Missing Believed Wiped 2016: Whack-O! 7.5 - Jim's Better Self

Jimmy Edwards in Whack-O! aveleyman.com

The first in a series of observations from Missing Believed Wiped 2016, held at BFI Southbank on Sunday 4 December 2016.

I’ve never understood entirely the ascendancy of Frank Muir and Denis Norden as comedy gurus in British broadcasting in the 1950s and 1960s, though it’s doubtful that I’ve really heard or seen enough of their work to judge it. This recently recovered penultimate episode of the original run of Whack-O! broadcast on 20 December 1960 at first seemed that it wouldn’t really help. The first half of the episode was ho-hum. Jimmy Edwards stars as a development of a schoolmaster persona he developed as a student performer in the Cambridge Footlights. It’s surprising to someone who watched him as a prematurely aged figure in the 1970s and 1980s to see Edwards (aged forty in 1960) with dark moustache and unlined face and with a more vital performance to match.

In this episode, ‘Jim’s Better Self’, Professor James Edwards, headmaster of Chiselbury School, finds his plan to spend the Christmas holiday abroad skiing frustrated by an outbreak of measles forcing him and his fellow schoolmasters – principally his cringing sidekick Pettigrew, an audience-eyeing Arthur Howard – to remain at Chiselbury for the Christmas holiday looking after the confined boarders. Edwards refuses to spend his holiday fund – the proceeds of his rigged one-armed bandit, to which he has successfully addicted and used to subject teachers and boys alike – to pay for the boys’ Christmas dinner, and banishes Pettigrew for the suggestion that he might have a ‘better self’. Come night-time, the better self appears as a ghost of Christmas or at least careers past, played in on film as an Edwards attired in a white version of his mortarboarded headmaster costume, and mixed with nightshirted Jimmy Edwards as live in the studio. The ghost reminds Edwards of the origins of his association with Pettigrew. The audience learns that one Wing-Commander Pettigrew, running the RAF’s education division a few months after the end of the Second World War, forgave a deserter – one Aircraftman Edwards, with Jimmy looking even weightier than usual probably because he was wearing the RAF uniform over part of his night costume. Pettigrew entrusted a letter to Edwards to post, only for Edwards to open the letter, copy the job application within, and duly become headmaster of Chiselbury School himself. He then appointed the well-meaning but humiliated Pettigrew boilerman and so began the cycle of appeasement and exploitation which results in the sapping of Pettigrew’s strength and decency and in the abusively co-dependent relationship at the centre of this episode at least of Whack-O!

The above summary might make the episode seem more profound than it is. It was pointed out to me that the writers were probably more pleased with a structure which built up to the scene of a dejected Pettigrew in the snow, with Howard declaiming theatrically that his tiny hamster was frozen as a pun for Puccini lovers, than they were bothered with exploring the Edwards-Pettigrew nexus. There is, though, a lot about the expectations Muir and Norden had of their audience’s taste which makes ‘Jim’s Better Self’ a period piece worth some consideration. Whack-O!’s title implies corporal punishment and a satisfaction taken in doling it out. A film version was even called Bottoms Up! The staff (we see little indeed of the boys in this episode) are irresponsible, impoverished but reconciled to their dependency on the monstrous Jim who lives off them as much as he does the parents who send him their sons for education. This was after all comedy for an institutionalized world, where the school with its hierarchies and petty disciplines and (lest we forget) single sex environment perhaps resembled many people’s workplaces and (as the episode as good as makes explicit) the peculiar security of wartime service in the armed forces. Pettigrew’s unexpected former persona as a wing-commander is something of an in-joke given that (though of a lower rank than the exalted wartime Pettigrew) Arthur Howard had been Frank Muir’s superior in the RAF during the war, while far from being a deserter Jimmy Edwards had been awarded the DFC for an act of life-saving heroism as a pilot at Arnhem. The schoolteachers are all of an age to have served (elderly Mr Dinwiddie perhaps in the Great War) and all cling to Chiselbury out of evident desperation. Conventions were comforts in a world that might not forgive if you offended. These included Edwards’s barrack-room insistence that he was going skiing to enjoy the company of women; one doesn’t have to import awareness of the sexuality of actors Edwards and Howard to remark that the character Edwards seems more anxious to ensure that Pettigrew comes with him on holiday to continue to act as dogsbody and willing dupe. Likewise, it’s taken for granted that a private boarding school, however run down and venal its regime, will have parents willing to send their sons there and help Edwards inflate his begowned academic pretensions.

‘Jim’s Better Self’ ends with Pettigrew finding the Christmas pudding sixpence and Edwards confiscating it for his slot machine, only for the machine to get into the Christmas spirit and pay out. Even though this wasn’t the final episode – there was one more episode of the original run before, according to Muir’s A Kentish Lad, I gather, Arthur Howard’s arrest and imprisonment for importuning in a public toilet in 1961 ended the series – it might have made a satisfying end, with harmony restored in the interest of all the characters and Edwards losing his monopoly on wealth and power in his closed world for the time being. Comparisons have been made between Professor Edwards and Sergeant Bilko, and while Edwards does owe something to Bilko he seems much less charming and much more brutal in his willingness to exploit everybody else with little or no reward for his closest associates. He’s a reminder that for all the nostalgia for social solidarity in the Britain of the 1950s, what solidarity there was rested on tolerance for a good deal of institutional and individual cruelty and acceptance of petty injustices; and that to no doubt varying degrees Frank Muir and Denis Norden and their viewers knew this and laughed with and at their own accommodations with a flawed world.

Edited 11 December 2016 to resolve the author's confusion of Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop and Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa's libretto to Puccini's La bohème.

On the other side of the rain

Thoughts on the BBC's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

Peter Harness and Toby Haynes's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was quietly involving, but only sometimes absolutely enthralling, and suffered at the end from a loss of the sense of scale and boundlessness that the realm of Faerie had in the book. Yet which book-hoarder could not wince as Gilbert Norrell surrendered to the loss of his library, knowing all the time that learning is nothing if it is not applied? Entertaining and exciting it was, but it felt also caught between two forms, the traditional closed-text book-to-television-serial adaptation, and the ongoing series which becomes its own narrative, seen in the SF and fantasy genres in The Tripods  in the 1980s, and more recently in Game of Thrones. The concluding episode felt as if it was hunting a second series commission, but with British ratings having fallen by two-thirds, it is perhaps unlikely that we will see it, unless American ratings are good enough to tempt a new co-production with further partners such Amazon or Netflix. The promised magical alliance of Arabella, Emma and Flora would be more than sufficient to hook a second series on. Incidents in the book which offered more closure were lost, though bequeathing to television potential for Stephen's reign at Lost Hope to be explored in any sequel, as well as introducing characters from the novel suppressed for the sake of clarity in the adaptation.

One might go further with such speculative proposals; though one might end up instead relating how there was in the year sixteen hundred and eleven a necromancer who came to Oxford and summoned the masters and scholars of all the colleges to meet him at the site of the Swindlestock Tavern, for to recall to life their predecessors slaughtered centuries before on St Scholastica's Day; and how he failed, for the college chefs could not make noodles with grain watered with St Frideswide's tears. Be this so, the Raven King may yet allow a little charity amidst his unkindness.

Drama and Delight: The Life and Legacy of Verity Lambert, by Richard Marson

The hardback jacket for Drama and Delight:
 The Life and Legaxy of Verity Lambert

Verity Lambert rolled up conventions about how women should behave in the masculine television industry of the 1960s and afterwards as if they were cigarette paper; rules were smoked, inhaled and remade because that's how Verity worked and made other people work to the best of their ability. Throughout Richard Marson's book, one gets the sense that throughout Verity Lambert was herself: indefatigable professionally and personally, not mercilessly uncompromising but determined that when she had identified the best way forward everyone was going to follow her plan and complete a programme to the highest achievable standard. At the same time, she emerges as intensely collaborative and generous of support, time and friendship, and one is caught up in her energetic, enthusiastic, positive personality: skills which made her the most widely successful and engagingly creative producer of fiction on television in her generation.

Drama and Delight is a more carefully structured and compiled book than his JN-T: The Life and Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Turner, which Miwk Publishing brought out two years ago. Footnotes identifying the sources of the quotations are welcome and the narrative is more linear and more focused. The writer's love of and support for the 'studio' era of British television is plain. Though the days of collegiality in the BBC or the ITV companies, when collective responsibility was held to take precedence over individualist notions of success, are celebrated, any rosy glow is balanced by the acknowledgements of collective irresponsibility too and of individual misbehaviour. I'll never quite look at a bar in one hotel, near where I live, again without thinking of an incident involving a male television executive, a female colleague and a broken glass which had implications for the said executive's career, and opened a door for Verity Lambert. Inevitably, comparisons and contrasts can be made with Marson's earlier subject. The world through which Verity Lambert worked and played was just as scandalous as that of John Nathan-Turner but has triumph and style and Verity's sense of the human spirit and achievement, and lacks the seedy, desperate edge of so much of Marson's portrayal of John Nathan-Turner. There are still many eyebrow-raising anecdotes and a few invitations to look for subtext among the professional and personal relationships of Verity's colleagues. The book is a great dispeller of myths already established in the public imagination - the Verity portrayed by Jessica Raine in Mark Gatiss's play about the early years of Doctor Who, An Adventure in Space and Time (2013) is swiftly dispatched in the opening pages, and one is left wondering how the party scene establishing her friendship with Jacqueline Hill in that play would have fared had it instead depicted a poker game, which Verity played with friends and colleagues in her pre-Doctor Who ABC Television days.

Front cover of the paperback edition of
Drama and Delight: The Life and Legacy of Verity Lambert

I've not written or edited a long form biography such as this, so only know shorter forms of a few hundred to ten thousand or so words personally, but would have tried to find solutions for some of the outstanding problems. I think that the reintroduction of some figures who leave and return to the story could have been better handled. Some asides in footnotes could really have been in the text, or provided springboards for discussion elsewhere. Late in the narrative a footnote tells us that industry rumour linked Verity with the job of head of the BBC Television Drama Group in 1983, which might have been better dealt with at the correct chronological point. Indeed, a few more dates here and there would have been useful in pinning down events. Some standardisation of references could have helped; an index would have been useful but having been involved in the last-minute editing of one once I know something of how expensive they are and how difficult to get right. There's lots of welcome detail, though, including entertaining oneself with the thought of a Verity Lambert walking tour of all her London addresses.

Perhaps the best point the book makes is that although she was a producer rather than a writer or director (at least, never openly so - there is some founded speculation about one of the Doctor Who episodes she produced, though) Verity Lambert's productions contain a certain quality which is recognisably hers. One absence in the book is that it doesn't set out to identify with particular precision what that might be, though in another sense it's enough to point out that a wider audience, somehow, knew her. That eye-catching name on the credits of Doctor Who, Adam Adamant Lives, Detective and the BBC's Somerset Maugham plays must have chimed with those viewers who saw the Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch featuring 'Mr Verity' and 'Mr Lambert' on first transmission. I can't have been the only reader whose reaction to the photographs of Verity in her early career as a production assistant at ABC Television, wearing to work those dress-code breaking leather trousers, was to wonder whether the inspiration for the creation of Cathy Gale in ABC's The Avengers, a leather-wearing woman of force, intellect and beauty in a man's world, was rather closer to home than has been realised.

Drama and Delight: The Life and Legacy of Verity Lambert by Richard Marson is published by and is available from Miwk Publishing in hardback and paperback editions.