Sunday, 17 February 2019

A Comedy On This Day: The Liver Birds - The Guest-House (18 February 1971)


 The girls' hopes are raised when an eligible bachelor moves in downstairs. My interest perked up when this sophisticated older man turned out to be… Ronald Allen! Long before Five Go Mad In Dorset, the great man already knew something about the comic potential inherent within his dashing matinee idol appeal.

 The density of detail in set dressing and costume remains a heady thing to survey. Sandra and Beryl are characters who would spend much of their money on clothes, and trying to impress this new man means that they change outfits frequently throughout the episode... generally what Sandra wears works better than Beryl's flea-market hippy bright colours. If that set had been preserved it could now be a National Trust installation of twentieth century tenement living, with its bare kitchen, Victorian paneling, skew-whiff line of china ducks on the wall, etc.

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