The good news is that I slept almost nine hours. The bad news is that I have felt terrible since waking up, which seems unfair since one of the last things I saw before bed, courtesy of ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks, was the plausible rediscovery of silphium. I had peculiar dreams suggesting the science fiction of M. John Harrison adapted with the budget of the BBC Quarry. I feel like every time I look at the news some actor or writer or otherwise artistically interesting person has died and here we are stuck with all manner of justices and politicians the earth would be lighter without. In less grievous annoyances, I have just found a six-minute excerpt of a fifty-year-old television play I have been hunting for more than a decade without success—I became re-obsessed with it in the spring after discovering the original stage cast and tracking down a script—which means there is at least one copy out there that doesn't require visiting the BFI Mediatheque and it wasn't worth uploading in full?
What the hell: the play is John Mortimer's Bermondsey (1970). Originally produced as part of a quartet of one-acts collectively titled Come As You Are, the stage version starred Joss Ackland, Denholm Elliott, Glynis Johns, and Pauline Collins, and I want a time machine like burning because when it was adapted by Mortimer for an episode of Thirty-Minute Theatre in 1972, absolutely none of these people who were not exactly unknown to film and television transferred to the screen. Nonetheless, I have wanted to see it ever since it got on my radar in 2009 as part of a memorial series for Mortimer, because it turns out to be important queer TV.
I can't speak to any differences that may have been enacted for television, but the play in its published text is a jewel. It concerns a long-term, class-crossing, poly and bisexual relationship and it is not at all a tragedy; it is a sweet, wry, affirming snapshot of a thirty-eight-year-old publican and his boyfriend of the last eighteen years and his wife of the last twelve and his midlife crisis that sees him in danger of throwing both of them over for a barmaid half his age and serves as the catalyst for bringing this three-cornered marriage out in the open where the question isn't what the wife and the boyfriend think of one another, it's what the man they both love is going to decide to do about his life and their own. It doesn't read like radical drama. It reads like people's lives. Beyond the ending which makes use of one of my two favorite Christmas carols, since it is of course a solstitial story, I love best the alliance that establishes itself between Iris and Pip, who are not jealous of one another and never have been, but need to have the conversation to find it out. "Look," she says finally, trying to reassure the godfather of her children that he's not about to be sent packing for Christmas, "it's quite natural to me. It's the people that don't fancy him I can't understand."
In any case, if you too would like to see the six minutes from the television version that unsensationally introduce Bob and Pip as lovers, they are currently on YouTube. It's not actually the first same-sex kiss in the history of British TV because as far as I can tell that happened in a 1970 BBC Edward II with Ian McKellen, but it's a quite good kiss and I had only seen a production still of it previously. The scene around it is beautifully acted. I just wish the rest of the play were available with it.
It is not impossible to bake honeycakes in a toaster oven, it's just silly, and yet here we are.
rushthatspeaks, was the plausible rediscovery of silphium. I had peculiar dreams suggesting the science fiction of M. John Harrison adapted with the budget of the BBC Quarry. I feel like every time I look at the news some actor or writer or otherwise artistically interesting person has died and here we are stuck with all manner of justices and politicians the earth would be lighter without. In less grievous annoyances, I have just found a six-minute excerpt of a fifty-year-old television play I have been hunting for more than a decade without success—I became re-obsessed with it in the spring after discovering the original stage cast and tracking down a script—which means there is at least one copy out there that doesn't require visiting the BFI Mediatheque and it wasn't worth uploading in full?What the hell: the play is John Mortimer's Bermondsey (1970). Originally produced as part of a quartet of one-acts collectively titled Come As You Are, the stage version starred Joss Ackland, Denholm Elliott, Glynis Johns, and Pauline Collins, and I want a time machine like burning because when it was adapted by Mortimer for an episode of Thirty-Minute Theatre in 1972, absolutely none of these people who were not exactly unknown to film and television transferred to the screen. Nonetheless, I have wanted to see it ever since it got on my radar in 2009 as part of a memorial series for Mortimer, because it turns out to be important queer TV.
I can't speak to any differences that may have been enacted for television, but the play in its published text is a jewel. It concerns a long-term, class-crossing, poly and bisexual relationship and it is not at all a tragedy; it is a sweet, wry, affirming snapshot of a thirty-eight-year-old publican and his boyfriend of the last eighteen years and his wife of the last twelve and his midlife crisis that sees him in danger of throwing both of them over for a barmaid half his age and serves as the catalyst for bringing this three-cornered marriage out in the open where the question isn't what the wife and the boyfriend think of one another, it's what the man they both love is going to decide to do about his life and their own. It doesn't read like radical drama. It reads like people's lives. Beyond the ending which makes use of one of my two favorite Christmas carols, since it is of course a solstitial story, I love best the alliance that establishes itself between Iris and Pip, who are not jealous of one another and never have been, but need to have the conversation to find it out. "Look," she says finally, trying to reassure the godfather of her children that he's not about to be sent packing for Christmas, "it's quite natural to me. It's the people that don't fancy him I can't understand."
In any case, if you too would like to see the six minutes from the television version that unsensationally introduce Bob and Pip as lovers, they are currently on YouTube. It's not actually the first same-sex kiss in the history of British TV because as far as I can tell that happened in a 1970 BBC Edward II with Ian McKellen, but it's a quite good kiss and I had only seen a production still of it previously. The scene around it is beautifully acted. I just wish the rest of the play were available with it.
It is not impossible to bake honeycakes in a toaster oven, it's just silly, and yet here we are.
