A Comedy On This Day: Seven Of One - I'll Fly You For A Quid (6 May 1973)

 As anyone who's seen Thick As Thieves might agree, not everything that Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais wrote was solid gold, even at the height of their powers. This story of gambling mania in a Welsh valleys village is pleasant enough little playlet, but doesn't really have much emotional purchase beyond passing the time engagingly.

 The comedy is at its most stimulating when it investigates death rather than gambling, with the lead character's father, Grandpa Owen (an opportunity for Barker to double), manipulating his family on his deathbed, the most dramatically interesting element. The effect used to convey this character's death in a filmed insert - a shaft of light projecting from Grandpa Owen's window and moving towards the sky - is the most surprising moment in the programme, and a bold device to deflect potential complaints of trivialising death.

 One of the more interesting aspects is seeing how well Ronnie Barker acquits himself playing Welsh, especially as an authentic supporting cast (including Emrys James, Margaret John and the inevitable Talfryn Thomas) risks exposing any shortcomings. He sounds alright to me, although I did notice that on a couple of occasions when his character gets a worldly-wise punchline intended to deflate floridity and pretention, he sounds like Fletcher for two or three words before correcting himself mid-sentence.

A Comedy On This Day: Seven Of One - Spanner's Eleven (15 April 1973)

  Roy Clarke's other script for this anthology series (alongside of Open All Hours) is pretty hard to get a handle on. Sometimes Ronnie Barker's football coach-cum-taxi driver character seems besotted by soccer, and on other occasions using his position to further his own way. Everyone seems rather sketchily drawn and it’s hard to tell what's supposed to be funny.

 I do notice the same thing that I always do whenever I chance upon something by Roy Clarke, and that's the inevitable mention of knickers and ladies' underclothes - it even happens in his episode of Manhunt! There's a kind of feeble lechery that seems to run through his writing.

 I'm intrigued by where this is set, especially the dilapidated football ground. The characters speak with West Country accents, but it looks more like West London to me. I think the football ground is the old Edgware Towns White Lion Ground... (some derelict pictures about half way down this page).

A Comedy On This Day: Seven Of One - Prisoner & Escort (1 April 1973)

 With pilots, you tend to be looking out for discrepancies from the eventual series - here, that there's no Godber, and the implausibly progressive institution which Barraclough promises to Fletcher doesn't bear much relation to the Slade Prison that we eventually see in Porridge. But this isn't how their original audience would have watched these programmes, and it’s instructive to try to respond to them as freestanding comedy playlets.

 The central relationship is between the prisoner and the kindlier warden, each needing something from the other, becoming ever more interdependent through adversity as - shackled together by handcuffs - they become abandoned in the freezing countryside overnight, eventually finding shelter by breaking into a deserted cottage. The dynamic of this is as tragic as it is funny, as Fletcher gets Barraclough drunk and the officer opens up ("I'm a failure. I'm only holding on to this job by the skin of my teeth"), and confides about being repeatedly cuckolded by his wife. The relationship is an uneasy thing to watch, with prisoner shown to be devious in his manipulation of the escort and Barraclough the greater victim of the pair. The viewer is grateful that the cunning Fletcher is never consciously cruel to Barraclough, and manages to maintain our sympathies. Its a strong story in itself, sharing the qualities of balance and two lives being reflected in each other with the authors' contemporaneous Likely Lads, but one can understand why Ronnie Barker was reluctant to take it to a series.

 

 (I love the bleak moody atmosphere from the time they leave the railway station to when the van breaks down, you can almost feel the chill in the air and the sense of isolation as darkness approaches. There's some very convincing 'cold' acting (shivers, pulls face) from Ronnie Barker in the scene of the three of them outside the van in the middle of nowhere. From the look of it, it didn't take much acting to feel the cold, but he still does a good job of making the viewer know about it.)