE: Well you must have some preference!

ALAN: Look, I don't mind a fry-up -

ELSIE: OH I WISH YOU'D MAKE UP YOUR MIND!

ALAN: If you could make it interesting! Just a little attractive -

ELSIE: HOW CAN YOU MAKE A FRY-UP ATTRACTIVE? A fry-up's been a fry-up ever since Adam was a lad!

ALAN: Well you you could use vegetables.

ELSIE: VEGETABLES?!

ALAN: Vegetables!

ELSIE: WHAT DO YOU SUPPOSE SPUDS ARE?

ALAN: OH COME ON, ELSIE! I mean peas and beans and carrots and sweetcorn -

ELSIE: SWEET WHAT?

ALAN: Sweetcorn.

ELSIE: WHERE AM I SUPPOSED TO GET THAT FROM? THIS ISN'T THE WEST END OF LONDON, YOU KNOW! AND I'M NOT A CHEF! I'm just a supervisor of a warehouse who is trying - trying! - to help her husband get solvent. Sweet-flaming-corn!

END OF PART ONE

 Two details that I'd forgotten watching this again, at the start and end of the scene. Props are clearly having fun providing unappetizing instant mashed potato. And the director (Paul Bernard) has elected to end the scene on an irritated Alan listening to a chiding Elsie, rather than the speaker. (This is reminiscent of Philip Saville's disturbing close-ups on Tom Bell's frustrated face as he listens to Madge Ryan's endless nagging as his mother in Pinter's A Night Out, eleven years ealier)

 This is clearly very functional dialogue, created at the behest of the storyliners needing to show the strains on the Howards' marriage at this point in the episode, rather than any particular inspiration or invention on the part of writer (Leslie Duxbury). Showing the two of them rowing in their lunch break will do fine, and is easy to set up.

 Knowing that Pat Phoenix and Alan Browning were a (combustible) real-life couple enhances one's appreciation of the natural-sounding rhythm of the argument. Pat Phoenix sometime used to skim through and paraphrase her lines, but it all seems to be as written here - we don't see her frequently deployed trick of banging her hand down on the furniture to call for assistance from fellow performers. Alan's word choice of "interminable" fry-ups is inaccurate - it should surely be something like "unending" - but has a certain authenticity to it in how one's vocabulary does start to get more imprecise when you begin to feel real anger rising within yourself.

 But the reason why this ordinary scene immediately lodged in my memory is because the details are far more interesting than what is going on between the characters. For a start, it supports one of my dramaturgical maxims that there is no scene in any drama set at a mealtime that cannot be improved by making some reference to what the characters are eating. It's almost the only activity that can be shown on screen that everybody watching has an active interest in, and imagining the taste and texture of the food consumed encourages an easy empathetic understanding of something of what the characters are feeling at the moment.

 But most of all, its the unintended, escalating, comedy that lies in the example given of an supposedly outlandish foodstuff. I know that Weatherfield was a bit of a backwater in the early days, but you would have thought that at least tins of sweetcorn would have been easy to come by. Perhaps even sold in the Corner Shop, though they would have to have had the Jolly Green Giant obscured by a label reading "KEY" (the unique to Coronation Street brand) in 1971. 

Watching Colin's Sandwich/ Recording Colin's Sandwich

 

 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.

The Rules of One-Day Conference Preparation

 I found these instructions that I made back in my days as an academic, burned by my experience of many poorly-prepared and poorly-paced events. I'm sure that they still apply:

1. Start no earlier than 10 (delegates to arrive from 9.30).

2. Tea and coffee on arrival.

3. Make sure that all speakers are given technical support to set up in advance of their panel. If possible, insist that your speakers take the time to set up before the panel starts.

4. Never run any more than four papers simultaneously without a break.

5. A conventional panel of three 20 minute papers should be given a 90 minute timeslot. This gives you a bit of slack for papers to overrun, and if the discussion peters out and you let people out early - well, no delegate has ever complained about that.

6. The first break is to occur no later than 11.30. Breaks should be thirty minutes. This alleviates rush and makes them proper breaks.

7. Lunch should be no later than 1, and no shorter than an hour.

8. Always provide biscuits.

Pace yourself

 I read an interview with Chris Tarrant in the paper. The 72 year-old presenter had recently had a stroke and was now attempting to relaunch his career as a broadcaster of gravitas with a series of historical documentaries for Channel 5, Hitler's Holocaust Railways with Chris Tarrant.

 One claim in the feature sticks in the mind - "Tarrant is a confident man. He once boasted of drinking 20 pints, smoking 60 cigarettes and sleeping with four women in a single day."

 It's a curious boast.

 I find 60 cigarettes in a day easy to believe.

 Sleeping with four women in a single day is credible. Drinking 20 pints in a single day is also credible. But combining both in the same day is more difficult to comprehend. If the four women were prostitutes, or he was attending some kind of orgy it would make sense, but then that doesn't sound like something that someone in his position would boast about.

 How many of the four women did he already know, I wonder? Presumably he was already a public figure when this day occurred. Fame can have a curious aphrodisiac effect - I once spent an evening in the University of Birmingham Students' Union with one of the 'stars' of (poorly-regarded Channel 5 soap opera) Family Affairs and - watching a flow of shouting drunken girls proposition him - I observed that he could easily have had sex with four women in succession, providing he had no inhibitions about very quickly finding a place to do it in. But not after more than - what? - ten pints?

 Maybe the chain-smoking Tarrant had sex with the four women during the day and then - in a fit of remorseful emotional confusion - got hideously drunk afterwards. But, again, that wouldn't sound like something to boast about to me.

 The one conclusion that I did draw from this compelling claim was that if Chris Tarrant evenly paced his three activities over the course of the day, then you would imagine that the fourth woman would have got the rough end of the deal.

A Comedy On This Day: Dad's Army - Ring Dem Bells (5 September 1975)

 The first episode of the eighth series. If you've got a programme as well-established as Dad's Army was by 1975, with much loved regular characters, you only need to have one very good idea per episode. A premise that's original, can be easily described and creates an image in the mind will is probably be enough to carry your audience. "The platoon dress up as Germans" is just one such idea.

 Having dressed them up, the eventual plot that stems from this idea ends up as a bit of a runaround. Far funnier are the little character bits that arise from the change of costume - Pike dressed as a German officer playacting behind Mainwaring's desk when he's alone in the office, or Wilson's approval of the "awfully smart" Nazi uniform.

 The reason why they are dressed up as the enemy is because they're extras in a film. The 'Crown Films' people that the platoon deals with are the part of this story that most extends the Dad's Army world. Instead of glamorous characters, they turn out to be a pair of unpreposessing cockneys played by John Bardon and Hilda Fenemore, who often appeared as variations of these roles, and it's diverting to see a bit of London visit Walmington-on-Sea. Neither has very much distinctive to do, but costume woman Queenie's combined solicitousness (calling the soldiers 'dear' as she measures them up) and practicality rings true to me.

A Comedy On This Day: Man About The House - The Last Picture Show (4 September 1975)

 When I'm watching Man About The House I often find myself thinking that Robin is just the type of person who I'd really dislike. There's an unappealing cockiness, taking the form of being unwilling to take anything seriously and a lack of regard for anyone else. There's an odd sequence when Chrissy brings her new boyfriend Neil home and Robin immediately starts impersonating him and agreeing with him in a sarcastic way that the boyfriend doesn't register but Chrissy does. And it makes me think, 'But Chrissy is supposed to be your friend! She'd have good cause to be upset by your behaviour!'

 The bespectacled boyfriend is an interesting period character, a film buff of the 1970s and - as one of him female friends who bumps into him when he's on a date with Chrissy tells him that "you were on that panel at the BFI" - some type of film scholar, to boot. He turns out to be a film-obsessed monomaniac, assuming that Chrissy knows all about nitrate stock, Melies and Edwin S. Porter and will be happy to come the cinema society with him to see two hours of Eisenstein offcuts. His downfall comes when he gives Chrissy a birthday present that he would want himself, a cinecamera (Robin of course gives her nothing) and is honest about her filmmaking efforts.

 The boyfriend is supposed to be a crashing bore, but such care and detail has gone into making his film history talk authentic and accurate that I'm afraid that my ears pricked up with interest whenever he launched into his boring lectures. He is certainly inconsiderate towards Chrissy, but then so is Robin... The film buff material reaches a peak of interest when Neil takes Chrissy to a film history exhibition of stills from early silents at the NFT! The exhibition set is only a few pokey panels in the Teddington studio, but Production Designer Alex MacIntyre has gone to some effort to get the exhibits right... I like to think that Thames had these items in stock from some Arts programme.

"Competent and combative"

 A dubious privilege of having attended a quite-famous public school is the opportunity to read obituaries of your teachers, an experience unknown to most other people. This school finally stopped sending me an annual print copy of The Old Grundian a few years ago, but I do still look at the online copies, just to check that no-one who I remembered has died.

 I learn that Mr B, my form master and mathematics teacher when I was a first former, is no more. When I was twelve I was terrified of this man. What do I remember of him?

 On my first day at school, talking to some other boys - who I had been at primary school with, but who had left to go to Grundwich a year earlier, when our classes were being allocated. "You don't want to get Mr B - he's a bastard." And a sense of confirmed fatalism when my name came up for his class.

 Our classroom still had wooden desks all facing the teacher's desk. How did he address us? The one recurring phrase that I do remember was, instructing a boy to come up to his desk, "Slither hither, wretched toad", said for his own amusement. He had a heavy physical presence. Most men - and particularly teachers - show flashes of a certain residual boyishness at some moments, but I never saw that in him.

 You never felt that he was speaking to a boy as an equal, having an ordinary conversation without a side to it. I recall one algebra lesson when a boy asked (not cheeking him - Mr B wasn't a teacher who you'd treat in that way), What's the point of this? I mean, how will it ever apply to our lives? With most of what we do I can see how it will go on to help us with money or measuring things. He refused to answer and we were disappointed in him. Disappointed for his not recognising the genuine spirit of enquiry and for his failure to covey an enthusiasm in maths, something that he was clearly very good at. I suppose that his best side would probably have been seen if you were a gifted mathematician at A-Level.

 Apart from mathematics, the other thing that he was interested in was sport. During the weekly class free period, he would put a little transistor on his desk and listen to test match commentaries. His valedictory speech to the class on the last day of summer term told us that we should spend our summer going to events like athletics meetings with our friends ("and you should have made plenty of those over this year") rather than wasting our time watching television. I didn't follow this advice.

 Mr B had a temper on him. College gossip recounted that he had been suspended a few years ago for brawling with an Art master. A curious thing about my memory of that year is that I remember his reputation for hitting boys, perhaps throwing things at us, but I can't clearly recollect his actually doing it, although I do recall the atmosphere of severity when he had been displeased with a boy. I don't know whether I've blanked out the memory. Maybe as a sensitive boy I wasn't capable of processing it at the time, or perhaps it didn't actually happen at all.

 One thing that I do remember. Because I was a boy who was brought to tears on most days at school, other boys would scathingly ask me, well, why didn't you cry when Mr B hit you, then? The object of the question was to prove some shamming or hypocrisy on my part, because if I didn't cry if the teacher hit me then it would in some way invalidate the authenticity of the many other occasions when I was brought to tears. But I don't think that he ever did hit me. Its the sort of thing that you ought to remember. Plus I don't think that I was the sort of insubordinate boy who would have brought out that kind of rage in him.

 The lasting impression that he left on me is that I don't think that I've ever come across a man with less femininity in his nature. I had the strong sense that he was the type of man with no interest in or understanding of women's things. Obviously this doesn't come up very much in a boy's school  but I do recall all the other masters in his position referring to wives or families on occasion, or just conveying a fluent interest in the wider world beyond school. For the type of boy that I was, having spent the previous seven years at a co-ed primary school around the corner, growing up alongside girls and boys with mostly women teachers, Mr B was exactly the sort of schoolmaster that I shouldn't have had, at that age and in that institution.

 Reading his obituary, thirty years after I last saw the man, is a sobering experience. I'm surprised to learn that he was only thirty-nine when he taught me. Twelve year-old boys aren't very good readers of the age of grown-ups but he exuded the sense of someone older. The obituary doesn't reveal any surprising details or aspects of his nature. He doesn't appear to have had any personal attachments. Mathematics, school and sport really were his life, even to the extent of regularly attending College matches and tournaments after he had left the school, a participation that is presented as admirably committed rather than illustrative of a sadly empty retirement.

 But my lasting impression is of the sense of something suppressed, that something being what are our best qualities - warmth, openness, kindliness. I'm struck by the lack of warmth in the obituary, with the best that can be found by way of colourful character detail provided by recollections of his "unsparingly critical observations". Mr B was a sarcastic schoolmaster, I think. One of the few things I've learned in life is that there's nothing as freezing as sarcasm. It shrivels people up, which is what its designed to do. Its invariably a bad thing to deploy, always reflecting badly on the person who uses it. I'd definitely rather be forgotten than be remembered for my unsparingly critical observations.