Television
Forget it
Jeffrey Bernard
I think I might lose a friend here. Well, maybe not exactly a friend, but certainly a something between an acquaintance and a friend. I've known Akin Owen for all the years I like to wallow in—and they amount to some twenty-five—but I can't help feeling a bit of a dog when [tell you that the first play in his new series, Forget Me Not (Yorkshire Television), was an amazing load of old rubbish. There were flashes of dialogue consisting of a sentence here and there which reminded me how good he can be, but for the most part it was incredible crap. When I arrived on Monday at the Daily Express, where I work sometimes, I thought that there'd been a leakage of nitrous oxide in the building, so jolly were its inhabitants. Now journalists are not as a general rule a happy breed. True, from time to time they accidentally become intoxicated with booze and the fact that what they do is marginally better than actually working, but they are a pretty depressing lot. Not this morning. 'Did you see Forget Me Not?' was the rage question of the morning as everyone lay slumped, ready and waiting for El Vino to open. The giggling in the passages damn nearly held up the production of the paper, so amazed were the pros at the interpretation that Alun Owen put on the business of producing newspapers. On the quiet I think that there really is something very dramatic, exciting, glamorous 'and romantic about producing newspapers, not that I'd let on about it, but I've always been utterly bewildered at the gloss and veneer that Hollywood and show business in general put on the sordid scene. Owen's main characters, two birds played by Cyd Hayman and Patricia Brake plus the newspaper lawyer portrayed by Derek Waring were all utterly wrong. Whether that was the director's, writer's or producer's fault is something I'm not sure about—directors do the casting— but you'd think that anyone in what's horribly called the media business would know better. But there they were. Derek Waring's lawyer wouldn't talk to anyone, when in fact I know hundreds of newspaper people who dread the conversational approach of the boring lawyer. Cyd Hayman played Avril Phelps, a hard nut expert on ladies' underwear who drank gin and tonics after work and who wore her vagina on her sleeve. She was so unlike anyone I've ever seen share an office with a rubber plant and a typewriter that I thought Alun Owen could never have seen a newspaper building.
It now occurs to me that he hasn't and that reviews of this dreadful bit that came out the following morning have got him all wrong. He never was in the newspaper business. He was an actor before he became a writer. Then there was the tiny star, Patricia Brake. There's a ghastly way that directors, make-up etc have of arranging the hair of a woman who's supposed to be a 'nice' girl. It's munitions factory style without the snood. Also, as Nancy Banks-Smith said, the wearing of light blue coloured clothes is supposed to denote angelic qualities.
The way that Derek Waring managed to pull Patricia Brake had me green with envy. Crusading lady journalists with bees in their bonnets and chips on their shoulders and parma ham on their plates are generally speaking a pretty terrifying lot who aren't that easy to seduce unless you happen to have a very large by-line and a fairly large current account with everything else in proportion. Nevertheless the lunchtime scene in the churchyard when , he shoots her a terrible line and scores straight away seemed to me to be a quick scene that Alun Owen really believed in. It's not like that. It usually takes minutes and minutes.
There was a flash of credibility in an appalling restaurant scene when Patrick Newell appeared. I was so mesmerised by Cyd Hayman's banal chat at her table that I can't actually remember what Newell was playing, but I do know that he is just about the best actor in the country at playing the definitive Englishman. Two names were dropped in the play, those of Molly Parkin and Mary Holland, whoever they may be, but the only authenticity that was apparent was that dreadful old lie that Derek Waring came out with after he'd had his way with Patricia Brake, when he said that he didn't sleep with his wife. This is something that scriptwriters seem to be obsessed with. The idea that men don't sleep with their wives when the arrangement is breaking up. For the information of gullible lady readers I must say that a man who knows he's going to dump someone is doubly attentive. However, Alun Owen has got really soppy with the romanticism. There are still five more episodes to go and I feel positive that they'll improve.
Meanwhile, I hope that someone resembling Jilly Cooper, whoever she may be, gets written in and that a feature writer with absolutely no sense of responsibility and who resembles any number of actual people appears. What might save the series would be two deeply authentic Fleet Street characters. A small man obsessed with Wagner and a slightly bigger one writing about television who's really OK, because he loves Byron. The women will have to go though unless Alun Owen makes them even more awful. Until he does, and they always order PuntE-Mes and very expensive prawns to start with, I shan't believe in them.
For your future entertainment the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Diamond Stakes, worth something like £80,000, is being run and shown on BBC television at 3.20 on Saturday. This could possibly be one of the great races of all time. Although it's exceeding my duties as a television writer to say so, have something on Pawneese and Ashmore each way.
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