Loud music, flirting, strip poker…previous people properties by no means seemed so enjoyable, CHRISTOPHER STEVENS opinions Play For Today: Never Too Late
Play For Today: Never Too Late (Ch5)
Albert Ladysmith Steptoe didn’t know what he was missing. If the lecherous rag-and-bone man had realised old folks homes were such hotbeds of sex, he’d have been in like a junkyard rat.
Dirty old man!
In one classic episode of Steptoe And Son from 1963, TV’s greatest comedy writers, Alan Simpson and Ray Galton, imagined Albert dumped in a care home, seething at his son Harold: ‘Slimy, that’s what you are. Conniving. Crafty. Just like your mother, God rest her soul.’
One memorable shot had Albert, played by Wilfrid Bramble, standing lonely and bereft at the window, watching his son walk away, before starting to cry. ‘There wouldn’t be too many people on the side of Harold at that moment,’ Ray told me.
Anita Dobson was a teenager when that episode first aired. She and Tracy-Ann Oberman replayed a version of it in Never Too Late, the first in the revived series of Play For Today vignettes.
Single mum Amanda was checking her cantankerous, widowed mother, Cynthia, into Cedar Wood retirement village, where residents paid top whack for a kitchen-diner, a balcony and a 9pm curfew.
The ‘village manager’, Heather (Nina Wadia), showed Cyn to her room, armed with ‘a welcome pack and an approved list of white paint’ for redecorating. After ordering everyone out, Cyn collapsed on the sofa with her face in her hands.
She soon rallied and began plotting her own eviction, breaking every house rule: walking in stilettos across the shag pile, playing strip poker instead of bridge, and infusing the fairy cakes with homegrown weed.
Nigel Havers played Frank Fury, an old rock ‘n’ roller who once had a fling with Cynthia played by Anita Dobson who is plotting her eviction out of Cedar Wood retirement village
Cynthia breaks every house rule: walking in stilettos across the shag pile, playing strip poker instead of bridge, and infusing the fairy cakes with homegrown weed
This was hardly a glum drama in the tradition of Play For Today — more of a Comedy Playhouse, the series of sitcom pilots pioneered by Galton & Simpson.
And though nobody was murdered, it owed a debt to the Richard Osman reinvention of retirement homes . . . all loud music and flirtations, a sort of halls of residence for the University of the Third Age.
Nigel Havers played Frank Fury, an old rock ‘n’ roller who once had a fling with Cyn.
Learning he had the room next to hers, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to run a mile or throw herself back into his arms.
The original Play For Today ran on BBC1 for 14 years from 1970 and included such classics as Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills and Alan Bleasdale’s The Black Stuff. Patricia Hayes won a Bafta in 1971 for Edna, The Inebriate Woman.
Channel 5’s revival isn’t trying to win any such awards. But the script by Simon Warne and Lydia Marchant was studded with great quips. When Amanda pleaded to her mother that Cedar Wood ‘had great reviews,’ Cyn snapped back, ‘Yeah, on Last Trip Advisor!’
And it’s fun to see the ageless Havers, still playing smoothies. ‘I’m not that guy any more,’ he insisted. He’s not a dirty old man, just a wicked reprobate.
