TV review

Michael Apted (1982)

It occurred to me a few minutes in that, in the early 1980s, the likes of Michael Apted and Jack Rosenthal had clout enough to mean that a piece of modest scope and ambition involving them could make it to the big screen.  I’d forgotten that P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang was originally shown on Channel 4 rather than released in cinemas even though it’s back on television now on Film 4.  I’d never seen it before – it was a combination of recently watching Apted’s 56 Up and wanting to know what the title meant that made me record it.  Of course ‘p’tang yang kipperbang’ is a nonsense phrase, used repeatedly by fourteen-year-old Alan Duckworth and his school friends.  They have a penchant for other extravagant verbal inventions, especially to express their revulsion for girls, kissing etc (‘vomituosity’ and words to that effect).  Needless to say, their vocabulary conceals these grammar school boys’ intense and fearful curiosity about such things.  When Duckworth (known as ‘Quack Quack’) gets cast in a school play with Ann Lawton, the girl in his class about whom he continually fantasises, he starts telling his pals that their made-up words are  stupid.

Jack Rosenthal enjoyed great success and acclaim as a teller of adolescent boy tales on television in the 1970s – The Evacuees, Bar Mitzvah Boy – but I tended to find his characters rigidly preconceived, sometimes embarrassing.   He relies heavily on audience recognition – not of full personalities but of familiar turns of phrase.  This is enough for many people to be convinced by a character – to say ‘I know someone just like her’.  But Rosenthal rarely reveals anything surprising or suggests anything original.   In P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang he writes about an adolescence nearly contemporary with his own – the film is set in 1948, when he was sixteen going on seventeen – yet Rosenthal’s teenagers are constructed as if he’d got an idea of what they were like from books or films rather than out of the experience of being one himself.   When Alan finally gets to tell Ann what he really feels about her, he concludes with:

‘But I’ll never forget you. And how you made me feel. Even when I’m 51 or something.’

Spoken like a true fifty-one-year-old (Rosenthal’s age in 1982).  Earlier in this improbably long speech, Alan tells Ann that ‘Kids kid themselves’.  The only thing that works in favour of this archness is that John Albasiny, who plays Alan, has a strangely middle-aged quality.  It’s a pity that Michael Apted – who you expect, from his Seven Up films, to know better – also gives Alan a designed schoolboy untidiness.  P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang is essentially nostalgic, sentimental and emotionally very limited:  David Earl’s irritating music is perfectly appropriate and Tony Pierce-Roberts’ photography bathes the outdoor scenes in a golden glow.  Alan is a cricket fan.  He fantasises not only about Ann but about playing a match-winning innings for England in the Ashes series of 1948.   In the early stages, Apted and Rosenthal use extracts from John Arlott’s test match commentaries of the time (although the sound quality makes it clear they’re not the original broadcasts).   Later on, the elderly Arlott’s voice provides ‘humorous’ commentary on Quack Quack’s attempts to score with Ann – as the story goes on, there’s an increasing dependence on John Arlott’s contributions.

John Albasiny and the other kids can act but Rosenthal’s approach proves infectious because, for the most part, that’s what they’re doing too evidently:  it’s only the nonsense words that come out fairly naturally.  Alan, Ann (Abigail Cruttenden) and Geoffrey Whitaker (Maurice Dee), a well-presented creep whom the other boys loathe, get cast together in the school play.  It’s typical of the lazy script that it’s a cast of three only, there are no auditions that we see, and the kids don’t rehearse with props.  The play is directed by the English teacher Miss Land, who’s in a tizzy for much of the film because she’s had it off with the school groundsman Tommy, and her period is late.   Alison Steadman overplays in nearly all her scenes in the classroom and at play rehearsals and Miss Land’s snobbish attitude towards the proletarian Tommy is crudely written but the best scene in P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang is between these two – a testy conversation in a barn with some believable emotions emerging.   Garry Cooper as Tommy gives the film’s most straightforward and appealing performance.   This is in spite of the wearying predictability of the character he’s playing.   Tommy and Alan take a shine to each other, and the young man tells the boy about his experiences as a soldier in the recent war – ‘Dunkirk, El Alamein, the Battle of the Bulge, and Burma’.  He turns out to be a deserter, of course.  The last we see of Tommy, he’s being bundled into a police van.

19 July 2012