A Comedy On This Day: Brass (9 July 1984)

 Curiously, the more Brass that I see the less of a handle I have on it. It’s the sheer scale of the enterprise that's peculiar. The general joke about an inappropriately glossy treatment of a cloth-cap-and-cobbles story would have found it's obvious fit in a few minutes in a sketch show. If you wanted to do more with this, a one-hour special would be the natural form to open out the idea into a more special, sustained narrative making the most of the actors and the production values. But a thirteen part sitcom serial? Followed the next year by another 13 episodes? That certainly shows a confidence in the idea. Its more screen time than many real Granada drama serials got.

 Is it as funny as it is impressive? I think that when I like Brass best is when I hear inventive phrasing in the dialogue, be that in the form of quaint metaphors -

HARDACRE (to his daughter on her wedding day): It is a proud and joyous day for me, and yet there is a pang in your daddy's heart. The first of my fledgling brood to fly the nest. I know now how a daddy frog must feel when he sees his tadpole growing little legs.

 Or when it takes an argument and turns it in on itself so it comes to convey something quite strange, such as a young woman's dismissal of a presumptuous rascal of a suitor:

Married? When I marry it will be to a real man! A man confident enough to be unsure of himself. A man dominant enough to be submissive. A man masculine enough to be unafraid of his own essential femininity!