To Please Sir with love… Please Sir! (1971), Network Blu-ray out now!

 

 

One of the biggest box office hits in Britain of 1972, when, Lord knows, we could do with a laugh, Please Sir! is one of those very rare beasts, a film based on a TV series that works on its own terms but also as an extension of the spirit and sensibilities of the series. Removed from the context of its source medium and, further, the school setting that created the situation, Please Sir! finds a new comedic environment with which to extend its mix of class and generational conflict in the more cinematic location of the great outdoors, albeit it just down the road from Pinewood Studios.

 

As David Barry (Frankie Abbott in 5c) says in one of the extras, the TV series was hugely popular and was even pulling in more viewers than Coronation Street at one point. As with Dad’s Army you had the eternal comedic conflict between the establishment of school authorities and beyond and the working-class kids (mostly in their 20s) who are written off as a bad job by almost all around them. There's some genuine pathos here amongst the (barely) scholarly slapstick.

 

The one person willing to take their side and who still has hopes for them is their teacher Bernard “Privet” Hedges as played by charming and quick-witted John Alderton who, in addition to having a certain McCartney-esque look, is able to convey a mixture of naivety and principled resolve. Bernard’s one of the most well-constructed comedy characters of the era because of these contradictions, his hesitancy almost always followed through by response and perhaps the sound of his hand gently slapping the back of a boy’s head. It’s hard to imagine any other performer holding these opposing forces together with a much likeability, ease and charm as Alderton and it was, as much as Arthur Lowe’s Captain Mainwaring, one of the iconic roles of early seventies sit-com.

 

John Alderton, Patsy Rowlands and Liz Gebhardt

There’s also, as with Dad’s Army, a superb troup of other performers who all score goals. There’s the magnificent Deryck Guyler – Wallasey’s finest - as Norman Potter, an ex-soldier with feet of clay who hates the pupils just as much as he loves his “senior officers” and relishes every small expression of authority even though the gang invariably run rings around him. The object of Potter’s loyalty, Headmaster Maurice “Oliver” Cromwell (Noel Howlett), is liberal and literal-minded, possibly a future-state Bernard who has ascended to a state of euphoric denial.

 

Whilst Potter puffs him up, the fearsome Doris Ewell (the wonderful Joan Sanderson) grounds him with her cynicism and political nouse. Mr. Price (Richard Davies) is of the Welsh persuasion and whilst just as cynical as Miss Ewall, lacks the gumption to do anything other than hang on in there and grab a beer when he can. Then there’s lovely old Erik Chitty as Mr Smith, a Godfrey figure – he was in Dad’s Army a number of times himself - who is occasionally called upon to deliver clarity to the situation.

 

Last but not least amongst the staff is Patsy Rowlands as the lovelorn Angela Cutforth, who holds at least four candles for Mr Hedges, a specialist in these types of roles – remember her affection for Kenneth Williams in Carry on at Your Convenience – she is the perfect emblem of The School Crush.

 

Carol Hawkins, Sir and Peter Cleall

This is where the series and the film scores as, in the world after Just William and before Tucker Jenkins (young Todd Carty is uncredited with a bit part in assembly fact fans), this series was one of the first to plug into our shared experience and it was far more Bash Street Kids than Billy Bunter at Greyfriars. The Fenn Street gang were rough and real albeit to varying degrees… Peter Cleall’s Eric Duffy was the class alpha, always ready with a quip and a comeback, cocky with a heart of gold. He is going out with the equally assured Sharon Eversleigh, played in the series by Penny Spencer and here by the radiant Carol Hawkins who then continued the role in the follow up series, The Fenn Street Gang (1971-3). Karen Gough in my class had the same feather cut as Carol... and I was dead impressed.

 

Sharon’s pal Maureen Bullock (Liz Gebhardt) is an earnest young woman of faith who has as big a crush on Mr Hedges as Miss Cutforth. She’s another relatively nuanced character with a lot of good lines highlighting the gulf between secular reality and the faith upon which the daily routines of education are based. The film begins with assembly and All Things Bright and Beautiful which couldn’t be further from the actuality.

 

Even more divorced from this reality is Frankie Abbott who, lives in a world of childish fantasy drawn from comics and films with his mother (Barbara Mitchell) doting on her “baby”, the two holding each other back. More grotesque is the family of day-dreamer Dennis Dunstable (Peter Denyer), presumably with special educational needs in modern parlance, who has a Dickensian bully of a father (Peter Bayliss) who cares not for his son’s learning or wellbeing.

Authority in harmony: Noel Howlett and Joan Sanderson

Rounding out the main players are Malcolm McFee as Peter Craven, a smooth-talking jack the lad, Aziz Resham as Feisal, and former Double Decker, future reggae superstar in Aswad, Brinsley Forde as Wesley. Both the latter characters are used to address the race issue and in ways that, for the time, are reasonably subtle. Talking of which, the school bus is driven by Jack Smethurst, star of  Love Thy Neighbour which was as heavy-handed on this issue as it was possible to be. 

 

The plot? 5c, after special pleading from Hedges worthy of Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch, are allowed to go on the annual school trip to a summer camp, with his reputation on the line if they fail to live up to his expectations and do exactly what Miss Ewell and the rest expect. In the course of their journey from inner London to the shires, Wesley is lost and picked up by airline stewardess, Penny Wheeler (Jill Kerman), who he persuades that Mr Hedges is a racist bully, a joke that persists once she also turns up as the barmaid in the local pub.

 

Jill Kerman and Brinsley Forde

Amidst the rom-com and the inevitable chaos of the city kids in the country alongside posh grammar school students, there’s some touching loyalties displayed between 5c and Bernard. The series’ ultimate message being that education is about support, patience and tolerance... and you know that can’t be bad.

 

The digital transfer is excellent, revealing even a little of John Alderton’s foundation, but making everything as fresh as the comedy. There’s also a host of special features:

 

• New interviews with actor David Barry (Frankie Abbott), composer Mike Vickers, second assistant director Nicholas Granby, unit publicist Tony Tweedale and assistant editor Christopher Ackland

• 1970 TV Awards sketch

• John Alderton interview with Gloria Hunniford from 1987

• Theatrical trailer

• Image gallery

• There’s also a limited-edition booklet written by Jade Evans which is a thoroughly researched and eloquent as you would expect given her love for the subject.

 

Please Sir! Is available from 29^th August on both DVD and Blu-ray and you can order it direct from those nice folks at Network.

Note the graffiti... I think we can all agree that Liverpool Football Club are indeed great!

History, man… Bless This House (1972), Network Blu-ray

“… the secret was simple. Sid James became everybody’s ideal next-door neighbour, drinking partner, stationery salesman, husband and father.” William G. Stewart*

 

Here I usually write about silent film and find a sense of association through my grandparents’ and great-grand parents’ generation; cinema as time travel with the ever-presence of some buildings and landscapes providing a more concrete connection. With this film, however, I’ve a direct connection having seen Sid James perform not once but twice in Blackpool, probably in His Favourite Family at the Grand Theatre and then in The Mating Game at the Winter Gardens in 1975. These were my father’s choices as he loved Sid just as much as his father Jim loved Laurel and Hardy; “watch these lad, they’re hilarious!”

 

Both of the plays were written by Northern Irish playwright, Sam Cree who had also contributed to the Carry on series featuring Sidney, as well as writing for the likes of George Formby and a certain Arthur Askey. All good northern fun but the humour wasn’t just of regional appeal and by this stage of his career James was a national treasure to match the two Lancastrians even though, famously, he was South African born and never quite lost his Johannesburg twang moving to the UK in his early twenties after the war.

Programme from Blackpool's Grand Theatre

Bless This House may or may not have been influenced by the success of His Favourite Family but Sid’s stock in trade was almost always being the bored husband, slightly put upon, rebellious, cheeky and constantly on the lookout for some boyish fun, fifty going on fifteen. The TV series ran for six seasons and 65 episodes from 1971 to 1976 as noted by film historian Jade Evans in her excellent essay accompanying this new Network Blu-ray. Evans quotes James’ biographer William G. Stewart in saying that this success was in providing as many “pegs” as possible to hang the actor’s beloved characteristics from. People knew what to expect and they were never disappointed, Sid had honest humour, charm and generosity of spirit and was loved in return. As Evans says, in so many of his parts he was simply called Sid, he was playing a version of himself even as King ‘Enery VIII.

 

The jokes in the series and this film adaptation, come from Sid’s father figure as he contends with his family and their neighbours. There’s generational conflict as his feminist daughter, Sally (Sally Geeson) is obsessed with saving the planet, a member of The Junior Anti-Pollution League, and concerned about their neighbour’s contribution to global warming: "In fifty years' time the Earth will be finished!" This is seen as earnest youthfulness as she tells Dad that he’s not bothered as he won’t be around to see it. Now fifty years’ later some of the older generation still stick their fingers in their ears and Sally wasn’t far off her doomsday schedule.

 

Director Gerald Thomas and writer Dave Freeman, both Carry on alumni, handle things with warmth and largely without the sauce those films were famed for. Yes, Sally spends a lot of time being gazed at in her turquoise bikini but the vibe is sexist not crude.

 

Diana Coupland and Sid James

Sid’s son Mike (Robin Askwith, Anthony Quayle’s only serious rival as Southport’s greatest actor), is a recently graduated engineering student who’s get up and go has seemingly got up and gone. Mike is doomed to disappoint his Dad with nearly every decision he makes and his purchase of a flower-under-powered Morris Minor, dated in all ways by this point, is an emblem of estranged confusion. Sid doesn’t understand Mike’s motivations and his son is still analysing them himself for comic effect.

 

One of my fondest memories of the TV series is the impressive chemistry between Sid and his on-screen wife Jean played by Diana Coupland who manages to be frustrated with her husband’s intransigence without ever losing her cool. She chides her grumpy partner and gently persuades and directs in ways which he can never really object; Sid’s a softie and we can feel the love. Here she’s determined to start an antique stall with their neighbour Betty (Patsy Rowlands) and you just know she’ll get her way despite Sid’s complaints about “women’s lib”.

 

Robin Askwith and Sally Geeson

Betty is married to Trevor who is played by Peter Butterworth whose actual wife, Janet Brown, plays Anne Hobbs, the wife of Tom as played by Julian Orchard, neighbours on the other side. Trevor is Sid’s perfect partner in crime as they decide to convert his shed into a distillery with inevitably comic consequences.

 

There’s a huge amount of slapstick and gags that were already predictable in Laurel and Hardy’s time. Sally, reading a book about the end of the world, in her bikini, transistor radio by the side of her deckchair, decides to put an end to Tom’s bonfire by squirting their hosepipe over the fence. The pipe gets stuck and everyone gets soaked including the couple who are about to buy the Hobbs’ house, Ronald and Vera Baines aka Terry Scott and June Whitfield.

 

Terry and June would go on to their own TV success as a couple trapped in suburbia**, the roots of so much domestic comedy from then till now with Not Going Out a tribute to mainstream sitcoms past. Here Terry is an officious customs and excise man who is bound to rub Sid’s sales executive the wrong way. From Mike’s choice of car to finding the Abbot’s trying to fix a hole in their new wall just as they arrive… everything is against the two men bonding and comic mistrust is there from the start.

Terry and June

 

When the Baines’ daughter Kate (Carol Hawkins, famous for farce and as Fenn Street’s femme fatale) starts seeing Mike, the stage is set for a grand finale involving food fights (more Laurel, more Hardy…) a fire and a familial truce that may of may not last. You can, after all, pick your friends but you’re lumbered with neighbours and family for ever.

 

Bless This House was the opposite of cutting edge but it was perfect popular entertainment at a time when the country was more resigned to its faults than we are now. The performers all captured this and the host of familiar faces in supporting roles reinforces the “consensual comedy” of the time; George A. Cooper, Bill Maynard, Molly Wier, Frank Thornton and Wendy Richard all popping up to play their assigned roles. Riving character players fitting in perfectly whenever an angry café manager, pompous businessman or chippy “dolly bird” was needed.

 

This was "comfort comedy" of the unsurprised and, actually, endlessly forgiving. These people might fall out over their fences but they were always able to find a way forward.

 

Terry, Carol Hawkins and Sidney

The Blu-ray is out now and features a crisp transfer from a 35mm inter-positive along with a couple of trailers and the 12-page booklet with publicity material accompanying Jade’s essay. You can order it direct from Network along with other very fine releases.

 

Bless This House took me back, but it’s also viewable as much as cinematic history as the silent comedies of just fifty years before it being exactly halfway from now to Hardy, Laurel, Chaplin and Keaton. The neighbours may have been joking more in 1972 than in 2021 but then they probably had a lot more in common…

 

 

*William G Stewart writing in The Complete Sid James by Robert Ross (Reynolds and Hearn: Richmond)

**The TV series was precisely located in Howard Street New Malden, but here the exterior shots of the houses were filmed at numbers 7 and 9, Bolton Avenue, Windsor with other locations in Buckinghamshire. A testament to how little England varied in the southeast…

White bread for the Abbots...

Brown bread for the Baines.

and the clock is still ticking...