Television
Only connect
Martyn Harris Looking for the link is a vice of review- ers, but television is about cacophony rather than connections, so perhaps all one really needs is the Monty Python formula of 'now for something completely differ- ent'. A play called Little Richard Wrecked My Marriage (Channel 4, 10 p.m., Monday) and a Little Richard documentary (Chan- nel 4, 11.05 p.m., Wednesday) offered a likely link but I'm still looking for it. Indeed, I'm not sure why the play referred to the Boy from Macon in the first place, apart from the fact that it had dubbed a couple of his tracks over the action. This concerned a Tyneside lad called Lionel Jef- fries (automatically hilarious name) who joined his father, a scab during the '83 min- ers' strike, in setting up a firm of bailiffs to seize the property of poll-tax dodgers.
Lionel's wife Brenda was introduced sticking up anti-poll tax posters (the play was full of these subtle character touches), so naturally she was outraged by his breach of working-class solidarity. Various gritty women friends were featured, dressing up for a rock 'n' roll do at the club and shriek- ing companionably together over glasses of gin and put-downs of their menfolk. An aged Teddy boy, billed on the cast list as `Ugly Jimmy', came in for some particularly witty badinage. 'Will you do me a favour?' asked a ginger-haired slag.
`Ooh Eeeh,' said Jimmy, goggle-eyed.
`A sexual favour,' said ginger.
`O0000h Eeeeeeeh,' said Jimmy.
`Will you fook off?' she said, and Jimmy `And if you beach yourself, the bastards tow you back!' meekly fooked.
Most of the dialogue was inaudible or so heavily accented as to be incomprehensi- ble, and I had difficulty working out which character was which, or what their relation- ships were. After being ostracised by the gritty women at the do, Lionel shaved off his quiff, donned his bailiffs overalls and went out with dad, confiscating children's scooters and family tellies, while the gritty women jived innocently and companion- ably on.
This could easily have been a decent play: it was prettily filmed, the music was good, and the cast was a strong one, with Derek Walmsley as Lionel, Colin Mac- Lachan as his father and John Woodvine as Uncle Lenny. But with writing so rotten none of them had a chance, and the poten- tial of the subject was squandered on crude moral categories and the self- congratulation of the female characters. Writer and director Karin Young made the play in collaboration with a northern women's writer's group and with aid from the Association for Northern Arts, and a worse advertisement for writing as therapy, lubricated by the public purse, would be hard to imagine.
And now for something completely dif- ferent, which was Little Richard himself in a tremendous 25-minute edited version of the Pennebaker documentary Keep on Rocking. It was no more than some splen- did Sixties concert footage of 'Lucille', `Good Golly Miss Molly', 'Turn Frutti' and `Hound Dog', with Richard spraying sweat, charisma and underclothes over his audi- ence, with comments thrown in by pop pundits. 'An enormous, devastating, total fire blizzard of a voice,' one said, though he didn't need to. Jim Kitson said, 'Lyrics never meant a thing to Little Richard,' and that didn't matter either, or, as Little Richard himself remarked: `Awop- bopaloolawopbamboom.'
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