Television
Wasted journey
Clive Gammon
I was delighted to see that BBC] were repeating Shakespeare — or Bust last week as a Play for Today because I'd missed it first time round and I still retained the happiest memories of Peter Terson's original, joyful comedy of the three Yorkshire miners Abe, Ern and Art, exposed to the gruesome gentility of a Scarborough boarding house. The Fishing Party was full of invention, of cold-eyed observation, and the kind of dialogue one responds to with admiring delight.
Sad to say, Shakespeare — or Bust was scarcely recognisable as the work of the same man. Instead of originality there was the laboured puffing and grunting that goes with squeezing the last drop of juice from an almost dry sitcom. The dialogue was enfeebled, the social observation dulled and the squirming embarrassment of the las/ ten minutes was such that not even a hastily poured quadruple Glenmorangie could sufficiently anaesthetise the sensibilities.
What can have gone wrong? The idea was a bad one for a start. It's entirely possible to imagine three miners going off to the cow.t for a winter weekend's fishing, but to hire a canal cruiser and head tor Stratford' to see Antdny and Cleopatra? With best respects to the Workers' Educational Association the notion seems somewhat contrived. Cruising our inland waterways has had comic possibilities ever since Jerome K. Jerome; as I can testify after a horrific fortnight on the Shannon some years back. The discouraging thing is that all the funny happenings are total cliché. You do fall in. The boat does drift away from its moorings in the night. The stern rope goes round the propellor shaft and you have to dive to free it. Daily you find Yourself up a dead-end creek with the reeds blotting out the sun. You realise that The African Queen Was a documentary.
Terson managed to avoid most of this with just a single dousing and not even a mishap while negotiating a lock. And the beginning of the play, when the three proles were checking out the boat with its owner, was promising enough with neatly observed touches. Abe's insecurity, his anxiety that no social' gaff es should be made, came out as he hissed "don't hurt his feelings" when one of the others started comparing the facilities aboard with what the brochure offered.
But after that things started going downhill with the appearance of a cliché blonde and What seemed her upper-class boyfriend in natty yachtsman's rig. The pursuit of them down the 'Grand Union Canal became
tedious. There, were jokes about boozing, but little of the real thing. (It was the magisterial thrash in The Fishing Party and the destruction of the weekend thereby that was central to the play.) This was just the equivalent, drinkwise, of flirting with Bunny Girls in the Playboy Club. There were arch lines like "Its getting perilously close to closing time" aad "I feel like a long drink myself, like five pints," but the comedy was chiefly concerned with them being prevented from getting a drink like the adulterous couple who never actually make it in a Feydeau farce.
And Abe gradually degenerated as a character. He was always more anxious than the other two about the social graces, but this time he was cast as a kind of cold-faced intellectual, his speech seeded with phrases like 'life style' and 'withdrawal symptoms' and self-conscious references to the 'ragged-trousered philanthropist.'
Worse was to come. They reached Stratford but there was no ticket for Abe. Pathetic, desolate, he made his way back to the boat, and who should'he meet there but Janet Suzman and Richard Johnson of the Royal Shakespeare Company? And wouldn't you know that they'd put on an inpromptu performance, there and then, of bits from Antony and Cleopatra? And couldn't you guess that Art would slip away for a skinny-dip with the blonde, her boyfriend having turned out to be what Ern would call 'one of them'?
inere's a new play in what now must be regarded as a series called Fite for the Fancy this weeki a pet show is the subject. Ern has a guinea pig, Art a rabbit and Abe a mouse. It would be encouraging if Terson regained his old form. The kind of talent displayed in The Fishing Party is rare on the box.
Previous page
