Secrets

TX : 14th August 1973
Director : James Cellan Jones
Script : Michael Palin and Terry Jones

Cast : Warren Mitchell (Rose), Julian Holloway (Robinson), David Collings (Atkinson), Clifford Rose (Villon), George Innes (Saville), Hugh Walters (Jackson), Brian Coburn (The Foreman), Brian Wilde (Major Forster), Gretchen Franklin (Mrs Pitt), Hilda Barry (The Despatch Lady), George Tovey (The Lorry Driver), Kenneth Wolstenholme (The Commentator), Godfrey Talbot (The Handsome Man), Sarah Douglas (The Beautiful Girl), Judy Robinson (The Country Girl) and Pamela Coveney (The Housewife).

Publicity : Black Humour: Is It Hard To Swallow? - The first in a new series of questionable comedies stars Warren Mitchell as the owner of a factory that makes the headlines in a way that defies tasteful description. But when Russell Miller met him, he found that far from blenching at the topic, Mitchell was lapping it up and ready for more …: We could actually smell the lobster before it arrived. If you have ever sniffed the muddy banks of the Thames around Wapping at low tide, you will know the aroma: high foreshore, powerful and full-bodied. It wafted gently across the empty tables in the dining room of the hotel at Lytham Saint Annes and hung in the air around the corner table where we were sitting. Warren Mitchell's nose twitched suspiciously and his voice trailed away as the odour became stronger. A waiter approached and with a triumphant flourish set down before us a sad little lobster which had clearly died of old age and malnutrition some time before. Its scent almost rippled the air. Mr Mitchell leaned forward tentatively, sniffed with extreme caution and then reeled back. For a moment it appeared he might fall from his chair, roll over on his back and expire with his legs in the air. But no, he recovered and prepared to speak from a position as far from the offending shellfish as the chair would allow.

I was almost expecting a stream of Alf Garnett-esque invective. What I was not expecting was French. "Mon Dieu," he said. "C'est fort! C'est terrible. Tre's dangereux". The waiter, it transpired, was French. Sticking gallantly to English, he apologised, removed plates and we settled for roast lamb. Mr Mitchell returned his attention to the interview. We had been talking about his role as the owner of a chocolate factory in a play called Secrets. But somehow, with the smell of the lobster lingering on, our discussion of what happens after three maintenance men fall into a vat of liquid chocolate and the flavour catches on, lacked the same enthusiasm … Secrets is the first play in a new series of contemporary farces, Black And Blue, and in it, the comedy is very definitely black. "When I asked my wife to hear my lines," Warren said, "she listened for a little while and then said `Sorry, darling. I can't take any more'. Then she went off to bed". Warren, who is as far from Alf Garnett in outlook as it is possible to be, believes that any area of human existence can be treated as comedy. "Sometimes I think that comedy is the only way to deal with the things people are expected to take most seriously. I mean, Jews have been telling jokes about gas chambers for years. If they did it publicly, there'd be a terrible scream in The Jewish Chronicle, but they have been passing them round privately for years. Look at the murder and mayhem on the roads, the crash of Konkordski, Vietname … we see so much blood and violence today that all these horrors don't make a vast impression on anyone any more. It is just something else you see on the television. Plays don't make trends, they only reflect the trends that are already there. We make a great pretence of caring today - that's the great difference between now and the Middle Ages.

Then there was no pretence: now there are all kinds of charitable organisations helping the poor and the dying. But to actually slaughter five hundred in Vietnam or on the roads doesn't seem to matter all that much, does it? I'll never forget a big lunch I was invited to at Newcastle in New South Wales. I didn't know what it was for until I got there and learned that it was to welcome a children's choir made up of orphans from South Korea. They were orphans partly because of the support that the Australian Government gave to America during the Korean war. So having produced these orphans, they then entertained them royally. Now you have either got to think that situation funny or blow your brains out". Outside, a watery sun struggled to shine on Lytham's West Beach. Along the promenade, a tightly-wedged rank of parked cars block the view to the tar-blotched pebbles of the beach.

"Look out there," Mitchell said, "Hundreds of people are sitting in murderous machines, reading their newspapers with their car windows wound down. They probably won't get out at all and on the way back they may kill somebody or be killed. Really, it's a funny old world". He remembers realising the power of humour when he was five years old and learned his first dirty joke. It was something about a Frenchman and "oui oiu" and the punch line was "not all over my new carpet". That's all he can recall. Since then he has been able to find humour in almost everything - except ice-cream. As an out-of-work actor twenty years ago, he took a job in an ice-cream factory. "The conditions were so disgusting that to this day I still can't stand ice-cream. You'd watch men come on duty with filthy dirty hands and ten minutes later they'd be soft and white from working the fatty ice cream. You were supposed to wear rubber gloves, of course, but if you did you just couldn't get the work done in time". Clearly Mitchell was not cut out for factory work. His previous job had been in a bottle-making factory and he only discovered after he took it that starting work at 6:00am on the Sunday shift meant he had to run all the way from home to get there in time. There was no public transport at that hour. "I'd leave Cockfosters at four-thirty," he recalled without relish, "and arrive at six o'clock in a half fainting condition. Then I'd have to work an eight-hour shift".

Undoubtedly Warren Mitchell owes a great deal of his current success to that loud-mouthed, bigoted hypocrite, Alf Garnett. But the role has also let him in for a lot of criticism from the clean-up television campaigners. Curiously, whenever Alf puts his foot in it, Warren often gets the blame. "Actually I have never found Alf really offensive in television terms. To me, a lot of the so-called family popular entertainment is indecent. But I would not want to ban it because I know a lot of other people want to watch it. I was once criticised by a man who is also on television who runs a show which I consider to be the most indecent thing I have ever seen on television; I feel physical revulsion if I watch it. The trouble is that the people who want to ban everything they don't like are organised into movements with official spokesmen. People who think the way I do have no organisation, no spokesmen, no one to protect us. Secrets, he agreed, is likely to get a reaction of shock or anger from some viewers because it makes fun of a tragedy and attacked very basic human emotions and taboos about death. It suggests in fact that we are capable of enjoying the nauseous. He ran through the gamut of the kind of different reactions that could be expected, adopting the role of different characters - first an irascible, red-nosed colonel, then a feeble old spinster, then an effeminate homosexual …

When he got round, inevitably, to mimicking what Mrs Whitehouse would say, the small group of waiters listening intently but discreetly by the door almost burst into applause. Since the success of Till Death in Australia, Warren has made an annual trip there every year to perform in cabaret. His fund of 'Strine stories is endless and he was well launched into one - about how, as Alf, he was able to make oblique criticisms of the Australian colour bar - when the French waiter, totally unabashed by the lobster, arrived back at our table behind the dessert trolley. "Right mate," said Warren in his perfect 'Strine. "Gimme some of those fresh strawberries in a bowl with some of that crème caramel and some cream on top. When I've had that lot, I'll go upstairs and be sick". (Radio Times, August 9, 1973 - Article by Russell Miller).

Synopsis : Three men fall into a vat in an automated chocolate factory. Can the machinery be stopped?

Notes : This episode was fifty-five minutes in duration and was originally transmitted 10:05pm to 11:00pm on 2.

The Middle-Of-The-Road Roadshow For All The Family

TX : 21st August 1973
Director : Mark Cunningham
Script : Philip Mackie

Cast : Bill Fraser (N J), Adrienne Posta (Jacki Darr), Stephen Moore (Robin Bolt), Anthony Hopkins (Hi), Ray Brooks (Peter Queech), Freddie Earlle (The Waiter), Anthony Haygarth (Sid), Chris Harris (Jacko) and Lynda Cherry (Margaret Nolan).

Synopsis : A Wardour Street film tycoon hires the wrong writer and pays him five-hundred-thousand-pounds…

Notes : This episode was sixty minutes in duration (transmitted 10:00pm to 11:00pm).

High Kampf

TX : 28th August 1973
Director : Michael Apted
Script : Hugh Leonard

Cast : Geoffrey Golden (Hartigan), Maureen Aherne (Alacoque), Philip Stone (Haymes), Brenda Fricker (Ellie), Kevin Flood (Ignatius), Ronnie Masterson (Dympna), Aideen O'Kelly (Malaventura), Donal Neligan (Canavan), Denys Hawthorne (Ulric), Rosaleen Linehan (Alice), Martin Dempsey (The Superior), Elizabeth Begley (The Mother Superior), John Bryans (The German), Kenneth Colley (Schultz), John Rogan (Buonasera), Peter Adair (The Superintendent) and Kenneth Sicklen (The Suspect).

Synopsis : Wealthy Johann Scultz lies close to death in an Irish monastery and the vultures gather - including the four, ill-assorted relatives of his dead wife who are his sole heirs.

Notes : This episode was sixty minutes in duration (transmitted 10:00pm to 11:00pm).

Rust

TX : 4th September 1973
Director : Waris Hussein
Script : Julian Mitchell

Cast : John Le Mesurier (Sir Henry), Elizabeth Spriggs (Eleanor), Allan Cuthbertson (Philip Crane), James Bree (Thomas Richmond), Ken Wynne (Jacko Bates), Rosina Thorndike (Lucy Hawkes), Raymond Platt (Tim Hawkes), John Owens (The Television Director) and David Monico (Mel)..

Synopsis : "Henry! Children!" declares Eleanor. "I have an important announcement. We have all been living a life…". Things look black and the air turns blue - but the facts are not to be sneezed at. A deadly influenza bug threatens to wipe out the world. A British-made drug can cure the influenza, but it leaves the takers impotent…

Notes : This episode was fifty minutes in duration (transmitted 10:00pm to 10:50pm).

Soap Opera In Stockwell

TX : 11th September 1973
Director : Timothy Aspinall
Script : Michael O'Neill and Jeremy Seabrook

Cast : Alfie Bass (Sylv), Michael Robbins (Bert), Cheryl Hall (Carol), George Tovey (May), Donald Gee (Dot), Harry Landis (Joan), Tony Selby (Mavis), Dinah Glaskin (Lois), Taiwo Ajai (Bolaji), Clyde Pollitt (The Policeman), Jack May (The Detective), Sam Kelly (Nancy), Griffith Davies (Cissy), Jumoke Debayo (Iris), Tony Robinson (The Reporter) and Melanie Jane (Jessie).

Synopsis : "Right, girls - the net's closing in". But things aren't what they seem … and how! Carol, Dot, Joan, Mavis and Sylv put the snatch on Bert, "the Stockwell baby-kidnapper". A baby is snatched from outside a Washteria. Will the snatcher come back for her washing bag?

Notes : This episode was sixty minutes in duration (transmitted 10:00pm to 11:00pm).

Glorious Miles

TX : 18th September 1973
Director : Ian MacNaughton
Script : Henry Livings

Cast : Peter Vaughan (Miles Miles), Dinsdale Landen (Lord Grotton), Russell Hunter (Pal), Anthony Sharp (Sir John Roe), Bridget McConnel (Myra) and Penelope Lee (Lady Roe).

Synopsis : A shady property developer takes on a butler to impress his guests. The butler believes he's being paid for an altogether different job…

Notes : This episode was fifty-five minutes in duration (transmitted 10:05pm to 11:00pm).

One of the most undeniably diverting anthology series of the 1970s, Black And Blue was a collection of six sixty-minute comedy drama plays which took as its central theme of "things looking black and the air turning blue".



A nice line in black humour was prevalent throughout the individual productions, which were penned by some of the best names in the business - Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Philip Mackie, Hugh Leonard, Julian Mitchell, Michael O'Neill, Jeremy Seabrook and Henry Livings.

The opening play, Secrets, which premiered in August 1973, concerned an accident involving three men who fell into a vat of chocolate and became inadvertently churned out as a new line of chocolcate gingerbread men. Consumers became addicted to the delicious new flavour of the "Secrets" chocolates, leaving factory manager and owner Rose (Warren Mitchell) with the problem of how to meet consumer demand. He turned his attention to the remainder of his staff, with darkly comic results…

Setting the tone for the episodes which were to follow, Secrets was a potently humourous entry to the series which directed James Cellan Jones masterfully directed. The episode itself could quite easily have been a comic series unto itself, as could the other entries in Black And Blue consisting of an illustrious film tycoon who hires the wrong author - at exorbitant expense, a highly-comic endeavour to precipitate a dying man's last hours in hour to inherit his highly-prized legacy, a lethal bout of influenza which could potentially wipe out the world, baby-snatching in the heart of London, and a dubious property developer and a butler trained under a very different code indeed.

As with a variety of other anthology series which appeared on BBC Television in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black And Blue is often disregarded in chronicles of the best output on British Television during this time.

This is a shame, as the programme was delightfully diverting and virtually one of the first examples of the comedy-drama format in its infancy. And any series which offers an episode title like The Middle-Of-The-Road Roadshow For All The Family deserves higher regard.

The programme was produced by Mark Shivas, with directorial contributions from Mark Cunningham, Michael Apted, Waris Hussein, Timothy Aspinall and Ian MacNaughton. The series was neither exported worldwide or commercially released, though the episode Secrets was released as part of a boxset containing all episodes of Ripping Yarns courtesy of Network Video in 2005.