George and Mildred - reputation vs. reality

[Sydward Lartle]

George and Mildred is often reduced to lazy shorthand for the embodiment of everything that was awful about sitcoms in the seventies, usually by people who've never even taken the time to watch an episode. Obviously, it's tempting to poke fun at the seventies fashions (though Yootha Joyce's outfits were pretty outlandish even when the episodes were first broadcast) or to shake your head and tut loudly at some of the politically incorrect moments (the use of a black baby as a comedy prop in the episode Baby Talk), but even a cursory watch of a couple of episodes on ITV3 or YouTube reveals that the received wisdom that this was objectively a lousy series reveals that it was actually a standout example of sitcom basics, fired by mostly fantastic scripts, dynamic lead performances and truly memorable characters.

In his book Crisis? What Crisis?, knowledgeable anorak Alwyn W.Turner singles out George Roper as one of the most intriguing comic creations of the decade, and he's right. In the series that introduced us to the Ropers, Man About the House, his character - an infantile miser living off his young lodgers whilst avoiding the amorous advances of his gregarious, sex-starved wife Mildred - is already set in stone, and when the Ropers left their old house (following a compulsory purchase order) for the more genteel surroundings of Hampton Wick, his rampant inverted snobbery was dragged to the surface by his and Mildred's middle class neighbours, snooty estate agent Jeffrey Fourmile, his understanding wife Ann and their precocious son Tristram. He describes the Hampton Wick set as 'all BBC2 and musical toilet rolls' and gatecrashes a drinks party at the Fourmiles' house, haranguing Jeffrey's guests - one of whom is a Conservative MP - with jibes about 'posh twits' and 'chinless wonders', thus setting out his stall as a solid Labour man. Oddly enough, in an episode of Man About the House, George had declared his support for Enoch Powell - as well as pissing off a visiting German student, played by future Sweeney icon Dennis Waterman, with repeated, ill-advised needlings about the 1966 World Cup final and memories of the Second World War - a full year before the most episode of Fawlty Towers. Here, it's the victim rather than the aggressor who gets the upper hand, with Waterman spitting out the uncomfortable truth that George is nothing but a 'bloody fascist'.

It helped that the series' writers, Johnnie Mortimer and Brian Cooke, were simply better at crafting believable situations and funny (if almost uncomfortably unsympathetic) dialogue for the middle-aged married couple than they were at writing for the younger characters, and George and Mildred hit the ground running, showing no discernable lowering of quality over the course of five series - although the early episode My Husband Next Door dips a little too freely into tried-and-tested pantomime pranks with its reprisal of the decades-old 'papering the parlour' routine as performed by Norman Wisdom and countless others. Not even a beautifully dry cameo from the underappreciated Spike Milligan stooge Keith Smith can save it.

Still, for every My Husband Next Door, there are plenty of solid gold winners to redress the balance, such as Your Money Or Your Life (which gets plenty of comic mileage from the fact that George is worth more dead than alive), Jumble Pie (George's stash of pornographic magazines - with such lovely Carry On-esque titles as Nudge, Wink and Titter - gets mistakenly donated to a jumble sale, and his referring to his stash as 'sort of art books' predates Bottom by nearly fifteen years), The Right Way to Travel (Mildred wants to join the local Conservatives' association - which George claims organize 'whist drives in aid of the death penalty' - purely to get a cheap holiday), The Delivery Man (Ann goes into Labour and George becomes an unlikely hero by taking her to the hospital in his clapped-out motorbike and sidecar combination), The Mating Game (Mildred wants Truffles, their Yorkshire Terrier, to have puppies - which George is happy with, because there might be money in it), Finders Keepers (which features a lovely cameo from potato-faced character actor Derek Deadman, as the disapproving father of Tristram's new best friend who looks upon 'posh kids' as a bad influence), and the genuinely touching series finale, the Seven Year Itch, with Patsy 'Lil Potato' Rowlands as probably the only woman in the world who thinks George is good company.

George and Mildred toured Britain in a stage version of the series, and Brian Murphy and Yootha Joyce appeared as the ugly sisters - Georgina and Mildred - alongside rising star and future Bond girl Fiona Fullerton in the 1977 London Palladium pantomime presentation of Cinderella. The series was adapted (not very impressively, despite the best efforts of Norman Fell) for US television as the Ropers, and everything in the garden looked rosy. Except Yootha Joyce was a chronic alcoholic, drinking no less than half a bottle of brandy a day, the revelation of which shocked her fellow cast members, none of whom had noticed any differences in her professionalism or performances. She died of liver failure on the 24th August 1980, just four days after her fifty-third birthday, with her screen husband at her bedside.

How, exactly, did George and Mildred get such a bad reputation? The answer is simple. The film version - featuring an ailing Yootha Joyce, written by Dick Sharples rather than Mortimer and Cooke, and not released until after Joyce's untimely death - was an absolute stinker, and stands as a tatty epitaph to a truly memorable partnership and a frequently brilliant series. The ITV network, particularly during the eighties and nineties, was not in the habit of showing repeats - although Channel Four gave welcome airings to Rising Damp and Man About the House - so the only knowledge a lot of people had of George and Mildred for far many years, prior to the release of a couple of video cassettes featuring classic episodes in the mid-nineties and the advent of multi-channel television, was the occasional screening of the film adaptation - usually on soggy Bank Holidays or late at night as a schedule filler.

What's so bad about it? Well, not quite everything. The early scenes are pretty close to the original, and a short sequence in which the Ropers' favourite restaurant from their courting days is revealed to have been turned into a greasy spoon café frequented by threatening rockers (including a pre-Lovejoy Dudley Sutton) may feel closer to Straw Dogs than sitcom, but it does at least give us the following memorable exchange -

GEORGE I'll see if they've got our tune.

MILDRED (indicating the jukebox) What, on that thing?

GEORGE Yeah, well they might have a punk version by the Socks Pistols.

MILDRED The who?!

GEORGE Yeah, or them!

Classic G&M, there. Sadly, the rest of the film isn't up to the same standard - Mildred wants to celebrate their anniversary in style at a swanky London hotel, but George gets mistaken for a hit man by a shady, strangely camp businessman (Stratford Johns) who wants a rival eliminated. The only other joke in the whole thing that's even remotely worthwhile comes from Mildred introducing herself as 'Mildred Roper née Tremble' (knee tremble, geddit?) which just shows what kind of a script we're dealing with here. The Fourmiles vanish after the first half hour, and not even a reasonable supporting cast including Kenneth Cope, Please Sir!'s David Barry, Benny Hill mainstay Sue Bond, hatchet-faced Neil McCarthy, the always reliable Harry Fowler and the Sweeney's Garfield Morgan can prevent tedium from setting in. It tanked so badly at the box office that it received its television premiere on ITV in December 1980, just months after its cinema release.

Julian Upton, writing for the Bright Lights Film Journal, describes George and Mildred as 'one of the worst films ever made in Britain' and 'so strikingly bad, it seems to have been assembled with a genuine contempt for its audience. It is the archetypal example of why a sitcom should never be made into a film. Visually, it is an insult to the entire history of set design, blocking, cinematography, sound recording, editing, and mise-en-scene...with fewer decent lines and less imagination than in half of a below-average twenty-five-minute episode, George and Mildred is nothing less than an ordeal to endure.'

I'll admit it, I used to have fond memories of the film version myself, having seen it when I was too young to know any better. I was particularly tickled by George, with his terror of physical intimacy, being forcibly stripped by a gangster's moll. Decades later, however, I was able to see it for the sad and shabby piece of work it is, the sense of melancholy engendered by the dingy weather and rain-soaked locations enhanced by the knowledge that this was Yootha Joyce's last work - how poignant the closing caption ("or is it the beginning?") seems in the light of what happened next. In case I haven't made it clear enough already, stick to the series and you won't go far wrong.

[Jockice]

Julian Upton, writing for the Bright Lights Film Journal, describes George and Mildred as 'one of the worst films ever made in Britain' and 'so strikingly bad, it seems to have been assembled with a genuine contempt for its audience. It is the archetypal example of why a sitcom should never be made into a film. Visually, it is an insult to the entire history of set design, blocking, cinematography, sound recording, editing, and mise-en-scene...with fewer decent lines and less imagination than in half of a below-average twenty-five-minute episode, George and Mildred is nothing less than an ordeal to endure.'

Not sure if I've ever seen it (although I did like the series) but as someone who saw the Are You Being Served? film on ITV3 on Bank Holiday Monday, I really dread to think how bad it must have been if it was any worse than that.

[Sydward Lartle]

I'd say George and Mildred (film version) was actually a shade better than the appalling Are You Being Served film, if only because they actually bothered to shoot portions of it in the outside world rather than sticking with ninety-odd minutes of cheapskate studio-bound bullshit. There again, the Served film was based on a stage adaptation of the series which had run with some success as a summer season attraction and in the West End, so obviously it must have been funny at some point?

Some less generous souls than myself might argue that the reason the big-screen antics of the Grace Brothers staff turned out to be less than stellar is because of the presence of Bob Kellett on directing duties. TV Cream damns him with faint praise as 'a solid comedy workhorse', having proven his credentials with the all-star construction site silent extravaganza A Home of Your Own (Barker! Cribbins! Woolf!) and the much-loved (if never quite as good as it's supposed to be) Ronnie Barker vehicle Futtock's End, but he was also behind the cameras for the appalling Alf Garnett Saga (1972), the piss-awful likes of Spanish Fly, Don't Just Lie There, Say Something! and Girl Stroke Boy, as well as all three of the Up Pompeii films with Frankie Howerd, only the first of which was actually any good (although Up the Front did at least have decent production design and Madeline Smith as a maid). So, did he just make lousy decisions, or did he simply do his best with increasingly meagre budgets and resources? Was he not up to the job of getting the most out of some of the finest comedy talents of the seventies (the same could be said of just about everyone else who directed a sex comedy back then, in particular Derek 'What's Up Nurse' Ford)? Is it mere coincidence that his sole directing credit after Are You Being Served flopped like a jelly on a wet mattress was an amiable if unremarkable filler for the Children's Film Foundation? We may never know.

[Autopsy Turvey]

The G&M film is definitely better than the AYBS film. The series is possibly ITV's second best sitcom.

[Sydward Lartle]

The series is possibly ITV's second best sitcom.

And first place goes to Never the Twain Rising Damp, obviously.

[Sydward Lartle]

Props to Norman Eshley and Sheila Fearn as the Fourmiles too, obviously. And of course Nicholas Bond-Owen, for not making Tristam too obnoxious.