’Savage' satire of Britain

Press, 21 April 1982, Page 18

’Savage' satire of Britain

NZPA London A British film at next month’s Cannes Festival satirises British institutions including the Royal Family, according to the “Standard.” The film, "Britannia Hospital,” features Buckingham Palace functionaries portrayed by a. female impersonator and a midget, also a figure in powder blue “who could easily be mistaken for the Queen Mother,” the newspaper said. The production was certain to provoke comment and even outcry both in Britain and abroad, reporter Alexander Walker said. He wrote: “ ‘Britannia Hospital’ is the most savage satire on the state of Britain, ironically financed by the combined resources of the Government-funded National Film Finance Corporation and the blue-chip city company of Thorn-EMI, since Tm All Right, Jack’ bared its teeth at w.rkers and management 23 years ago.” But "Britannia Hospital,” whose exterior scenes were shot in the grounds of a mental hospital.in Middlesex, takes its withering attack on class, privilege, intolerance, greed, snobbery, bloodymindedness, work-shyness and other British complaints right up to the top layer of the establishment to include the Royal household itself. Walker said the turbulent

highlight of one anarchic day in the life of a big London hospital was a visit from the palace with two protocol fixers arriving in advance of the royals to smooth the red carpet through the picketlines of belligerent-minded but otherwise bone-idle cfrikprs One of them was Lady. Felicity, a blue-chinned martinet, played by a female impersonator, John Bett, who drilled the trade unionists singled out for the presentation line in how to bow and curtsy, denounced the pick-: eters as “scum” and approved .a totally paralysed bed-case which , could move only its eyes as “just perfect" to meet the royal visitor. The other palace flunkey was a three-feet-high midget called Sir Anthony Mount, played by Marcus Phillips, who bullies everyone in sight’, including the metropolitan police commissioner,, who . is obsessed by overkill to the point of populating the hospital grounds with snipers. The royal entourage has to be smuggled through the pickets now swollen by black militants demonstrating against an African dictator housed with his wives, chickens and mistresses in the private patients’ wing. The means of doing so is to disguise them as casualties

of an I.R.A. bomb attack. Representatives of the law. Church and armed services arrive in wheelchairs, on. stretchers and crutches, and, in the case of the old lady in powder blue; played by.singer-turned-actress Gladys Crdsbie, on a hospital trolley swathed in gauze like an Egyptian mummy, to be ceremoniously unwrapped by her flunkeys when safe inside. . ’ Lindsay Anderson denies

any intention of insulting any individual member of the Royal Family, least of all the beloved Queen Mother, Walker wrote. “What is under attack is the function of monarchy. Royalty has a debilitating effect simply by being there and using its enormously sentimentalised appeal to anaesthetise us all and lull us into accepting the establishment view. of things,” Anderson said.