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The groundbreaking political sitcom ‘Citizen Smith’ is as relevant today as it was in the 1970s
A critic argues that it’s high time for Britain’s favourite revolutionary, Wolfie Smith, to make a return.
Ayoung man steps out of Tooting Broadway tube station in London. He has long hair and a beret, a guitar slung over his shoulder. Someone, somewhere, is whistling the socialist anthem The Red Flag. He liberates a bottle of pale ale from a dray truck and as the music swells to a crescendo he stops, breathes deeply, and issues a mighty cry. “Power to the people!” An old lady stops and stares at him.
It could, conceivably, be a scene from modern London, a bright, young Corbynista on his way to a Momentum meeting, his thoughts on how the New Left can topple the dominant elite that holds the wealth and power in a mid-Brexit kingdom rapidly heading towards being disunited.
But of course it isn’t. It’s a scene from British television just about 40 years ago, when BBC1 aired the pilot episode of a brand new sitcom, Citizen Smith.
TV hadn’t seen the like of Citizen Smith
before, and nothing’s touched it since — that’s evident from the number of people who remember it so fondly. It was a curious beast that walked a tightrope of comedy and politics thanks to the deft touch of screenwriter John Sullivan, who quite frankly pulled off something of a coup with the presentation of his subject matter.
The politics was the whole point, but Wolfie Smith’s pantomime Che Guevara turn was, on the one hand, to be laughed at rather than fully sympathised with. On the other, he was surrounded by reactionary, entrenched bigots, and this was Sullivan’s masterstroke, to appeal to both demographics in the same show. You could sit in front of the TV and cheer on Wolfie against the mainstream of then older generation, while your parents on the sofa beside you would shake their heads at his anti-social revolutionary tactics.
Wolfie, or Walter Henry Smith (that’s right, WH Smith) was played to a tee by Robert Lindsay, who had already made his name in a clutch of British films and in the RAF National Service sitcom Get Some In! He is idealistic to the point of delusion, the nominal leader of the Tooting Popular Front, a small group of misfits mainly comprising Wolfie’s long-suffering pals Ken (Mike Grady) and Tucker (Tony Millan). Wolfie’s girlfriend Shirley refuses to be politicised and just wants to settle down, spurred on by her down-theline parents, portrayed wonderfully by Peter Vaughan, who died last year, as Cheryl’s constantly angry father, and Hilda Braid as her mother, who always refers to Wolfie as “Foxy”.
Citizen Smith was Sullivan’s big break in TV. He would later go on to achieve lasting fame as the creator of Only Fools and Horses and Just Good Friends. But in the early 1970s he was working at the BBC’s props department, where he finally got to push his script for Citizen Smith into the hands of a decision maker, and on April 12, 1977, the pilot was screened as a one-off Comedy Special on BBC1. The first series began proper in November and it ran for four years.
“Sullivan was from a working-class background and although he never professed to be a Marxist, to even pitch a sitcom based on a revolutionary Trotskyist suggested some affinity with revolution, or kicking against the system,” says TV scriptwriter, critic and broadcaster Andrew Collins. “Neither antagonist was let off the hook — Dad’s reactionary kitchen-table conservatism made him look foolish, especially when undercut by his politically neutral wife, and Wolfie’s idealism was also depicted as foolish. In the same way that Esmonde and Larbey treated the woolly ecowarriors and the middle-class snobs with affection in The Good Life, I think Sullivan found something to like in both extremes: Dad’s decency and Wolfie’s passion.”
Citizen Smith was really of its time in the way it distilled wider politics and events through the comedic interaction of the characters.
That was the genius of Sullivan. He wrapped up his extremely shrewd observations in jokes about mothers-in-law and being too skint to take your girlfriend out for a meal. He was also extremely prescient. Take Wolfie’s monologue from the first scene of the pilot episode: “One day, citizen, there’s going to be a revolution in this country. And they will recall that it was I, Wolfie Smith, who led the people on that glorious day. Can you imagine, Ken, all the oppressed masses taking to the streets in one festival of the people? Snottynosed kids dancing a ragamuffin dance of freedom. Plumbers with machine guns. Black blokes with hand grenades. Rabbis with flak jackets. And afterwards, everyone will be left in peace.”
So why do we still love Wolfie? Because revolution is timeless? Because even the most politicised of us needs to sometimes take a step back and look in the mirror? Journalist Grace Dent says, “I think that it shows the quality of the writing that Citizen Smith is still a jokey, friendly insult I hurl about today. Citizen Smith nails the painfully, unintentionally hilarious way our friends behave whenever they become fully politicised. Especially on the left.”
She cites her fellow Independent writer and comedian Mark Steel on the subject and adds: “The more left you become, the more you loathe other lefties for not being quite left enough. Until you literally are the Tooting Popular Front.”
Sullivan tapped into that and it’s just as relevant today. “Lindsay nails that idea of sexy, youthful, laughable idealism,” says Dent. “I think the observation is probably as strong as Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. I had to reread this recently and was gobsmacked at how little things have changed regarding the middle classes and the working classes adopting Corbyn’s views.”
Ah, yes, Jeremy Corbyn. It’s almost impossible to see the Labour leader ducking under the foliage in his front garden and trotting down Islington’s streets in his little cap and not think of Wolfie. In 1977 Corbyn was a councillor in Haringey, at the age of 27. Surely he must have watched Citizen Smith?
Like in 1977, the Labour Party is somewhat in disarray, though for very different reasons. Is it time for another show like Citizen Smith? Indeed, what’s Wolfie doing now? In this very newspaper in 2015 Robert Lindsay said: “I’ve been chased by a production company which is very much trying to get Wolfie to run for the Labour Party and bring him back into power. I think that’s a fantastic idea.”
Despite John Sullivan dying in 2011, Lindsay hinted: “There are moves afoot in the industry to bring Citizen Smith back with some respected figures that I very much admire.”
However, it was not to be. Sullivan’s son Jim told the BBC a couple of days later it was “not something we would want to do”. He said: “Every episode of Citizen Smith was written by my Dad. The show only ever had one writer and it is going to stay that way.”
Which, perhaps, is a good thing, says Collins. “The trouble with today’s domestic politics is that the right and the left are no longer polar opposites — Blair and Cameron saw to that. When Corbyn is running a three-line whip, without a trace of irony, to get his MPs to vote with the Conservative government on Article 50, what’s the point of writing a sitcom about the left?”