My Life's My Own (1969) and Wednesday's Child (1970)

One of the occasional pleasures of my obsession with British television of the sixties and seventies is stumbling across a series which I'd barely heard of, and discovering it's a forgotten gem.  In the past this has included relatively well known shows like the proto-Minder Turtle's Progress, the peculiar Avengers-a-like Spyder's Web and the astonishing and bleak 1975 BBC version of The Legend of Robin Hood, but this week I started watching one of the dvds I picked up on a whim in the Network sale just before Christmas.

Public Eye will, no doubt, get a seperate blog post at some point but for now I want to mention the fourth episode of the fourth series, My Life's My Own.  I watched it this afternoon and thought it was excellent, and surprising in its willingness sympathetically to examine a lesbian relationship (even if, as tended to be the way back in the day, any deviation from the sexual norm ends up with one or other of the people involved being punished).  Stephanie Beacham as heartbroken nurse Shirley, is excellent and if hero Frank Marker both assumes a man to be behind everything and is then treated to a shock revelation, that's perhaps understandable given the 1969 air date.  This is only a year after 'The Killing of Sister George' after all (though a staggering 38 years after the brilliantly shot German movie 'Maidens in Uniform').  The actual relationship is never seen, but since the story is really that of the aftermath, as Beacham's jilted lover runs from rejection to Marker's boarding house, that's not an issue, though the brief scenes in which Marker confronts the married couple from who she's fled did make me want to see more.


Which made all the better the discovery* (courtesy of Jim Smith) that the equally excellent Armchair Theatre had shown a prequel play, Wednesday's Child, the following year, in which the growth of the relationship between Shirley and the older woman she is supposed to be nursing is laid bare.  The role of Shirley is played by Prunella Ransome in this rather than Beacham but she's equally good in a role with a different set of requirements, and the other two over-lapping roles - that of Chris Nourse (Katherine Blake in great form) and her bullying idiot of a husband Charles (Gary Watson) are played by the same actors. This consistent casting isn't the only thing which unites the two plays - most obviously, the bracelet which Beacham wears in Public Eye is given to her by Chris in Armchair Theatre but there are also subtler scripting links (the description of sick rooms requiring get well soon cards and grapes, for instance) and the growth of the burgeoning relationship is beutifully shown across the two plays, as Shirley falls for Chris, convalescing after a hysterectomy, and Chris - for all her initial claims not to feel the same - reciprocates, only not enough and not completely.  It's all subtly done, with no character snow-white and none totally repellant (though Charles comes bloody close), and the feelings of the central characters never entirely clear or definite.

Obviously, as a genuine prequel (shown in 1970), it's intended that it should be watched in the order Public Eye then Armchair Theatre, but it works just as well either way.  Both plays are available from Network - well worth a watch for anyone who appreciates well written and acted television.

* Note to self - I buy too many archive telly dvds sinceI somehow missed this fact even though it's mentioned on the back of the Armchair Theatre dvd...

Mrs Capper's Birthday (1968)

Everybody knows that the best Coronation Street were the black and white ones. You watch them now on dvd - grimy, poorly lit and grit specked prints in which everything moves at a glacial pace and the majority of the action consists of half-cut pensioners whispering about brassy looking types and men fighting about pigeons, women and booze. It's like real life except every so often something dramatic will happen or, even better, something plain odd.

'Mrs Capper's Birthday', an Armchair Theatre play from 1968 from a story by Noel Coward, is like watching a year's worth of that sort of Corrie all squeezed into an an hour long special. It's wickedly fast paced for the period, admittedly, which Corrie never was, but the amount of sheer stuff the writer crams into a bare hour is astonishing. And yet you never feel that it's gone daft or ludicrous. It always remains rooted in something akin to real life, even if the situations Hilda Capper finds herself in very often veer towards the implausible.

Because all it is, really, is a single day in the life of fifty year old cleaner Mrs Capper.

At first I thought it was going to be a bittersweet tale of an old lonely lady (Beryl Reid 's age is very hard to pin down after she hits about forty, I find) and her long dead husband, then I thought it might well be a darkish sort of story about marital infidelity, with Hilda taking sides between the couple she cleans for, but it wasn't. Then I wondered if it were about the generation gap and it wasn't. I even wondered if it were a late blooming romance sort of thing, as Arthur Lowe gave another wonderful little man performance as the tobacconist whose proposal of marriage Hilda interrupts.

But it's none of these things, nor is it about the loud, drunken friend who takes over every occasion, or the prissy, sniffy landlady who spoils every occasion. It's not about the camp, gay waiters who serve the family at dinner and who Hilda thinks 'talks all funny', or the unexpectedly appearing pre-op tranny who runs the pub (of whom Hilda asks whether she has many more injections to get), or the singer who belts out two complete old time sing-songs towards the end of the play.

It's not even about the film star (played by George Baker) who just happens to be visiting the pub with his glamorous American co-star, and who remembers Hilda when she was younger.

What it's about, in the end, is the happiness to be found in even the most simple life. Beryl Reid as Hilda has one of the all time great smiles, making her entire face shine as she moves through her fiftieth birthday, surrounded by family and friends, delighted by the gifts she's been given and the life she leads, remembering her husband (dead in the war twenty five years before) but not allowing that memory to sour any part of her life.

Quite wonderful, really. Quite, quite wonderful.