SITCOM · CARRY ON · GLASGOW · CHRISTMAS · CARTOONS · SATIRES · BANDS · BONDS · TREK · WWII · POSSESSED · HOME
Sitcom spinoffs
"Gotta get these things OUT!"
Yes, you knew it was coming. The drill here should be self-explanatory - round up and rate those hoary old laughing stocks of British filmdom, the TV sitcom films. Without further ado, let's get a move on - the sooner we start, the sooner we'll be out of here.
First out of the traps was 1958's I ONLY ARSKED!, based on phenomenally successful excused boots bumbler The Army Game ('The original Army Game shower make their 'scream' debut!') The plot is a bit more involved than the usual store-bound larking about. Arab sheikh Marne 'Lazar off of The Man with the Golden Gun' Maitland hires a squadron of British troops to prevent a revolution in his newly oil-rich fiefdom - cue Alfie Bass, Bernard Bresslaw and co. Broad slapstick and harem antics result.
The following year, Associated British Pictures (of Ice Cold in Alex and The Rebel fame) raised Jimmy Edwards' corporal punishment drollery Whack-O! to silver screen status with BOTTOMS UP!, via Professor James Edwards MA (applied for)'s typically self-serving scheme to raise the profile of the school by passing off pupil Melvyn Hayes as a middle-eastern prince. A proto-If... subplot about student insurrection, leading to a marvellous, climactic scene in which a recently-constructed 'whacking platform' is torn down by a mob of youths including Richard Briers among their number, makes this one of the superior entries in the sitcom pantheon. About the same time, amiable David Kossoff/Peggy Mount vehicle The Larkins was remoulded as INN FOR TROUBLE, which established one of the genre's most identifiable traits, by ditching the original premise and uprooting the pair from London to run a country pub with some bizarre customs.
Nothing, sadly, followed in its wake for a decade, so we were denied a glimpse of The Rag Trade or Mr Digby Darling in glorious Eastmancolour. The first of the main wave was, unusually, 1969's TILL DEATH US DO PART, which had a good crack at that potentially disastrous practice, 'opening the story out for the big screen'. A chronicle of Chairman Alf's life from the Blitz to the present day, with the neat irony of the East End terrace that survived the war being compulsorily purchased and demolished at the end of the film, as a relocation-resisting Alf potters about morosely in its empty, crumbling interior, it perhaps suffers from the absence of the Garnett-Booth dynamic for a fair wodge of its length, but some great scenes, imaginative direction (from Norman 'Confessions' Cohen) and a lovely theme song (from 'Village Green'-era Ray Davies, no less) make for a fine film.
All these elements are absent from 1972 sequel THE ALF GARNETT SAGA, which keeps the narrative thread from its predecessor - the family are now ensconced in a high-rise tower block - but jettisons everything else, along with Booth and Una Stubbs, replaced ineffectively by Paul 'Z-Cars' Angelis and Adrienne Posta. Curiosities aside (Alf accidentally ingests LSD, and hectors a galaxy of stars including Max Bygraves, Eric Sykes and George Best at a football match) it exemplifies the wrong kind of sitcom spin- off as neatly as the first film does the right kind.
By now the floodgates were open. 1971 brought DAD'S ARMY, a nice if unremarkable history of the home guard complete with pleasing montages put together by Cohen again, plus a hellishly catchy bit of incidental whistling. PLEASE SIR! set the situation-uprooting mould by sending the class off on a bleak-looking field trip - a fun idea, but it meant less Norman Potter-based fun. Still, it did OK, augmented by Brinsley Forde as the butt of some highly dubious racial gags, and Todd Carty in need of a piss. Alderton fought off bigotry allegations and the advances of Patsy 'I'll remember you in my will!' Rowlands, while Jack Smethurst, aptly enough, drove the bus.
Ah yes, buses. Mention sitcom films and people will often respond 'ON THE BUSES!' and indeed Hammer's trilogy of moneyraking Blakeythons score quite highly with us, being far more watchable than the iffy TV original. The original is a fair enough riff on the battle of the sexes transport war first laid out so beautifully in Carry On Cabby. Mutiny is a largely poor sequel with some zoological slapstick and a Union Jack-clad coach the arguable highpoint. Holiday's the best of the trio, with a too-hot-for-TV opening calamity entailing the depot's warring triumvirate being sacked (by Mr Bronson!) and relocating to Pontin's in Prestatyn, for some khazi- detonating fun. Queenie Watts, Henry Magee, Arthur Mullard, and best of all Wilfrid Brambell, help out with the funnies.
The other sitcom franchise that ran to three episodes, in a roundabout way, was UP POMPEII! Now, this really shouldn't have been any good - the source programme being not so much a sitcom as an interrupted Frankie Howerd monologue. The intimacy of the TV studio plus audience is, you would think, necessary for this sort of thing. But, while the films are certainly not the peak of the Howerd canon, they're fun all the same. The first is great stuff, playfully opening with Howerd looming over a scale model of Pompeii and cracking gags about the production ('Copulatum expensium, as we Pompeiians say!') before strolling through a market set to a fantastic oompah theme song. The following film doesn't quite live up to that opening, and relies a lot on knockers (and, more forgivably, sitcom film stalwart Derek Griffiths), but it's amusing all the same.
Following hot on its heels came UP THE CHASTITY BELT, moving the whole shebang forward to the Crusades, with Howerd as chastity belt salesman Lurkalot, predictably mistaken for Richard the Lionheart in a plot-propelling manner. There's a pleasant amount of stunt cameo casting about - Hugh Paddick as Robin Hood! Rita Webb as Maid Marian! Eartha Kitt as Scherazade! Derek Griffiths as Saladin! Long John Baldry as Little John! Fred Emney as a drunk! OK, maybe not so adventurous, then. UP THE FRONT, following 'Lurk's recruitment (by Bob Hoskins) into the First World War and a secret map being tattooed on his arse. Griffiths aside, the bets thing here is Lance Percival cast as a Nazi alongside the usual Peter Bulls and Gertan Klaubers.
The STEPTOE AND SON films are probably the best in all of the more- than-one spin-offs, however. 1972's eponymous effort, with Harold marrying a cockney stripper (Aylesbury's own Carolyn Seymour, who played more or less the same character in highbrow Peter O'Toole satire The Ruling Class the same year) and Albert doing his level best to sabotage the affair, leading to a Spanish honeymoon climax (or anti-climax, in Harold's case), is the essence of the TV series transposed to grimy celluloid, with added Mike Reid. STEPTOE AND SON RIDE AGAIN, though, is the one. The plot may be patchy - a local gangster extorts cash from Harold and sells him a duff greyhound, leading the desperate pair to fake Albert's death for the insurance - but the seediness is overwhelming and the cast - especially Henry Woolf as local mobster Frankie Barrow and Milo O'Shea as a pissed physician - are largely great (apart from a tragic-looking Diana Dors, who's just large).
Such was the mania for sitcom films at this time that a whole second rank of shows found the silver screen thrust upon them. NEAREST AND DEAREST, with Jimmy Jewel and Hylda Baker as the brother and sister team behind Pledge's Purer Pickles was a prime example. A long- running bout of tantrums, double entendres and malapropisms, Nearest and Dearest was never the most sophisticated or involved of entertainments, so it's no surprise to learn that the film adaptation obeys every rule of the bog standard sitcom spin-off.
Rule one - why bother risking new material when tried and tested lines and situations from the original programme will do? Rule two - take advantage of the location budget available and get the characters out of the studio setting - send them all on holiday, perhaps (Blackpool in N&D's case, to a B&B run by Yootha Joyce). Rule three - take the risqué factor up a notch from the telly, perhaps with a bit of female nudity (Nellie visits a strip club unknowingly, paving the way for a textbook bit of penny-dropping fun). Best of all, rule four - replace the telly version's instrumental theme with a full-blown title song (Hylda herself penned and warbled 'When you hold my hand/I'm in wonderland/You are the nearest and dearest to meeeee!') Incidentally, Hylda had previously appeared in 1961 film She Knows, Y'Know, which must be the only example of a film being spun off from a catchphrase.
Pensionable malapropism was also the order of the day for Irene Handl as the cockney veteran wooed by northern gravedigger Wilfrid Pickles in the film of FOR THE LOVE OF ADA, while a more middle class turn came from the seemingly permanently cardigan-clad Patrick Cargill in camp divorcee-with-wayward-daughters favourite FATHER, DEAR FATHER, notable mainly for being the only big screen work of director William G Stewart.
LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR has undergone something of a critical rehabilitation of late, mainly thanks to journalists batting politically incorrect theories back and forth at each other, although both camps tend to ignore the fact that the actual comedy on display is as weak as you like, and the film, in which Rudolph Walker's dad comes home to roost, and gets the hots for Jack Smethurst's mum, similarly fails to capitalise on a potentially interesting premise. Things were getting silly now, and 1972's film version of little-remembered Bill Fraser undertakercom THAT'S YOUR FUNERAL is the galloping excess of the trend in a nutshell. A standard coffin mix-up plot is enlivened mainly by the entire cast unconvincingly coming under the influence of a smuggled consignment of accidentally cremated weed (if in doubt, drug up the old men, seems to be a rule of thumb), the film crew appearing on-screen during the credits, and, er, some shots of a shockingly traffic- free '70s motorway.
Similarly broad and bitty, but somehow standing above the also-rans, is BLESS THIS HOUSE. A largely kitchen-bound generation gap sitcom on telly, the 'opening out' of Sid James' most doorbell-addled half hour is achieved by almost entirely junking the original premise for some 'warring neighbours' slapstick set-pieces. And it's about ten times more fun, probably because series creators Vince Powell and Harry Driver (whose stuff we've never really thought much of) made way for Terry and June scribe Dave Freeman and director Gerald 'Carry On' Thomas. And, indeed, the Abbotts' new neighbours are... Terry and June! And what's this? The sainted Peter Butterworth's here as Sid's rhubarb brandy-distilling mate! And the son has mutated into Robin Askwith along the way. Oh, and Eric Rogers is doing the music. To be honest, they couldn't have moved it much further away from the TV series without setting it in space, and that's fine by us.
The most satisfactory, in the sense of complete, coherent and, well, film-like, of them all is probably THE LOVERS. This should come as no surprise, seeing as the first series' writer, the inestimable Jack Rosenthal, was still wielding the foolscap - the following year he would write Hot Fat, the first of four tremendous entries in the Play for Today strand, and the masterly narrative skill he showed on Spend, Spend, Spend and the like show signs of developing here. From the charming opening montage setting up the characters of hapless Geoffrey (Richard Beckinsale) and repressed Beryl (Paula Wilcox) through to the genuinely moving finale, it plays, looks and feels like a proper film (note that Rosenthal decided to just retell the story already laid out in the series, rather than take audience familiarity as read and cart the pair off to Spain on a singles holiday or something).
That look is important. By and large, all the sitcoms considered here were produced in standard '70s no-nonsense LE style, which gave even the most naturalistic of them a harsh, overlit, audience- laughter-backed, claustrophobic feel. The necessarily garish lighting makes the 'indoors' of '70s telly the most indoorsy indoors you ever did see - it's hermetically sealed, almost cooked in fact, courtesy Lee Lighting Ltd and friends. While this is ideal for the music hall stylings of, say, a Dad's Army ensemble scene, the more wistful stuff seems better suited to that contrastingly overcast, drizzly wilderness that was the 16mm film stock- enshrined '70s 'outdoors'. The Lovers was a rare benefactor of the absence of chuckles and glare.
As was the film of THE LIKELY LADS. The film's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, especially not when compared to the best episodes of Whatever Happened To..? But you can't deny it looks and feels absolutely right, which helps the 90-odd minutes pass by in a more than enjoyable way. A quick mental snapshot of the series is likely to feature, not the indoor set of Bob's front room plus dodgy serving hatch, but rather the outside, that fabulously drab new estate, complete with vegetation-free flower beds. It's a wistful, nostalgic programme, and the '70s 'outdoors' is the perfect location. It's unlikely too much deliberation was ever put into the visual aspect of these films, but whoever decided to stick the lads in a caravan in the remote Yorkshire hills deserved a BAFTA for cinematography.
Scooping the prize for best direction at our notional sitcom film awards, however, is PORRIDGE. Not only is there that same perfect match between muddy film and gritty location, there's a real sense of the prison that was missing from the telly series' plasterboard brickwork. Little details like the National Express coaches radio add buzz in and out, and the overall effect is more akin to that year's cinema version of Scum than any other film in this genre. Shock horror - someone's actually directing this thing! Co-writer Dick Clement, as a matter of fact, who'd cut his megaphone-chomping teeth on spy comedies like Otley, and obviously learned that a camera in a comedy film has to do more than just move into position and wait for the funny to occur. What's also great, if we're not being too cod-metaphysical about things here, is the absence of adoring laughter - the sarky one-lines are greeted by a despairing silence (on screen at least), which for once in these films seems entirely fitting. Oh, and Joe Brown's closing theme is an air- punching joy, too.
Having laid down these ground rules for a successful tape-to- celluloid transfer, we feel duty bound to admit that our favourite sitcom film obeys precisely none of them. Yes, MAN ABOUT THE HOUSE should be all wrong. The cock-among-the-pussies premise of the series is jacked in after about ten minutes for a completely out of character 'all the gang together' adventure to prevent Peter 'Sir Frank is in charge of civil service pay' Cellier flogging off the street the house is on. The plot ambles arbitrarily from set-piece to set-piece, finally unravelling completely for the all-star, self- indulgent Thames studios guest star finale. It's a badly scripted, badly shot, 'will this do?' mess. And yet we love it, more so than the telly original. Constant repeats may play a part, but there's something eminently rewatchable about the steak Diane scene, or the Grundy-Milligan-Smethurst ending. It's pantomime, in effect. With, once again, a lovely closing theme.
The worst? Well, let's get ARE YOU BEING SERVED? out of the way first. It's terrible, but hardly much more so than the source material it had to work with. A lot of play is often made about the tenuous way the film contrives to send the entire shop's staff on holiday together, but really this is little more than an excuse to not build/rebuild a proper department store set, as - due to a convenient guerilla uprising on the Costa Plonka (what is it with these films and their incursions into geopolitics?) - they are confined to the Elstree-based hotel (prop. Andrew Sachs!) After that, it's the usual mix of lines and plot ideas from old, store- bound episodes - the team end up camping in tents as their rooms aren't ready, much as they did in-store one night in the programme, for instance. It's an entertaining look at the bottom end of the film industry - for once the term 'wobbly sets' is entirely justified - but cheap recreations of '70s Spain are nowhere near as fun as cheap recording of real '70s Britain. Best bit is Derek Griffiths as a sheikh (ah, the middle east again!) having his inside leg measured, which tells you all you need to know.
The bottom feeders here must be the ones which actually threw away real comic potential, and the death rattles of the genre are our prime suspects. GEORGE AND MILDRED is generally regarded as superior to its O'Sullivan-led progenitor (though we're not so sure), but no- one sticks up for the film, and rightly so. The shoddiness is entertaining, and even knowingly mocked by the film-makers - G&M celebrate their second honeymoon at 'The Candlelight Restaurant', and thence decamp to 'The London Hotel', which sounds like something out of the Beano. The obligatory high-stakes jeopardy plot - George is mistaken for a mob mogul, and Kenneth Cope is dispatched to bump him off - is above average for this sort of thing, and that 'London Hotel' decor is marvellously garish. But with suited heavies replacing traditional nemeses the Fourmiles, and Yootha Joyce painfully ill with hepatitis (she wouldn't last to see the film's premiere - a blessing, of sorts) it's not a fun watch for anyone with even a residual fondness for the original show or its stars.
Richard Beckinsale didn't make it to production of the RISING DAMP film, but the producers didn't let that stop them. Christopher Strauli visibly struggles in the thankless replacement role, and yet again the plot is bodged together from old telly scripts, but so much more goes wrong. That seedy look 16mm film stock lent the similarly downmarket Porridge and the Steptoes should help here, but they fudge the issue by making the cramped, squalid flats into huge, relatively palatial rooms. The 'Damp was, of course, originally a stage play, and that farcical element probably does work best in a telly studio. It certainly doesn't work here - once again, the arrival of Derek Griffiths lifts the sunken spirits, and in a film that stars Leonard Rossiter that really shouldn't be the case. And Chappell's decision to provide closure on two aspects of the sitcom we didn't want closure on in the first place - Philip's real origins and Rigsby's Christian name - just tramples on the original series' reputation.
After that, the genre slid into remission (a film was made of Whoops Apocalypse in the mid-'80s, but it's stretching a point to call the original series a sitcom, we think). This wasn't entirely down to the hopelessness of the late entries. The tax-dodging Eady Levy, introduced by Harold Wilson after the war, had artificially boosted cinema production in the UK for nearly four decades, enabling the sitcom spin-offs and the likes of the Confessions films to stay afloat. Thatcher's cabinet, appropriately enough, knocked this on the head with the 1985 Film Act, bringing a fine tradition of evocative, humble British film-making to a halt, and paving the way for W**king Title and their floppy-haired brethren. As Mrs T would no doubt piously claim, that's progress... and that was Movie! Movie!
SITCOM · CARRY ON · GLASGOW · CHRISTMAS · CARTOONS · SATIRES · BANDS · BONDS · TREK · WWII · POSSESSED · HOME
