Television
Reaching North
By CLIFFORD HANLEY
THE Carry On series is widely regarded by proper-thinking chaps as the direst thing in our post-war cinema, and it's in- teresting to notice that London viewers of ITV are not being exposed to a current comedy series which is more or less the television equivalent.
Best of Friends has all the passionately con- trived low laughs that make Carry on Whatsit a box-office hit, and I must add brazenly that I enjoy it without a single reservation. The friends are Hylda Baker and Charles Hawtrey, the situations are worn to shreds, the jokes are sig- nalled from half a mile away and the whole show, which I see on Sunday afternoons in my regional outpost, is a scream. Miss Baker, in the context of a script, is a fairly undisciplined player, and hams most outrageously, but the scripts allow for this, and consequently get maximum value from her. She's a corker, this lassie, in the great tradition of Nellie Wallace and quite as good.
Best of Friends, with its extravagant Laurel- and-Hardy view of life, is, of course, no more old-fangled than The Dickie Henderson Show. It is also in a well-established tradition, one peculiar to Southern English humour; the bourgeois kind that dominated the pre-war cinema in Britain. Quite often it turns out to be quite funny, but I rarely laugh as readily as the studio audience. I do when Hylda Baker is on. I must be a bit coarse. Tempo has arrived in my outpost, too, and this functions most persuasively as a fluent, only slightly earnest middlebrow project. It must not be compared with Monitor, which tends to aim more uncomfortably high, tries harder and some- times fails. My recent memories of Tempo include the programme devoted to Annie Ross, which was pretty well perfect in what it set out to do, and last Sunday's piece on the flowering of creative energy in Australia. The subject was scarcely new or surprising, but the programme informed and enlightened without provoking any brain-fag.
The most completely satisfying television ex- perience of the week was the ITV production of Anouilh's The Rehearsal, which went out last Thursday but still dominates my recollection. Anouilh, now that I think about it, keeps on writing the same play, but it's a very cunning play and naturally he has become very good at it. Innocence, in that effete anachronistic France he enjoys so much, is seen as a piece of property, and this view strikes me as gravely limited.
Nevertheless, the château-load of high-bred layabouts gripped the attention from the start. With Gielgud and Pamela Browne leading the troupe, it was intended as a 'distinguished' pro- duction; and that's the way it turned out, too. If this is • ITV entertainment, I'm almost ready to start buying soap powder to keep the pro- grammes going. I like it.
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