Muriel Box (1955)
Peter Finch’s last and (alas) probably most famous role was in Network (1976), a satirical, hysterical anti-TV polemic produced in Hollywood, directed by Sidney Lumet and (over)written by Paddy Chayefsky. Twenty years earlier, in his first leading role for the Rank Organisation and during the infancy of television as a widespread centre of attention in British living rooms, Finch co-starred with Kay Kendall in this milder, cosier Pinewood lampoon of the upstart medium’s ethos and technical crudity. Although its chief target was, necessarily, the BBC, the launch of ITV was imminent when the picture started shooting in early June 1955: the country’s second channel began broadcasting on 22 September that year, exactly two months before Simon and Laura opened. As a comedy, the film is strenuous, even tiresome, but it gives an interesting insight into contemporary cinema’s anxiety about the growing popularity of the box. The director’s surname is a nice irony.
Contemporary British theatre must have been anxious too because Simon and Laura started life on stage and ran in the West End for six months immediately before the film, adapted from Alan Melville’s play by Peter Blackmore, went into production. Bright-spark BBC producer David Prentice (Ian Carmichael) has a wizard idea for a new crowd-pleaser: a series, with an episode to air live each evening, that, in David’s words, ‘will mirror the lives of an ordinary, happily married husband and wife’ – the ordinary pair to be played by a real-life, happily married celebrity couple. The Controller of Television (Richard Wattis) – aka CT (the many acronyms in use at the BBC generate too many acronym jokes in Blackmore’s script) – objects that the latter don’t exist but David affably disagrees: there’s the Attenboroughs and the Oliviers although ‘I think we can do better than that’ (this gives a flavour of the film’s arch lèse-majesté humour). David proposes instead Simon and Laura Foster – ‘They’ve been married for years. Both of them have been stars for as long as I can remember. And, sir, absolutely devoted to one another’. Muriel Box promptly cuts to the Fosters in the middle of a full-scale domestic – Laura (Kendall) hurls a plate at Simon (Finch) as he leaves the room and locks her inside. He then asks his butler-cum-factotum, Wilson (Maurice Denham), to buy him a one-way train ticket to Leicester. Simon is appropriating, we gather not for the first time, a traditionally female response to marital discord: he’s going home to mother.
The couple’s agent, Bernie Burton (Hubert Gregg), hotfoots it to St Pancras and stops Simon just as he’s about to board the train to Leicester. At first both Fosters, whose claim to fame is as stage performers, pooh-pooh the BBC offer but it turns out their star status is as shaky as their marriage; when Bernie points out they need the work, they think again. And once ‘Simon and Laura’ the TV programme gets underway, Simon and Laura the film puts the turbulence of the couple’s actual relationship on the back burner until the plot needs it to resume a major role. The new show attracts a huge audience; the title characters are so celebrated that their names and faces are soon advertising this and that in magazines and on double-decker buses. (I was maybe wrong to be surprised that performers under contract to the BBC in the 1950s were allowed to do this but I couldn’t help wondering if this was one of the details in the film that anticipated the arrival of commercial television.) The TV series cast also includes – also supposedly as themselves – not just butler Wilson, himself an ex-thespian, but also the Fosters’ cook, Jessie (Thora Hird), who is spotted by set dresser Adrian Lee (Alan Wheatley) when he visits their home to get décor ideas for the show: Jessie is ‘absolute heaven’, says Adrian, adding, more ambiguously, ‘I’ve never seen a face like it’. David Prentice becomes the blue-eyed boy of Lime Grove studios. Janet Honeyman (Muriel Pavlow), the ‘Simon and Laura’ scriptwriter, is the literally blue-eyed girl who carries a torch for David.
Everything’s going great guns until it isn’t. Worried that the leading man and lady’s childlessness will soon limit their family viewing appeal, CT insists that a young boy character be drafted in – Simon and Laura’s visiting nephew, who then turns into their adopted son: Timothy (Clive Parritt) is a card on camera and a little monster off it. Janet overhears David on the phone to Laura and gets the wrong idea. Laura suspects Simon, with form as a womaniser, of playing away with Janet. Simon finds out that Laura has spent a long evening at David’s flat. The plot’s thickening is a means of distracting attention from Simon and Laura’s distinctly scattershot satirical approach but doesn’t disguise it entirely. The film depends heavily on the phony idealisation of the TV version of the couple’s relationship: that the show is a hit seems meant to demonstrate that people are content with this illusion until CT is alarmed by a rash of reviews complaining that the perfect marriage is boring. A Christmas episode, broadcast from the Fosters’ actual home, descends into chaos: off-screen hostilities intrude onto the set, culminating in a set-to between Simon and Laura and more serious blows exchanged by David and Simon; naughty Timothy flicks a switch to ensure the programme stays on air. The resulting press reviews are enthusiastic and a shot in the arm to the show. The longer the film goes on, the more it seems to deplore the fickleness of public opinion as much as television’s built-in opportunism – and it’s a bit rich for a piece of mainstream cinema to laugh at TV integrity being inevitably compromised by an eye on viewing figures. Everything’s finally resolved happily in Simon and Laura – the title characters realise they’re made for each other, David decides he loves Janet back, even Timothy lends a hand to clear up the romantic misunderstandings – because the film-makers know better than not to keep their audience happy.
It’s true this small-screen-baiting, although based in real nervousness about cinema attendances, is often tongue in cheek. But the film strikes what are, at least in long retrospect, some jarring notes. Every so often, Muriel Box shows a ‘typical’ family watching ‘Simon and Laura’ – mum (Marianne Stone), dad (Cyril Chamberlain), their two children (uncredited) and gran (Muriel George). The trouble is, these are ‘typical’ TV viewers because they’re also working-class (Cockneys). When the first episode goes out, gran assumes it’ll be dull and asks what time the boxing’s on; in fact, her tastes are pretty constant – as the Christmas episode mayhem unfolds, she’s yelling, ‘Go on, ‘it ‘im, champ!’ The paterfamilias, chided by his wife for siding with Simon when he raises his hand to Laura, tells her, ‘That’s the only way to treat ’em’; she replies, ‘I’d like to see you try it’, and he does. The film reasonably pokes fun at Simon and Laura’s showbiz egos but also makes much of Jessie the cook’s increasing resentment that she’s not getting enough lines. This could now be seen as prophetic evidence that everyone wants their bit of celebrity but it comes across as simply snobbish: Jessie should know her place, in the kitchen. Although Simon and Laura has fun illustrating television’s primitive techniques, it unsurprisingly majors in the pitfalls of live transmission – not exactly a proof of the medium’s inherent inferiority to film. Repeated jokes in the script about less than princely BBC salaries present television as cinema’s poor relation in a strictly pecuniary sense
Muriel Box certainly keeps the action pacy: there’s real momentum in the build-up to the farcical climax, even as you hear the creak of plot machinery and flinch at some of the overacting. A familiar face seems to appear on – then almost instantly disappear from – the screen in nearly every one of Simon and Laura’s ninety minutes: Joan Hickson as a barmaid; Charles Hawtrey as a railway porter; Nicholas Parsons as a TV producer; Esma Cannon as an Ordinary Woman from Newcastle who’s also called Laura Foster; Gilbert Harding, Isobel Barnett and John Ellison as themselves. All four main players succeed through a combination of hard work, theatrical verve and screen presence – although each of Peter Finch, Kay Kendall, Ian Carmichael and Muriel Pavlow has these qualities in different proportions. Kay Kendall is particularly remarkable. She was only twenty-eight at the time, much too young to play someone who’s been a star for as long as David Prentice can remember, yet Kendall’s imposing height and (essentially light-hearted) authority somehow make her senior enough for the role. She also stands out thanks to some wonderful gowns, designed by Julie Harris, which Kendall wears superbly. Peter Blackmore even gives her what would now be termed a post-modern reference. Faced with the prospect of sharing the screen with a child actor as gruesome as Timothy, Laura insists you have to draw the line somewhere – even though ‘I have acted with octogenarians, dipsomaniacs, dope fiends, amnesiacs, and veteran cars’. Spoken like a true star of Genevieve.
8 May 2023
