Television and Radio Mr Nightengale’s sour song

Press, 24 February 1979, Page 13

Television and Radio Mr Nightengale’s sour song

By

JOHN COLLINS

I had heard, I can t remember where now, that “Nightingale’s Boys” (TVI, Thursday) was the shocking story of the lewd and unnatural relationship that developed between a plain but musically gifted bird and a trio of young ornithologists trapped by unseasona] weather in a hide on Exmoor in 1907. So, with this rather disturbing plot in mind, it was with some trepidation that I hastily threw together a passable imitation of a small hedgerow on the sitting-room floor, disguised myself as a thrush, daubed the wife with mud in case she should glint in the light from the television and give our presence away, unsteamed the binoculars, and tuned in to see how within the bounds of decency such an unusual saga could accommodate an episode entitled “Big Sid.” I had been misled. Big Sid did not turn out to be

an inexperienced but wellbuilt young nature lover trapped in a maelstrom of passion with a delicate creature he knew he could never make his own. He was a cricketer.

Well, at least for the first few minutes of the programme, he was a

cricketer. He then scored a duck (if such a phrase is acceptable, given the speculation of the preceding paragraphs) in the last innings of his career and became a former cricketer, a grippingly bitter and twisted former cricketer who is invited to return to his old school to present the sports prizes and who decides to give the boys, not the usual encouragements lifted from Kipling or Newbolt, but rather his own view of the world as being more of a mine-field than a playing field.

Ronald Lewis was de right as the embitter*. Sid, convinced that in world of self-serving bad stabbers he alone had th guts and integrity to pla fair and stab people in th front for their own gooc and where had it got him' Tell me that, where had i

got him. he who was thin in the batting averages foi Lancashire and, now what, they don’t even give you the time of day. let alone a job, when you’ve given them the best years of your life, etc., etc? His rehearsal of his world-of-bastards speech in front of the wardrobe mirror was superbly acted —one almost felt'for a fleeting moment that there might have been a grain of truth in this unhappy view—and the camera swung in brilliantly on his eavesdropping wife, used

to his bitterness and knowing that, although Sid wouldn’t abide backtabbing in others, he had sever been unusually verse to self-serving and ypocrisy himself. The speech never went üblic. of course. The man if integrity who was ibout to really tell the packed school” hall what life was all about suddenly found that the offer of a iob dramatically altered his view and the boys vere told to face life with t straight bat. Predictable. 1 suppose, mt written with a con•'incing realism up to Coin Welland standard (than which there is no higher praise) and excellently acted by both Ronald Lewis and, as Sid’s strungout wife, Mary Miller. The scenes in which Sid swaggered around his old school, staggering under the weight of the chip on his shoulder and fulfilling every schoolboy’s dream by telling his former teacher exactly where to get off, were priceless.

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