A Comedy On This Day: Sykes - The Hypnotist (4 January 1978)

  I hadn't seen this one since the 1979 repeat. I would have been six, and I can see how it appealed to me - the adults are foolish but likeable, and the absurd situation is so clearly set up that a child can follow it. There's an interesting couple of paragraphs about Sykes' comedy in an essay in the most recent volume of About Time where Tat Wood describes Sykes practice as to never get easy laughs by belittling anyone, and for everyone in the episodes to always treat the increasingly ridiculous situations with utter seriousness. I can see why this approach would particularly appeal to a child viewer.

 Something that I wouldn't have picked up on at the time is the weak direction. For a story of mounting mayhem in a posh dining club, it is noticeably poorly choreographed, with a lot of wide shots inhabited by many characters, as if Roger Race hasn't decide what the audience should be looking at. This is a remake of a (surviving) 1964 episode. I wonder if the original worked better?

 If only every series had an Andrew Pixley production history/ viewing notes booklet to refer to, such as the Network collection of 1970s Sykes! Useful information to know about this one is that it was recorded on Sunday 1 January 1978. Perhaps a squeezed Christmas schedule accounts for the feeling of it needing a bit more preparation. We also learn that it has fleeting uncredited appearances from Felix Bowness and Nula Conwell (as a cigarette girl), which I might not have registered otherwise.