Television Roger Lewis
In my experience old friends are the very people to shake off, not become reacquainted with. Nevertheless, everyone has been giving Cold Feet a big welcome. I never saw the original transmissions, back in the Nineties, so was unable to give any yelp of recognition when the cast appeared: a man with painted-on music hall eyebrows called James Nesbitt, a depressed Teddy Bear named Pete, a veritable Circe of a woman played by Hermione Norris. The only person known to me – known to me personally it is only fair to say – was Robert Bathurst, who as a comic actor is in the John Le Mesurier and Ian Carmichael class. His character dithered, fumbled, smiled fixedly and tried to make light of everything as he got lost in the maze of fibs and clumsy cover-ups he came out with to explain his silly scrapes, which so far involve tax fiddles, misappropriation of clients’ funds and speeding points.
He might as well be still at school, breaking the rules and confronting the matron – personified here by his battle-axe of a wife, Robyn. For this is the key to Cold Feet. Though middle-aged, everyone is finding that adolescent problems persist – love, sex, break-ups, dreams and disillusion. None of that ebbs, one simply gets out of breath quicker when going for a bike ride dressed in yellow Lycra. Everything in life remains incongruous and unpredictable – though I think I could predict that Hermione Norris would end up in bed with the sleazeball played by Art Malik.
The soapy series could obviously dawdle and totter on forever and a day, but it must resist the theme of creeping melancholy, hopes crushed, guilt accumulating. Because speaking for myself my fifties have been my happiest decade. With the children grown up and gone there is money in the bank. I am famous enough to have been spotted by a fan on one occasion, in 2013, outside Goodge Street Tube station, though alas there were no witnesses. I have published the books I wanted to write and, fingers crossed, there is still a year or two to go before the cancer starts.
I must be glad I was never famous in the Seventies. Everyone from that decade who worked in light entertainment is now either in jail or has been faced with jail. There can’t be a comedian of a certain vintage who has not had to come out of his retirement bungalow with a blanket over his head. Thus, National
Treasure, the engrossing four-part series based on Operation Yewtree.
Now there are two ways of dealing with Operation Yewtree. Personally I’d opt for Ray Cooney farce, with girl guides hidden under the stairs, boy scouts piling out of the loft when the Old Bill comes up the drive, mistresses, drugs, Pringle pullovers. Robbie Coltrane wore a frightening Pringle pullover, but otherwise his character, Paul Finchley, was treated to an Operation Yewtree that resembled Stalin’s Great Terror, which is the other, more obvious, way of treating the matter.
This is what it must be like, though, when one is a venerable show business figure, fêted at awards shows with Life Achievement statuettes, and suddenly girls one absolutely cannot remember come out with their ‘historical’ allegations of rape – allegations that cannot be backed up with factual or forensic evidence, but which nevertheless instantly destroy one’s reputation. ‘They think I’m Jimmy fucking Savile,’ muttered Coltrane. His late-afternoon quiz programme is instantly taken off the air.
He gave a powerful performance, and was haunted from the outset. The director kept Coltrane’s grim slab of a face in brutal over-lit close-up – blotchy, lumpy, weary, and capable of both Oliver Hardy sweet innocence and, when he was in the shower, a silent scream that was reminiscent of a canvas by Francis Bacon. The soundtrack, too, was deliberately uncomfortable, with a
cacophony of bells, sirens, crows cawing, footsteps and doors slamming, interspersed with ominous long silences and occasional muffled sobs from Julie Walters and Andrea Riseborough, as Robbie’s pious wife and mad daughter.
There has been a puritan relish about the Yewtree trials, as if revenge must be taken on the permissiveness and randiness of the Sixties and Seventies, everyone punished who liked looking at dolly birds in the nude. Comedians are at the top of the list because people additionally rather resent anyone who makes them laugh – as if they have been compelled to lose control of themselves. Wasn’t it Cocteau who said that laughter is like the sound of wild beasts?