Feb 3, 2021
Half-Hour Story: George's Room (Rediffusion, 1967)
"He had his little ways. Well, I'm not saying I didn't have mine - we all do. But sometimes respect is more important than lust."
"What did you say?"
"I said: sometimes respect is more important than love."
"You didn't say that, you know."
"Of course I did."
"Do you believe you did?"
#Half hour story#George's room#alan clarke#Alun Owen#Single play#Rediffusion#1967#John Neville#Geraldine Moffat#In almost every sense an anachronism. By 67 the tide was turning in the anthology drama strands: Armchair Theatre was making efforts to#Go beyond London for their plays and playwrights‚ Theatre 625 had ushered in a new kind of experimental artsy film making and lest we#Forget‚ the grim and gritty Play for Today was only a few years away. And yet here we have an oddity; a perfectly staged‚ highly mannered#Two hander which consists of nothing more than two people talking in a consciously theatrical style. It could very well have been a play#For radio given how little actually occurs in any visible sense. A man and a woman‚ previously unknown to one another‚ discuss the#Possibility of his renting a room in her house. And that's it. Except of course it isn't‚ and in just 25 minutes Owen teases out a rich and#Complex subtext about gender dynamics and disparity in age‚ class‚ experience and fortitude. It rewards close viewing‚ whilst ironically#Providing very little to look at. Perhaps that was Clarke's intention; altho it's worth noting that this is also an oddity in having been#Shot in colour and on film (highly unusual for a drama anthology even then). Actually a little digging reveals that Clarke filmed it twice:#Once in the usual monochrome (as with the rest of the half hour stories) and once on a new film system as some kind of test. That's lucky#Because it's probably the only reason this survived: the bw version and many of its sister episodes were of course wiped (Rediffusion#Notoriously one of the worst franchise holders in terms of archive destruction: precious little survives before the company merged with ABC#To form Thames). So what a joy to have it at all‚ and looking so shiny! Cold comfort to Clarke‚ who by all accounts had put a lot of effort#Into the bw version and filmed this test copy with much less flair. Still‚ it's the opening play on the BFI Clarke boxset some 50 years on#Not to be sniffed at Mr Clarke.#Both Alun Owen and John Neville were by this point staples of the single drama strands; both had worked on multiple Theatre 625 entries#And so on‚ and both would be involved in The Company of Five the following year‚ a short lived experiment in which the same five actors#Would be cast in different plays each week. Moffat's work was much more within genre lines although she wasn't without dramatic experience.#Today I hope she is doted on in a golden mansion: her sons founded Rockstar Games and so are presumably gazillionaires
