Television
Masochistic nostalgia
Clive Gammon
Sam is back, and a nasty bit of work he looks too. Merciful time has eroded the memory of shorttrousered Sam in last year's Granada series. I can't recall him looking like one of nature's storm troopers as he does now; low of brow, short of haircut, a moody pint-supper, a snakey shadower of old gentleman, looking for a bit on the side. Somewhat prissy too, if you can fit that into the identikit, one of the very few miners to turn out for work on January 1 1974, the Vesting Day of the National Coal Board. And did he, wonderingly, lift a piece of sacking from a freshly painted notice to reveal that the NCB had taken over? You bet he did. Not a trick was missed to drum it into us that this was the ice-age of Crippsian austerity causing one to reflect that a vogue for nostalgia is all very well but that recalling 1947 comes very close to certifiable masochism.
The gap between little and big Sam was swiftly closed with a fifty word precis of what happened in the war. Sam was usefully employed down the pit, you see. Then it was time for heavy underlining of the period we were in, with contrived references to the Home Service and the Light Programme and Nye Bevan's Health Service. It was clearly going to be just as heavy going as the first series and in the opening
minutes, as predictably present as a pigeon loft in any film about miners, came the first pithy (if I've spelt that right) saying: " Life gives nought for expectations. It's what you hold in your hand."
Pieces of profundity like that justify, presumably, lingering shots of work-worn but still stalwart miners taking ten philosophical seconds to fold up their overcoats.. There's a cloying heaviness about Sam which I think is intended to convey censoriously to the viewer that this is what life is about, see, and that the biggest problem he's likely to have is a loose exhaust on his Ford Escort and that he ought to be ashamed of himself. In reality it is all completely phoney.
It's very easy to spot phoneyness in the professional Irish (or Welsh, or Scottish) act. But when it comes to the north, otherwise intelligent people seem to get taken in. The linguistic impoverishment of northern dialects. (especially the idiomatic impoverishment) actually makes it more difficult to see that 'serious' efforts like Sam are soap operas writ large. Characteristically, Orwell (in The Road to Wigan Pier) noted the self-conscious cotriplacencies of northern speech patterns at the same time as he recognised ; the genuine hardship
and povertyof the 'thirties.' " ' A stitch in time saves nine' as we say in the West Riding." Maybe it's that good old archetype the guilt-ridden middle-class intellectual who's at fault as he makes his compulsory obeisance to the working class, a Pavilion reaction easily triggered by such images as a straggly-haired woman doing the ironing alongside an old fashioned kitchen range and saying "'appen " occasionally. (The " 'appen " count in this first episode of the new series was interesting. I didn't record a single one until twenty minutes had gone by, but then they came thick and fast and in the run up to the ending we were sprayed with them.
Soap opera indeed — I could have sworn I recognised Albert Tatlock supplying his ale in one of the pub sequences. Braces-flashing George, a portly elderly miner, is clearly going to dominate the early episodes as he pursues the local loose lady while his sorrowful wife (on your feet! off with your caps, you horribly little intellectuals) irons sheets at home.
I'm not going to be around to see it through. At 8.30 on future Thursday evenings as a character in Sam said in perhaps the most .poignant line of the hour, " 'appen I'll go up pub."
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