Alan Tarrant (1960)
Why is it that some actors are so much better on television than in the cinema? The obvious explanation of the reverse phenomenon is the ‘size’ of a film star’s overpowering presence. The reasons why someone who makes their name in concentrated psychological drama on TV and fails to translate to a big action movie aren’t hard to work out either. But what if there’s not that much difference in the physical scale of the pieces of television and cinema in which an actor makes such a different impression? In The Hour, currently on the BBC, Ben Whishaw is not only emotionally precise and expressive – he’s charismatic too. Could he replicate this kind of power on a bigger screen? He was feeble in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; although he gave a fine performance in Bright Star, his John Keats was for the most part an unusually quiet protagonist and Jane Campion succeeded in creating an unusual intimacy between the principals and the audience. Jon Hamm, a very different physical type from Whishaw, looks a master actor in Mad Men: in his cinema roles last year in The Town and Howl, he was vague and unremarkable. As a character antithetical to Whishaw’s in The Hour, Dominic West is no less excellent; several years on from his huge success in The Wire on HBO, his big-screen filmography hasn’t been much embellished.
Apart from his Artful Dodger in David Lean’s Oliver Twist, I’ve always found Anthony Newley a rebarbative performer – self-aware, egocentric, excluding – whether I’m watching him in films or just listening to his singing voice. It hadn’t occurred to me that, on the small screen, Newley might have been a truly engaging actor. The Strange World of Gurney Slade is proof that he was. It’s because of that, as much as because this television series was so unusual for its time, that I found these two episodes of it shown at BFI so revelatory and enjoyable.
Gurney Slade (the name of Newley’s character, taken from that of a town in Somerset) aired on ATV in the autumn of 1960. Only six episodes were made: according to Wikipedia, the first two (the ones screened at BFI) went out at 8.35pm and the last four were shunted into a graveyard slot of 11.35pm. Newley was a big name at the time and was given free rein by ATV to develop this comedy vehicle. It was written by the rapidly up-and-coming Sid Green and Dick Hills (who later wrote for Morecambe and Wise) and produced and directed by Alan Tarrant (who also did some late Hancock and Arthur Haynes’ The Worker in the first half of the sixties). The Newley character often speaks to us in stream-of-consciousness interior monologue that has a wryly melancholy, philosophical flavour. Early in the first episode, he walks out of his living room in exasperation with his family and neighbours and off the set, exchanging grumpy words with the producer – the alienation device rather anticipates the Armchair Theatre adaptation of N F Simpson’s A Resounding Tinkle the following year. Gurney Slade laments more than once being trapped in a television programme. At the time, this may have been a comment about Newley’s own plight as a celebrity but it now comes across as a striking foreshadowing of The Truman Show, made nearly forty years later.
There are surrealist elements – Gurney romances with a girl in a poster on a hoarding who comes to life; they take the vacuum cleaner she’s advertising on the swings in a park; other inanimate objects are as vivified as the people Gurney encounters (a newspaper transforms itself alarmingly and passes moral judgments on Gurney, a voice issues from the bowels of a dustbin). The suburban (North London, by the look of the street signs) settings are so impeccably familiar that they intensify the surreal effects. It’s not hard to see why The Strange World of Gurney Slade flopped on ATV in 1960 and has developed a cult following in its afterlife.
In the very first scene, in the overpopulated sitting room of Gurney’s house, Newley seems to be doing too much, working to draw attention to himself – just as I’d have expected. Once he’s out of the house and heading down the street in his buttoned-up light-coloured mac, his movement is comically inventive yet you still feel his priority is to remind you he’s talented. Because of this, it took a little while for me to warm to him: I suspected he was comfortable because he had the camera to himself. But the longer I watched Newley, the more charming I found him. He reads the bizarre lines naturalistically, and with great control, and makes them consistently funny. And he does interact – especially in conversation with a (talking) mongrel dog but with human beings too, including us. You feel you’re really on Anthony Newley/Gurney Slade’s wavelength.
There’s a serious risk in this kind of set-up that the rest of the cast will try to make too much of their small parts but no one overdoes things and nearly everyone’s effective – notably Una Stubbs (as the poster girl), Dilys Laye, Keith Smith and Norman Pitt in the first episode, and Hugh Paddick, Edwin Richfield and Anneke Wills, who was at BFI for the screening, in the second. The agreeable, eccentric music by Max Harris, conducted by Jack Parnell, seemed very familiar. It turns out it’s been used in other well-known television programmes subsequently. (I think I recognised it from Vision On.)
11 August 2011
