Te l evis io n Alf's return Clive Gammon _ Al Garnett's more outré
racial Insults are an important part of his charm: they reflect in little what is ttlie.least remarked of his character his vaulting imagination. if.ednesday night's revival of the f1 Death Do Us Part series i..?f3C1) was light on gems of this Zubd but there was one memorable ;!toment. "Russian Mick!" he elled at the hated name of
Ludovic Kennedy. Nearly as good as what Ian Mikardo recounted as having once been scrawled over his name on a ballot paper "Japanese Jew," it said.
But sadly it was a thinnish offering for the start of a new series of TDDUP. The situation wasn't strong enough to spin out the half-hour: Alf refusing to pay his telly licence because the BBC was run by the Liberal Party or the liberals — it was difficult to figure out just what he meant. Horrific Mrs G. was as sinister as ever — that woman really frightens me — Una Stubbs as pliantly, deliciously beautiful and Anthony Booth as red a rag as was ever offered to bull. But it was all pretty static and there was a sad reliance on old, sure-fire laughs.
All the same it was interesting to see which way Alf would go in the Arab-Israeli context. Difficult for him to make a choice of which side he hated the more but in the end it was the Jews he kept the major punch for and in this how accurately Johnny Speight reflected current pub talk amongst, in my recent experience, middle-class Alfs. Saloon-bar antisemitism, of a vicious kind you'd never have heard three months ago, seems now quite commonplace, unleashed and licenced by the oil crisis.
All's relationship with his wife, not all that satisfactory, is a cliché of comedy. Explored with infinitely more subtlety, as in Alpha Beta (BBC2, with Albert Finney and Rachel Roberts) another bad marriage was more moving than anything I've seen on the box for a long time.
It's honest sadness made months of Plays for Today and Plays of the Month look shabby in retrospect. The honesty was in the actors, the direction, the dialogue, the last a patchwork of clichés just as normal telly plays are but deployed quite differently. A cliché in the mouth of a man or woman painfully trying to express misery has a special pathos of its own.
Totally committed to physical action, last week's Man Alive, Some Like It Hot on BBC2, made me turn away from the screen in the fashion that normally only M. R. James dramatisations and documentaries about lung cancer and coronaries can achieve. It showed the horrible things that film stuntmen do to earn a living, and watching a man like Bob Woodham actually do it was far more scarifying than seeing the finished result as part of a feature film. I met a group of stunt men recently. Then, and on the Man Alive programme, they were quite unable to explain why they did it. I found them far more alien than, let's say, Russian Micks.
Let's leave the last word to General Amin. Asked on Midweek (BBCI) how he planned to help Britain in her hour of need, he • replied that he could send us plenty of bananas. Now there's a confrontation for you. All and the General. The trouble would be that Alf would lapse into total, spluttering and probably permanent speechlessness. And that would never do.
Previous page
