Saturday 13 July 2019

A Comedy On This Day: Pardon The Expression - The Pensioner (14 July 1965)


 Very little in the way of overt jokes in this episode, which really functions as a character piece for Swindley, who meets an old man in the park and offers him a temporary job in Dobson & Hawks' greengrocers. Naturally the old man lets him down, giving away the stock to needy pensioners.

 Swindley responds to the disappointment with the characteristic decency and kindness that lies under his surface pomposity. Arthur Lowe has some nice, rather melancholy, moments to get his teeth into here and we learn a little about Swindley's wartime service in the Navy (but prosaically on a barracks ship, rather than at sea) and that his most treasured possessions are "my cello and my late father's silver snuff box." There's more continuity with Swindley's Coronation Street persona here than in much of Pardon The Expression.

 Ambitiously, the designers have constructed with a section of boating lake (with water) in the Granada studios this week. You would think this was fraught with risks, but having made it they then put it to good use, the episode concluding with Swindley and his new friend Jacob Elijah on a boat and casting off.

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