Bingewatch: I Didn’t Know You Cared – series 4

Dierdre Costello

It’s taken me some time to find the time to watch the fourth and final series of Peter Tinniswood’s Brandon family onscreen, and it’s taken an even longer time for the catchphrase I most associate with I Didn’t Know You Cared to make its appearance. And even then, Mrs Brandon experiments with “It’s not conducive, our Mort, it’s not apropos,” before, halfway through episode 5, we finally get the words I remember so well, the full deal: “It’s not conducive, our Mort, it’s not concomitant.” Gloriously, ridiculously meaningless, except in my memory.

The last series of I Didn’t Know You Cared also carries a copyright date of 1978, and despite the drastic change in Keith Drinkel’s haircut (considerably more Young Executive), the series carries almost directly on from its predecessor. Mr Brandon and Carter are still both unemployed, and Pat is still pregnant: “three months and still as slim as a virgin.”

And still obsessed with turning her life into that of the wife of a Young Executive. Indeed, roughly 50% of her lines this series involve those two words appearing, but then Tinniswood is actually relying heavily on repetition for his comedy. To be honest, he’s over-reliant on that, and one other gag, which crops up at least three times an episode. After the general brilliance of series 3, taking the novel of the same name as its framing story, series 4 is a flat finale, drab in its first half and then redeemed by some late flowering surreality in its last three episodes.

The underlying story is original, though Tinniswood borrows slightly from the most recent Brandon novel, Except You’re a Bird, firstly in Pat having dreams where Nigel (Carter: “Who’s Nigel?!”, Pat: “Our unborn baby”) has Young Executive parties in her womb, and, rather more seriously, in having Pat rushed to hospital after a car accident, though the genuinely life-threatening experience of the book is here bathetically reduced to a badly-sprained thumb.

But the story is weak. Uncle Mort has fallen in love, and is proclaiming it to all and sundry. The problem – and the running gag – is that he can never remember the woman’s name, which is Olive Scrimshaw, and has to be reminded of it by everyone, though by the back half of the series it’s exclusively Carter, responding with Pavlovian regularity to a snap of the fingers.

If it seems unusual for ol’ miseryguts Mort to fall in love, then the reasons for this delirium are all too familiar to the series’ concentration on misery, drudgery, boredom and squalor as the ideal way of life. Olive is ugly, loud, rude, aggressive, and the licensee of a pub that is dirty, squalid, uncomfortable, dingy, and never open. Oh, and she throws customers out for such sins as smiling, talking, being women and wanting drinks during licensing hours.

Of course Uncle Mort is in love. Mr Brandon and Carter worship the ground on which this pub squats.

This is of a keeping with the deliberately downbeat Northern world of Tinniswood’s dense and imaginative ear;y novels, but as I’ve said before, once this attitude is concretised into the appearance of actors relishing a life we really wouldn’t want to live, the exaggeration becomes less effective, and Tinniswood is merely turning up the exaggeration at a time when it’s no longer sustaining itself.

Of course, there’s always Linda Preston, whose doo-dahs continually threaten to escape their minimal confinement. Deirdre Costello is once again wonderfully self-aware in a role that could too easily have degenerated into mere blonde-bimbo, and she adds life to the screen every time she sashays across it, rolling her hips and doubling her entendres.

But with the series coming to an end, poor Linda is doomed to frustration. Carter’s all set to run away with the common-as-muck sexpot, who does genuinely care about him, until Pat’s crash reminds him that beneath it all, behind all the irritation she causes him, he does love her, and his rejection of Linda is eventually a positive decision, and not a sliding into the inertia that is his natural state.

Then comes that final trio of episodes, when suddenly the story takes on a bizarre turn. Olive Scrimshaw has decided to marry Mort so Mrs Brandon decides that, six decades after he served “all thru’ t’Furst World War”, her brother is going to be christened. So is her husband (his family was almost more concerned with the dogs than that sort of thing), and even Carter. And you should see the array of suits Olive comes up with for the men! Mr Brandon in a powder-blue teddy boy suit with bootlace tie, Uncle Staveley as a page boy…

And that spirit spills over into the final episode, with the marriage taking place on a clapped-out old canal barge. The trouble is that Staveley’s got confused and, instead of finding the lucky horseshoe with which to present the bridge and groom, he is carrying the lucky bung from the bottom of the canal boat. And the determined Olive, deeply unpleasant to the end, and dressed in jockey colours of purple and yellow bands, goes down with her barge.

There are some good lines in those last three episodes, when the inherent absurdity of the Brandon world finally breaks through normality and establishes its  own suspension of disbelief, and there is one line that had me rolling on the floor laughing. But generally, series 4 is the weakest of the series and it were better it ended then.

Liz Fielding never really gets the chance to impose herself as Pat in the way Anita Carey did, whilst Keith Drinkel is much less forceful this time round, having weaker and more passive material to work with. There’s a final cast change: Bert Palmer was no longer able to play Uncle Staveley and the role was taken over by former Music Hall star Leslie Sarony, who was smaller and more rubicund and who looked too comic for the role.

It’s a long time since I watched these series, and I don’t expect I’ll drag them out again soon. Overall, the Brandons were better in their books, where things could happen that could never have been put into a BBC sitcom of the Seventies. On TV, I Didn’t Know You Cared could only encroach on territory already colonised by Last of the Summer Wine, except that it was too niche an idea to compete with what would become the world’s longest running sitcom. Its audience consisted of the faithful, and there were never enough of us.

But for four series, and twenty-seven episodes, we did indeed care.

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Bingewatch – I Didn’t Know You Cared – Series 3

I’ve been looking forward to the third series of Peter Tinniswood’s situation comedy version of the Brandon family, because I remember it being based firmly on the novel from which the sitcom’s title is taken. Uncle Mort being told he’s got a fatal disease and being considerably cheered by it, Carter and Mr Brandon being unemployed and the latter turning into a full-blown housewife and Pat getting a job and falling under the spell of Mr Leatherbarrow, Young Executive (Not Macclesfield, as in the novel: that name had already been spoken for in series 2).

And I was right: this was the best of the four series, even if it couldn’t quite sustain seven episodes, with the final one being more sentimental for (northern) times past than as outright funny as most of the episodes until then.

One thing that was immediately notable was how much more the series used location filming and, in those sequences especially, how much more visual the humour became. Robin Bailey in particular had a glorious time hamming up Uncle Mort’s expressions and movements, and there were several  examples of outdoor scenes that served no more purpose than to let the male side of the cast horse it up in a gentle manner that hazed the humour over into a teasing surreality.

Perhaps the perfect example of how this new approach was handled came at the start of episode 2, which began with Carter Brandon walking down the back lane that lead to Uncle Mort’s allotments: at first, he’s slouching along on his own but then he stops, checks carefully that he is unobserved and then, with a silly grin and a word almost of self-apology, dances down the lane like Morecambe & Wise saying goodnight over the final credits.

But there were location scenes in profusion, almost to the point where more screen-time took place on the allotments, or outside the boozer, or in the street. It wasn’t always silent: Linda Preston (Dierdre Costello having the time of her short-skirted, cleavaged life) is now a cheerfully-unwed mother, moving in next door to the Brandons, which led to an hilarious scene in which everyone examines her baby, and pronounce it the ugliest baby ever!

The majority of the series took its cue from the book, Uncle Mort’s disease (which is no disease after all but pollution from his ‘spring’ on his allotment) and the range of bizarre responses from everybody around. The sitcom can’t encompass the whole of the novel, and especially not the darker aspects, but Tinniswood crams in jokes and lines that I greeted with roaring recognition (though I regret he didn’t see fit to include the wasting disease gag, even whilst he mentioned Uncle Gladwin).

The Peewit Patrol did sneak in in greatly revised form, converted to the 5th International Sea Scouts, Inland Waterways, which in practice turned out to be Sid Skelhorn (Ray Dunbobbin replaced by Bobby Pattinson) and Louis St John in long shorts. Once again, several of the jokes around Louis would not be written in the modern era, but Paul Barber again played the character very broadly, switching from cod-‘massa’ to gentle Barnsley with an easy fluency that took the sting out of the thoughtlessness.

A lot of the humour did rely on stereotyping male and female roles, which were inverted to very funny effect. Mr Brandon’s unemployed and has taken over the household, whilst Mrs Brandon goes out to work and does nothing around the house unless nagged into it. John Comer throws himself into this with gusto and makes the most out of what might, in a lesser player’s hands, be a bit thin.

But then everyone’s performing on all cylinders here, thoroughly cognisant as to just what extent their characters are broadened stereotypes, pushed just over the border into caricature, and playing up to it with just the right amount of knowingness. Bert Palmer, as Stavely, has much more to do, though practically every line is either  ‘I heard that! Pardon?’ or some variation of it, and the range and variety he brings to his dialogue is wonderful to observe.

Nevertheless, I can sense you waiting for my comments on the great cast change, with new actors playing Carter and Pat Brandon after Stephen Rea and Anita Carey left, for reasons of which I know not.

Last time out, I said that their replacements, Keith Drinkel and Liz Goulding, were not their equals as actors, but that they better fit the roles of Carter and Pat as I imagined them from the book. I’m still of that opinion in respect of Drinkel. Rea, to me, was just too laid-back in his performance, and his accent had a little too much of the Liverpudlian to sit quite right. Nor did his curly hair fit my vision of Carter.

Drinkel, with a squarer face, straight, short black hair, and a more solidly northern accent in keeping with the rest of his family, still comes over as more what I ‘see’ when I read. He plays Carter with a little more forcefulness, a little more demonstrativeness. His range may be narrower, but so too is Carter, and his solidity fits in well with the others.

Liz Goulding is hampered by having a less emotionally-stretched part in this series. She’s still the outsider among the Brandons in her determination to better Carter whether he likes it or not, but despite his not demonstrating his passion for her like he used to because she’s working and he’s not, she isn’t given any insecurity to work with. Pat’s on course, and she’s loving it, and she’s sailing along undisturbed. Goulding is given a much more superficial part in this series and it’s unfair to compare her to Carey on this evidence.

She chooses to pick up a lot of how Anita Carey played Pat, especially vocally, and Goulding’s voice is how I hear Pat, no question.

Pat’s actually at the centre of the series’ one big inconsistency, which is that, initially, Carter and Pat aren’t having sex, as in the novel. But this is never gone into beyond the first episode, and midway through the series, there’s a dramatic change of tack as Tinniswood steals a story from Except You’re a Bird, and has Pat announce she’s pregnant.

Sadly, as I said, the series did rather tail off in its final episode. Mort’s curability comes out in episode 6, but no-one has the heart to spoil his pleasure and tell him, and in the end the issue of Pat’s pregnancy, and her wholly imaginative response to it, drifts into the background and everything winds up with Uncle Mort feeling well enough to join the others on his post-funeral treat for them, at a Tram museum. The comedy gets overwhelmed by some very Tinniswodian nostalgia for old working class days, until Mort’s finally told he’s going to live, and gets turned down for the Last Tram because it’s full.

He’s promptly run over by the next after the Last Tram, but survives that intact,  allowing him to use the novel’s brilliant last line, albeit in a completely different context.

Despite the weak ending, series 3 was very funny, and the best representation of the Brandon’s world outside the novels. It was filmed and broadcast in 1978, and I watched it miles away from home, from the north I counted myself of, the north of the series that I persisted in forcing into a Manchester setting, in the BBC lounge of the place I lived in Nottingham, among people who, for the most part, didn’t get it at all.

The same would go for the fourth and final series.

Bingewatch – I Didn’t Know You Cared, series 2

Clearly, I Didn’t Know You Cared made enough of an impact for the BBC to re-commission it for a second series in 1976, though there were only six episodes this time, and it was moved from Tuesday night. It had to have been: Tuesday Night Football would continue until 1977 but I did get to see the series this time.

There were a number of changes made to the supporting cast. Auntie Lil had disappeared without explanation and Bert Palmer as Uncle Staveley was now a member of the Brandon household. Two of Carter Brandon’s workmates from the books, Louis St John, the West Indian fitter, and Rudyard Kettle, who never went anywhere without his gauntlets, appeared in a couple of episodes. When it came to Louis, the contemporary racist epithets he attracted in the books were out of the question for a sitcom, but the vigour with which he was played by Paul Barber, many years before his role in Only Fools and Horses, was a small delight.

Unlike the first series, there was no underlying story as such, nor, despite the presence of a considerable number of lines and exchanges from the novels, did what story there was utilise any of the books. It began with Carter and Pat’s return from honeymoon in London, and dealt with their adjustment to married life, firstly under the Brandon roof, then in pursuit of the perfect new home for young executives, and lastly under the threat of moving in next door to Pat’s mother.

This gave Stephen Rea and Anita Carey much more exposure than in the first series, especially so in the second episode where, having retired to bed at 7.30pm but not for sleep, they are disturbed by a succession of visitors completely oblivious to the fact that Pat wants more than a bit of passion. And Carter’s coming round to the idea as well, if only everybody would stop telling him to put his pyjama jacket back on.

Though Carter gets away a lot to sit and moan with his Dad and two Uncles, the extra attention being paid to him and Pat as a couple has the unfortunate side effect of throwing Uncle Mort and Mr Brandon into greater relief with their unrelieved misogyny. With almost no countervailing tendencies, it tends to get a bit monotonous, and coming from the mouths of real people rather than the charged atmosphere of the book, the misogyny is far too prominent and too solid. It doesn’t work at all well.

Nor does it help that, as Mrs Brandon, Liz Smith gets correspondingly less time onscreen, and when she does she’s too often reduced to silence by Vanda Godsell as Mrs Partington, Pat’s Mum, who’s a dedicated and forceful talker.

I’ve mentioned Uncle Staveley, and can I say how brilliant Bert Palmer was in a very limited role, as a deaf and wandering old codger who’s mainly the butt of slapstick humour. Practically his first words in the series are his catch-phrase, “I ‘eard that. Pardon?”, which arrives with regularity. And Deirdre Costello gets a bit more room as Linda Preston, still gleefully overplaying her part, but allowed a little more emotional depth as she slips out of her brassy, sassy character to demonstrate a genuine feeling about Carter.

Overall, the second series wasn’t as good as the first, but it redeemed itself in a brilliant final episode, filmed mostly out of doors. In order to rescue Carter from living next door to his mother-in-law, Uncle Mort plans to persuade the widow Mrs Macclesfield (whose name no-one can remember and who gets addressed by half the towns in Cheshire at one point or another, including Droylsden) to re-marry and stick where she is. He’s planning on foisting the petrified Staveley off on her but finds himself accepted instead, without even knowing his bride-to-be’s Christian name (it’s Persephone!).

But on the day of the intended nuptials, along comes the happily litigious gas-meter reader, Mr Fallowfield, a former admirer and would-have-been husband of the fair Persephone, if only her third husband hadn’t gone and recovered. Mrs Macclesfield is torn between suitors who, like gentlemen, decided to duel for her hand by playing a game of Crown Green bowls for her.

And if you have difficulty imagining that a game of bowls can be in the least bit funny, let alone hysterical, just watch the final episode of series 2.

It made for a fine ending, but to my surprise, my favourite part of series 2 was Anita Carey’s performance as Pat. Though she’s part of the Brandon family now, she’s the outsider in every possible sense, devoted to Carter and devoted to her vision of a modern life of lounge/diners and fitted Venetian blinds, young executives sipping sweet sherry, and going up in the world. Pat’s out of place, but prepared to fight for her place. She’s not afraid to fight Linda Preston over her Carter, even though she hasn’t a tenth of the ammunition. And though Linda’s the obvious blonde with big knockers and the willingness to flaunt them, and Pat/Anita’s a sweet-faced but unspectacular girl with nothing like the cleavage, I found myself on her side throughout. Pat’s life is never going to go the way of her impossible and horizonless dreams, but she’s a nice lass underneath, and doesn’t deserve what Carter Brandon’s going to become. My eyes were on her every time she was onscreen, and her wardrobe was superbly chosen.

Unfortunately, this was her last appearance, When series 3 appeared, both she and Stephen Rea had left the series, and Carter and Pat’s roles had gone to other actors, players who were not as accomplished actors but who I always felt fitted my conception of the parts more closely. I wonder if I’m going to think the same about Anita Carey’s successor after these bingewatches?

 

Bingewatch: I Didn’t Know You Cared, series 1

This is long overdue, given when I completed my Peter Tinniswood readthrough, and it’s a shame that it was not until the death of Liz Smith last week that I finally spurred myself into action, but I have set aside this final afternoon before the great post-New Year return to work, to bingewatch the first series of I Didn’t Know You Cared, the Seventies BBC sitcom that Tinniswood made of his own Brandon family novels.

The first series was broadcast in 1975, on Tuesday nights, which meant that I never saw it until obtaining the video, a decade ago (the day meant Tuesday Night Football with the lads, and these were days when the video recorder was still just an electronic glint in an R&D Lab). It ran to seven episodes, with an underlying story thread, two, in fact, like the books, which was still very rare in 1975, despite the way having been paved by Clement and La Fresnais’s classic Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? three years earlier.

I was already a devotee of Tinniswood, and the books, and horribly disappointed to miss seeing their translation to TV, but that was the way of things back then. Television came and went. It was of the moment and for the moment, and fewer things got repeated than people seemed to think, and then only the ones that had pulled in big audiences first time round. I had to wait for series 2 to see the programme for myself.

It had a strong set-up. It had Tinniswood himself adapting, and it had a cast of tremendous strength, though few of the central cast were well known on TV. John Comer (Mr Brandon) was a veteran face in film and television for supporting roles, most notably that of Sid, of the cafe, in the then still-fledgling Last of the Summer Wine, whilst Liz Smith (Mrs Brandon) had only a prior credit in a Mike Leigh production.  Robin Bailey (Uncle Mort) had appeared in the popular ITV multi-series Sixties drama The Power Game but was only beginning his period of TV recognition.

So the older generation were strongly cast, but the two youngsters, both in their late twenties, were equally good. Stephen Rea (Carter Brandon) and Anita Carey (Pat) had to wait for the series to develop before getting room to demonstrate their abilities, but these were five fine actors and actresses.

As for the first series, though the show took its name from the second Brandon Family novel (presumably because of its sitcom-friendly title), the story was an odd conflation of elements from the first and third novels, with nothing from I Didn’t Know You Cared itself.

So, we begin with Auntie Edna’s death by falling off a trolley bus, Uncle Mort’s anticipated freedom to do what he wants and the decision, taken by the Gorgonic maiden aunts from Glossop, that he should move in with Mr and Mrs Brandon. Then we stir in the fact of it being the senior Brandon’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary this year, and Mrs Brandon’s determination to have a Ceremony of Re-Dedication and a Second Honeymoon. Meanwhile, Pat is disappointed at the sheer number of times this week Carter Brandon has failed to propose to her, despite the opportunities she’s created. Between these two set-ups, the series takes as much as it can from the books, including large chunks of dialogue, and rumbles along.

Does it work? Watching it again, I find my answer is a lot more equivocal than it would have been if I’d just relied upon memory. It’s not as good as the books, and it was never possible that it could be. The books are dense and the humour is black, they are surreal and dark in a way that no sitcom airing at 8.30pm on a Tuesday night in the BBC summer of 1975 – a summer that was a forerunner of the Great Drought Summer of the following year – could ever have been. There was no Daniel, no Bentley, no Corporal Parkinson (apart from his ashes, that is).

The story is thus shorn of everything tending to the fantastic, and has to make its way in a reality that is only slightly bent towards eccentricity. In the books, the overwhelming relish the (male) characters had for drudgery, misery, despair and apathy can be ladled on so thick that it creates a distorted worldview that takes the reader with it. Out of the mouths of actors, it doesn’t work so complete a trick. Comer is superbly grounded as Mr Brandon, whereas Bailey is more of a caricature, and Smith is wonderfully eccentric as Mrs Brandon, but she is speaking from the wrong side of the divide.

The male-female divide is far more obvious and male-centric onscreen, and in places, because the worlds of 1975 and 2017 are vastly different in their attitudes to women generally, the misogynistic element of the former, whilst not outstanding at the time, cannot wholly be contained. Where in the books, the relish with which it is treated takes it sufficiently far over the top as to become parodistic in its overstatement, the groundedness of real voices speaking real words keep the words too much in a real word.

And it’s clear from early on that this is a sitcom in which the humour is almost entirely verbal. That’s so for the books, but in the books, when one character is speaking, you don’t have to look at the other four cast members standing and sitting around with nowt to do but react, sometimes clownishly. The words are funny, and like the books, the laughs can come along thick and fast, line after line, but the studio audience’s response are subdued, chuckles rather than guffaws.

But then comes the elopement scene in episode 6 (and it’s not who you think it is), which is performed without a word, and with a surrealisticly improbable sense of solemnity, in broad daylight, that had me rolling about.

Though the older generation get the best of it in the first half of the series, the longer the run goes on, the more time is given to Rea and Carey. Rea is clearly a superb actor, but he was never quite right in the part to me. Nevertheless, he has a central role, and Pat a dependant one, clinging to him. Their engagement is on, off and on again throughout the story, to Carter’s unwilling bemusement.

Anita Carey plays Pat a little more brittle and artificial than she is in the books, where her heart (and her ignorance) are far more firmly on her sleeve, but the longer she is given, the more Carey underlines her performance with the sweetness that Pat really does love Carter, and seriously. At the beginning, there are large chunks of Paula Wilcox as Beryl in The Lovers permeating her performance, and its testament to Carey’s abilities that these disappear so thoroughly. Carter’s not even going to get to look down the front of her blouse until their wedding night on Majorca, a wedding night she has planned in complete detail (except for what it’s going to be like to have sex), but she’s going to throw herself into that in a way Beryl will always find disgusting.

Three supporting roles should be mentioned here. Veteran Bert Palmer, who would have a greater role in later series, cameos in episode1 as Uncle Staveley, but I’d forgotten that Gretchen Franklin has a big role as Auntie Lil. I hadn’t forgotten the cheerfully vulgar performance by the buxom blonde Deirdre Costello, as the cheerfully vulgar Linda Preston: only two episodes, but memorable throughout. Yes, she’s basically playing a scrubber, and she’s pretty much a stereotype that no longer exists outside such times, but there’s a brio to her performance, a self-awareness in both actress and character that makes her delightful.

No, there are many ways in which the sitcom doesn’t work anything like as well as the books, and many ways in which it couldn’t possibly compete, and if you’re thinking of digging this out to watch, read the books first, for your own sake. But watching it this afternoon, as the equivalent of a three and a half hour movie, I laughed more frequently, at lines I could have read with as much facility as Bailey, Comer, Smith et al did, than I expected.

So I think it gets a pass from me, on balance, a qualified thumb’s up and let’s have series 2 sooner rather than later. I hope you won’t think me self-indulgent if I review these as well.

Neither conducive nor concomitant: RIP Liz Smith

I Didn’t Know You Cared

Most of you will remember her for playing the Granny in The Royle Family, but I remember Liz Smith, who is the latest to leave us in 2016’s great toll, for another role entirely, almost at the beginning of her career on television.

Liz Smith played – was – Mrs Brandon on all four series’ of Peter Tinniswood’s sitcom I didn’t know you cared, its title, and the underlying plot of its second series, taken from his second novel about the Brandon family. Robin Bailey as Uncle Mort, John Comer as Mr Brandon and Liz Smith as Mrs Brandon, Jesus!, was that series blessed with a heavyweight cast.

Of the three, Liz Smith was probably the least experienced, but did that show? No, it didn’t. She was immaculate, brilliant, crushingly funny. And she went on to be as willfully, and unashamedly, oddball in everything I saw her do. This bastard year cannot be over fast enough.

This blogpost’s title? Tinniswood already had one catchphrase lined up, Carter Brandon’s mumbling, “Aye. Well. Mm.” and he gave Robin Bailey the angry, “I served all through t’First World War!” Liz Smith got the spectacularly meaningless, “It’s not conducive, our Mort, it’s not concomitant,” with which she would weekly berate her brother.

It never caught on, except with me. I remember it fondly, I remember Liz Smith spendidly, and I mark her passing, however grand the age, with regret, yet again.

Travelling with Tinniswood: I Didn’t Know You Cared

“What have you got then, if it isn’t a personal question?” said Mr Brandon from behind his evening paper.
“A wasting disease,” said Uncle Mort.
“I’m not surprised neither, considering all the time you’ve wasted in pubs and betting shops,” said Mrs Brandon.
“Steady on, Annie. Steady on, lass,” said Mr Brandon, rustling his paper.
“Well, it makes me livid,” said Mrs Brandon. “There’s our Mort spent all his life supping and smoking, and there’s me Uncle Gladwyn never touched a cigarette nor a drop of hard liquor in his life and dead at the age of fifty-one.”
“I know, but he fell down a bloody lift shaft,” said Uncle Mort.
For his third novel, Peter Tinniswood went back to the Brandon family. I Didn’t Know You Cared appeared in 1973, and would provide the title to the BBC sitcom loosely adapted from some aspects of the novels, beginning in 1975. It was my introduction to Tinniswood, another of those discoveries (like Donald Westlake) that came from scouring the extensive shelves of Didsbury Library.
I don’t know what it was that caught my eye and lead to my borrowing the book, but I loved it, and it’s still my favourite of all of Tinniswood’s books, for its gusto, its beautifully sustained balance between Tinniswood’s short, declarative sentences, its romantic innocence and its wonderfully inventive morbidity.
The book is driven by two stories, nominally independent but linked in the Brandon family. On the one side, Uncle Mort has just been told that he’s suffering from a fatal disease (cancer, in fact,the very thing that had taken my father three years earlier) and is determined to go about his last six months his way. On the other, Carter Brandon has been out of work for two months and is being a very efficient househusband whilst Pat is the family breadwinner who has just earned a promotion to personal secretary to that rising young executive, Mr Macclesfield.
It’s two years since the end of A Touch of Daniel, when Carter defied the strike and lost his Union card, and it’s 1961. He and Pat live on their newly-built estate, in a house so badly made that everything is damp, swollen and doesn’t fit. Pat’s in her empty-headed element, worshiping the ground Mr Macclesfield walks (presumably) upon and repeating his every word of advice to Carter in the hope that she can transform him into a young executive as well.
The only drawback for her is that Carter hasn’t had a hard-on for six weeks.
Meanwhile, Mrs Brandon has taken her brother’s impending death as a personal affront, refusing to believe he’s got it right at first, fulminating that after paying National Health Stamps for so long, they can just turn round and tell you you’re incurable without so much as a kiss-my-bottom, concerned at what the neighbours will think of her for letting him get terminally ill, and then settling down to make sure the whole thing is handled properly.
Such as a funeral party for the family before Uncle Mort snuffs it – it’s only decent of him – and helping him pick out his gravestone, not to mention pay for it out of his pension: well, he’ll appreciate it all the more, won’t he?
Uncle Mort doesn’t want any of this fuss. He’s got his own plans, plans that involve cashing in his National Savings Certificates to buy two more allotment plots, to add to the one that’s already an unkempt, untended wilderness. This puts Mr Brandon in a panic about how three wild allotments could unleash a plant chaos on the whole country and put paid to his shallots.
But Uncle Mort’s purpose is the pride of ownership: a weak, dribbling spring of trickling, funny-looking water rises on his allotment and these two other allotments comprise its course to the Barclay Brook, and thence the river, the sea, the ocean: Uncle Mort now owns the full riparian rights of the full course of the River Mort.
Pat’s fawning attitude to Mr Macclesfield gets so far on Carter’s wick that, with the gleeful support of Louis St John, the West Indian fitter (with a mum what’s born in Antigua and a Dad what’s born in Barnsley and a trick of switching from self-satirising coon-talk to broad South Yorkshire), he applies for and gets back his union cards.
Yet he doesn’t take up the fitter’s job at Wagstaffe & Broome’s that’s clearly waiting for him.
All this is taking place against a background of change and destruction that’s a silent echo of Uncle Mort’s condition. The city is being torn down, brick by brick, old and familiar buildings turned into rubble. Dead birds and animals are continually being discovered in and about the river, covered in sores. Even woodlands are being torn down so that new estates for young executives can be built. Carter doesn’t approve: There’s baby rabbits and redstarts in that copse, he tells one bulldozer driver, whose cynical response is that there’s about twenty tons of used french letters too.
It’s this continuing pulse that drives I Didn’t Know You Cared, the continual running of what are, beneath it all, serious subjects into lines like that, an inexhaustible supply of them as Tinniswood constantly booby-traps his listeners into giggles about the most uncomic of things.
There’s Vernon Collinson, Uncle Mort’s oppo at the clinic, a younger man under the same sentence, a constant reminiscer about, believe it or believe it not, completely mundane things. There’s cousin Celia, bereft of that Mr Coppersedge from Derby, invited into the bosom of the family by Mrs Brandon and arriving with boundless relish for the most unimpressive things of life.
Cousin Celia fills the gap left by Uncle Staveley and Corporal Parkinson, neither of whom are around for this book, with no explanation. She’s larger-than-life, a virgin at the age of fifty-five, extremely bountiful, and supposedly a witch who intends to cure Uncle Mort, whether he wants it or not, but who runs off with Vernon Collinson instead.
Carter has other problems of his own after new neighbours move in next door, Gerry and Ursula Phelan, both of whom work on the local newspaper. Gerry, an older, balding man who works nights, is a sexually boastful pig, who Carter can’t stand, whilst Ursula, his younger wife, is German. She’s very fit, in both senses of the word, though the fact she’s German less than twenty years after the war arouses prejudices amongst the older members of the family.
Ursula is trouble, everyone can see that except Pat, whose faith in Carter is as strong as her love for him. And considering his erections have suddenly come back, Pat’s eager in getting her end away quite often.
But, like not actually bringing Mog onto the stage until a long way into his novel, there’s one last substantial character to introduce, who turns up on page 48 and proceeds to turn the book upside down in a similar way to how he did with the first Brandon novel.
For Carter dreams, and in his dreams he enters the cemetery, to meet a baby sat up in a pram. The baby is smoking a Woodbine (a very popular, ubiquitous working-class cigarette). It’s Daniel, here to look after his Dad and help Carter sort out his problems. From hereafter, everything Carter does is accompanied by a running conversation with Daniel, constantly interrupting with his opinions.
You think Daniel’s just a voice in Carter’s head, a Freudian inner consciousness? Don’t be so sure.
The summer goes on. Pat’s away on business trips with Mr Macclesfield (and there’s none of that going on because Pat isn’t that kind of woman and she loves Carter too much: and in this book, Carter actually tells Pat that he loves her too).
But temptation is on Carter’s doorstep, not necessarily in the form of Ursula but rather her younger sister Erika, on an extended holiday. Erika has been scarred for life after a car crash, a jagged scar down one side of her face and neck that she keeps concealed by her hair-style, awkward though it is. The accident has changed her, turned her inwards, a process not helped by Gerry Phelan’s constant cartoonish sexual buffoonery.
Carter, encouraged by Ursula to treat her normally, like an attractive woman, takes an interest in her for herself, patiently, quietly, towards the point when, with Pat in Amsterdam for a week, everything is heading neatly towards consummation. Which is when it all goes wrong.
Things have already gone wrong in the other half of the story. Mr Brandon’s lost his job through redundancy and the dignity of his trade prevents him from accepting any old employment. So Mrs Brandon goes out to work at the Dinky Bakery, a job that Mr Brandon feels is below her, and he emulates Carter in becoming a housewife, and a bloody sight more enthusiastic and efficient housewife than any of them.
Nevertheless, money is getting short when the letter arrives from a property company wanting to buy the allotments to build on. With £750, the Brandons can build up a small enterprise in the country, and change their lives utterly. With £2,250 for his three plots, Uncle Mort will be truly rich.
Only he won’t sell the River Mort, and the offer won’t stay open until he dies, and the deal is all the plots or nothing, a fact succinctly explained by Chairman Sir Peter Wakefield (!) at the meeting at the Scout hut. His refusal to sell and allow the Brandons to improve their lot results in Mrs Brandon throwing him out: Uncle Mort goes to live in the adapted railway carriage on his allotment, and gets adopted as a project by the Peewits Patrol, whose least adroit member, Timothy Goodge, is a constant and improbable source of all manner of alcohol, swiped from his Dad.
Uncle Mort isn’t alone that long. First he’s joined by Vernon Collinson, run away from cousin Celia, who has made his life truly miserable by curing him. Then, when Mr Brandon gets too sentimental about his shallots, he leaves home to live with Uncle Mort (though the need for money forces him to take that job that’s going on the bowling greens in the Park).
Uncle Mort is getting weaker and weaker. Carter’s in dead shtuck: his seduction of Erika took a wrong turn when she briefly popped into the Phelan house to fetch something, and the figure at his back door a couple of minutes later was Ursula, who practically drags him into bed and fucks his arse off.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, in roars the boorish Gerry, bringing drinks to celebrate Carter having got his end away with his sister-in-law. His response to seeing his wife instead in bed with Carter? “Not again? Bloody hell. Not again?”
Suddenly, Carter’s bit of fun on the side has gone horribly sour. He wants nothing more than to keep it quiet, forget about it all, make sure Pat never finds anything out about this. Gerry’s surprisingly fine, this isn’t the first time, he knows the drill, he won’t spill anything. But Ursula makes it plain that this isn’t going to be a one-off. When she raises her hand, Carter will come to her. And he’ll finish what he started with Erika. Coming up with a story for Pat is his business,though.
And cousin Celia’s back at the Brandon household, supporting Mrs Brandon, an unstoppable force roaring with delight at every little ragged weed on Uncle Mort’s allotments. She’s negotiating a compromise which basically consists of the men agreeing they were wholly wrong, apologising and promising not to do it again. Oh, and Mr Brandon taking his wife out for dinner at the Trocadero grill the next night.
Which is where the arrangement falters as all the male Brandon’s are going to see the running of the Last Tram.
Which is where everything suddenly races forward. Unable to bear the thought of something about to go desperately wrong, Vernon Collinson throws himself under the Tram’s wheels. His inquest reveals that he was far from being cured: cousin Celia had conned him. Mr Brandon comes home, followed shortly by Uncle Mort, who collapses at the funeral. He’s in his last days, slipping in and out of consciousness to the tremendous frustration of Mrs Brandon, who’s desperate to get him to sign the sale documents on the allotments.
And Ursula wants Carter on Monday night, or she will tell Pat.
Cousin Celia, who is constantly proclaiming her witchly status, tells him not to worry. She knows mystically of his problems and will protect him. It’s all the usual moonshine and rot – but that night, Ursula and Erika’s father dies abruptly, and the pair have to return to Germany immediately. On the Monday. You should hear what Daniel has to say about it.
Uncle Mort’s going downhill steadily, and Carter’s problems aren’t quite over. A chance overhearing in a pub of Mr Macclesfield talking to a couple of his clients about Pat sees him straight down the hill to sign on at Wagstaffe & Broomes. The decision outrages Pat, as does Carter’s orders for her to give up her job (naturally Carter does not explain what he’s heard). So Pat walks out, though she’s soon back, extremely abashed, as soon as she finds out for herself.
Suddenly, there’s an epidemic. Cousin Celia’s having convulsions and the Peewits have all been rushed to hospital. Nothing can be done for cousin Celia who, in keeping with Brandon family tradition, dies, but it is Timothy Goodge who cracks the book open by putting together all the clues Tinniswood has left scattered throughout the story: they’re poisoned. The Peewits and cousin Celia have been drinking from the River Mort: they’ve been poisoned.
And it all unravels. The River Mort is polluted, with material escaping from the plastics factory owner by one Geoffrey Macclesfield. It’s been responsible for poisoning the Peewits and cousin Celia, not to mention the Barclay Brook and the river and the death of all those animals, dying with sores all over them. The offer for the allotments is quickly withdrawn.
It’s also poisoned Uncle Mort too. It wasn’t cancer at all. He’s not going to die, in fact he’s going to be cured. The last word, of course, has to go to the woman in the middle of all this: “Talk about perverse,” said Mrs Brandon. “You just can’t trust nature to work its natural courses these days, can you?”
But that’s not quite the last word. The scene shifts to Autumn, the season where all things begin dying, a fact commented on by Carter Brandon and Daniel as they head towards the allotments, where Uncle Mort is once again restored to full health. Out of a flash of sunshine, a lightning bolt strikes the railway carriage, turning it into a ball of flame. Despite the fact Uncle Mort must be dead, Carter plunges in and drags his Uncle out. He’d just been throwing out the last of cousin Celia’s bloody herbs.
“What an escape. Do you know, lad, I reckon if I put my mind to it, I could be bloody immortal.”
Again, there’s so much more going on in this book that even such a detailed account as this could possibly describe. The energy that drives it along, that keeps the flow in a constant bubble of humour, dry, dispassionate, northern, is only a part of all this.
Once again, Tinniswood paints a word picture of a time and a place now long gone. The book spends so much time in actual destruction of the pillars of this lost, working class Northern world, yet it’s also evident that the new, modern world coming to replace it is temporary in a way that past had never been, and would never last.
Again, despite my fervent belief that Tinniswood was writing about a fictional Manchester, I can’t stop myself recognising Sheffield as the true template, though I’d argue that the humour is Lancastrian rather than Yorkist, in its inflexions and rhythms, an effect achieved by Tinniswood eschewing dialect and instead concentrating on patterns of speech: I was six in 1961 and these books draw me back into that era of my life, and I was a Manchester back-street kid.
I Didn’t Know You Cared gave its name to the sitcom version of the Brandons, which ran four series between 1975 and 1979. It was beautifully cast, with the great John Comer as Mrs Brandon, Liz Smith as Mrs Brandon and Robin Bailey, a theatre actor of great experience previously known for a handful of dramatic roles on TV, as Uncle Mort. Stephen Rea and Anita Carey played Carter Brandon and Pat in the first two series but were replaced by Keith Drinkel and Liz Goulding – Tinniswood’s wife – for the last two. Though the first pair were the better actors, I always felt that Drinkel better fitted the part as I imagined it from the books.
Though the story of this novel, or at any rate Uncle Mort’s part in it, underpinned series two, the sitcom was a very different kettle of fish. I’ll review it in due course, but needless to say, Daniel and the greater part of the black humour were expunged, and the series rested on the lugubrious dialect and relish in misery inherent in the characters. Not to mention a couple of catch-phrases.
One last point. Tinniswood fully introduces Lous St John, the West Indian fitter, in this book. Louis’s the only black character in the story and, this being 1961, there’s some racist talk about him. Indeed, Louis’s own manner is a mixture of cod-African ‘lawsy, massa’ talk, spun out into great skeins of fantasy, and his own Barnsley accent, with its sweet, gentle, ‘nah, flower’.
It could be seen as a racist portrayal. Indeed, many people will not see it any other way. Yet let’s not forget the sequence where, after Louis has turned up at Carter’s house and had a playful mock fight with him, Pat comes home in outrage at Carter wrestling a nigger in the street.
There’s more of that in Pat’s entirely racist ranting about their position in the neighbourhood and the unwanted presence of niggers, all met by Carter’s oft spoken concentration on the practicalities of getting her dinner on the table. He’s waiting for her to wind down, but Pat doesn’t. At which point he turns on her, warning her that if she ever calls Louis a nigger again, he’ll put her over his knee, pull her knickers down and give her the biggest bloody hiding she’s had in her life.
It’s never as simple as you might think.

Travelling with Tinniswood: Introduction

I only ever saw him once.
It was at Lords, in the early Nineties. I was there with Lancashire CCC: we were there often that decade, getting to a helluva lot of One-Day Finals, NatWest Trophies, Benson & Hedges. It was the lunch interval, and I’d gone across to the Souvenir Shop, and was returning to my seat when I saw him, deep in conversation.
I recognised him immediately, from television, from pictures. The greying pudding-bowl hair, the dark glasses, the beard and goatee, the inevitable pipe, the cravat. He was a devoted cricket fan, and a Lancashire member, but I’d never made the connection to the possibility of his turning up to watch his beloved County.
I had nothing for him to sign so I didn’t interrupt him and his friend.But, like I said, we got to Lords pretty often after that, and each time I poppedone of his books in my bag, to be ready in the event of seeing him again. Of course, that sighting was never repeated.
I’d first discovered Peter Tinniswood’s novels in the early mid-Seventies, and I’d loved his work and followed him devotedly ever since. He was in the midst of his Brandon Family novels then, and the BBC sitcom version, I Didn’t Know You Cared was about to start. He’d been a journalist, a satirical sketch writer. He’d go on to create fantastic, surreal cricket stories. He’d later write extensively for Radio 4, plays and serials: these latter dominated the last ten years of his life.
He died in 2003 and it was the ubiquitous pipe that did for him. Throat cancer, and, despite an  operation to remove of his voicebox, he passed away in early January, days after his 66th birthday.
I’d love to have gotten his signature on one of those wierdly stylised books of his. Not for any presumed value that a signature adds, but for the record of a moment of personal contact with someone whose mind has fascinated me, and for the chance to express my thanks for the hours of occupation someone’s imagination has forged for me.
What kind of writer was Peter Tinniswood? He was surreal. He was funny, black of humour to the point that it shaded into ultra-violet. He relished words, the sound, the rhythm, the sensation of them. He wrote in short paragraphs, and his early novels were decorated with titles for every page, knowing, ironic, bizarre summations of what was going on on that page.
Because of that relish for words, he was far more suited to books and radio than TV, though that was where his career began, on The Frost Report, with his early writing partner David Nobbs. He was unique, and he shouldn’t be forgotten. Most of all, he was a Northerner: born in Liverpool, brought up in Sale, just outside Manchester, a journalist in Sheffield. Though he lived for many years down South, the North never left him, and he used his words to shape it into a living, breathing, comic force.
I don’t have all his books, though I have read them all. I certainly haven’t heard anything like all his Radio 4 work. I’ve seen most of his TV series, one of which still stands out in my mind as an incredible piece of work that would still be ahead of its time even now.
For many years, I thought he was one of the funniest writers I have ever read, and although the later years of his career did considerable damage to that opinion, as I will later describe, and though I heard little or nothing of his output for Radio 4, those books from his early career are still as bizarre, hilarious and surreal as I found them when I first plunged into these deep waters.
So for the next few months I’m going to delve into those books, and take you with me into what animates this most unusual of writers, and just what dark and despairing comic glooms the northerner’s mind can encompass.