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Caricature by Daniel Mackie
CAITLIN MORAN ON
A SITCOM
WITHOUT WISECRACKS THAT IMPROVES
AS TIME GOES BY
MOTHERHOOD HAS changed me in many ways. I started wearing
high heels because I realised I'm going to die soon, stopped smoking
because I realised I have to live forever, gave up wearing mohair because
the babies kept getting hairballs, and I now view cows just standing in a
field as interesting things in their own right ("Look! A cow!").
The thing I find most intriguing, however, is that I have
come to obsessively
revere the hit Nineties sitcom As Time Goes By, starring Geoffrey Palmer
and
Judi Dench, (UK Gold, weekdays; BBC Two, Friday, 10pm).
It may call itself a sitcom, but what it really means is that it is
half-an hour long, set in a house and doesn't have the theme-tune to The
Bill. In terms of "sit", As Time Goes By is no Don't Look Back. There's no
rollercoaster of emotion followed by the freezing log-flume of surprise
here.
The average plot will be that some new neighbours move in next door, and
Judi
Dench is curious to see what they're like. Geoffrey Palmer pretends he
isn't,
but goes to the corner-shop to buy some brown sauce "for his sausages" as
a
cover for checking out their house.
Dench rumbles him when she finds there is already a bottle of sauce in
their
cupboard.
"Come on Lionel -own up! Sausages you never intended to eat, brown sauce
we
already had - isn't it really an excuse to go out and have a snoop around?"
An archetypal "com", meanwhile, would be that a character, after some
minor
trauma (hat doesn't fit, cat eats vol au vents, picture falls off wall and
dents trug) requests a gin sling.
"Sling away, Madge!" Judi Dench will trill.
That's it. That's the joke. Indeed, that's not just any joke - that's a
scene-ending joke, where you traditionally put a bit of a humdinger in
order to stop people flicking channels and going to watch a baby giraffe
being born on the Discovery Channel instead - an event, I've always
thought, that looks rather like a very wet umbrella falling off the hall
table.
Often the gaps where jokes should be are so inexplicable you start to
presume
that someone broke them and they didn't have time to get a new one before
they started filming. For instance, in the episode where Palmer's mad,
ancient father gets married to mad, ancient Joan Sims, the vicar says,
"You may now kiss the bride," and we cut to Judi Dench's thirtysomething
daughter and her best friend in the congregation. They wipe tears from
their eyes, and the scene fades.
Now, how could you not put a joke there? In that scenario, something would
appear on the page without you even realising: "Are they going on
honeymoon?"
"No, Rocky's diabetic" say; or "What was their 'something blue'?"
"Lower half of the bride's body. Poor circulation."
I've often wondered what the scripts look like.
Vicar: I now pronounce you man and wife.
Rocky and Madge kiss.
Cut to: Sandy and Judith wiping tears from their eyes. (Please note: I
have deliberately not put a joke here as the location scouts have found us
such a beautiful chapel to film in that I think we should all spend a
little time admiring it, instead.) But this is, I suspect, the magic of As
Time Goes By: its unwillingness to fill every cranny with one-liners. The
world is too full of wisecracks, these days. In the 21st century, everyone
does zingy little scene enders - from newsreaders ("Fireworks night -now
what bright spark came up with that?") to the man in PC World in Solihull
who sold me my lap-top ("And good news if you're scared of mice - this one
just has a touch-pad, instead!")
Some days it's like the whole world is trapped in an episode from the
fourth
season of Friends -one with too much Ross in it. Wisecracking is
exhausting for the person being cracked at - it's gladiatorial and sexually
combative, which is why it's so alarming when children and Michael Buerk
do it.
As Time Goes By, on the other hand, is happy to be good-humoured, rather
than
humorous. It wants neither to impress you nor to go to bed with you
- instead, it just wants you to muse on how comforting it would be if Dame
Judi spent half an hour trying to smuggle a box of candles past a stern
housekeeper who has strictly instructed her not to bring a box of candles,
while Geoffrey Palmer harrumphs Geoffrey Palmerishly in the background.
GEOFFREY PALMER IS OUR FIRST AMBIENT
ACTOR
Of course, in the final analysis, it's Palmer and
Dench that make As Time Go By the thing that, during my Eavie's first
three colicky months, stopped me giving her a helium balloon and leaving
the front-room window ajar.
Geoffrey Palmer plays The Geoffrey Palmer Character: a lugubrious,
slightly
irascible man constantly being prevented from listening to Radio 4 by half
hour sit-com plot-twists.
As always, watching him quietly harrumphing away like a horse on a cold
day is an almost tangible pleasure - Palmer is perhaps the first ambient
actor this country has seen, just percolating Palmerishness through a
programme by irritably rustling a newspaper, raising his eyebrows and
occasionally saying "Good grief".
Palmer so invariably plays this character that you do start to wonder, at
1.30am with a colicky baby, if he mightn't secretly be a terrible actor.
We have, after all, never seen him do anything else - this is a man who
has never been handed a script where he plays a gay French athlete, or a
blacksmith who copes with unrequited love by dancing naked in the rain
with Stomp.
Dench, meanwhile, is just as beautiful as snow - so
in control of her performance it's like watching protons and neutrons
revolve around each other. She's clever, strong, flirty and sentimental.
No one can do a grande dame with a slightly skittish side better. Whether
she's trying to fit 42 guests in her dining room or make Palmer donate a
cardigan to a charity shop, she rides through every scene like an empress
sucking a sherbert lemon. On top of this, she has the best voice in
Britain - slightly husky and slightly wonky, like Nina Simone trying to
cover up the fact she's Welsh. Watching her and Palmer perform is
pleasurable simply because mastery always is - even someone who hates
cricket will stop and watch Shane Warne bowl a while, in quiet
appreciation of humanity excelling.
And besides, Dench and Palmer and their elegant Georgian house and their
small, solvable problems present just about the most inviting picture of
what it's like to be 50 we are likely to see. It's going to be flirting,
dinner-parties, black cabs and country houses all the way.
And that, I realised last week, is why motherhood has made me love it so
much. The kids will have left home by the time I'm 50.
Thanks to Connie E,
CA, USA for sending this article to me
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