Strindberg or sitcom?

Press, 16 August 1988, Page 19

Strindberg or sitcom?

A.K. Grant

on television

I have usually taken the view that it isn’t fair to review a new series on the basis of its first episode: that you should watch two or even three episodes before you can come to any reasonable sort of conclusion about what a series is up to, how successful it is in achieving whatever it seems to be setting out to achieve. But “Bert and Maisy,” currently screening on Thursdays on One, has not benefited from this policy as far as this reviewer is concerned.'

I rather liked the first episode: to be sure Grant Tilly’s Bert was rather reminiscent of his playing of Wally in “Gliding On,” Bert thus becoming a sort of Wally among the cucumbers. But Tilly is a fine player for all that, as is Alice Fraser, and I thought the subjects of sudden widowhood and having to sell your house, because it is getting too big for you were set up in a promising way. I didn’t see episode two, but watched last week’s and was most disappointed. It is not that the show is devoid of percep-

tion or insight: it is just that no sooner do you get a moment of perception or insight than somebody falls into a spa pool or a pressure cooker blows Irish stew all over the kitchen. The show doesn’t seem to know what sort of show it wants to be: neither sitcom on the one hand nor Strindberg on the other.

In theory there is no reason why drama has to be either, particularly in the theatre where you are playing to only a few hundred people a night, and those few hundred people don’t necessarily come along with specific expectations about what they are going to see. But on television you are, if you are anywhere near prime time, as this show is, aiming for an audience in the hundreds of thousands. And most of those hudreds of thousands will assume that if something looks like a sitcom and sounds like a sitcom then it ought to be a sitcom, and they will be disappointed and annoyed if they don’t get the laughs out of it that they expect from a sitcom.

Sure, some of the greatest shows, the ones that we remember most fondly, have been mouldbreakers, from “Steptoe and Son” to “Fawlty Towers” to “Cheers” or “The Singing Detective”: some of the best shows haven taken a while to find their audience because they weren’t what

people expected. But if you are going to break the mould of people’s expectations you have to do it extremely well. And “Bert and Maisy” hasn’t been done well enough. The author Robert Lord, has to take a good deal of the blame. He has put a lot of thought into his two central characters, but not lavished as much care or attention on the subsidiary ones, leading to some rather wild overplaying from good actors who know better but presumably didn’t feel there was any other way to go.

The makers of the show, writer, producer, performers, deserve credit for attempting something difficult: a series of half-hour dramas exploring the comic and not-so-comic issues arising out of real situtions confronting real and recognisable people. But television is an unforgiving medium: fine words butter no parsnips, nor do they guarantee either the satisfaction of a job well done or the satisfaction of a mass audience well pleased.