LES: Look at it all. Gloom, muck, desolation. Ugliness.
MORT: Aye. Bloody marvellous, in't it?
Only the second episode, and the studio audience are audibly subdued and
hesitant at times. You can tell that they're trying to orient themselves around
what sort of comedy this is and how it works. It has no familiar stars in it,
and the rhythm and object of the jokes feels different to anything else. Peter
Tinniswood was one of those writers with his own distinct idiom (none of his
characters speak like people in any other programme) and I Didn't Know You
Cared doesn't try to iron it out, making a virtue of this peculiarity
instead. It's also very Northern/ Yorkshire and working-class, and so
presumably harder for the Television Centre audience to quickly identify with.
The audience become more won over by a bravura performance by Vanda Godsell as
Carter's soon-to-be mother-in-law. Mrs Partington is a truly appalling woman,
mean, judgemental and uninterested in others, traits that are revealed in a
near-incessant monologue. Watching and understanding this character makes more
sense of the rest of the world depicted in I Didn't Know You Cared,
explaining why these menfolk are so gloomy and fatalistic about dealing with
women.
Personally, the one thing that really made me laugh in this episode was it's
most extreme statement, when a despondent Uncle Mort reflects that, "Still, there's a
lot to be said for death. I'll bet it's not half so boring as life."
