by Allan Fish
(UK 1960 150m) DVD2
Follow…proceed…
p/d Alan Tarrant w Sid Green, Dick Hills m Max Harris
Anthony Newley (Gurney Slade), Una Stubbs, Bernie Winters, Douglas Wilmer, Charles Lloyd Pack, Moyra Fraser, Dilys Laye, Anneke Wills, James Villiers, Geoffrey Palmer,
Was there ever a TV series more completely out of its time and place? If the Timelord from Gallifrey had landed his Tardis in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park – imagine Tom Baker’s scarf as he legs it from a T-Rex – he would have been more in his comfort zone. For fifty years it was whispered of as something of myth, a cult before the term was even invented. Did it really happen? Was there really such a show? One would have been forgiven for thinking it a dream.
It all came about at old ATV in the glory days of ITV when they actually had ambition to make decent programmes. The BBC had Hancock and dominated the world of TV sitcoms, while American imports from Bilko to Lucy were still going strong on re-runs. Gurney Slade was never meant to be a long runner, however. It was like a comet flashing past TV screens only to disappear as quickly as it came.
Ironically it begins with the sort of sequence that dominated TV comedy of the day, with Gurney sat in his armchair and trying to tune himself off to his young wife and nagging mother squabbling about supper. Then he gets up, goes out of the door, which is a TV set, and wanders off down the street. The Purple Rose of Cairo a generation earlier and a thousand times better. In Cairo film characters interacted with the audience, but here the characters are literally figments of the hero’s imagination. So in Episode 1 we see Gurney summon a hoover advertisement model down to dance in the park. In the second episode we meet him at a deserted wartime airfield trying to chat up a gorgeous blonde. Then he’s lying in a field thinking about what it would be like to be an ant and acclimatising himself with the country. Next up he’s put on trial for lacking a sense of humour, in which in essence the show itself is put on trial, trying to defend himself for finding countersunk screws funny. Then from telling a story to a group of kids he finds them inside his own mind along with various other subconscious squatters.
If it all sounds mad, it is. The trial sequence even goes further than the legendary final episode to The Prisoner, yet even it pales beside the final episode for nonsensical whimsy, in which Gurney is sat on a stool in a studio like Val Doonican – expect in his trademark suit and raincoat – and finds himself harangued during his show not only by the producer in his ear but by the suits on a tour and then by the characters of the earlier five episodes, who berate him for leaving them in limbo underdeveloped. One almost expects the studio to collapse in on itself like the end of Wagner’s Rienzi, but instead Newley himself escorts Gurney from the stage and he turns into a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Choice moments are too numerous to mention, many from that final episode. The girl from episode two (future Doctor Who alumni Anneke Wills) finds herself allotted a part in a French movie and debates whether she can get away with taking her clothes off, the couple are split up and forced to go their separate ways (one to Emergency Ward 10), a fairy and a headsman are sent off to Lionel Bart’s (Newley’s on-off collaborator) musical Oliver! (about Oliver Cromwell, not Twist) while the prosecutor from episode four (the imperiously flustered Douglas Wilmer, below right) is naturally sent off to Boyd QC. As for Gurney himself, with his trademark mimed tinkle to set the theme music going, talking to inanimate objects and discussing Lassie with a dog (“I don’t remember Lassie singing…well, you’re not a dog, are you?”). Chuck in cameos from the likes of James Villiers, a delirious theme tune which became famous in the sixties long after the show was forgotten, and enough surrealist touches to make Charlie Kaufman and Monty Python double take. David Bowie was also a massive fan, telling NME he “was Anthony Newley for a year.” Newley himself probably knew it would fail; in Gurney’s own words as he prepares to be beheaded for being unfunny, “I still think it was funny. Perhaps the timing was wrong.” Flangewick!!!
