Television
The best we have
Clive Gammon
"We used to sing in the same choir at Bury St. Edmunds. For eight rears I loved that man. I'll never forget his name. E. R. Harrison. He'd smile and stir sugar into his instant coffee...."
The trouble is, casting my eye over the notes I scribbled watching William Trevor's play, The General's Day (BBC-1 Monday), I can only find scraps of dialogue like that. No instant judgements, no handy little phrases jotted down for hotting up on column day.
And a more honest tribute you couldn't find than that to pay to some of the closest-woven, complex, satisfying dialogue that I've heard in a telly play for a very long time. Out of context, the few lines above might sound a touch Noel Cowardish. In the pattern of the play they didn't even though Annette Crosbie, who spoke them in the sad character of the lonely Mrs Elsie Lorrimer, sometimes conveyed a ghostly echo of Brief Encounter (oh my head-scarved Celia Johnson long ago!).
Indeed, this was a serious play, as full of disquiet as of sharply-observed behaviour. General Suffolk (Alistair Sim) is fighting his last battle to rid himself of the horrific Mrs Hinch (Dandy Nichols) who has moved into his cottage, a revolting mother-spider figure, as housekeeper. Instead, wooing her with gins-and-tonic and his photograph album from the prospect of release from a drab future as a schoolmistress, he tries to recruit Miss Lorrimer to the post.
He fails. Though at the climax of the Play Miss Lorrimer accepts with a tearful Joy. "I will be your housekeeper!" she cries as passionately as Mollie Bloom on How the Head cried "Yes, yes, yes!"), the intervention of a treacherous, hearty, vicious old boot of a boozy lady acquaintance renews her fears and she reneges. No hanky-panky for the General With Elsie. "Mind like a sewerage system," sniffs the old boot. But no. The general (so it seemed to me) was an honest romantic even to finally wrecking his cause by confessing to a night's indiscretion with the awful Mrs Hinch.
The play could easily have been a series of well-turned, acceptable cameos. All the materials were there. It was a severe task to dissociate Dandy Nichols from Mrs Garnett especially in her char's outfit, but Mrs Garnett doesn't get lines like, "Pity the poor colonel went over the rainbow." Pro-Alf, I have always noticed an incipient viciousness in Mrs G. Mrs Hinch, deliberately and horribly smashing a treasured coffee cup of the general's to demonstrate her power, was the Old Moo in a third dimension. By the end, I'd managed to block out Mrs Garnett altogether.
And what of Alistair Sim in this rare appearance on the box with, to me at least, an unfamiliar, predatory moustache? This was a performance so far above the usual telly level that one is bound to feel deprived for a long time to come. How beautifully he conveyed late-flowering lust, as the Poet Laureate once felicitously called it. How one's heart warmed to him, the old hero, when he joyfully called for two gins and tonic on Miss Lorrimer's acceptance of his offer. How towering his rage when he turned on the old woman Who betrayed him and roared, "You cow!"
Annette Crosbie's Miss Lorrimer was fine, too, as the sad sack with no future. ('I always wanted to grow herbs . . . rosemary, thyme . . .") Obviously with characters as differentiated and as Nvellplayed as these the cameo danger was there in the conception of the play. That it didn't materialise, that the play was a coherent, moving unity underlines that William Trevor is close to being the best television dramatist we have.
I stayed tuned to catch the repeat from Friday of the presently-running Ireland series (Part 7 — 'What we have we hold ') and was rewarded by hearing a question. so fatuous, even by BBC-on-Ireland standards, that I must repeat it here.
The interviewer had old Lord Brookeborough there, long since retired (he must have thought him an easy target and had him ' balanced ' by Mr Eddy McAteer, the vigorous republican nationalist). " Why " he asked, "did Protestants in Northern Ireland fear the Catholic minority?" Lord Brookeborough, politer than I could ever be, told him: " Because they undermine the State," he said, " and try to kill us."
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