Am I Imagining That?

Some stories have dirty great holes in them. David Rodinsky, the enigmatic Jewish philosopher and translator, walked out of the flat he took above an East London synagogue one day in the 1960s and simply vanished. On 28th February 1975, a tube train ran at full pelt into Moorgate station and crashed into the wall at the end of the tunnel, taking 43 lives with it; no-one has established why. The Italian Job, a fantastically successful film and about as much fun as was ever committed to celluloid, doesn’t have an ending. The writer, Troy Kennedy Martin, tried several, none to his satisfaction. The all too literal cliffhanger finale was dreamed up by producer Michael Deeley, and filmed by the second unit because director Peter Collinson refused to shoot what he regarded as a total cop-out.

This story, too, has no ending. At least, for now.

For many years, British television series were produced in runs of six, seven or thirteen weekly episodes. There was a good reason for this: a 52-week year divides nicely into thirteens, and thirteens split into sixes and sevens. Often, that seventh episode was a bonus – say, a Christmas special. Currently, series length is more fluid: fours are common, and there have been some very good (and shout-about funny) series that have only run for three episodes: Cowards, for instance, the first series of Getting On, and the first two series of The Thick Of It.

Series one of Ever Decreasing Circles (1984) has five episodes. That’s odd. (And not just literally.) It’s one short. The second series has eight. That’s one over (even with its bonus Christmas episode). Was one programme lost from the first series and cashed in on re-commission to make up the shortfall? And if so, why?

While it later became properly episodic (in other words, each show was a self-contained story), the first series of Ever Decreasing Circles has a single arc. Paul moves in next door to Martin and wife Ann, immediately annoys Martin and flatters Ann, and Martin disappears down a Martin-hole, Roneoing fixture lists, ferrying pensioners to and fro and reading DIY Answers magazine, while – when Martin falls asleep on the sofa one Saturday evening with the book Lamp-Posts Through The Ages on his lap (very much the measure of the man) – dashing boulevardier Paul takes a thoroughly frustrated Ann to a Vladimir Ashkenazy recital at the Royal Festival Hall.

Ann had turned Paul’s invitation down. She mentioned the concert to Martin, who enthusiastically told her to book the tickets, which she did. Then Martin, back in superplanner mode, clumsily overlooks it, (‘How many bloody Saturdays do you think there are in a week?’) and Ann impulsively takes Paul up on his invitation – and, what’s more, she lies to Martin about her companion for the evening (‘I’ll find someone else to go with.’) She says it’s Maureen Jameson, an old school friend. She admits as much to Paul. The two of them are now in league with the same cover story – the same lie. The story seems to be heading in a very clear direction.

On the DVD commentary Peter Egan mentions that, at one point, Paul and Ann were to fall into each other’s arms.

Wasn't that something that was written, in the first series? And did you not say, Richard, that if they did elope together, there wouldn't be another series? Am I imagining that?

He elaborates further in the BBC programme Comedy Connections (2006).

I seem to remember somewhere in the first series there was a final episode where Paul and Ann actually eloped together. And, of course, by the time we got to the fourth episode of that series [the writers] realised that would be a total disaster, so it was never made.

This is exactly where the first series is pointing – but better sense prevailed, and the idea was abandoned.

But how far did the idea progress?

In a most unprepossessing bungalow in Berkshire is an astonishing and underlauded national resource: the BBC Written Archives Centre. Staffed by a modest team brimming with dedication, it contains mountains of microfiched paperwork dating back to 1922. A great many academics and historians (as well as oiks like me) have spent hours there, sifting through memos, scripts, contracts and correspondence. Want to know what the Head of Light Entertainment thought of Bob Monkhouse or find out what that music is in Abigail’s Party or which quiz question Captain Sensible read out on Multi-Coloured Swap Shop? The WAC has the skinny.

All the studio scripts for Ever Decreasing Circles are there. And they throw up some questions. But none of the production paperwork exists (producers weren’t obliged to keep it), which means that those questions aren’t easily answered.

The title page of a BBC script typically contains the show’s name, authors and episode number (or title, or both) along with the recording date and location (if studio), transmission date (if known), and a programme number. These numbers, assigned well before filming, lock the show to the commission. They are jargon to lay eyes, but they contain some coded information like whether the programme was national or regional, and which department was making it.

Episode three of the first series (in which Martin, blithely overlooking Ann’s date, and finding a topless woman in Paul’s garden, about whom Ann is tellingly curious – and which ends with Martin telling Ann that ‘Mr clever-dicking, Hillview-burning, rare blood group-ing Ryman’ is flirting with Hilda) was recorded two days before Christmas 1983 in TC8 [studio eight, Television Centre] and due for transmission at 7.15pm on BBC1 on Sunday, 12th February, 1984. The programme number is 50/LLC F423K.

I promise this gets more interesting. I promise. Bear with me.

The next episode in the series (in which plans are laid for the annual holiday to the Gasthaus Glockenspiel for the eighth year running, and Martin puts the finishing touches to his wonderfully unnecessary plywood model of it) would have been recorded after the Christmas break, and transmitted a week after episode three, on 19th February, 1984. And it would have been called Episode Four or, as the script would have it, ‘No.4’.

Except it doesn’t.

It’s ‘No.5’ and the title page has been amended by hand: ‘TX [transmitted] as No.4’. And what had a transmission date of 26th February (where episode five would have been) has been given episode four’s broadcast slot. Similarly, script No.6 has been amended to be No.5. This suggests that a fourth script existed, with a programme number assigned (the missing 424K) and a recording date booked, and that its place was taken by bringing the previous episode forward a week.

Before it arrived at its splendid moniker, the series wormed through the circular corridors of the BBC under the rather Rixier title Hell’s Bells. Some script pages still bear that header. In the running order for ‘No.5’ (i.e. the fourth episode), the first scene has been amended. And in the script, it’s clear that it was rewritten: it’s at least one generation of photocopy younger. Was a gap being bridged? Was there a fourth script, in which Ann and Paul perhaps followed the logic of the storyline and made the beast with two backs, to their mutual chagrin?

One of the engines of the series is that Paul, who is a peripatetic charm-spreader, could sweep Ann away at any minute, but he doesn’t. She doesn’t let him. This is crucial to maintaining the situation (and this is a situation comedy, after all: the writer changes the situation at their own peril – see The Legacy Of Reginald Perrin for an example of how that can come tumbling down). If Ann and Paul had disappeared down Affair Street together, what would have become of Ever Decreasing Circles? The lead character’s heart would have been not so much broken as irreparably smashed to bits. (This all but happens in the penultimate episode of the last series, when Martin thinks Ann and Paul have hooked up: he walks out, his suitcase packed, posting the front door key through the letter-box behind him, and leaving Ann a note gallantly and sincerely wishing her and Paul ‘every happiness – I cannot bring myself to write “with Paul”.’) Hilda and Howard would have disowned Ann as a scarlet woman. Paul and Ann would have had to move away in disgrace. As cute as the possibility is that the better-matched pair might have tangled limbs, its consequences don’t have Series Two written all over it. But it did cross the writers’ minds.

This is, plainly, speculation. And yet…

The arc of the story between the third and fourth episodes doesn’t elide neatly. The last we see of Martin in episode three is his bristling distrust of Paul’s intentions. When we next find him, he’s planning a holiday. The scripts have been altered and re-typed. The programme number, script number and series length suggest an episode was skipped. So what happened?

The answer is: I don’t know. And I don’t know who does.

I approached Peter Egan (Paul) with the question. He remembered the intention for Ann and Paul to couple up, but suggested a recording could have been skipped due to illness. That’s a more prosaic and much more likely answer, in all truth – but it wouldn’t explain the renumbering of the scripts. Producer and director Sydney Lotterby couldn’t recall anything about a dropped script, though he arrived after the scripts were finalised; equally, he remembered nothing about a week missed due to illness. Esmonde and Larbey are no longer with us, so they can’t be asked. And Bob Larbey didn’t keep his manuscripts or typescripts, so if the answer exists, it might well have long since been recycled as any number of egg cartons or rolls of sustainable tissue.

There seems little doubt that something happened. What and why isn’t clear. Perhaps there was a fourth episode in which an infidelity took place, to be paid off by Paul and Ann running away together in the last episode (which is exactly how Esmonde and Larbey’s previous BBC sitcom, The Other One, concludes). Perhaps the folly of this was caught in time, the bunk-up storyline dropped, the ending of the series rewritten, and the episode shortfall made up during the second series.

Perhaps.

In the first series finale, there is a very telling moment when Ann and Paul dance together in the church hall, on their own, and seem to come very close to a kiss, before being interrupted by Howard and springing apart guiltily.

SINGING ‘DANCING IN THE DARK’ LOUDLY, PAUL WHISKS HER INTO A DELIBERATELY FLASHY DANCE. ‘DANCING IN THE DARK’ ARE THE ONLY ACTUAL LYRICS HE KNOWS, SO HE ‘DAH-DAHS’ THE REST. THIS MAKES ANN LAUGH AND SHE JOINS IN.

THE DANCE MOVES FROM ENERGETIC TO SLOW AND THEIR SINGING MOVES TO HUMMING SOFTLY TO EACH OTHER. THEY BEGIN TO ENJOY THE EXPERIENCE AND THE DANCE GETS SLOWER AND CLOSER.

Could this be left over from an earlier draft that saw them disappear together?

If the answer’s out there – maybe Penelope Wilton (Ann) or Geraldine Newman (Hilda) or one of the production team or the writers’ families can help – it may surface. Until then, this full stop remains a question mark.

Some stories have holes in them. For now, this is one.

Three Party Sevens of Watney’s to producer Ed Morrish, director Roy Gould and historian Louis Barfe for their help parsing programme numbers, which were (perhaps mercifully) a closed book to me. If you give a shit about TV – and I’m sure you do – buy one or all of Louis’s books. They’re very good.

Real life is how well you pretend: Stanley Lebor, 1934-2014

Others will write, I hope, about Stanley Lebor with personal affection and detailed knowledge. Having not known him, I can’t. But his death last November, only recently announced by Equity Magazine, deserves reflection.

Though he appeared in Gandhi, Flash Gordon, Jason King, The Naked Civil Servant, Department S, The Tomorrow People, Secret Army, Shoestring and Grange Hill, I only know (well enough to discuss) two of his performances: Don in Ready When You Are, Mr McGill (the original version, not the remake) and Howard in Ever Decreasing Circles.

Both are characterised by steadiness.

Jack Rosenthal’s Ready When You Are, Mr McGill was broadcast in January 1976. Lebor is half a double-act, numbering Phil and Don, the director and cameraman of a TV play. (Phil and Don are assumably an Everly Brothers reference: Rosenthal was keen on nested wit. Ditto Esmonde and Larbey: Tom and Jerry in The Good Life, most obviously.)

Rosenthal called his satire ‘perfectly acted’ and ‘beautifully directed,’ and with good cause: it is. As a jumping-off point, a play by a TV playwright about the making of a TV play is a hostage to fortune: writers seldom set off their writing-about-writing distress flare more than once per career. It’s a Get Out Of Jail Free Card.

But that would seem to demean the film, which is, happily, a tremendous, sensitive piece: it’s David versus Goliath – the director (as martinet) of a play versus the little man, the extra (or, as they’re now known, ‘S.A.’ – Supporting Artist) with one line. Mr McGill’s single speech is, ‘I’ve never seen the young lady in my life before. And I’ve lived here fifty years.’ Two sentences, but one line. Of course, he fucks it up. This is a comedy, after all.

Don, played by Lebor, is the getting-on-with-it cameraman. He went to see Murder On The Orient Express the night before the action takes place. Asked if it was any good by the sound man, Don’s fourteen-word review, as a professional film-maker, is, ‘Some bloody comedian nicked my fishing rod out of the boot of my car’. Later pressed, again, on whether it was any good by Phil, the director, the reply comes

DON: Cost me over thirty quid, that fishing tackle.

PHIL: You can claim.

DON: Oh, I’ll claim.

(Which appears to be the end of the conversation, possibly the end of life.)

Quite by coincidence, this is very much in the key of Esmonde and Larbey. Especially the stage direction.

Don is an ever-present but almost wordless presence in the film. Most of Lebor’s lines read like the straight man in a comedy routine: ‘Yep,’ ‘Hang on,’ ‘Not a lot,’ ‘Yep,’ ‘Phil!’ ‘Hair in the gate’. Occasionally, he’s gifted a moment of quotability.

DON: There’s a foreign body on Bernard’s knee.

Lebor’s job on Mr McGill was to quietly do his job playing a man quietly doing his job. Not much to say, but an ever-presence. And he did it to studied perfection. Perhaps this is the key to the man.

In Ever Decreasing Circles, Lebor was cast rather against type. Howard Hughes (echoes of Phil and Don: Howard Hughes is one of two characters in the sitcom named after a famous individual, along with Tommy Cooper) is another ever-presence – but instead of being stiff and workmanlike, Howard is sensitive, naïve, happy, and of simple tastes. He and his wife, Hilda, are not so much a couple as two halves. To play a character is difficult: to play half an enshackled character requires technical refinement and an ear for harmony, which requires both actors to sing in tune, while listening assiduously.

As The Good Life saw Tom and Barbara paired (via an affectionate antagonism) with Jerry and Margo, so Ever Decreasing Circles paired Martin and Ann with Howard and Hilda. The antagonist in Ever Decreasing Circles was Paul; in The Good Life, it was what might be characterised as consumerism or modern life or the 1970s or The Way The World Is. Jerry and Margo Leadbetter were never The Enemy: likewise, nor Howard and Hilda Hughes. Thus Paul Eddington, Penelope Keith, Stanley Lebor and Geraldine Newman had warm shoes into which to step.

All four actors did this with delicious aplomb.

Eddington and Keith have been examined at length, and found to pass with distinction, but Lebor and Newman have been less pondered. Pity, really, because it is such a memorable partnership.

Howard proposed to Hilda in an ice-cream van. Since her acceptance, they have become each other.

HILDA: Here she comes. Here comes Mrs Teapot. 

HOWARD: Followed by Mr Assorted Biscuits. 

And, though they remain childless (a peculiarity not uncommon to sitcom, nor are they alone here), they still operate as an almost blithely happy squab-free unit.

HOWARD: Come on, Hilda. We'll miss The Shipping Forecast.

I’ll put 50p and a kidney on nobody ever having looked forward to The Shipping Forecast. It’s not a soothing national mumble: it’s a tedious list, like the phone book (if that still exists) or the football results (if they still exist): a secular Lord’s Prayer (if that still exists) – an inconsequential litany. Words. Just words. Yet Howard and Hilda love it (and here Esmonde and Larbey have it right) because it’s timetabled: it’s a routine. Not only is it a routine, it contains regularity itself. ‘We’ll miss Bells On Sunday’ or ‘We’ll miss the Ten O’Clock News’ would have done. But the news isn’t a photocopy of itself, and Bells On Sunday features a different peal each week. The Shipping Forecast routines the same roll-call every time: Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea…

Howard and Hilda are creatures of habit. You know – you just know – that spring cleaning, blackberry-picking and Stir-Up Sunday are dates not only firmly in their calendar, but discussed, agreed and concreted into their calendar. They plan ahead. Decades ahead.

HOWARD: We've booked ourselves into a retirement home. 

ANN: Already? 

HOWARD: Yes. The fifteenth of August in the year two thousand and twenty-four. 

HILDA: That'll be two days after our diamond wedding anniversary. We thought we'd have that at home and then go in on the Saturday.

‘The Saturday.’ As if it were three weeks hence, not (as in this case) forty years hence.

Stanley Lebor brought two wonderful qualities to the rôle of Howard: firstly, an air of delight. Was Lebor delighted to be Howard, or was Howard delighted to be Howard? To the latter, I’d say a big, fat yes. To the former, I’d say another yes. Secondly to the rôle Lebor brought something of a treat: a steadfast soppiness. That’s not an easy blend. Being steadfast and soppy is a tightrope act that could see the actor plunging career-first into syrupiness, clunkiness or, worst of all, a credibility chasm. Lebor didn’t. He walked that line, as practised as Philippe Petit, with an easy flair that required no cadenzas: he simply arrived at Howard and stayed firmly at Howard. It’s a masterful bit of work.

If you want Howard’s episode in the sun, watch the fifth episode of the second series, in which he enters (and wins) the snooker tournament. It’s the episode in which Lebor casts off his Howard Wayne outfit and becomes BatHoward. By not being himself, he asserts his Howardness. If you want his scene in the sun, seek out his sharing a bed with Martin (in the eighth episode of the second series – the Christmas special).

At the climax of Ready When You Are, Mr McGill, Joe the extra makes a total splup of his line, repeatedly, and under pressure. It gets worse the more he re-takes it. The director rounds on him, saying

PHIL: (Quietly, almost regretfully) Real life is how well you pretend, isn’t it, sir? You. Me. Everybody in the world.

(A pause. JOE’s mind shuts off. The thought’s too painful to dwell on.)

PHIL: (Gently) We’ll perhaps try and find the decent bits from what you did.

Stanley Lebor did a lot of decent bits.

Elephant, double elephant, half an elephant. Twice.

Ever Decreasing Circles seems an unlikely choice of springboard for an advertising campaign, and Martin Bryce – a character whom Richard Briers described as ‘pathetic,’ ‘intolerable’ and ‘a pompous bore’ – an unlikely mascot.

Evidently, this didn’t trouble the Nottingham Evening Post, which ran this radio advertisement, in which Martin finally loses his temper with Ann’s pet elephant. As if the snoring and the overeating weren’t enough, the damn pachyderm has sat on his satellite dish.

(You remember Ann’s pet elephant, of course. And the Bryces’ satellite dish. Yep. Taken as read.)

Advertising is an eccentric duchess. ‘Whose voice says frozen peas like no-one else?’ asked some sharp-collared type at J Walter Thompson in 1970. The answer, green and tiny and sweet, was obviously Orson Welles.

Ringo Starr has hawked insurance and famous drum-shaped food the pizza (an endorsement he shares with Mikhail Gorbachev). Mop-headed misery Andy Warhol flogged TDK videotapes. Walking testosterone farm Jason Statham advertised that manliest of products, KitKat. And John Smith’s, the maker of pointedly crap beer, saw no problem in paying popular killer Leslie Grantham to sip cocktails at a piano in one of their commercials. 

Wispa, the frothy pocket joist, roped in a series of sitcom characters to promote it, including Ruth Madoc and Simon Cadell (as Gladys Pugh and Jeffrey Fairbrother, Hi-De-Hi’s delicious unrequited romance), Jan Francis and Paul Nicholas (as Vince and Penny, still Just Good Friends despite Vince’s persistence) and Windsor Davies and Windsor Davies (as Windsor Davies and the loudest man in India, BSM Tudor Williams from It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum).

In short, it doesn’t seem to matter how wide or bizarre the divide between promoter and product, as long as the likely audience has heard of both.

None of this goes any way to explaining this advert, which seems to have more in common with N.F. Simpson’s fabulously daft A Resounding Tinkle (in which married couple Bro and Middie Paradock have been sent the wrong size elephant) than Ever Decreasing Circles. Still, it’s an interesting curio.

By the way, the voice actor topping off the ad, who sounds a heap of a lot like Peter Egan, isn’t.

I owe John Williams a pint of Thanks Mate for bringing this ad to my attention, which he found while guddling in David Lloyd’s Radio Moments.

Another Day, Another Pound

In 1988, Harold Snoad, producer and director of the third and fourth series of Ever Decreasing Circles, wrote a book for BBC Television Training called Directing Situation Comedy.

It’s a lively, highly opinionated book, full of first-hand information.

Some writers say their adrenalin only flows when they are working against the clock, which is really just another way of saying that the script is going to be late.

It’s also, necessarily, quite technical and detailed in places.

You can… tighten the action by cutting from either a ‘single’ of character A (or a narrow-angle two shot favouring him) to the narrow-angle two shot favouring character B (or, of course, from a ‘single’ of character B to a narrow-angle two shot favouring character A) and no one will be any the wiser.

At the time, Snoad was working on the fourth series of Ever Decreasing Circles, and the book contains a handful of on-set and on-location pictures, mainly from episode three (The One Where They Get Stuck In The Loft) and four (The One Where They Get Tricked By A Con-Man). Here are a few, along with some screengrabs of the scenes they depict.

Here, the studio audience at Television Centre (the show was variously shot in studios 1, 4, 6 and 8) is being warmed up by actor and stand-up comedian Bobby Bragg.

This camera is presumably being used in the Con-Man episode, in which Martin does a fair bit of peering out of his front window as he becomes possessed by the spirit of Neighbourhood Watch.

Here, Snoad is positioning cameras on the studio floorplan. Squint hard enough and you can make out the words ‘MARTIN’S HOUSE’ and ‘POLICE STATION OFFICE – ONCE ONLY’. The sofa and chairs in the Bryces’ living room are clearly marked.

And here are the sofa and chairs. This image was used on the cover of Snoad’s book, and unfortunately crops out Peter Egan.

There he is. Handsome cove. Is there anyone on television who better suits black tie?

This is Martin’s tiny office (during camera rehearsal), described in the first script as

A BOX-ROOM, MADE EVEN SMALLER BY THE FACT THAT THE WALLS ARE LINED ON THREE SIDES BY TIERED SHELVES CONTAINING A MYRIAD OF HOME-PRODUCED ‘LITERATURE’ – ALL NEATLY STACKED AND THE CUBBY-HOLES LABELLED, E.G. ‘CRICKET, BADMINTON, RESIDENTS’ ASSOCIATION, NEWSLETTER, CAR RALLIES’. THE SMALL RECTANGLE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM IS OCCUPIED BY A DESK, TWO CHAIRS AND A SMALL PHOTO-COPIER. ON THE DESK IS A TYPEWRITER AND A TELEPHONE. THE MAXIMUM DISTANCE BETWEEN ANYTHING AND ITS NEIGHBOUR ON THE FLOORSPACE OF THE ROOM IS ABOUT 18 INCHES. ALL MOVEMENT IS THEREFORE REDUCED TO EDGING ALONG.

Designer Eric Walmsley realised this handsomely.

Howard and Hilda are (now, during the recording) in matching knitwear. Of course. Of course they are.

On location in Dell Lane, Billingshurst, which played The Close in the series. The large white screen above the Dormobile is a ‘butterfly,’ and is used to diffuse sharp sunlight.

As you can see, the butterfly worked.

In this episode, the Bryces, the Hugheses, Paul and his companion are on their way to a holiday cottage. The camera is on a bridge here because the shot started looking down at a stream, before tilting up to see the Dormobile approaching. It’s the opening of the episode, thus the directorial flourish.

There she is.

And this is the perhaps the most detailed photo in the book. To shoot Richard Briers and Penelope Wilton, the Dormobile was put on a low-loader with a camera rigged to the driver’s door. Crouched between them, on the floor (and very possibly getting to know the gearstick rather too well) was the sound recordist, Morton Hardaker. Watching the camera feed on a monitor in the foreground of the shot is Harold Snoad himself.

‘One man went to mow, went to mow a meadow…’

I’m indebted to archive maven and all-round good egg Rory Clark for alerting me to the book, and to international pottery magnate Peter Neill for identifying Bobby Bragg. Grats, chaps. Your pints are in the post.