ITV (Thames), 1.30pm
LWT's phenomenally popular Upstairs Downstairs came to an end in 1975, leaving its characters on the threshold of the 1930s. So it was an obvious move for rival company ATV to nab the show's script editor, Alfred Shaughnessy, for a new drama series that picks up in that decade. But where Upstairs Downstairs had been primetime Saturday night drama, the new series, The Cedar Tree, would be a smaller scale affair. Each week saw a two-part story broadcast on Monday and Tuesday afternoons,on an open-ended, soap-style basis rather than in a 13-week series. The regular cast was correspondingly scaled down: rather than a full downstairs staff the upstairs characters, in this case the Bourne family, are complemented by only an elderly nanny and a pair of married servants. The family lives in a country house in the Midlands, and consists of father Arthur (Philip Latham), mother Helen (Susan Engel) and daughters Elizabeth (Sally Osborne), Anne (Jennifer Lonsdale) and Victoria (Susan Skipper).
As well as the small cast in each episode, the limited budget is obvious from the fact that a large proportion of each story usually consists of characters telling each other about things that have happened off screen. In this story, written by another UpDown stalwart, that event is a cricket match.
Those poor fools who've read my earlier posts may remember me confessing that I struggle to concentrate on anything military-focused. The same goes, doubled, for anything involving sport, so a lot of this is gibberish to me - it probably doesn't help that one of the participants is an admiral (played by Richard Caldicot, best known for playing another admiral in Radio's The Navy Lark).
The annual village cricket match is about to take place, and as the second part of the story opens, the admiral's confident his team will win, having had a dream in which "I was particularly severe on a young Indian they had bowling." Helen Bourne's father Charles Ashley (Cyril Luckham), who's due to umpire, is sceptical: "Well, I don't think the Hallbury cricket club have any Indians, Admiral. There are not many of them in this neck of the woods."
Arthur Bourne's managed to acquire a secret weapon for his team: flighty middle daughter Anne's latest beau, handsome young baronet Sir Nigel Marsham (David Robb), who also happens to be a demon batsman. Anne teases her older sister Elizabeth that he'll be on the opposing team to her chap, village doctor Brian Harrington (Anne's the only other person who knows about their relationship, which they're having to keep hush-hush as, while he'd love to get rid of his dreadful estranged wife, he's a Catholic and that throws a bit of a spanner in the works).
The women of the household all wear some pretty spectacular frocks to the game, but none more so than Arthur's mother Alice (Joyce Carey), a vision in lilac.
Sir Nigel's so taken with Anne's outfit that he doesn't think he'll be able to concentrate on the ball.
Helen stays behind to arrange the after-party, and is overjoyed when youngest daughter Victoria returns home from her German finishing school (this being set in the 1930s, any mention of Germany is made to seem very ominous).
My favourite member of the Bourne family is Arthur's sister Phyllis (Kate Coleridge), a sophisticated London-dweller seemingly written as a disguised gay man. As well as being terribly witty in a brittle sort of way, she's unmarried (the family regularly trot out the the death of her fiancé in the Great War as a rather unconvincing excuse), the height of fashion, and she's even a close friend of Ivor Novello. And Ms Coleridge wrings every camp nuance from the character (not least in her very Grey Gardens way of calling Alice "Mother darling"). "I got talking to someone in the refreshment tent and quite forgot the time!" she tells Helen by way of excuse for not picking Victoria up at the station.
Here's a good look at Susan Engel's cleavage for anyone interested in such things.
In the end, Arthur's team loses "catastrophically", with Charles' umpiring skills getting much of the blame. Sir Nigel didn't take the defeat well, storming off and sulking in his car.
Anne's upset that Nigel seems to care more about the outcome of the match than seeing her. He does nothing to disabuse her of this idea.
At the party, Liz and Brian (James Fagan) steal longing glances across the room, before sneaking off together for a snog.
By now Nigel's drunk rather a lot, and when he sees Liz and Brian exit a room together he loudly jokes about them leading "secret lives". Liz takes him to task for his behaviour. "I don't give a fig what you think of me," he explodes, "nor do I give a fig what your family think of me. I mean to make the most of what remains of a highly disagreeable evening."
Anne is consoled by her grandmother, but they're interrupted by Phyllis: "Anne, darling, I think you should do something about your young man. He's making rather an ass of himself with some local girl on the dance floor." She sounds ever so slightly gleeful about reporting this news.
As if Nigel's behaviour wasn't bad enough, that night he comes to the room Anne shares with Liz, pawing her all over in search of "a goodnight kiss". He's then sick outside the room.
The next morning Arthur unceremoniously chucks the beastly baronet out, leaving Anne free to find yet another unsuitable young man.
Right, telly off now. You can imagine you're popping down to Bejam then getting dinner ready or something. We switch the box back on for...
Few hugely popular sitcoms have dated quite so badly as It Ain't Half Hot Mum. Following up on the success of writers Jimmy Perry and David Croft's previous hit, Dad's Army, it focuses on another previously under-represented group of soldiers in World War 2: here it's a concert party touring India at the tail end of the conflict. The thing that makes the show seem particularly dodgy to 21st century viewers is the way the natives of the country are presented, and one character in particular: the native bearer Rangi Ram. Rangi acts a sort of Greek chorus, welcoming viewers to the show each week and catching us up on what the troops are up to. Seeing the adventures of incompetent British troops through the eyes of an Indian servant is something with good comic potential, but this is undermined by the fact that Rangi (unlike any of the less prominent Indian characters) is played by a white actor (Michael Bates), who despite being smothered in brown boot polish doesn't look even vaguely Asian. Even less palatable is the way that Rangi's insistence that he is British (something which many children of the British empire genuinely felt) is clearly meant to be a laughable delusion ("It is amazing that after many years in India we British become fond of Indian food," he says at one point as he sits in front of a simmering curry). Though it wasn't the intention, it all seems like a bit of a slap in the face to any Indian viewers (though it doesn't do to make assumptions about how things like this are received: when working in HMV I once served an elderly Indian gentleman outraged that we didn't have his favourite TV show, Mind Your Language, on video).
Anyway, now that preamble's out of the way let's move on to the substance of the episode (the second of the show's fourth series, by the way), which is pretty funny stuff for the most part. The troops' CO, Colonel Reynolds (Donald Hewlett) has been carrying on with a Mrs Waddilove-Evans (the hilariously "jolly hockey sticks" Frances Bennett). Their already ludicrous romance is given an extra layer of silliness by their first names, Charles and Daphne - stereotypical names for lovers in romantic films of the era ("Bite my ear, Charles!").
But there's trouble in paradise as Daphne reveals that her Major-General husband will soon be returning. Terrified, the Colonel decides to take his men to entertain some troops in far away Kohat. But he makes the questionable decision to take Mrs Waddilove-Evans with him. The shaking about of the army truck makes her feel ill ("I'm going to be icky-poo!") so the Colonel arranges for the men to surround her in a way that will prevent her from being jogged. "You could go 135 miles with us all pressed up against you, could you, Daphne?" She seems more than happy with the arrangement.
But they don't get far before a group of Pathans block their way. Daphne's hurriedly concealed beneath a tarpaulin: "Daphne, you'd better hide. These tribesmen might get ideas!" "I don't mind them getting ideas!" And indeed, though the Pathans initially want to buy the army rifles, they soon become more interested in Daphne when she peeps out from beneath the tarpaulin. "They's getting ideas," rumbles Sergeant Major Williams (Windsor Davies). "How can you tell?" wonders the Colonel. "Is it the look in their eyes?" "Not exactly, sir."
Nervous nelly Bombardier "Gloria" Beaumont (Melvyn Hayes) is assigned to search the tribesmen's saddlebags: "The Sergeant Major says I have to have a little ferret in your portmanteau."
To the Colonel's bemusement, he discovers a quantity of powdered rhino horn. "They do say it's very efficacious, sir," explains the Sergeant Major.
Even more efficacious is a collection of dirty books: "Disgusting!" "Let's have a look!" The porn is confiscated and the Pathans are sent on their way, but the Sergeant Major's concerned that their leader may not be happy at losing face in front of his men.
The concert party heads to a grim abandoned fort for the night. The Sergeant Major tells the Colonel of his fears for Mrs Waddilove-Evans, surrounded by sex-starved young men: "I know I is always referring to them as a shower of poofs, but you never know, sir, one or two of them might be a bit..."
It seems unlikely that Gloria is one of the men the Sergeant Major's referring to, and the only thing on the mind of Gunner Mackintosh (Stuart McGugan) is food: he's so hungry he could eat a donkey between two slices of bread. "I wish I wasn't so artistic and sensitive," sighs Gloria. "I wish I was more sort of basic and earthy like you. I mean, a couple of slices of donkey and one of those dirty books you're in paradise, aren't you?"
Gloria's stage sets have come in handy for sleeping quarters: the Colonel's concealed beneath his Minnehaha wigwam, while Mrs Waddilove-Evans' bed for the night leads to much confusion when Captain Ashford (Michael Knowles) is asked to get something out of her shoe.
The Colonel and Mrs Waddilove-Evans share a moment of romance. "When my husband finds you he's going to horsewhip you!" she announces cheerfully, before reflecting that "It's so wild and strange and primitive here. It makes me feel wild and strange and primitive. Does it make you feel wild and strange and primitive?" "Up to a point, yes," responds the Colonel non-committally. But before either has a chance to act on these wild and strange and primitive feelings the Colonel absents himself for a moment and Mrs Waddilove-Evans is grabbed by the Pathans!
Much to the Sergeant Major's discomfort, the Colonel then mistakes his blanket-shrouded form for that of his missing lover: "Don't turn around, you look exactly as you did when we first met."
Eventually the kidnap is discovered, and during the ensuing panic a mysterious wrapped object is flung into the fort from outside. Could it be the severed head of the unfortunate Mrs Waddilove-Evans? Gunner Lofty Sugden is instructed to unwrap it but promptly faints.
ITV (Thames), 8pm
People in 1976 didn't use the word reboot (unless, perhaps, they were talking about putting a boot back on), but if they did they would definitely have used it about The New Avengers, which resurrects the gentleman of espionage, John Steed, and gives him an up-to-the-minute pair of new companions in rough-and-ready Mike Gambit (Gareth Hunt) and elegant Amazon Purdey (Joanna Lumley), who has the air of mystery inevitably surrounding people with only one name (like Iman, or Dappy).
Tonight's episode (the second to be made, and fourth to air) begins with an agent frantically morsing a message, only for an intruder to break in and smash his equipment to bits.
Then we're in London, in time to see ever-debonair Steed leave a restaurant with his ladyfriend of the week (though the spacing in the restaurant's name suggests it's maybe not the sort of place one should take a lady). As they get into a cab Steed's accosted by the dishevelled figure of Freddy (John Carson), a disgraced former agent. "Perhaps if you could put a word in for me...?" he pathetically asks. The New Avengers is hardly gritty realism, but Freddy feels more like a character out of a John Le Carré novel than The Avengers' fantastical 60s heyday.
The next we see of Freddy he's in one of those dingy warehouse interiors so integral to shows of this kind, apparently being pursued by David Swift (who's bald in that flowing locks at the sides way so few people are these days) and a group of henchmen. He cowers in a corner, and we launch into the credits.
When Swift's men eventually break down the door Freddy's hiding behind, it turns out that the heavies weren't after him at all, but an escaped guinea pig. As Swift puts the little feller back in his cage, an unfortunate goon who was bitten by it is casually killed behind him, then wrapped up in black plastic.
Swift's character, it emerges, is Dr Turner, a rogue scientist who has something highly sinister named "Midas" to sell to the highest bidder - the guinea pig is a kind of prototype. This is likely to Mr Vann (Ed Devereux), a shady representative of one of those shady foreign powers. The name Midas comes from Turner's obsession with gold (his name, too, is clearly a reference to "turning" dross into gold). Well, just look at his office.
As payment, Vann is offering half of a spectacular collection of gold antiquities currently loaned from his country to a museum in London.
Steed and Purdey, meanwhile, are waiting at the airport to intercept a dodgy character known as Hong Kong Harry. And when he eventually appears, we can see that dodgy is very much the word for him. Although he's apparently meant to be Chinese he's played by the very white Ronald Lacey with the barest minimum of eye makeup and without even a wig to conceal his ginger hair. His accent's a grotesque amalgam of Charlie Chan and Peter Lorre (Lacey having previously done a Lorre impression in the Avengers episode Legacy of Death). Steed's astonished by the vast amount of weight Harry seems to have put on. When he's unexpectedly shot by an airport security guard, Steed rushes to his aid and discovers that rather than food, Harry's belly's full of gold dust.
Purdey chases after the rogue security guard - Gambit's waiting outside in the car for just such an eventuality. They set off in a thrilling car chase - and of course, no thrilling car chase in the 70s would be complete without a hubbub in a marketplace. Purdey nicks one of these scattered oranges and suggestively feeds it to Gambit. Then it all goes just a bit too arch with the pair arguing over who directed The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) while still in hot pursuit.
They come to the deserted warehouse place (is it the same one? I'm not sure, actually) and director Robert Fuest's heightened style comes into its element as Gambit and Purdey hunt their prey, and indeed he hunts his. It ends in a hugely satisfying way, with the gunman poised to shoot Gambit and Purdey's foot unexpectedly appearing in the frame to disarm him. She then proceeds to chuck him off the building, which sadly means he's unable to say who he is or why he was after Hong Kong Harry.
Meanwhile, Steed is trying to find out what Hong Kong Harry is doing in the UK. The viewer, by this point, has deduced that he's another potential buyer for Midas. Viewers intrigued by Steed's presence at the Cock Pit may be even more so by his keenness to thrust his hands down Harry's pants. As well as the gold dust, Steed finds on Harry's person an invitation to a party, which he decides his friends should crash.
There is nothing, nothing I like better in this world than a 1970s party, and this one's an absolute smasher: wild costumes, drunken debauchery, and all suffused with a scary crimson glow.
The light matches the robes of a sinister figure who enters the party dressed, like the Phantom of the Opera, as Poe's Red Death. He dabs his fingers in a punchbowl, and departs as mysteriously as he came.
The partygoers, seemingly oblivious to this shocking disregard for hygiene, continue thirstily drinking the concoction...
...And a short while later Dr Turner and Mr Vann enter upon the scene, dressed head to toe in white shrouds. Vann seems appalled, but satisfied by what Turner has to show him. They depart, but not before setting an explosive charge that will blow the place up.
Purdey and Gambit now arrive, and discover that the partygoers are all quite dead. Gambit just manages to defuse the bomb in time.
Back at Turner's HQ, the Red Death is unmasked. This young man (Gilles Millinaire), with his pronounced cheekbones and clearly dubbed voice, is Midas. Vann's first impulse, being greatly taken with him, is to touch, but Turner swiftly prevents him from doing so.
Steed has an audience with a Chinese official, Sing (Pik-Sen Lim) to get to the bottom of what Harry's mixed up in ("I've got a soft spot for Hong Kong Harry. I suppose because he's more scrutable than most".) I should draw attention here to Joanna Lumley's quite extraordinary outfit.
Now, you may be wondering what's happened to dissipated Freddy, as I've been very remiss in not telling you. As a matter of fact he's been sneaking around Turner's place, spying on the doctor and his client in the hope of getting some information that will see the secret service welcome him back with open arms. He calls Steed with the standard request to meet him somewhere to hear the info (Carson's brilliant as Freddy, gloating over having the upper hand at last), but shortly after he puts the phone down Midas advances on him. Freddie punches him, then escapes. Shortly afterwards he finds himself covered in strange blemishes. By the time Steed and Purdey meet him he's in such a state he drives his car off a cliff (it's an exciting scene, but comprehensively stolen by Purdey's outfit, seen here in its full majesty).
Autopsy results are in on the partygoers, and the conclusion is that they died of, well, everything.
It turns out, you see, that Midas is a carrier of every disease on Earth, hence his lethal touch. Vann is a member of a republican faction aiming to use him to kill off their country's beloved Princess.
Before he died, Freddie was able to tell Steed that he recognised Turner from a top secret germ warfare unit, and Purdey heads there to find out about him, impressing the Lieutenant (Jeremy Child) that she interviews with her skill in the assault course as they talk. The women's lib stuff's a bit on the nose: "Where would you prefer me? In the kitchen? Tending the nursery? In bed?" The Lieutenant recalls Turner's love of gold (it would have been rather marvellous if he'd said "You know, like that chappie in the James Bond film"). Purdey heads straight to the gold exhibition at the museum. Both Turner and Vann are there, and she's swiftly identified and captured by a henchman. Midas is keen that once Purdey's been interrogated she should be given to him.
Gambit goes to see Sing, and gets into a fight with her burly henchman Choy (Bruno Erlington - the name suggests he's meant to be Chinese but compared to him Ronald Lacey looks like Xi Jinping). Once he's defeated, Sing reluctantly gives Gambit the details of where to find Turner.
At Turner's place, Purdey is tied to a chair but gets to spy through a keyhole, through which she sees the baffling sight of a shrouded Vann kissing Midas' hand (Midas has the most marvellous dressing gown).
As if being promised to Midas wasn't bad enough, Purdey has to suffer the attentions of a sleazy henchman. She manages to keep him distracted while Gambit breaks in. Disposing of the henchman, he frees her.
By this time, Midas has been taken to the museum, where he prepares to greet the Princess (Pola Churchill) and give her hand a deadly kiss (Robert Mill is hilarious here as the toadying curator, hyperventilating with excitement at meeting this royal personage). Steed pulls her out of the way in time and Purdey shows up, avoiding the Midas touch by kicking him into a sarcophagus.
Turner, however, is not so fortunate.
ITV (Thames), 9pm
Now, which ITV company do you think would produce a series recounting the life of Charles Dickens, with special emphasis on his relationship to London? Thames? LWT? Good answers, but as a matter of fact it was Yorkshire Television who made this 13-part prestige series by famed playwright Wolf Mankowitz, which retells the great author's life story with all the vivid colour of one of his own books (while biographical dramas haven't entirely disappeared from television in the 21st century it seems unthinkable now that they could go on for 13 episodes). This is the seventh.
The format of the series sees Dickens (Roy Dotrice), nearing the end of his life, look back over that life in the course of a framing story that has seen him strike up a romance with an American fan, Miss Baldwin (Holly Palance, daughter of Jack) during a visit to New York. Miss Baldwin is herself an aspiring writer, but Dickens advises her against it, and casts his mind back to the time of his first great success, The Pickwick Papers.
The novel's tremendous popularity has seen young Dickens (Gene Foad) inundated with offers, which he merrily boasts of to his family - pregnant wife Kate (Adrienne Burgess), her sister Mary (Lois Baxter) and his brother Fred (Graham Faulkner, whose career had hit an early peak a few years before with the lead role in Franco Zeffirelli's Francis of Assisi biopic Brother Sun, Sister Moon).
Having quarrelled with the original illustrator, Dickens is delighted that someone new has been discovered to provide the pictures. This is young Hablot K Browne (Robert Longden), who Dickens soon decides is to be published under the name "Phiz" to match his own Boz.
Dickens is astonished to find that everywhere he goes, everybody, rich or poor, is reading Pickwick (there's a lot of artistic licence here: the majority of poor Londoners at this time would not have been able to read).
But despite all his success, there's clearly something troubling Charles, as we're treated to a dream sequence in which an idyllic day out in the countryside with Kate takes a sinister turn with Dickens becoming a boy (Simon Bell) again, Kate seemingly threatening to devour him, and ends with him back in the blacking factory where he spent the most miserable days of his youth.
Awakening from his dream, Charles is comforted by Mary, in whom he suddenly seems a lot more interested than his pregnant wife. He tells her that the dream has inspired him to write a new story, all about an orphan...
The ubiquitous Tony Steedman turns up briefly as an actor in one of the various plays that Dickens currently has on.
Having been offered a much better deal for his future books by Richard Bentley (this episode, as its title suggests, is obsessed with the amount of money Dickens was making at this stage of his life), Dickens tries to get out of his contract with Mr Macrone (John Nettles), publisher of Sketches by Boz. Macrone insists on having full copyright of the book, and the meeting puts an end to the previous warm friendship between the two men. "Oh, success, success," mutters Macrone to himself after Dickens has left. "What a slut of a bitch you are."
Kate, whose pregnancy is making her feel useless and unattractive, is becoming increasingly jealous of Charles' closeness to Mary. He excitedly performs a scene from his new book, Oliver Twist, to her (inevitably it's a bit with Fagin so Gene Foad gets to do the voice). "It's lovely, and awful. Terrible, and beautiful," she thinks.
Dickens is horrified to learn that Macrone is cashing in on the popularity of The Pickwick Papers by republishing Sketches by Boz in monthly issues. He sets his pugnacious friend John Forster (Trevor Bowen) on him. Eventually Chapman and Hall, publishers of Pickwick, buy him out for £2000 (sorry, I'm going into rather too much boring detail now). Meanwhile, Kate vents her frustrations at Mary: "You've no idea how wretched it makes you feel, being blown up like a balloon." "I don't know what's got into you." "Oh really? I thought it must be rather obvious."
While Kate's feeling sorry for herself at home, her not-terribly-sensitive husband is out carousing with the leading lady in one of his plays (Gillian Rhind). "I just love that strange, steel face of his," she opines to one of her colleagues.
Dickens and Phiz walk the streets at night to research into pickpockets, and interview a policeman (John Malcolm) who tells them all about the notorious Jewish fence Ikey Solomons and his stable of child thieves (Solomons, obviously, was the inspiration for Fagin, so it's very odd that this scene takes place after we've seen Dickens read an excerpt from his book involving the character). During the interview further inspiration strikes as Dickens witnesses a brutish figure (Mike Perry) threatening to beat a young lady called Nancy (Maria O'Brien).
Charles bristles at Fred's suggestion that he spend more time with his wife, and when she finally goes into Labour he nips out for a stroll while Fred and Mary tend to her...
That's the end of Dickens' reminiscences for the week. Back in New York, the older author remarks to Miss Baldwin that he's having a curious sensation of having his life flash before his eyes. But he can't dwell on this, as he's approached by a sinister pair of revenue men (James Walsh and George Roubicek)...
Well that's it for this week. Next week, a new year but more, yes more, Dickens.
