Chuckling through the Sixties
A new comedy showcase series of four plays
IT’S a full-time job keeping pace with the Sixties — but it’s made easier with Granada’s Comedy Four, the Thursday replacement for Bootsie and Snudge.
Many people are always a step behind … and can never understand why. Still, they cling to their own ideas. Old fashioned … certainly. Square … very possibly.
But their cheerful determination not to get with it is often very amusing.
Comedy Four didn’t set out to cash in on this situation.
The idea was simply to keep us chuckling. Four half-hourly, completely different, situation comedy stories were planned.
Every story has a different script team and cast.
Yet one theme has been unintentionally stitched through the four stories – the struggle of some people to keep up with the Sixties.
Tonight’s first episode — “Tea at the Ritz” — is a fair example.
A dithery couple run a dowdy cinema called the Ritz that was probably all the rage in Valentino’s day and which still serves tea to patrons during the interval.
Into this happy, but none-too-profitable set-up, steps a slick young salesman, with a get-rich-quick scheme to scrap the tea and show sexy films.
“Tea at the Ritz” has a definite hint of Bootsie and Snudge about it.
Producer Peter Eton and writers Peter Miller and James Kelly were members of the B & S team.
The dotty couple who run the Ritz both appeared — as dance-hall owners — in a B & S episode on December 20 last year.
Their names: Ann Lancaster and Ronnie Stevens.
Off-stage, they are old friends. Ann is god-mother to Ronnie’s three-year-old son, Paul.
On-stage, they are two of television’s most versatile characters, each with a rich repertoire of dialects.
You have heard both many times in ITV comic commercials. Ann Lancaster has been the ’voice’ of pigs, glasses, oranges — and she was the mystery caller of “Albert!” in the popular man-in-the-bath TV Times advertisement.
Ronnie has appeared recently in a toffee commercial with Arthur Haynes.
He was also in ITV’s New Look and The Peggy Mount Show.
Ronnie — quavering impressively — told me: “For ‘Tea at the Ritz’, Ann and I concentrate on our crackly, wavering elderly people-type voice.”
The salesman is played by Norman Rossington, one of the bright young men of British comedy.
He has appeared in many successful films, including Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, and many television laughter programmes … The Army Game, Our House, and ITV’s Tune On The Old Tax Fiddle.
“Tea at the Ritz”, then, has three talented and experienced mirth-makers.
But the entire series is encrusted with top-line comedy character actors and actresses.
Second show in the series is Tin Pan Alice, with Athlene Seyler, Warren Mitchell and Carole Carr.
It’s about an old dearie who runs an out-of-date music shop who suddenly has the alarming experience of having a hit record on her hands. Third of the quartet brings two great comedians together — Kenneth Connor and Deryck Guyler.
They star in Fit For Heroes, the story of a retired Army major and his faithful batman who plan revenge in the Post Office when their pensions are stopped.
Finally, Dudley Foster and Bernard Bresslaw come together in Home From Home — the story of two bewildered old lags caught up in changing conditions in one of Her Majesty’s prisons.
Comedy Four intends to be uncomplicated and amusing But watch for ironic twists in all four plots.
