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.]

The secret life of Her Indoors

‘Her indoors’.

The phrase alone is enough to strike terror into the heart of every loveable scamp and scallywag in sitcoms and popular dramas stretching all the way back to the very dawn of British television.

But who is this elusive figure?  And why is this type of unseen fictional character so popular in drama?

Most people these days know ‘Her Indoors’ as the delightful euphemism employed in Minder  by Arthur Daley to describe his wife.  Like Samuel Pepys, he prefers never to refer to her by her proper name, though like Elizabeth Pepys presumably she must have one.

For some strange reason, many of these women ‘feature’ in comedies.  Although you never actually see or hear them, they still interact with the characters that we do meet.  Sometimes they even manage to influence events in the current storyline.  Apart from Mrs Daley, other classic examples include  Mrs Elizabeth Mainwaring from Dad’s Army, Maris Crane from Frasier and Mrs Doomes-Patterson from The Good Life.

From time to time, Her Indoors is also encountered in popular drama.  It seems to be considered particularly funny if you have one of these characters in a radio programme.  Indeed, The Archers enjoys this type of joke so much that they’ve had several of these silent characters over the years.  (Well, there’s not an awful lot else to do out there in the sticks and the rural sense of humour appears to be a bit on the simple side, to say the least of it … )

Silence is the outstanding characteristic associated with Her Indoors.  She can never ever speak.  The scriptwriters on The Archers used to compete with each other to come up with the most outlandish and unlikely reasons why Pru Forrest never talked.  (Eventually, however, Terry Wogan’s guest appearance on the show in one famous episode aggravated her so much that she erupted into a positive torrent of words.  Game, set and match to whoever thought up that one.)

Mrs Mainwaring, on the other hand, prefers to exert control over her husband through frequent phone calls.  However, you never even hear her voice or side of the conversation, which means you are left to work out her likely words and attitude through her husband’s replies and body language.  This has the effect of making her even more formidable and frightening in the eyes of the viewer.

Probably the unspoken cultural equation says that the public sphere is the space for men and the private sphere the space for women.  A television/radio series/book is seen as a form of public space, while silence counts as the private space.

As well as not speaking, Her Indoors never goes out.  Just one of many examples, Mrs Mainwaring ‘hasn’t left the house since Munich’.

This does tend to make you wonder - WHY THE HELL DO SO MANY OF THESE WOMEN NEVER EVEN LEAVE THE HOUSE?  Are they all suffering from agoraphobia or what? 

If that is the case, then they are surely begging for more sympathy, understanding and support on the part of their husbands. 

If not, then perhaps something more sinister might be going on.  In one episode of Dad’s Army, Mrs Mainwaring has apparently accompanied the platoon on their  manoeuvres and is sleeping in the tent next door.  Despite being a cast-iron bitch on roller-skates, there is no mention of her suffering anything like a panic attack whilst there. 

Meanwhile, in an episode of Minder, Mrs Daley puts her husband in a panic by leaving the house.  Of course she has returned home safe and sound again by the end of the programme.  So maybe she has been making a sneaky and devious protest against social injustice, just like Mrs Tucker from Citizen Smith.  

Naturally the man is the one who enjoys the exciting adventures you see onscreen, while Her Indoors thinks there’s nothing better than being the good little housekeeper for the male characters.

While you watch them getting up to various jolly scrapes and wheezes in the programme, she is sitting at home ironing their paisley print nylon Seventies Y-fronts (this is PRECISELY why I sincerely hope that Harry Fenning doesn’t take his smalls and socks round to Joan Tofkin’s house to be washed instead of learning how to do it himself.  Knowing that Harry possesses something of a penchant for loud, lurid clothes already, it is sadly all too plausible to imagine him prancing about in tight red paisley print Y-fronts with navy contrast piping round the edges to Hot Chocolate albums whilst spraying himself liberally with Hai-Karate before hot-footing it down The Vigilante to threaten Wolfie Smith with extreme GBH for daring to use Blu-Tack to stick posters on the newly papered bog walls.).

(Wonder if Mrs Daley got up to no good visiting a gigolo on her single trip out of the house?   Hee, hee, hee ... ) Mind you, if Groutie the gangster from Porridge can still manage to keep running all his operations when he is banged up inside, there’s no knowing what type of businesses any of these so-called invisible women might be running from home on the quiet with the aid of modern technology …  

When Her Indoors lacks a proper name of her own, it suggests that she is not regarded as an important person by either the male characters or the scriptwriters of the  show.  If she does have a name, it shows the male characters respect and fear her enough to recognise her as an individual in her own right, but they still don’t like her very much.  Elizabeth Mainwaring and Maris Crane are the two perfect examples here.

Usually if she does have a name, you soon find out that the male characters probably fear her because of their own problems, weaknesses and personal deficiencies.  Some male characters find it easier to admit to their fear of Her Indoors than others.

Both Captain Mainwaring and Niles Crane are uneasily aware that the problems they have experienced with their wives are at least partly of their own making.  However, Niles can own up to this fact a bit more readily than Captain Mainwaring – partly because he is American, partly because he is slightly younger, partly because he lives in a more recent historical period in which it is more acceptable for men to admit to difficulties like these, and partly because he and his brother are both shrinks.

The main reason Captain Mainwaring is so keen to devote all his spare time and energy to the cause of the Home Guard is to gain a sense of purpose and comradeship so woefully lacking from his own marriage.  This went right down the tubes just as soon as it got started.  Indeed, Mainwaring learnt how to play the bagpipes on his honeymoon in Scotland ‘because there was nothing else to do’ – instead of wangsting on at great length and considerable wit about the lack of sex and love like Niles Crane would no doubt do.

So why do the male characters fear and dislike these unseen women so much?  Well, apart from being rampantly sexist gits, they seem to blame them for everything that is wrong in their marriages.  Okay, so Elizabeth Mainwaring seems to be pretty domineering, neurotic and withholding of affection, to judge from the way that her husband reacts to her phonecalls.  Yet it can’t be the easiest business in the world being married to Captain Mainwaring, I wouldn’t have thought.

Yes, Maris Crane is rather difficult and neurotic too, we gather.  But her ex-husband Niles can get too bound up in the many failures and shortcomings of their relationship to stop and consider just why he decided to get married to a woman so like himself in so many ways.

It’s usually men that fear these characters.  Women often seem to quite envy figures like Jenny Piccolo from Happy Days.  Margot Ledbetter’s unease with Mrs Doomes-Patterson seems to be an exception to the rule (although there still tend to be far more male than female characters portrayed in modern popular drama.  Perhaps if the gender imbalance was resolved, we would see more female characters who fear, loathe and detest unseen women).