Hunters Walk: Local Knowledge (1973): Representing rape in the studio police drama

 

 

 This article was first published on the (now defunct) University of Reading 'Spaces of Television' blog on 01 October 2013:

(Text of a paper given by Billy Smart at the University of Glamorgan ATRiuM in Cardiff – twice! – at ‘Spaces of Television: The Performance of Television Space’ on Friday 20 April 2012 and ‘Cops on the Box: Crime Drama on UK TV Screens’ on Friday 15 March 2013.)

 What I’m going to do today is to reconsider the form that most British television drama took between the 1960s and the 1980s – programmes that were shot in the television studio on multiple cameras, recorded onto videotape, and that used pre-filmed inserts for exterior scenes. I shall attempt this through identifying particular qualities inherent to studio drama, suggesting that there were types of story that could be told especially well in this form.

 I shall illustrate this by showing how studio drama told stories through visual details of performance as much as it did through dialogue, exploring this idea through investigating how popular police dramas used rape storylines, showing ways in which the effects of rape were conveyed to the viewer through the non-verbal means of looks and gestures.

 Discussion of studio drama has often been predicated around the form’s perceived similarity to the theatre, particularly the naturalist theatre of the 19th century onwards. An early, notorious, declaration of this idea was Troy Kennedy Martin’s 1964 article, provocatively titled ‘Nats Go Home’. For Kennedy Martin studio television drama was inherently naturalist and that was a bad thing, giving primacy to verbal storytelling over visual storytelling. In ‘nat’ drama, the nature of characters and their relationships, abstract themes and ideas were all revealed through dialogue.

 Kennedy Martin was emphatic in this belief:

 Despite what everyone may say to the contrary, naturalism is not a visual form. The bulk of the dramatic information rests on the dialogue and the visuals do nothing but supplement it. (Kennedy Martin, 1964, p. 27)

 I’d like to suggest that this was a mistaken assertion. Although the programme around which I’m basing my case, Hunters Walk (ITV, ATV, 1973-76), was unquestionably a ‘nat’ drama and not a place to see experimental and nonlinear storytelling, it – and other such programmes – could achieve their dramatic effect through visual means – glance, gesture and inference.

 Hunters Walk was overseen by Ted Willis, the creator of Dixon of Dock Green (BBC, 1955-76), and bore some affinity to that series, in presenting stories about the crew of one police station, but in this case in a small provincial town (‘Broadstone’, filmed in Rushden, Northamptonshire) rather than London, and scheduled to be watched by a nighttime adult ITV audience, rather than an early-evening family BBC1 audience. It’s a good example of what Brett Mills calls “invisible television” (2011), series that are highly popular (every episode of Hunters Walk was in the Top 20 programmes for its week, and it achieved ratings of up to 16.6 million (Gambaccini & Taylor, 1993)), but which fail to gain the critical or academic attention generally awarded either to quality programmes or shows with cult status – Dennis Potter or Doctor Who. Its also literally invisible television for the most part, as only ten of the 39 episodes survive, and five of those – including the edition that I discuss here – only exist on rather muffled black-and-white 16mm prints, rather than the sharp colour videotape image that viewers would have seen in 1973.

 Of all of the major crimes that police have to deal with, rape was the one least often depicted in police dramas between the sixties and the eighties. I’ve only managed to find four storylines explicitly concerned with the investigation of rape (Hunters Walk: Local Knowledge, ITV, ATV, 11 June 1973; The Gentle Touch: Decoy, ITV, LWT, 12 September 1980, Juliet Bravo: Misunderstandings, BBC1, 27 November 1982, The Bill: With Friends Like That…?, ITV, Thames, 27 January 1986). There are very sound reasons why police series avoided rape plots, making the rare occasions when they were attempted of particular interest.

 I’ve identified three particular potential problems for rape storylines in police drama;

▪   Content: rape is a disturbing crime to contemplate, and not one that could be depicted. Police dramas could show an armed robbery, but they couldn’t show a rape happening onscreen. Dramatising a crime of a sexual nature ran the risk of either being too shockingly graphic for viewers to be prepared to watch, or too circumspect to be convincing drama.

▪   Tone: rape storylines ran a risk of appearing titillating or salacious. This is certainly a trap that ‘Decoy’, the episode of The Gentle Touch, falls into, in which the glamorous female detective goes undercover as a sexy barmaid who puts herself in positions of danger likely to draw out the rapist, having to be rescued by her male colleagues.

▪   Responsibility: a considered rape storyline can only be pretty depressing. If an armed robber is caught at the end of an episode, the viewer can presume that they will go on to be tried and sentenced, allowing their victims to start to recover. But if a rapist is caught, then the prospect of the case going to trial is traumatic to imagine.

 The episode of Hunters Walk that I’m discussing (‘Local Knowledge’ w. Richard Harris, d. Ron Francis) avoids the first two of these pitfalls. The third potential problem – responsibly representing the effects of rape – is an insurmountable one, but the programme makes the grim repercussions of being a rape victim the source of its drama.

‘Hunters Walk: Local Knowledge’ (ITV, ATV, 11 June 1973)

 ‘Local Knowledge’ has a retrospective dramatic structure, starting with the police arriving at the scene of the alleged crime, therefore placing the viewer in the same position as the policeman, having to judge the veracity of the crime and the reliability of the victim from the evidence that they are given. The episode has two concurrent plots, each told in a different narrative mode; the detective work conducted by the police, led by Sergeant Smith (Ewan Hooper).

and what happens to the victim, Christine Lewis (Frances White)

 The detection plot conforms to Kennedy Martin’s definition of ‘nat’ drama, through being constructed verbally. The police make sense of the case through language, conducting oral interviews and taking written statements from the witness, victim and suspect, and through discussions amongst each other and with professionals – in one dialectical scene Sergeant Smith goes through the wording of a medical report with a doctor (Dennis Chinnery), discussing its possible interpretation in a courtroom. The vital clue that leads to the suspect’s arrest is also verbal – before the attack he uses the expression “iron bridge” to Mrs. Lewis, rather than “railway bridge”, revealing that he must be a local man, the ‘Local Knowledge’ of the title.

 By contrast, Christine’s story is largely silent and conveyed through gesture and expression. I was reading a memoir by the feminist writer Kate Millett while I was thinking about this episode, and was struck by this passage:

How strange the dynamic of persons, their emanations, the effects of their mere movements or expressions. How more powerful and definitive finally than words. (Millet, 1977, p. 155)

which describes how the viewer is made to understand the victim’s story in this episode.

 ‘Local Knowledge’ achieves much of its dramatic effect through the presentation of small visual details, something that the multi-camera form of studio drama was particularly well suited to do without disrupting the flow of continuous performance within a scene. To give examples of how this works, we see; Sergeant Smith’s wife (Ruth Madoc) deciding to chain her front door when her husband leaves in the night to investigate a complaint of rape;

 Mrs. Lewis’ Mother-in-law noticing that Christine isn’t wearing her wedding ring while she sleeps;

 Christine leaving her food uneaten;

and the Mother-in-Law almost holding Christine’s hand, but then deciding not to.

 Such attention to detail primes the viewer of Hunters Walk to be attentive to the nuances of characters’ physical movements and facial expressions, such as in this brief scene of Christine waiting at the police station

 (Clip 1: One minute: Christine is brought into the Police Station and briefly waits for Sgt. Smith to be able to see her. The Desk Sergeant (Davyd Harries) asks her if she wants a cup of tea, which she declines. Once sat, Christine is seen in a large close-up. Shots of her are alternated with shots of three policemen reacting to her presence. The scene ends with a lingering shot of the Desk Sergeant watching her go.)

 In plot terms, there’s no need for this scene to be in the programme, yet it clearly isn’t padding and is doing something dramatically, in giving the viewer a greater understanding of Christine’s character and situation by showing a sequence of looks from the various policemen and her responses to them. To articulate what is being conveyed visually through the facial expressions in this scene, which places great confidence in actors’ ability to convey subtle changes of thought; every time that a policeman looks at Christine, she responds acknowledging their attention, realizes that they are looking at her in a different way than in ordinary social interaction, and the change in her expression registers this realization with discomfort. Because the scene is recorded in continuous time, creating a lifelike sense of hesitancy and awkwardness in the characters’ movements – these aren’t perfectly composed shots – this mood of displacement and unease is accentuated. What is least significant in this scene is the dialogue.

 This way of presenting Christine, as a woman who is aware that she is being looked at, is repeated throughout the episode in various forms, whether by her neighbours in the street –

  – Or by her husband at home, in awkward scenes that make full use of the extent of the set of the room, with the husband not only looking at his wife with an expression of trepidation, but wary of even getting too close to her.

 Domestic scenes with the husband show him reluctant to make eye contact with his wife, only able to fleetingly look at her before having to leave the house.

 Having established the motif of the look, the episode then uses it to convey the various forms that Christine’s ostracism takes, inviting the viewer to register the different types of look and to form associations between them, as in this scene of Christine being taken home.

(Clip 2: 40 seconds: Exterior of Christine arriving outside her home in a police car, expressions of two female neighbours, close-up of Christine’s face. Interior of waiting husband (Ian Thompson) looking out of window. Christine arrives indoors, husband looks at her with an uncertain expression, crash zoom on Christine’s face. Christine runs to husband, embraces him and sobs, observed from the staircase by her mother-in-law (Hazel Bainbridge) in silhouette, who then turns away.)

 This scene shows three different types of look in immediate succession; the neighbours’ hostility;

the husband’s hesitancy;

and, shown in a rather sinister Hitchcockian way, the mother-in-law’s disapproval, where the viewer doesn’t even have to see her face to be aware of the look –

  

Again, the dialogue is insignificant.

 Only once in the episode is the convention of the look reversed, and Christine presented with her own opportunity to look and to judge. In a scene when the two plots of the drama come together, Christine identifies her assailant – the police arrange for her to wait outside the suspect’s workplace and pick him out. However, in order to be able to prove in court that Mrs. Lewis has recognized her assailant herself and not been led towards her decision, she has to be alone when she identifies him, sat inside a car and alerting the police by switching on the headlights.

 So at the one moment when Christine is presented with the power to look herself, she is also presented as an isolated figure.

 Christine’s final scene in the episode works retrospectively, finally giving the character voice to reflect on her treatment since the attack –

(Clip 3: Two minutes: Scene of Mr and Mrs Lewis in their living room. Husband drinks and makes half-hearted sympathetic conversation. Christine tells him that he is looking at her with “That look – the same as the others.” The husband then complains that everyone will be looking at both of them with the same look from now on, as he was the husband who let his wife be raped. Christine asks him if he has any idea what it feels like to be raped, and her husband complains that everybody always knew that she was the type and he’s going to be a laughing-stock from now on.)

 This remarkably bleak and upsetting concluding scene makes explicit verbally what that has been implicit visually for the preceding fifty minutes, the notion of “the look”. Mrs. Lewis will be fated to remain an object of unwelcome fascination for as long as she stays in Broadstone, as a “two-headed monster” to be looked at, but not to be seen as a person.

 That the drama ends in this way, with a verbal articulation of visual ideas, might seem on the face of it to support Kennedy-Martin’s contention, but my interpretation of how the episode functions dramatically is different. The programme has placed great trust in the viewer’s patience and intelligence in being able to follow a visual idea for fifty minutes without it having been signposted or made explicit, a dramaturgical decision unlikely to be made in a present-day equivalent to Hunters Walk. The programme has presented a character’s situation through showing, not telling.

 So, to conclude, I hope that I’ve demonstrated how the narrative of studio drama could be communicated as much through visual nuances of performance as it was through dialogue, and I want to suggest that we should think of the studio form of drama as much in terms of the possibilities that it offered for storytelling, as its limitations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gambaccini, Paul and Taylor, Rod, Television’s Greatest Hits: Every hit television programme since 1960, London: Network Books, 1993.

Kennedy Martin, Troy, ‘Nats Go Home’, Encore, 48, 1964, pp.21-33.

Millet, Kate, Sita, London: Virago Press, 1977.

Mills, Brett (2011) ‘Invisible Television: The Television Programmes No-one Talks About Even Though Lots of People Watch Them’, Critical Studies in Television, 5 (1), 2011.

A Comedy On This Day: Two Of A Kind (31 August 1963)

 The material that Morecambe & Wise were given to work with in this series was sometimes gossamer-thin. There are several cherishable moments in this episode - Eric trying to placate a growling offstage dog ("Is he registered with the kennel club?" "No, the zoo"), Ernie, dressed as a hussar, attempting to sing 'Wunderbar' through Eric's interruptions, Eric wearing a suit for an enormously fat man and claiming that it's perfect fit - but none of these moments happen in something that could be described as a fully-realised routine, let alone sketch. The sheer likability and silliness of the stars carries the material.

 An underwhelming pair of musical guests this week. Drumming bandleader Eric Delaney was one of those musicians who put on a show by moving about the stage, but even with him capering from one drumkit to another it's hard to maintain much interest. The Mike Sammes Singers were the vocal harmony group for hire in the 1960s (the Trunk Records Music For Biscuits compilation of their advertising jingles is a strangely compelling listen) but I'd never actually seen them before. I didn't realise that there were only six of them! I'd always imagined a big choir. The three men and three women perform a "boop be doop boop boop" interpretation of 'Pick Yourself Up', counting time and swapping chairs.

A Comedy On This Day: Astronauts - Going Home (23 August 1983)

 The final episode, broadcast on this day only in certain ITV regions, and at 11.35pm. An ignominious end for a series initially held in high hopes...

 You can see the promise in the situation, with the three astronauts preparing to return to earth, the scientist frightened of the dangerous process, and the Captain traumatised to learn that his wife has been having an affair at home. That promise is dramatic rather than comic, though, in a Moonbase 3 sort of way. Unfortunately, whenever the character and situation goes somewhere interesting, the programme remembers that it's a sitcom and quickly (if unamusingly) undercuts it.

 This isn't helped by canned (rather than recorded with a studio audience) laughter, a jarring feature in several ITV programmes of this period. Once you start to notice it you can hear it, in the way that the laughter suddenly starts and stops and the silences in between, and it sounds nothing like the organic responses of a real audience. It also has an unfortunate editorialising effect. Garden and Oddie's dialogue doesn't have much in the way of jokes, but it has got a comic rhythm which gets undercut by sudden bursts of loud laughter at exchanges which are only tangentially amusing in themselves. Then, once the scientist astronaut gets frightened and the evangelist pilot attempts to comfort her, you get a similar exchange like "God is your pilot/ I hope that he has a fully qualified license", received in an unnaturally sterile silence, because it was decided that laughter at a joke would be distracting during a serious bit.

A Comedy On This Day: The Larkins - Counter Attraction (8 August 1964)

 Series six and we're almost at the end of The Larkins. Alf and Ada are now running a cafe, sensibly creating a new seam of situations and stories to mine at a point where a lot of long-running programmes start to run out of steam.

  Indeed, a lot of what's most engaging about this episode is purely dramatic rather than funny. Almost nothing that amounts to a joke in the first five minutes, which establish that the cafe is experiencing a serious shortfall and no customers. What one obituary described as Peggy Mount's "unsentimental style of sternly boisterous acting" carries the viewer through these dispiriting circumstances, without realising that we aren't laughing much. She's also slicing a cucumber and then mixing a salad during the scene, adding a sense of general verisimiltude and her character's practicality.

  ATV's designers do a grand job in establishing a contrast in the reveal of why trade has dropped off so alarmingly, switching from the Larkins' gleaming, empty cafe to a grotty, packed rival establishment, Joe's Snack Bar, located in a dustbin-filled alley strewn with junk. The unappealing character of Joe rather unfortunately combines two Scottish/ Glaswegian stereotypes for the price of one in being both mean and aggressive, but his snack bar's new custom-winning asset is Jennie, a waitress who has followed him south.

  Some thought has gone into how Jennie is introduced, with her appearance preceded by a reaction shot from an immediately smitten David Kossoff, soundtracked by the non-diagetic noise of a boinging spring. The effect of such a build-up leads the viewer to momentarily expect someone like Diana Rigg or Julie Christie in the next shot, but provokes unintentional bathos when she turns out to be an unremarkably ordinary looking woman on first glance. The actress playing Jeannie, Toni Gilpin, goes on to get some decent opportunities to show the character as a personable and sympathetic character whom men would warm to, but it does seem unlikely that she would create such a mass reaction.

A Comedy On This Day: Two Of A Kind (13 July 1963)

  The (particularly feeble) main sketch this week feels curious to a viewer primed by seeing Morecambe and Wise's later performances. Eric has spent sixteen years building a scale model of the Battle of Waterloo, which he earnestly explains to the audience, which a mischievous Ernie then smashes up during their re-enactment. Eh? Shouldn't that have been cast the other way around? 

 We also have a rare sight of Ernie Wise in drag in this edition, in the big physical number with M & W as a pair of ballroom dancers, surrounded by three real dancing couples. This is much more of a pleasure to watch. Putting the comics in identical costumes to the real dancers means that they can momentarily blend in, before inevitably disrupting the order of things.

 Janie Marden sings I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm in a shoo-be-be-doobee scat jazz style, shaking her arms, raising her eyebrows and tilting her head. It's certainly a committed performance, but magnified by the camera looks more unhinged than enticing.

 

A Comedy On This Day: George & The Dragon - Table Manners (24 June 1967)

 A particularly loosely-structured episode this week, with not much happening in the first half until George and Gabrielle decide - on a whim and for no good reason - to start a 'battle of the sexes' contest, to determine who has the greater willpower by going without food for the longest.

 The highlight of the first act is a very simple, almost music hall, routine of Sid James and Keith Marsh doing the washing up. This works through the viewer following a disrupted right-to-left rhythm, with Marsh perpetually returning the same cleaned plate to the pile of dirty dishes, meaning that James never makes any progress. Although the first thing that you think of when someone mentions Sid James is his dirty laugh and a hangdog expression, when I watch him in these sitcoms I'm often struck by how physically nimble a performer he was. There's a lovely fastidious movement in the washing up routine when he is repeatedly about to hand the plate to Marsh but pauses and brings it back to scour again.

 Realisation of the competition is quite ambitious and sophisticated. Most of the second act is taken up with solo routines for the light-headed and food-fixated James and Mount in their bedrooms, complete with voice overs ("sausages... eggs... bacon") and visual mixes of their hungry faces superimposed over a mobile point-of-view shot of an imagined surreptitious visit to the kitchen and opening the fridge door. I was interested to see what was stored in the Maynard household's refrigerator - a cold roast chicken, a joint of beef, sausages, a gala pie and two packets of butter. The four of them get through a lot of meat!

A Comedy On This Day: George & The Dragon - The Old Flame (17 June 1967)

 An old flame of Colonel Maynard's from thirty years ago returns to England from Australia, having accepted his proposal by post.

 This episode is a good example of a sitcom with modest ambitions that are achieved exceptionally well. Importantly, something of genuine significance is at stake over the 25 minutes, the Colonel's emotional well being and the servants' position. The guest role of the childhood sweetheart, Priscilla (Sonia Dresdel), isn't given much time to form a well-rounded character, but instead is realised as a creation of almost Dickensian cruelty, making impossible demands of the staff ("I don't bandy works with the working classes!") behind the Colonel's back.

 The chief reason for the success lies in the top-drawer casting. Unlike a lot of star vehicles, real thought and care has been given into giving the performers things to do that suit their talents, remain in character and have something emotionally real at stake. So the Colonel puts John Le Mesurier's crumpled suaveness to good use - looking dapper but anxious when awaiting the his lover's return, beautifully turned out but wearing odd shoes, charmingly gallant when she arrives, very politely vexed when he realises that he's made a terrible mistake. Sid James' chauffeur doesn't have so much to do this week, but what he's been given is well judged - rude enough not to curry favour with the viewer, but loyal enough to persuade us that he's on the right side.

 The heart of the piece lies with Peggy Mount's housekeeper, radiantly happy at the Colonel's romantic story before Priscilla arrives, rapturously embracing a coat hanger, elegantly arranging flowers. And then, once Priscilla turns out to be a monster, the only character able or prepared to stand up to her, an outcome that combines convincing character traits with skills that the performer was supremely good at.

A Comedy On This Day: Two Of A Kind (11 April 1964)

 Even though you never quite get the killer lines and ideas that Eddie Braben could come up with, and Sid and Dick never do anything much other than stand around, I generally find sixties Morecambe & Wise more fun to watch than the later series. Half an hour is probably enough and they have notably more energy. In particular, you sometimes get a vigorous dance routine, always a pleasure that never outstays its welcome like some other routines. This week, the duo performs a medley of twentieth century dances with two women. The tango is done straight, but Eric disrupts the Charleston by dressing as a flapper and - best of all - dances the soft shoe shuffle in hobnail boots.

 This week's special guest Janie Marden has been dealt a poor hand by posterity, with not even a Wikipedia page to explain why her credits stopped in 1969. Her performance of 'Happy Days Are Here Again' is quite something, rendering it as an expressive ballad, rather than the blaring jazz age choon that I'm familiar with (I now realise that the recording is indebted to the 1962 Barbra Streisand recording, though with none of the star power). Her expressive facial and bodily interpretation of the number is performed to camera, but it might have been less quaint if recorded by a camera that was further away. It’s like watching a West End musical performance that's signalling to the back of the gallery from the front of the stalls. Janie Marden then gets a sketch with the two leads, asking Eric "Why do you never do anything with the girl singers?" and letting the two jostle each other for the chance to mime actions for 'Just The Touch Of Your Lips' with her. Janie is a striking lass, notably taller than the funny men (especially with her lacquered blonde hair), and her physical mismatch to them makes their routine jolly to watch.

A Comedy On This Day: The Arthur Haynes Show (28 March 1964)

 Just two long sketches in this Easter-themed edition. Indeed, as both halves feature the unfortunate Reverend Parsons, you could almost watch this as a sitcom (with an interval performance from Kenny Ball & His Jazzmen). Original viewers would also have been able to watch Pearl Carr & Teddy Johnson (cut from the retained ITC print), whom I would have preferred to the Jazzmen.

 Johnny Speight went on to use the problematic new technology of the telephone several times in Till Death Us Do Part. In an ambitious sequence here, we see Arthur at home with Patricia Hayes, the Reverend Parsons in bed and down the stairs to his telephone table and a Doctor at home linked by a sequence of telephone calls. As you might expect in this set-up, Haynes keeps on getting the Vicar out of bed, enraging him and maddening him by repeatedly hanging up just when he gets to the phone... Its impressive in a way, and interesting to follow how the situation escalates, but not having Haynes and Parsons face to face in the same room means that it never really generates that much laughter. The most interesting aspect is Patricia Hayes' period qualms about using the intrusive device ("I don't like to answer that thing"), a mistrust that - uniquely among my peers - I've always shared.

 The second half, in which the tramp and Irish cadging a medicinal drink of whiskey out of the Vicar at the 1964 St Stephens Easter Bazaar, is more straightforwardly enjoyable. Odd features include the combination of whiskey and Eastertime making Irish maudlin and start to sing 1916 rebel songs, and a climax of Rita Webb warbling 'The Sunshine of Your Smile'.

A Comedy On This Day: The Worker - Out Of The Mouths Of Casual Labourers (6 March 1965)

 I wonder if its possible to date a comedy programme just by the quality of its laughter? Charlie Drake's antics and bon mots bring his studio audience to a collective ecstasy here, but there's something that you can hear in their laughter that disappears sometime in the 1970s. Maybe it’s their willingness to derive pleasure from, and to be genuinely surprised by, the most pedestrian reversals of expectation. There's one woman - or more likely, girl - in this audience with a very noticeable high-pitched squeak of a laugh, whose sense of humour can be traced throughout the whole show. She seems to find some sort of release through Drake's performance, and I increasingly started to speculate about who she might have been and what her life might have been like as the business on screen ground onwards.

 There are a few odd of-their-time concerns and attempts at off-the-wall satire in the set-up of the Worker's assignment this week, at a large anonymous corporation which exists to make people happy ("S.U.Y.P. - Send Us Your Problems"), where Drake gets hailed as a Chauncey Gardiner-type seer. I'm not sure that this gels at all well with Drake's slapstick and mawkish irritating man persona, really, although the set for the S.U.Y.P. reception is an unexpectedly impressive marvel of depth and perspective.

A Comedy On This Day: The Arthur Haynes Show (5 March 1962)

 Disappointingly, Ken Morris and Joan Savage are separated for their two spots this week, diminishing the interest of both appearances. The husband's performance of 'Belissima' at the piano is straightforward, while the wife's bossa nova interpretation of 'I've Got You Under My Skin' is mimed on a curious set consisting of curtains, windows, table and a plant. It’s a representational, rather than realistic, setting intended to convey the essence of elegant continental living rather than looking like an actual place.

 I'm not sure that my sympathies are in the right place to find the first long sketch as funny as I might do. The tramp inveigles his way into a rich woman's home by having answered her job advertisement for a mother's help as 'Emily Haynes', sits down on her chair, starts to drink her sherry and eat her chocolates and runs rings around her protestations. I find it a lot easier to empathise with her alarm over the intrusion and threat, than with him for browbeating this unfortunate woman into providing him with accommodation and funds.

A Comedy On This Day: A Sharp Intake of Breath - Your Very Good Health (26 February 1979)

 This week, Peter Barnes breaks his foot and is admitted to hospital. A little bit of OB recording with an ambulance at the doors and in a long hospital corridor works wonders in making the location feel convincing - two things that we never really saw in 29 episodes of Only When I Laugh! Richard Wilson's Doctor here is a more passive and less angry character than Dr Thorpe was in that series.

 The funniest bits are the most purely physical. Get David Jason to try to walk with a pair of mismatched crutches - or just fail to swallow two pills - and you get comedy that works on a very elemental level, but realised through high-level performance skills.

A Comedy On This Day: George & The Dragon - Big Deal (17 February 1968)

  Even somewhat lax plotting from Powell and Driver can't mar the cheerful glow of this always-enjoyable programme. If I were a chauffer and a scrapyard had accidentally collected my employer's Bentley rather than the old banger that they were meant to buy for £50, the first thing that I'd do would be to phone them up! Although then there wouldn't be any hilarious consequences...

 Peggy Mount really was something of a wonder as a performer - knowing how to be funny but always seeming true, even when given the weakest generic battle-axe material. There's a long (and rather dull on the page) scene of the three servants relating George's financial dire straits to the national economy (devaluation - a rare moment of topicality) which becomes actively pleasurable to watch simply by having Mrs Dragon mixing a cake and doing the washing up during it.

A Comedy On This Day: The Arthur Haynes Show (15 February 1964)

 The two long sketches inspire more laughter this week, even though both start to peter out before they finish. A respectable man buttonholed by a loquacious eccentric in a single railway carriage was an absolute staple of sketch comedy of this period, but the interesting surprise element this time around is that Haynes is impersonating Parsons. Two parallel seams of comic mileage are mined out of this scenario - why is this character behaving like this? - and, can Haynes sustain the performance and how will Nicholas Parsons respond to it? There are a couple of ambitious unexpected cutaway close-up shots of Haynes' face from the perspective of the luggage rack and carriage door as his character explores the space of the carriage. But also one of the blinds over the railway door falls off, with no back projection through the window... In the second sketch the Tramp and Irish cause havoc in a bank ("You'd give us an account if we were The Beatles!") starting a cockney brawl of a type that will become familiar in Till Death Us Do Part.

 This week's musical guests (that survive in the truncated ITC print) are Freddie & The Dreamers, whose songs are so short (and whose popularity was at the time so great) that they manage to fit both 'You Were Made For Me' and 'Over You' into their slot. Watching the familiar 'You Were Made' routine (best-known from their often-shown Blue Peter appearance) is an object lesson is ill-considered LE direction. The band quite spaced-apart on the set, so when they perform their synchronised knee-kicking movements in a very wide shot they look like beat boom ants rather than distinct personalities (especially on a little 1960s TV set).

A Comedy On This Day: The Arthur Haynes Show (13 February 1962)

 First episode of a new series without Nicholas Parsons, whose absence is felt. First long sketch is a domestic scene of the tramp "at home", rowing with his wife on a church bench. Speight has fun with presenting familiar marital niggles between a couple who have nothing, but after several minutes of this I started to find the combination of homelessness and unhappy marriage depressing to think about, rather than funny. The second sketch is a long vaudeville routine with Haynes as a pain-inflicting dentist. I was interested to see that dentists were still using cocaine in 1962.

 Musical guests are husband-and-wife duo Ken Morris & Joan Savage, who will be appearing throughout the series. The unassuming Morris is behind the piano, while Savage sings, a ball gown-and-peroxide Babycham vision in the 1950s style. She has an exceptionally expressive face, and looks a bit cross-eyed and fish-mouthed at times when miming 'As Long As I Have You' (which concludes with her producing a large photograph of a baby, to the audience's delight). Their second song, 'Rock-A-Bye Baby With A Dixie Melody' (sung by both) reveals the thinking behind this extreme performance style, when they extract considerable comedy from picking up the wrong cues and impersonating each other miming each other's voices, Savage moving behind the piano, and so forth. I found watching them work together in this routine actually made me laugh rather more than Haynes did, their cheerfulness working well as a corrective to the rather sour comedy that surrounds them.

A Comedy On This Day: The Squirrels - The Cover Up (27 January 1977)

 Here's a novelty - a sitcom script by Alan Hackney, creator and co-author of I'm All Right Jack (and author of the original novel of Private's Progress). You can see a few of his distinctive individual touches from time to time in this episode, I think, in the details of the endless freebies and perks promised at the Highland conference and the scam selling off damaged matting. But most of all in this week's original character - a guest turn for Benjamin Whitrow as Northwood-Black, a smooth asset-stripper from the company board. He's an insanely assured person, darkly rhapsodising about the brutality of nature and the violence of cacti, who works well as both archetypal Machiavellian management figure and distinctive character in his own right.
 

 Alan David was sat a few seats away from me when I saw The Birthday Party in the Pinter Theatre last year. He was with his daughter, I imagine. Once I'd worked out who he was, I did toy with the idea of telling him, "I enjoyed your performance in The Squirrels" - something he's unlikely to have heard for 40 years - but he left before me. Top that, celebrity spotters!

A Comedy On This Day: The Arthur Haynes Show (18 January 1964)

 Johnny Speight could always have done with a rigorous script editor, and both long sketches do ramble on a bit without much of a punch line this week. The first one - Haynes visits the Ministry of Defence - includes jokes about Alec Douglas Home for of-the-moment period specificity and scarcity value. It’s easy to hear Alf Garnett speaking Hayne's ill-informed theories ("Joe Stalin was the best spy America ever 'ad!"). The second one - the tramp and Irish cause mayhem in the waiting room of Harley Street psychiatrist Dr Nicholas Parsons - has a bit more legs, but the pair's speculations as the mental illnesses of the mute elegant ladies who surround them does start to leave a rather nasty taste in the mouth after a while.
 

 'Bobby's Girl' one hit wonder Susan Maughan performs her latest non-hit 'Hey Lover'. She's a perky girl and gives an animated reading direct to camera in medium close-up for most of the song. Not much thought has gone into directing this performance. Frustratingly, the ITC overseas print cuts out the week's other musical guests The Searchers, who must surely have been the best thing on it.