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Bagpuss |
While television sitcoms, whether enduringly classic or "Are You Being Served?", continue to find enthusiastic audiences when they are repeated or released on video, it's a seemingly little-known fact that most of them up to about 1980 spawned their own cinematic translation. Perhaps the main reason for this situation is that they never seemed to translate to the big screen very well, and - with a few notable exceptions - they generally lost what had made them distinctive and successful along the way.
Even staunch fans of the sitcom genre find it hard to appreciate the underachieving cinematic equivalents, and have some interesting theories about why they failed to work. Few big-screen translations of British television comedies in the 1960s and 1970s seemed to work very well at all. Some would argue that with the likes of "Guest House Paradiso", this is a situation that has stayed the same to this day. - TJ Worthington It's the half-hour of fun gone on far too long syndrome, very evident of course in the Morecambe and Wise movies. Can't think of any good British comedy shows made into movies that worked... the Steptoe and Hancock ones have their charm but they're not a patch on the TV shows - Ronnie Bookless One pattern that seems to emerge from any sitcom's transfer to feature film is that the characters 9 times out of 10 end up on holiday either in Britain or Abroad (but filmed of course around Pinewood and Shepperton). - Ronnie Bookless Half the reason why the British film industry is (often unfairly) a laughing stock is that a lot of money and talent that woud go into cinema in other countries goes into television instead. Result = telly programmes that try to look "cinematic", and films that look like telly programmes. Hmmm. The sitcom-as-film shows what happened when cast and production crew could persuade Wardour Street's bean-counters to back a tried-and-tested formula. And it wasn't just sitcoms ("The Sweeney" and "Doomwatch", among others, also had spin-off films). Many don't work, for one reason or another. "The Likely Lads" and "Porridge" are better, but Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais had done several films themselves ("Otley", "Villain") before then, so they at least knew what they were doing. - Andy Durrant
Sometimes, comedy sketch shows would be translated into the cinematic medium too. One of the most unlikely examples, "Every Home Should Have One", was adapted from Marty Feldman's late 1960s BBC2 show, which was popular and critically acclaimed, but ultimately far from being a conventional or mainstream show. It wasn't a sketch show format but a straight story about a clean-up TV campaign (a la Mary Whitehouse) led by Patrick Cargill. Marty was an odd-jobbing actor I think. It was a bit stagey and not very funny - a bit like those slightly risque adult British comedies like the Confessions films. However, I'm sure at the time of release it was worth going to the cinema just to see Marty's eyes on an even bigger scale. - Ronnie Bookless
Even Eric Morcambe and Ernie Wise, despite their record-breaking success with their long-running television show, failed to impress very much on the big screen. I've never understood the adulation that is routinely afforded to Morcambe and Wise's feature films. I've never been that big a fan of their humour anyway, but the films really do seem to be stretching their act way beyond the point of most people's tolerance. It seems to me that they always worked best with short sketches and with freewheeling in-character ad-libs, and neither of course are really possible in the forum of a full-length film with a linear narrative. - TJ Worthington
More successful was "The Rebel", an extension rather than a direct adaptation of Tony Hancock's "Hancock's Half Hour", which writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson were very carefuly to approach in a different fashion to the television version. I always thought "The Rebel" worked very well - possibly because while the film was very clearly a cinematic translation of "Hancock's Half Hour", enough subtle changes were made to the character, format and structure to allow it to adapt to a very different environment. - TJ Worthington "The Rebel" has some fantastic bits in it, not least Irene Handl's "Get it out of my house. Get it ouuut." - Sam Donohoe Interesting fact about "The Rebel" - the first couple of times I saw it, it was on a black and white television, so I just automatically assumed that, like the series, it was shot in monochrome. It came as quite a surprise when I finally saw it in colour. - TJ Worthington "The Rebel" is good, but my favourite of the Hancock films is his "The Punch & Judy Man" (filmed in monochrome). I think it's even better, perfectly capturing that run-down seaside resort feeling on a damp Tuesday afternoon in August. - Ronnie Bookless
Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais were another team of writers who were keen to adapt to the needs of different times and genres, as evidence by their refusal to mount a straight revival of their hit 1960s series "The Likely Lads", instead developing the two central characters and their lives to create the arguably even better "Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?". Correspondingly, the film version of "The Likely Lads", and indeed that of another of their classic sitcoms "Porridge", while not quite reaching the same high standards as the television version, worked better in a cinematic sense than most of its contemporaries. As far as I remember, the Likely Lads film was a pretty good transistion, wasn't it? Admittedly haven't seen it for years, but if memory serves, it held true to the spirit and level of hilarity of the series. - Sam Donohoe "The Likely Lads" did seem to stand out as being a better translation than most. It did seem to be structured almost as three seperate episodes within a larger framework, which probably helped to smooth the transition. Am I right in thinking that it actually dated from the time of "Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads"? Or was it actually made between the two series? - TJ Worthington It was during the "Whatever..." period, which was a massive show at the time of course and totally brilliant. - Ronnie Bookless Clement and Le Frenais have put together a half-decent film career, and wrote/directed (Clement)/produced (Le Frenais) arguably the best film-version-of-sitcom, Porridge. Though it's a danger to 'open up' a sitcom built on claustrophobia, I think they get away with it. - Dave Rolinson
The film version of "Rising Damp" causes divisions among fans, with some feeling that it stands up well next to the highly-acclaimed television version, and others feeling that it falls way short of the mark. The "Rising Damp" film is great, and follows the sensible template of trying to work a number of storylines into the main narrative rather than just extending a flimsy half-hour plot over ninety minutes. Indeed, many elements of the plot are partial reworkings of earlier television episodes; they don't always flow superbly, but on the whole it hits the mark. There are some great new moments (Rigsby daydreaming about dancing with Miss Jones, Phillip revealing that he's not actually a prince with ten wives but from Croydon), but one disappointing and baffling factor - the sets are simply too large for the cramped, living-on-top-of-each-other atmosphere that pervaded the television series so brilliantly to work here. - TJ Worthington
Made by Hammer Films, the cinematic version of "Man About The House" made several conscious attempts to expand on the premise of the series rather than simply replicating the television original on a larger screen, and included several sequences that were quite at odds with the supposedly 'unadventurous' nature of the early 1970s ITV sitcom. My favourite movie spin-off is the 1974 Hammer version of "Man About The House". The principal characters seem to work very well in the ninety-minute format, although the increase in the intensity and frequency of sexual dalliances between Richard O'Sullivan & Paula Wilcox seems incongruous in comparison with the innocence of the TV episodes. Thankfully the Ropers (Brian Murphy and Yootha Joyce) are on top form, especially the spiteful and withering Mildred. The main plot thread concerns property developers who want to knock down the row of houses in which the Ropers and our flatmate threesome live. But there are plenty of extra sub-plots, such as George's desire to make some money by selling out when Mildred wants to stay, or the pervy MP who keeps a mistress in the same tenement block, a woman who will happily entertain the local milkman behind his back. Or, there's the developer, a real pantomime villain played by Peter Cellier in superbly smarmy form. He fancies Wilcox and takes her to a posh restaurant to chat her up, and try to persuade her to sell out. Unbeknown to him, chef O'Sullivan works in the kitchen, and has laced his meal with ingredients that give him the runs. All good clean fun. I have to admit, the gear changes in plot, from comedy to exposition and back again, are very clunky, and the whole Thames TV sequence is a very bizarre twist, but it doesn't matter. The film entertains on so many levels. For example, you can enjoy the movie purely as a celebrity romp. So many 70s character actors and TV stars make cameo appearances that one can star-spot the whole ninety-minutes. There's Michael Robbins as a security guard, Johnny Briggs as a milkman, Arthur Lowe as property tycoon, and Patrick Newell as randy MP. Best of all, in the climax to the movie filmed at the Thames TV Euston Road studios, Bill Grundy plays himself as the host of the "Today" programme. He's involved in a very amusing "This Is Your Life" gag involving Patrick Newell and a red book. I also love it when he acts bemused and hapless, as his interview goes awry, which has a terrible resonance when one considers what happened to him just a year later. Grundy confronted the Sex Pistols in a drunken stupor and effectively killed his career in a scandal of provocation and foul language. Most bizarre of all is the sequence in the Thames TV bar. George hurries through, looking for the Today studio, and passes Jack Smethurst and Rudolph Walker - playing themselves for real. George questions the White Man's choice of enjoying a drink with "Sambo the Nig Nog" because, on TV, he wouldn't touch him with a shitty stick let alone share a pint of Double Diamond. Walker points out that Smethurst only says those words on TV because he's paid to, and both actors are irritated by George's question. When the movie is repeated on TV, this bar scene is always excised because of its "non-PC content". Plus, no viewer today (except those with very long memories, or an interest in TV history) would have a clue what it was all about. The fusion of faux-reality and fiction intrigues me. Two 'real people', actors who played the rival lead roles in the Thames sitcom Love Thy Neighbour, meet a gormless 'fictional' character from another Thames sitcom who is also, patently, a racist. As viewers we are intended to be disapproving of George. We already know that he's a tight-wad obsessed with making money from the property developers, now we see that he's also a gormless tit, lacking in sophistication and unable to understand the fact that the characters played by Walker and Smethurst are totally unlike their real selves. I suspect the film-makers intend George to embody the typical ITV viewer of 1974, a white Anglo-Saxon shit who would have found "Love Thy Neighbour" hilarious for all the wrong reasons. So, "Man About The House" - The Movie, has comedy, big stars and even a race-related edge. - Simon Harries
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