Sunday 25 August 2019

A Comedy On This Day: For The Love Of Ada - Ada & Walter Are Haunted (26 August 1971)


 This first episode of the final series certainly moves For The Love Of Ada into unexpected territory, as Walter and Ada discover that they share their new home with a ghost.

 The new home is the cemetery lodge, and Thames' designers have done a good job in conveying the historical character of this building, furnishing it with interesting-looking, chests, carved wooden chairs, brasses and Victorian portraits on the wall and the like. The haunting is dealt with in quite a sober way for a comedy, with Ada treating the matter practically ("Does this mean our rates will go up?") and cheerfully, sitting up for the night in the hope of meeting the ghost.

 When it looks like an apparition might be happening, the programme goes into a completely different register, with suspenseful incidental music, a close up of a slowly turning door handle and the camera panning through the room before returning to the handle. It isn't a spectre at the door, of course, but the ghost is given further attention, with Walter and Ada conducting some offscreen research about the history of the lodge and the ghost's identity. Its established in a few lines of dialogue that they've taken action to honour the ghost's wishes, and then in a detail in the final scene the viewer is led to believe that the ghost has been a real presence.

 This is subtly done for a Powell & Driver script, and is really only a subplot for the usual domestic concerns. But it's a really good way of establishing that Walter and Ada have moved into a new home, encouraging the viewer to understand on a subliminal level that the lodge a different sort of environment to what we've seen before.

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