What follows is a lie.
Here is some dialogue that was cut from Ever Decreasing Circles:
MARTIN: Look, Howard,
I am trying to scull here. Would you kindly stop dragging the anchor in the
water?
HOWARD: Sculls don’t
have anchors.
MARTIN: Now, let’s
have a look at you, Devizes. You’ve put old Bridport in the shade.
HOWARD: Martin, you
are talking to those bits of paper.
MARTIN: You know, I
used to do this for my Auntie Alice. She was a very nice lady. She made a
lovely chocolate spread, I seem to remember. I often wonder if I was
responsible for her phlebitis.
These lines aren’t from Ever
Decreasing Circles. But they easily could
have been.
Before the success of Brush
Strokes (1986-1991), Esmonde and Larbey’s two biggest BBC series were The Good Life (1975-1978) and Ever Decreasing Circles (1984-89). Both
starred Richard Briers, and there’s a clear line to be traced from Tom Good to
Martin Bryce.
As The Good Life begins, Tom Good is a frustrated industrial
designer, turning forty and wondering what more there is to life. His solution
is to apply his skills and enthusiasm to something new: self-sufficiency. Four
series later, he has morphed into a forthright bully, not listening to his wife
or (pretty much) anyone else, and going largely unchallenged. Neither the
writers nor the actor liked the character.
Ever Decreasing Circles introduces a man who tries to control everything, doesn’t listen,
and has gone unchallenged for rather too long. But now – unlike Tom Good – he
has an antagonist, and the two are a mere driveway apart.
Between these two sitcoms there was another, penned by Esmonde and
Larbey for the BBC and starring Richard Briers. And it wasn’t a success.
The Other One has slightly
faded from view. There were two series, in 1977 and 1979. The first was
released on DVD in 2007 to little fanfare, and the second is yet to be
commercially available. It is that rare confection: a sitcom that’s neither
domestic nor workplace.
Ralph
Tanner (Richard Briers) is ‘the most bumptious, pushy, ghastly man in the world’.
At an airport bar, he bumps into Brian Bryant, ‘the most boring man in the
world’. (See Dan and Diana Danby in Ever
Decreasing Circles: character names with built-in echoes are Esmonde and
Larbey shorthand for ‘boring’.) The pair are spectacularly mismatched.
Ralph is
an appalling, cocky,
oily, boorish, charmless know-it-all and self-proclaimed ‘lone wolf’.
RALPH: You put any
door in front of my knuckles and I’ll knock on it, whether it wants to be
knocked on or not.
Brian is nervous, divorced, well
meaning, gutless and an outright passenger, musclebound by minutiae.
BRIAN: Take me, for
example: I count. Railings, stairs, bricks and so forth. Well, that’s not really
right, is it?
Both have moustaches. Both are on
their way to Spain. Both are clearly bachelors. And, as will become evident,
both are lonely.
Brian is immediately impressed by
Ralph, who (unlike him) can get the barman’s attention at a stroke (see Paul
Ryman at The Egremont Club – ‘Steward!’), and he hesitantly follows Ralph’s
lead in being markedly relaxed about boarding the plane.
RALPH: I don’t scrum,
I don’t jostle, I don’t race. I stroll. I’d sooner miss
a plane my way than catch it your way.
As a result, they do miss their
flight, arrive at their Costa del Sol hotel nine hours late and find themselves
having to share a (non-guest) room together. So is this a holiday sitcom, like Duty Free or Benidorm? To begin with, yes.
Ralph and
Brian are well written characters. But they are also, perhaps, works in
progress. Ralph has a lot in common with Martin.
Don’t quote
Shakespeare at me, Brian. Particularly when he’s in one of his cockier moods.
Look, I’m not being
old-fashioned about timekeeping. I’m just saying it’s your fault.
Brian, am I allowed to get to my crux?
I am a difficult sort of chap to get on one postcard.
I don’t like satire, Brian. Doesn’t ring bells with me.
Would you kindly put
all these little birds in your head into their respective cages and listen to
what I’m saying?
Nail on the head, Brian. Nail on the head.
And some (though far fewer) of Brian’s lines could have been Howard’s.
I should be home in
time for Nationwide.
I, personally, am my
weakest point.
That’s why I don’t
talk about myself. I’m not vital.
Everything I deal with
is totally useless.
Together, Ralph and Brian contain
the seeds of Martin and Howard’s double act.
RALPH: Look, Brian, I
am trying to scull here. Would you kindly stop dragging the anchor in the
water?
BRIAN: Sculls don’t
have anchors.
RALPH: All right,
Brian, all right. What’s the matter? Have you gone mad? Are you having a spasm
or something?
BRIAN: Well, you did
ask.
RALPH: Oh yes. He
asked. Ralph asked. And he got, didn’t he? The old death by a thousand cuts,
eh?
Ralph is irritated by Brian’s
little habits.
RALPH: The one that
comes at the top of my list is when you say, every single day that we are out
in the country, ‘Hello, hello: first cow of the day.’
BRIAN: Oh, well, I can
explain that. It’s connected with Swiss roll.
This is very typically Esmonde
and Larbey. Compare:
ANN: Hilda, why do you
call your spare room ‘The Polly Wolly Doodle Room’?
HILDA: Because of the
gramophone record.
But the big difference between
Ralph and Martin is that Ralph is, by any measure, impossible to like. Tom Good
is remembered with affection, and he’s unbearable. Ralph is awful – for solid,
comic reasons – but something drives a wedge between the character and the
audience. What?
There is a virus in TV comedy
that occasionally flares up, and it comes in the form of the note (to writers)
that the character must be likeable.
This is horseshit.
Tom Good is a bully. Basil Fawlty
is a snob. David Brent is a twat. Edina and Patsy are monsters. Brian Potter is
a martinet. Literally everyone in Spaced,
Girls and The Young Ones is a
bellend. But they’re all VERY FUNNY. ‘Like that. All in capitals,’ to quote
Georgette Heyer. And that gets the audience past the characters’ shortcomings. Likeable
isn’t necessary: they need to be sympathetic.
The viewer can sympathise with Basil’s snobbery: running a small hotel must be
like nursing a never-ending stream of picky infants, each with its own demands
and sore points.
But in The Other One, something didn’t land. Bob Larbey spotted something
was up at the first recording in December 1976:
You could feel the
studio audience recoil when Richard came forward with the moustache and the
smarmy kind of look about him. And the look said, ‘No. That’s not Our Richard.’
‘Not our Richard?’ Briers could
play unlikeable (Tom, Martin) with enormous charm. Here, Ralph is characterised
by his total lack of charm. He’s sexist, twitchy, selfish, egotistical,
meretricious, brutish, a coward and an inveterate liar. A toxic blend of
Martin’s twitch and Paul’s Teflon coating.
Brian (Michael Gambon), on the
other hand, is solicitous, gauche, proper, credulous, foolish, awkward and – also
– a coward.
Gambon’s background was in
theatre, and he was relatively unknown to TV in 1977. When he came into his
own, most notably as writer/victim Philip Marlow in Dennis Potter’s peerless The Singing Detective, it became clear
that he was an actor of astonishing chops. But in The Other One, he’s a lot less sure of himself in front of the
camera. He even fluffs his lines, quite noticeably.
Was the casting upside down? It’s
tempting to flip the actors, and imagine Gambon as an irritating
medallion-chested know-it-all with brilliantined hair and Briers as his faffing
acolyte. That might work: Gambon with his anatine tenor, Briers with his
desperation to please. But it’s simplistic.
The problem isn’t so much that
one of the two leads isn’t likeable, but that he doesn’t meet enough
resistance. There’s no counterpoint. There’s no Paul Ryman. The Other One clearly has Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (aim
high – why not?) in its sights: what might now be termed a ‘road trip’ or
‘buddy’ story. But these are very fussy buddies. Resistance, had it been there,
may have fostered sympathy.
The writers even seem at pains,
in the scripts, to shore up ‘these two pariahs’. Typically, Esmonde and Larbey
wrote short stage directions. Their typical half-hour amounts to around 50
pages. The first script of The Other One
runs to a lardy 77 pages. It includes lots of what might be read as justification.
Brian ‘feels guilty,’ ‘is used to
being unnoticed,’ ‘is obviously wearing his best Hepworth’s suit,’ ‘tenses like
a greyhound in the traps,’ and ‘accepts this as his usual fate’. Ralph ‘smiles
patronizingly,’ ‘makes Brian do the hard work by volunteering nothing,’
‘chuckles a “thereby hangs a tale” chuckle,’ ‘preens in his innocence’ and
‘doesn’t have the faintest idea what’s going on, but compensates by doing a
running commentary’.
Perhaps the other significant
weakness of The Other One is its
overall story arc. The trouble with holiday sitcoms is that they rely on a cow of
a lot of suspension of disbelief – the audience has to deliberately avoid
questions like ‘why are these people still here?’ or ‘do they always come to
the same place?’ or ‘when are they going home?’ Esmonde and Larbey tackled that:
in the fifth episode of the first series, Ralph and Brian go home.
Episode six opens, and the title
sequence has changed. The sunglasses, cocktail and cigarilloed ashtray in the
opening cameos have been replaced with two briefcases – Ralph’s smart 1970s
aluminium attaché, and Brian’s battered old leather Wexford. Back to life.
(This is noteworthy. Sitcoms that
change their ‘sit’ are rare. It’s difficult to pull off. And it doesn’t quite
succeed here. The pair go from holiday pals to work colleagues, on the road,
repping together. It leaves a credibility itch in the audience’s nerve endings,
which doesn’t help.)
The remaining eight episodes see
the pair travelling around the west country in Ralph’s crimson Ford Capri trying
to sell packaging.
In Ever Decreasing Circles, the writers were prompted to explain why someone
as lovely as Ann (Penelope Wilton) married a skyscraping buffoon like Martin.
They addressed this in the second series.
ANN: When I first met Martin, quite frankly I was a
bit of a mess. I’d picked the wrong bloke, and the wrong job. Left both. I
wasn’t really coping with anything. And then suddenly there was Martin who
said, “Don’t try to cope. Leave it all to me.” So I did. He brought back some
order into my life – some security. And he was always kind. He drives me mad
sometimes, but I love him.
In The Other One, Esmonde and Larbey went to greater dramatic lengths
to apologise for Ralph. Why is he single? Was he never tempted to get hitched?
RALPH: Married? No.
Only once. I was on time all right, standing there like a lemon with a rose in
my buttonhole, making jokes about the bride always being late. She wasn’t late.
She was on the Dover ferry with my brother.
This is a moment of candour and
possibility. The awful mask slips, revealing the human beyond. A chink of
redemption. Yet, in the next scene, the following morning, Ralph is back to
usual dreadful self. Reset. A dead end.
The canniest decision Esmonde and
Larbey made (possibly in their whole career) was in the early execution of The Good Life. They had their
forty-year-old central character and his wife espouse self-efficiency, Rotovating
their garden to muddy hell; and they had the upper-middle neighbours (the
Leadbeatters – ‘better’ versus ‘good’) looking down their sitcom noses at the
Goods. Then they threw in a masterstroke: what
if these two couples like each other? Wallop.
Putting animosity to one side
left them with rich characterisations and acres of canvas. In Ever Decreasing Circles, Paul was the
nice enemy. In The Other One, the two
characters were cross with each other. They had stand-up rows. Ralph bullied
and took advantage of Brian. That seems, if there were one, to have been a
mistake.
Was The Other One, then, ‘a flop,’ as Richard
Briers called it, and ‘a glorious failure,’ as Bob Larbey said? It wasn’t the radiant
success that its neighbour series were. (There were nearly others too: Now And Then, commissioned by the BBC in
spring 1980 but which John Howard Davies nixed and eventually appeared on ITV three
years later, and Arthur’s Kingdom,
seven episodes of which were ordered in October 1979 but which didn’t happen –
why and what it was remain unclear.)
The Other One was, though,
a stepping-stone. It had the bones of Martin Bryce and Paul Ryman in it, but unfortunately
it also contained the bile of Ralph and the shrivelled balls of Brian. (The
series was originally titled Ralph And
Brian – is it too much to read a ‘R&B’ reference into this? Probably.) The
show is vinegary, and lacks much of the writers’ typical warmth.
Usually,
Esmonde and Larbey deployed ghastliness in careful measure. In The Other One, they put it front and
centre, and built an entire series around it. Esmonde and Larbey’s work tends
to glow with charm. Here, they tried something else. And not all experiments
yield success.
It’s
hardly surprising that two male writers wrote a lot of male double acts (Ben
and Walter in You’re Only Old Once,
Jacko and Eric in Brush Strokes,
Harry and Dennis in Hope It Rains)
but it is unusual for one of Esmonde and Larbey’s to have backfired.
However,
writers are proficient recyclers, and Ralph Tanner had one more (wholly
successful) outing – in the third series of Ever
Decreasing Circles, as swaggering creep Rex Tynan (played with oiky unction
by Peter Blake of Kirk St Moritz fame).
Rex T (a
dinosaur, as his name suggests) doesn’t just share his initials with Ralph
Tanner. He is also a rep. He’s also a womaniser. He also drives a red Ford
Capri. And he is a liar. He hoodwinks Martin into thinking that he has been
unfaithful to Ann on a two-day business trip to Bruges. Rex Tynan is Ralph Tanner.
What Ever Decreasing Circles got right –
sidelining a horrible character and confining him to one episode (two, if you
count Rex’s off-stage appearance as the man who stamps ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ all over
Martin’s face at the Christmas party) – The
Other One arguably got wrong.
Rex gets
punched on the nose at the end of his story. Ralph’s finale is something quite definitely
else. The closing scenes of The Other One
are a bizarre, awkward cadence in which the writers bolt headlong for the fire
exit: the lead characters get into Ralph’s car and drive off. They actually drive off together into the
future. It’s hella odd. It is an example (a bit like the slightly overstaged
finale of Ever Decreasing Circles) of
an ending being all confection and no logic. Ralph and Brian haven’t been in
love, as far as we the audience can tell, at any point: nor do they need each
other. These two lonely men have found each other and bonded, though that bond
is brittle and insubstantial and goes nowhere except into the distance. What is
set up doesn’t pay off. It is an ending, yes: but adding Shave And A Haircut (Two
Bits) to the end of Mozart’s Requiem is an ending, and adding ‘and they all
lived happily ever after’ to Animal Farm is
an ending. It just isn’t the the right one.
The
likeable horror and the significant shadow are characters that the writers had
fun with more than once, in varying shades of subtlety. Their best work was a
blend of cuddle and needle. In The Other
One, there may have been rather too much needle.
Pints this time to Ian Greaves and James Cary, for words of wisdom. Grats, amigos.
