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.]
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