Citizen Smith and the politics of steady relationship type situations

To help me learn how to structure narrative arcs better for the purposes of the sitcom option and final project on my MA course in Television and Radio Scriptwriting, I've been reading a number of novelisations of famous sitcoms and comedy drama series.

Now I've finished Citizen Smith, next up is Tutti Frutti. 

Bloody hell, are some of the fictional worlds of these programmes depressing or what.

Here's a basic summary of what I've learnt about gender relations in the late Seventies, no thanks to Citizen bollocking Smith:

• Girlfriend/wife = ball and chain
• Men want to enjoy their freedom and independence
• Women don’t have much to look forward to in life
• They therefore want to settle down as soon and as quickly as possible
• Getting married = growing up + becoming adult – for both genders

According to John Sullavan and his novelist co-author, the main reason blokes hate marriage is because a serious commitment like this means you can no longer do what you like with your time and money.  Instead of following your own heart as a wannabe Marxist revolutionary or Buddhist monk in the community, you are forced to take a fulltime job doing something really boring and mundane such as being a security guard like Charlie, simply because you, your wife and your kids all need the money to live on.

If Wolfie did the decent thing and married Shirley, he could no longer spend his money on fun stuff like drinks in the pub or funky new wheels for his Lambretta because now he would have to hand over his entire wage packet to his wife so that she can buy sausages for tea and pay the gas bill.  Hell, he would even have to knuckle down and get a job!  And that means ditch the beret and Che Guevara T-shirt, get a normal shit porno-star 118 man style haircut and stop chuntering on about ‘power to the people’ and ‘first against the wall when the revolution comes’.

Naturally Harry Fenning, his ‘business associates’ and the barman are only allowed to hang out in the pub on a regular basis because they all earn their various livings there.

Once a woman nears her mid-twenties, like Shirley is doing, she feels increasingly pressurised into settling down.  Ken tells Wolfie quite plainly that as he and Shirley have been going steady for two years now, he should really be thinking seriously about getting married to her.  His comments show that this is expected as the ‘done thing’ by the society they live in.

Much of Charlie’s virulent dislike of Wolfie seems to stem from the fact that Wolfie is so obviously not suitable husband material for Shirley.  Apparently Shirley’s previous boyfriend (who Charlie rather liked) was a librarian, but she chucked him because he was too boring.

In the book, Charlie heartily approves of Shirley dating David Crossman the suave businessman – even though it subsequently turns out that Crossman is already married.

Charlie reasons that, unlike Wolfie, Crossman is employed, earns an excellent income from all his business interests, has short hair, wears a smart suit and polished shoes, doesn’t espouse radical political and social doctrines, and could afford to buy Shirley a nice house and car and take her on exotic foreign holidays.

Therefore, women have to manipulate their boyfriends into marriage, as there is no way most men would agree to tie the knot if the question was raised honestly.  Ken is nicer than most, so he appears to be an exception to the rule.  He openly and cheerfully admits he would be quite happy to settle down and change his life completely, should he happen to meet the right girl.  Yet at the same time he seems to be quite genuinely devoted to peace, spirituality and art.  However, he is not very good with girls, which means he hasn’t had enough experience of them to challenge his romantic and idealistic notions of love and sex.

In their society, the classic way a woman forces her boyfriend into marriage is by getting pregnant sooner than perhaps she had originally intended.  Back in 1967, poor June Tucker had to have a shotgun wedding.  It seems that both she and her husband may indeed be Catholics, as Tucker is claimed to have moaned he wanted to sue the Pope for the failure of the rhythm method. 

Possibly Shirley’s mum Florence had to get married a bit sharpish too, because her own dad strongly suspected she was shagging Charlie, only he couldn’t prove anything if he didn’t know where they were doing it.  The last place he thought to look was his own car, which he had locked up in the garage until the end of the war.

When Shirley bursts into tears in front of Wolfie, he immediately jumps to the conclusion that she is pregnant – even though both he and she have been very careful to use contraception.  She isn’t pregnant, it turns out, and she hasn’t had a pregnancy scare, presumably because her period started exactly when it was expected to that month.

Another way to twist the man’s wrist until he puts a ring on her finger is to go and collect a bridal magazine from the newsagents and application forms for mortgages and savings accounts from the building society.  Then you show them to your boyfriend in the pub as proof that you are deadly serious about settling down.  If he is sensible, he will agree that it is an excellent idea to start planning well in advance and gladly go along with all your suggestions.

Shirley forgets just one thing.  Wolfie is a ‘normal’ man, not a wimp.  Any ‘normal’ man tries to avoid conversations like this one like the plague, knowing they sound the death-knell to freedom and independence.

Of course, characters who are unable to discuss such vital issues of relationships and commitments honestly with each other could hardly be expected to call sexual functions by their proper names.  Sex is not referred to plainly as ‘sex’, ‘having intercourse’, ‘sleeping with someone’, ‘having a shag’ etc.  Instead it is euphemistically skirted round as ‘…it’.  Obviously there is no mention whatsoever here of anything so rampant and disgraceful like penises, vaginas and menstruation.

You cannot begin to imagine Charlie being able to ask Wolfie straight out: “Have you been sleeping with my daughter?” - even though Wolfie most definitely has and Charlie has been feverishly suspecting it all along.

The women turn out to be their own worst enemies, because they often find the most completely unsuitable of men the most sexually and romantically attractive.  This is presumably what Charlie’s friend means when he explains to Charlie that all young women go through a phase of fancying ‘yetis’.

According to this mate, this eventually wears off once the girl becomes emotionally mature enough to realise that she is really seeking a deeper, more committed relationship – and the yeti won’t and can’t give her this.  Charlie obviously thinks it is about bloody time Shirley wound up her yeti phase.

If it is true that Harry Fenning was thinking about making a possible pass at Shirley, perhaps he assumes that a woman still at the yeti stage of emotional development would be more amenable to the advances of someone so obviously unsuitable as him.  Or maybe he just doesn’t care, as long as she has a pretty face, blonde hair and nice tits.

When men long to regain the freedom they lost to matrimony, they can take up a slightly anoraky hobby and escape to the male space of the garden shed/spare room/garage to pursue it every time the women of the house start getting a bit too much [hence that digital TV channel that had its name changed to ‘Discovery Shed’?]. 

Charlie collects toy soldiers and uses them to re-enact famous battles from history.  Not being a geek by inclination, Harry Fenning apparently decides to take a plus-sized mistress who looks like Ruth Jones playing Hattie Jacques during her offstage hours [note to readers – this is a prime example of Citizen Smith fanon as invented by me for want of anything better to do with my mind, and is not endorsed in any way, shape or form by the official Citizen Smith canon.  Well, the existence of Joan Tofkin is.  Her appearance and personality are completely my personal opinion, so therefore totally and utterly mad.].

Whilst we’re on the subject of Harry Fenning, I wonder which phase of female psycho-sexual and emotional development his wife Beverly [again, this is just my own idea of her, so do please excuse me for indulging once again in the most arrant fanwank here] was negotiating at the time she decided to marry him?

Harry is impossible to categorise according to the yeti theory.  He is far too flash in appearance, jaunty in manner and just plain all-round scary to count as ‘respectable’, ‘boring’ and ‘humdrum’ in any sense.

A man who is reputed to run over high-ranking council officials who oppose his business plans, then claims it was all a terrible accident that occurred while he was reversing his car is hardly likely to be cowed into marriage simply by his girlfriend cornering him at the pub with a mortgage application and a copy of Brides magazine [yeah, go Harry!  Maybe this is one of the reasons why Mrs Fenning didn’t make it on to our television screens in the end?].

And Harry is quite probably enough of a sexist bastard to leave a woman right in the lurch if he gets her up the duff and does not want to marry her for her herself.  Doubtless he would enjoy the proof of his virility no end – but insist that no modern woman should be stupid enough to fall pregnant until she already has a ring on her finger.  She should realise that no man can be trusted – and use effective contraception till then [presumably Beverly did – as there seems to be no indication in the novelisation of the series that they have any kids.  Unlike June Tucker, she realises the Pill is most definitely not a suppository.  Though if Harry was a father, I could definitely see him being the sort that would idolise and spoil his daughter – who would probably end up as a female version of him!].

Yet because Harry has short hair, wears suits and ties and runs a whole string of businesses that prosper, presumably he would appear to the Charlies of the world as a fine prospective husband to the marriageable girls like Shirley, especially if he originally hails from Kray/Richardson brother territory somewhere in the East End.

Maybe Beverly was one of those girls who find gangster type men fascinating and sexy, rather than off-putting, so he was her equivalent of an unsuitable yeti.  See, I told you it was difficult!

Although she seems to spend much of her time in the back room preparing the food for The Vigilante, she cannot be that bad a cook if Wolfie’s only complaint about her steak and kidney pie [not that he’s a restaurant critic or anything approaching it, so I wouldn’t take his opinion too seriously here] is that one of her fingernails fell off into it.

The fact that she wears scarlet Coty nail varnish – and perhaps false nails too? – suggests that she still takes care of her appearance and likes to be noticed.  The obvious implication is that like Ronnie Lynch’s wife, she may look a bit on the tarty and vulgar side, to match her husband.  Beverly, on the other hand, considers herself to be extremely chic and sophisticated.  She would certainly be far too modern and assertive to end up with a crowd of nine kids, as June Tucker has done.  Wolfie, Ken and Smudger pity Tucker and June for their difficult situation.  The last thing Beverly wants is for anyone to pity her and Harry – so she makes damn sure they don’t, by keeping her end up.

Perhaps the most horrible implication of this book from another age is that women have to ‘manage’ men in order to get their own way, instead of speaking honestly to them when they want or need something.

The prime example occurs when Shirley and Florence basically manipulate Charlie into letting Wolfie and Ken become the new lodgers in the upstairs rooms.  It turns out that Charlie suspects that his wife is probably rather more intelligent than she might appear on the surface.  For years he has secretly been worried that she might be laughing at him behind her back.  He could well be right, seeing as she has persuaded him to accept Wolfie as a lodger and manages to avoid the wrath of Harry Fenning when she teases him with faux-naif references to his ‘foster-children’.

Even if a woman is as ‘thick as two short planks’ like Fiona the PVC-clad girl from the bakery and Smudger’s go-go dancer girlfriend Desiree, she still knows instinctively how to manipulate men to her own advantage.

Fiona takes advantage of Wolfie’s sexual interest in her and his gentlemanly manners to persuade him to buy her lots of glasses of double gin and tonics at the pub.  Desiree manipulates Ken’s obvious appreciation of her charms to persuade him into taking her down to spend a weekend with Smudger near his open prison – with Ken and Wolfie footing the bill for all three of them to travel down and stay at a nice guesthouse

Apparently it doesn’t occur to any of these women that manipulating the men in such ways might not be a very nice way of carrying on.  Neither do any of the blokes concerned openly object to it and confront the women about their bad behaviour.

[A really dreadful possibility has occurred to me – if Harry Fenning disappeared while Wolfie & co were in prison for stealing the tank and he didn’t get bumped off by Ronnie Lynch or flee to the Costa Brava in the nick of time, then possibly Beverly was so fed up with him getting kidnapped by the Tooting Popular Front, running over council officials and shagging Joan Tofkin that she laced his steak and kidney pie with arsenic.  Then she persuaded the Lynchs to get his corpse installed in one of the concrete pillars holding up junction 26 of the M25, sold them the pub – and buggered off to Spain with Alphonse the cat on the proceeds.]

Cuddles and Bubbles

Just in case anyone out there in the worldwide blogosphere (sorry, this is still the most appallingly inept neologism imaginable - but at least I've got nothing to do with it) is wondering (somehow I doubt it - but then, you never know these days ... ), this particular entry has been prompted by a protracted bout of watching Citizen Smith online.

My ostensible reason for hanging out in the YouTube version of late Seventies Tooting was to attempt to learn more about exactly how many scenes and how much dialogue a sitcom writer can hope to pack in the space of half an hour.  I'm currently writing the first of two 25 minute sitcom episodes for my MA course at the moment - which can prove a bit of a bugger when you don't have all that much practical experience just yet.

However, coughing, snuffling and sneezing all over the shop as I was yesterday afternoon made this sort of sustained concentration rather more difficult than initially anticipated.  So instead I got in some concentrated Harry Fenning watching.

And guess what?  Turns out that Stefan Elnore Travis is by no means the only misunderstood 'psycho' out there in tellyland.

So why did Stephen Greif decide to chuck in his lot with Harry in the end?

Well, according to this interview here: 

http://www.denofgeek.com/television/43623/interview_stephen_greif_on_blakes_7.html

there were as always a lot of rather complex reasons.  Back in its Terry Nation incarnation, the Federation appears to be a grim and bitter place where laughter and good cheer are in short supply.  So the sunshine and bonhomie of Citizen Smith’s failed revolution must have come as a great relief to him.  Greif’s subtle sense of the absurd gives him a fine touch indeed in comic roles – and it is Harry Fenning who lives in a society relaxed enough to be able to laugh at revolutionaries and criminals, rather than locking them away or zapping them into oblivion.

Happily there was rather more room for manoeuvre in this role – and Greif seems to have relished the challenge.  Indeed, the way in which he managed to broaden out Harry Fenning shows perfectly just how actors can actively collaborate with writers and directors to lift a script and create a real work of art out of it.

Because he is a fine actor, Greif’s touches of comedy never diminish Harry Fenning or his potential for serious aggression.  Instead, they really help to turn him into a three-dimensional being.

Take his outfits, for example.  Even by the standards of the late Seventies (and remember, fact fans, this was the decade of my childhood, so I was actually priviliged to live through such sartorial traumas for real), tartan tuxedoes and black shirts worn with kipper-width white satin ties count as serious offences against manhood.

However, if you watch the programme for longer than five minutes, you soon discover that, strange as it may seem, the frankly rather disturbing Harry Fenning also has a more endearing, almost childlike side.

It's probably this gauche teenage part of him that reckons all the awful, slightly cartoonish outfits he sports during the series count as the ultimate in gentlemanly 'smartness' and 'sophistication'.  (So quite how Wolfie and co came to mistake him for the MP they wanted to kidnap in that famous episode The Hostage, I couldn't tell you.  And why Fenning didn't start shouting and bawling as soon as they laid hands on him outside the Conservative Club in the first place also remains a mystery.  Might have guessed Harry would be a paid-up grovelarse junkie of Maggie-Maggie-Maggie-OUT-OUT-OUT, though.  Can you IMAGINE what he would have been like during the Eighties????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!) 

When he's not bowling round the local hostelries putting the frighteners on susceptible rival publicans, Harry enjoys nothing better than winding up Wolfie and his mates.  Like Stephen Greif says, this probably counts as a very welcome interval of light amusement in what must usually be a very aggressive, somewhat stressful daily round.

Now as a child, I must confess I never quite understood the Fenning sense of irony.  I probably drove my dad round the bend and up the wall by constantly asking him why Harry kept referring to Wolfie and Ken as 'Trotsky' and 'Gandhi' when those were certainly not their proper names.

I know for a fact that euphemisms like 'legitimate businessman' and 'fell off the back of a lorry' continued to puzzle and disturb me for years.  I also never could work out just why Harry Fenning needed to pursue his so-called ‘respectable’ careers as a publican, businessman and mini-cab company owner when his true love was always crime and violence.  After all, the villains in Batman never wasted any time in putting on a front.

Later as a teenager, I got the impression that Fenning was one of those men who think they are a lot more intelligent than in fact they are.  Watching the series yet again today, I am not so sure.  Yes, he certainly has a childlike side.  I imagine he probably uses this to lull a lot of people into a false sense of security.  But all in all, like Commander Travis, when it comes down to it, Fenning is actually a pretty astute bloke.

Presumably his childlike side is what may account for the fact that he appears to have a reputed mistress with the nickname of 'Cuddles'.

Now, I don’t know about you, but to me 'Cuddles' seems a very old-fashioned nickname for a funky Seventies chick with blowdried hair to have ended up with.  

‘Cuddles’ sounds much more like some sort of plus-sized goddess played by Hattie Jacques in a red and white spotted Fifties bombshell halterneck dress, plus a pair of outrageously vertiginous scarlet peep-toe fug-me winkle-picker shoes and a Kiss Me Quick Squeeze Me Slowly hat that Harry has bought for her on that daytrip they took to Margate.  Underneath it all, she no doubt wears a black lace basque complete with stout stockings and suspenders.

When she is in a good mood, Cuddles laughs her head off at all the rude jokes on the telly (Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams are particular favourites) and thinks nothing of whipping you up a huge tea of shepherd’s pie, carrots and peas with pineapple upside down cake swamped in half a can of evaporated milk for afters (typical menu that Harry gets fed round her place before having certain other bodily comforts seen to.  Hope he doesn’t take his washing down there – but at least Joan is probably British rather than American, so did not receive lectures in ‘Introduction To Marriage’ whilst she was at college.).

Of course, Joan 'Cuddles' Tofkin is just one of the many, many characters referred to in sitcoms who you never ever see.  Therefore, viewers and listeners are at perfect liberty to imagine them however they want.  The above description is just my personal idea of what Joan may be like.  (Certainly my investigations into fan fiction for both the article that I am writing and the panels I took part in at Redemption 2011 have revealed that it is sometimes the characters just like this who capture the imagination of the aspiring writers.  As we saw previously, Vila Restal’s mum is a good example.  So maybe the above is my own personal mini-example of Citizen Smith fanfic?  God only knows what Citizen Smith slash fiction is like, though I can now hazard a reasonably accurate guess ; ) … )   

Remember, her husband Tofkin does appear onscreen (quite prominently in two episodes) – and he certainly doesn’t seem the type to have an especially young or conventionally glamorous wife.  From what I know of John Sullivan’s work as a writer, if Joan was ever meant to be like that, then someone would have said so right away.

So menacing psycho-racketeer extraordinaire Harry Fenning may possibly have a pleasingly plump mistress – and he definitely likes nothing better than being cuddled.  This reveals him as more sympathetic, quite surprisingly and delightfully human.

Good luck to the bugger.  

What bothers me most about Citizen Smith on the current viewing is the sheer bloody blokiness of much of the humour.

Okay, nearly all the main characters in the series are male, so obviously you might expect the masculine point of view to be fairly predominant in the scripts.  However, what I am talking about here is sexism.

By ‘sexism’, I mean the really wearing way in which the men all jockey to constantly score points off each other, thus establishing the Tooting social pecking order from alpha to omega male.  Harry is obviously the alpha male par excellence in their tiny community – and Joan is regarded as one of the prime proofs of his high status.

Brazenly shagging some other bloke’s bird brings Harry extra kudos amongst the habitués of The Vigilante.  Such roguish behavior only makes him even more of a man – hence all the tiresome posturing and over-exaggerated pronunciation of vulgar demeaning expressions like ‘rumpy-PUMPy!’.  Meanwhile, Joan seems to be regarded as basically a bit of a slag.

If you just pause to look at the situation from the female point of view, it starts taking on a radically different complexion.

Poor old Joan Tofkin has a bit of a sad life, so in some ways you can't really blame her for her behaviour.  Her husband is suffering from serious long-term mental health issues, he has had to be put away in the bin, people probably gossip about her in the supermarket and avoid her on the street, and she can't divorce him for fear that it might send him totally over the edge.

Probably her affair with cousin Harry is meant as a bit of company and comfort during a time of trouble and need, rather than an all-in assault against respectable morals.

It would be very interesting indeed to talk to her and the other women characters from Citizen Smith while the men were absent and hear just what they had to say about the situation. 

I know some people criticize John Sullivan for a perceived over-reliance on stupid female characters (Shirley’s mum from Citizen Smith and Marlene from Only Fools And Horses and The Green Green Grass being the two main offenders here), but speaking as a woman, it is entirely possible that some of their silliness could be exaggerated or even feigned.

After all, if you had the choice between Harry Fenning dismissing you as being a few sandwiches short of a picnic or roaring with rage and chasing you down a dark corridor brandishing a broken-off chairleg, which would you pick?  (If you are my mother, Fenning would know immediately that your reference to his ‘foster children’ was meant in deepest irony.  But you would manage to get away with it big time because you combine the face of Elizabeth Taylor with the devastating posh charm of Margot from The Good Life.  Not that you ever see any women like that round The Vigilante of a Saturday evening during the Seventies.)

Mrs Tucker always had me seriously impressed.  I strongly suspect that knitting the set of balaclavas with the smiley faces on may have been her particularly creative way of making a veiled political protest against the so-called ‘revolutionary’ activities engaged in by Wolfie, her husband and their various equally daft mates.

Poor Shirley was so fed up with the lot of them that she became one of those many people who got the hell out of the country shortly before Mrs Thatcher swept to power.  Wonder if she ever came back?  Or was she another who started a completely new life abroad?

While we’re still on the subject of sexism in sitcoms, I need to agree wholeheartedly with Andy Merriman when he states that Hattie Jacques probably would NOT have been a fan of Little Britain.

Yeah, yeah, I know that Matt Lucas and David Walliams would no doubt lose no time in telling me that greed, hypocrisy, fear and loathing are all worthy and venerable targets for humour and satire.

As a larger woman myself (size 20, in case anyone is wondering), it disturbs me that big women characters like Bubbles DeVere and Ting Tong the so-called ‘mail order bride’ are presumed to be physically unattractive to the opposite sex, so therefore reveal themselves as both presumptuous and deluded when they persist in acting as if they are.  If they display any sexual desire for one of the men, then that is considered a monstrously greedy and rapacious lapse in good taste, rather than a simple fact of life.

At the same time, the Rob Brydon character and the mail order groom bloke are both only too obviously up for it with fat slappers – only they are careful to do it well out of the eagle eye of society, so that they do not lose precious points in the pecking order by getting it on with ugly useless women rather than beautiful desirable ones.  This suggests that fat women with sexual feelings and intelligent minds are regarded by these men as a sort of guilty secret indulgence, on a par with a woman pigging out on huge tubs of triple chocolate ice cream when she’s alone at home and pretending to like quinoa and alfalfa salads.

If Ting Tong really is a mail order bride (or feels she has to pretend to be, for whatever reasons), then like many women living in less economically advantageous societies even today, she might well have to employ her femininity and sexuality simply to ensure her survival.  Rather than starve on the streets, she might have to grit her teeth and charm the pants off a pompous, hypocritical, deeply unattractive man in order to lay her hands on his wallet.

Meanwhile, Bubbles DeVere seems to get slapped down because she has the temerity to want too much – food, sex, money, beauty, men who should be off-limits (hang on a second – why’s it apparently just fine for Harry Fenning to knock off his cousin’s estranged wife when Bubbles DeVere is roundly condemned for seducing her newly remarried ex-husband?  And how come Joan and Bubbles end up castigated as greedy sluts whilst Harry and whatisname are lauded to the skies as the toast of the lads?).