"Cold Comfort Farm”

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32219, 11 February 1970, Page 3

"Cold Comfort Farm”

There are high hopes that “Cold Comfort Farm,” which will begin a three-part screening from CHTV3 tomorrow night, will be as good as the book, for it has an impressive cast —Alastair Sim, Sarah Badel, Fay Compton, Rosalie Crutchley and—from Z Cars ;—Brian Blessed. , Stella Gibbons’s outrageously funny novel of 1933 is a satire on the earthy, melodramatic novels of the age —“the kind of story in which .peasants have babies in cowlsheds and push each other; down wells.” It shows the impact of one, strong, balanced character, iwith a feeling for hygiene and good order, on the untidy

lives of the earthy, passion-! ate people who make a cult, of doom. It contains a line which has now become parti of the English language—“l saw something nasty in the woodshed.” This, then, is "Cold Com-! fort Farm,” where Great i Aunt. Ada Doom rules with! a rod of iron. Into this extraordinary atmosphere! comes young Flora Poste,] who sets about putting things right. Writing in the “Sunday, Mirror,” Bernard McElwaine said: “The production has a wild, semi-hilarious, crazy,! far-out quality which will produce a want-to-see-more” feeling.