Series 1 – Episode 9
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Marker
Alice Benjamin Ruth Alfred Benjamin Janet Benjamin Reg Benjamin Basher Robin Morris Young man Collector Driver Warder |
Alfred Burke
Avis Bunnage Ida Goldapple Harry Ross Pauline Delany Stewart Guidotti Michael Robbins Henry Soskin Anthony Dawes Arthur White Ronald Bridges Fred McNaughton |
Uncredited cast:
The rehearsal script also included the character of George Arthur Benjamin, and non-speaking roles for extras as a barman and customers in the public house, none of whom were credited in TV listings
Production
Series based on an idea by Roger Marshall & Anthony Marriott
Theme Music composed by Robert Earley Story Editor: Richard Bates Floor Manager: William Lawford |
Stage Manager: Betty Crowe
Production Assistant: Marian Lloyd Designed by Peter Le Page Producer: Don Leaver Directed by Kim Mills |
Rehearsed from Thursday 26 November 1964 at Steadfast Hall, Riverside, Kingston upon Thames
Camera rehearsed from Tuesday 8 December 1964 at Studio 2, ABC Television Studios, Broom Road, Teddington, Middlesex
Recorded on Wednesday 9 December 1964 at Studio 2, Teddington
Camera rehearsed from Tuesday 8 December 1964 at Studio 2, ABC Television Studios, Broom Road, Teddington, Middlesex
Recorded on Wednesday 9 December 1964 at Studio 2, Teddington
TV World Synopsis
Wed: “Intrepid Fox”, Commercial Road, 7 p.m. Alice Benjamin. “George loves Alice – Alice loves George – everyone loves George; so why’s he missing, and why didn’t Alice call me ten weeks ago?”
Click here for detailed synopsis
Click here for detailed synopsis
Transmission
Saturday 20 March 1965, 9.10pm (ABC Midlands, ABC North, Southern and Ulster)
Saturday 12 June 1965, 10.10pm (ATV London, Border, Channel and Westward)
Saturday 21 August 1965, 10.10pm (Tyne Tees)
Sunday 5 September 1965, 10.35pm (Scottish)
Tuesday 5 October 1965, 10.37pm (TWW)
Saturday 12 June 1965, 10.10pm (ATV London, Border, Channel and Westward)
Saturday 21 August 1965, 10.10pm (Tyne Tees)
Sunday 5 September 1965, 10.35pm (Scottish)
Tuesday 5 October 1965, 10.37pm (TWW)
Archive
Rehearsal script (one or more pages missing from the end) – held in the BFI Special Collections
Story Notes
Michael Gerald Hastings (1938–2011), the writer of this episode, was raised by his mother, Marie, in a council flat in Brixton, South London. Marie was a ballroom dancer and shop assistant, while Michael’s father, Gerald, was a Jewish tailor and something of a playboy – charming, impeccably dressed and (like George in My Life, That’s a Marriage) regularly absent. Gerry was shot down over Dresden, flying a Lancaster bomber, in 1942. Marie then fell in love with an American army officer, Franklin Todd, who promised to take her and Michael back to Ohio, to live with him. The affair ended abruptly when Marie learned that her lover was married. She tore up his letters, burned a fur coat he had given her and suffered a nervous breakdown. Following her recovery, she never spoke of the matter again. Michael was educated at Dulwich College Preparatory School and Alleyn’s School, both in South London, where he excelled in athletics and boxing – so much so that he neglected his studies to coach some of the younger boys. He left school at 15 and served a three-year apprenticeship in bespoke tailoring. Eventually, though, these interests gave way to a love of theatre, and Hastings spent much of his spare time and money on cheap seats and long walks home at night. He was already writing, and his first play, Don’t Destroy Me – concerning a tailor’s apprentice growing up in a chaotic Jewish household – was produced at the New Lindsey Theatre Club in Notting Hill in 1956. George Devine, founder of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre, saw the play and took Hastings under his wing, offering him a starting wage as an actor and writer at the theatre. Hastings’s second play, Yes, and After, followed in 1957, as did his first novel, The Game, by which time he was also writing for radio. Television work soon followed, including Granada’s Triangle series of collaborative plays (co-authored with Hugh Leonard and Robin Chapman) in 1964 and three episodes of the Emmy Award-winning BBC2 miniseries The Search for the Nile in 1971. Hastings later enjoyed West End success with Gloo Joo (1978), a farce about a West Indian facing deportation from the UK, which won the Evening Standard Comedy of the Year Award in 1979, the same year in which the play was brought to the small screen by London Weekend Television. The writer is best known for his 1984 stage play and 1994 screenplay Tom & Viv, about the poet T.S. Eliot and his wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood. Hastings returned to the world of tailoring with The Cutting of the Cloth, a play revolving around two master craftsmen in a 1950s Savile Row workshop, which was written in 1973 but not performed until 2015, more than three years after his death.
The rehearsal script gives this episode’s working title, One Small Marriage. The wording of the final title, My Life, That’s a Marriage, is not present within the rehearsal script, and so must have been added to the dialogue at a subsequent stage. In the detailed synopsis presented on this website, I have made a guess as to when and by whom these words might have been spoken – by Janet, in Act One, when talking to Alice.
At the end of the script’s opening scene, Ruth is referred to in a speech prefix as Janice. This suggests that the character’s name was changed (and this single instance erroneously retained), or that an earlier draft had included an additional member of staff in George’s shop.
At least one page is missing from the end of the surviving script. The copy held in the BFI Special Collections finishes abruptly at the bottom of page 65 with Alice asking George, “Sleep well, do you?” Events and dialogue beyond this point in the detailed synopsis have been extrapolated from clues from within the script and elsewhere. Though the preceding dialogue contains hints that a blazing row may be imminent, with George saying to Alice, “Go on, throw a few bricks at me” and “Don’t be so wet”, scripted directions immediately after the latter line indicate that the discussion will play out in a more stilted manner: with Alice “straightening herself up, wrapping herself in her old style” and the pair of them “shrinking into a kind of weariness, the words tumble from both of them with a mechanical ring”. During an earlier scene with Marker, Alice had already predicted how this conversation would go: “What do we say? Had a nice time, George? Did you have a good rest, George? Did I? Did you? Who did!” It is therefore notable that she also foresees that she and her husband will end up living a lie once more: “Pretend it never happened – and it never will again. And pretend nobody will ever mention it again…” Of course, the fact that this eventuality is mentioned in the dialogue could be setting things up for a dramatic twist, in which events turn out differently. However, completely happy endings are quite rare in this series – usually someone ends up at a disadvantage. George’s financial difficulties are addressed, with Alfred set to bail his brother out yet again, so it is perhaps too much to expect that the marriage can also be fixed.
In the rehearsal script, George is essentially a voice-only role. Apart from “A pair of hands face down on the table beneath the edge of the wire mesh” in the prison visiting room, “We never see George.” Strangely, though, George is not listed in the cast of characters at the front of the script. Nor is any actor credited with the part in TV listings. Furthermore, though the prison’s reception room (i.e. the waiting room) appears in the list of sets at the beginning of the script, the visiting room does not. It is possible, therefore, that the final pages of the script are absent because George’s scene was due to be replaced with a different ending. (If so, this would not be the only instance of material being deleted from the script and the replacement text not yet being in place. When Alice brags about George’s tailoring skills in Act Two, there is a blank space where a missing word should be: “When George makes a suit it’s meant to last five years and by [missing word] it’s built to last five years.” Perhaps the text had originally repeated the word “George” here, but this was deemed unsatisfactory.) Alternative approaches for the episode’s finale might include leaving things open-ended, with Alice walking into the visiting room and the audience never knowing the outcome (Three’s a Crowd, an episode of the 1960 ABC drama series Police Surgeon, concluded in such a way) or cutting straight to a scene in Marker’s car after the visit (see below).
Though the list of sets does not include the prison visiting room, it does mention Marker’s car. This is also curious, because there are no scenes featuring such a set in the surviving pages of the script. This site’s story summary therefore assumes that the missing ending included a scene in Marker’s car. For this imagined scene, I have borrowed a small section of text from the ABC synopsis (“George loves Alice – Alice loves George”, which itself echoes a line of dialogue spoken by Alice during Act Two: “But George loved Alice”) to add a note of finality to the proceedings.
The rehearsal script gives this episode’s working title, One Small Marriage. The wording of the final title, My Life, That’s a Marriage, is not present within the rehearsal script, and so must have been added to the dialogue at a subsequent stage. In the detailed synopsis presented on this website, I have made a guess as to when and by whom these words might have been spoken – by Janet, in Act One, when talking to Alice.
At the end of the script’s opening scene, Ruth is referred to in a speech prefix as Janice. This suggests that the character’s name was changed (and this single instance erroneously retained), or that an earlier draft had included an additional member of staff in George’s shop.
At least one page is missing from the end of the surviving script. The copy held in the BFI Special Collections finishes abruptly at the bottom of page 65 with Alice asking George, “Sleep well, do you?” Events and dialogue beyond this point in the detailed synopsis have been extrapolated from clues from within the script and elsewhere. Though the preceding dialogue contains hints that a blazing row may be imminent, with George saying to Alice, “Go on, throw a few bricks at me” and “Don’t be so wet”, scripted directions immediately after the latter line indicate that the discussion will play out in a more stilted manner: with Alice “straightening herself up, wrapping herself in her old style” and the pair of them “shrinking into a kind of weariness, the words tumble from both of them with a mechanical ring”. During an earlier scene with Marker, Alice had already predicted how this conversation would go: “What do we say? Had a nice time, George? Did you have a good rest, George? Did I? Did you? Who did!” It is therefore notable that she also foresees that she and her husband will end up living a lie once more: “Pretend it never happened – and it never will again. And pretend nobody will ever mention it again…” Of course, the fact that this eventuality is mentioned in the dialogue could be setting things up for a dramatic twist, in which events turn out differently. However, completely happy endings are quite rare in this series – usually someone ends up at a disadvantage. George’s financial difficulties are addressed, with Alfred set to bail his brother out yet again, so it is perhaps too much to expect that the marriage can also be fixed.
In the rehearsal script, George is essentially a voice-only role. Apart from “A pair of hands face down on the table beneath the edge of the wire mesh” in the prison visiting room, “We never see George.” Strangely, though, George is not listed in the cast of characters at the front of the script. Nor is any actor credited with the part in TV listings. Furthermore, though the prison’s reception room (i.e. the waiting room) appears in the list of sets at the beginning of the script, the visiting room does not. It is possible, therefore, that the final pages of the script are absent because George’s scene was due to be replaced with a different ending. (If so, this would not be the only instance of material being deleted from the script and the replacement text not yet being in place. When Alice brags about George’s tailoring skills in Act Two, there is a blank space where a missing word should be: “When George makes a suit it’s meant to last five years and by [missing word] it’s built to last five years.” Perhaps the text had originally repeated the word “George” here, but this was deemed unsatisfactory.) Alternative approaches for the episode’s finale might include leaving things open-ended, with Alice walking into the visiting room and the audience never knowing the outcome (Three’s a Crowd, an episode of the 1960 ABC drama series Police Surgeon, concluded in such a way) or cutting straight to a scene in Marker’s car after the visit (see below).
Though the list of sets does not include the prison visiting room, it does mention Marker’s car. This is also curious, because there are no scenes featuring such a set in the surviving pages of the script. This site’s story summary therefore assumes that the missing ending included a scene in Marker’s car. For this imagined scene, I have borrowed a small section of text from the ABC synopsis (“George loves Alice – Alice loves George”, which itself echoes a line of dialogue spoken by Alice during Act Two: “But George loved Alice”) to add a note of finality to the proceedings.
Production Notes
The rehearsal script notes that this is Episode 7, its place in production order.
My Life, That’s a Marriage marked the first appearance in Public Eye of Dublin-born actress Pauline Delany (1925–2007), who would go on to portray the semi-regular character of Mrs Mortimer from Series 4 onwards. She also appeared, this time credited as Pauline Delaney, in Series 2’s Don’t Forget You’re Mine, another tale about an apparently missing husband, in which she played the spiteful Mrs Jessup (pictured below, being confronted by Marker).
My Life, That’s a Marriage marked the first appearance in Public Eye of Dublin-born actress Pauline Delany (1925–2007), who would go on to portray the semi-regular character of Mrs Mortimer from Series 4 onwards. She also appeared, this time credited as Pauline Delaney, in Series 2’s Don’t Forget You’re Mine, another tale about an apparently missing husband, in which she played the spiteful Mrs Jessup (pictured below, being confronted by Marker).
When characters appear in consecutive scenes, Michael Hastings’s script suggests various techniques to allow recording to take place without breaks. For example, at the start of the second scene of Act Two, “We hear Alice’s and Marker’s voices”, played in from audio tape, for their first couple of speeches, while “The camera pans slowly across the fussy decor, the trivial bits and pieces” within Alice’s flat. Later, when Marker interviews Ruth immediately after visiting Basher, the scene opens with a close-up of Ruth, who speaks directly to camera. In the next scene, the camera is on Alice for her opening speech, before Marker steps forward: “Alice with her back to the camera. She talks away from the camera as if she doesn’t want to turn round.” The use of audio tape is instructed again during Act Three, for Alice’s speech at the beginning of the scene in her flat. At this point, the camera is on Marker, who covers his ears while Alice rants and rails at him in the aftermath of the revelations at the Saturday lunch.
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On Saturday 20 March 1965, My Life, That’s a Marriage aired against the Eurovision Song Contest, which was screened on BBC1 from 8pm.
Home and Away
There are just two exterior settings in the rehearsal script: the front door of Alfred’s house and a small section of the street nearby in Act Two; and the area surrounding a park bench in Act Three. Both of these are listed as studio sets at the front of the script.
Many a Slip
According to the script, “It is late on a Friday evening” when Basher calls at the tailor’s shop during Act One. However, other evidence suggests an earlier day of the week. Previously, Ruth told Janet that the bowler-hatted rent collector had called on a Monday, though it is unclear how long ago this was. When Marker meets Alice in the pub, he seems confident that he can track her husband down “before the end of the week.” Later, in Alice’s flat in Act Two, Marker promises that if he finds George “before Monday”, he’ll waive his bill. To add to the confusion, during the Saturday lunch in Act Three, Marker tells Robin Morris, “As of a week ago, I am not hired anything” – suggesting that Alice engaged his services at least one week earlier. The ABC synopsis for this episode (see TV World Synopsis, above) indicates that the pub scenes take place on a Wednesday.
In Act One, Ruth tells Basher that she has “worked nine years with George”, having “seen him five days a week all nine year”. In Act Two, however, she informs Marker that she has “Been with George sixteen years nigh on.” This may be an error on the writer’s part, or it may indicate that Ruth has worked with George in the tailoring industry for sixteen years but has worked for him in the shop for only the last nine of those years.
In Act One, Ruth tells Basher that she has “worked nine years with George”, having “seen him five days a week all nine year”. In Act Two, however, she informs Marker that she has “Been with George sixteen years nigh on.” This may be an error on the writer’s part, or it may indicate that Ruth has worked with George in the tailoring industry for sixteen years but has worked for him in the shop for only the last nine of those years.
Who Wants to Be Told Bad News?
The ABC press release for this episode observed that guest star Avis Bunnage, who played Alice Benjamin, “is on home ground in this story [set in London’s East End], having been a leading player with Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at Stratford East.” It also noted that “Miss Bunnage last appeared for ABC in Allan Prior’s Blackpool play I’ve Got a System” – an episode of Armchair Theatre that had also featured Nobody Kills Santa Claus’s Keith Baxter. The release referred to the “well-known Irish actress” portraying Alice’s sister-in-law Janet inconsistently as Pauline Delany (in the cast list) and Pauline Delaney (in the text below), commenting that she “was in A Kind of Kingdom for ABC in 1963 – the second of Hugh Leonard’s trilogy [again, for Armchair Theatre] about Irishmen in England.” The document concluded by discussing the career of Stewart Guidotti, who played Alice’s son, Reg, mentioning his appearances in the ABC children’s serials Pathfinders in Space (1961) and City Beneath the Sea (1962). “He is now going through what he calls the ‘growing up’ period, and looking forward to shaking off for good the label of the child actor.”
The title given in the press release, listings magazines and some newspapers was My Life – That’s a Marriage, but contemporary written evidence suggests that the title was punctuated with a comma, as My Life, That’s a Marriage.
Scottish critic Alan Stewart did not much care for the unhurried pace that Public Eye had settled into. In the TV Comment section of Glasgow’s The Sunday Post on 12 September 1965, he predicted that “The case of the missing husband will have nothing on the case of the missing million viewers unless we get something a bit snappier.”
The title given in the press release, listings magazines and some newspapers was My Life – That’s a Marriage, but contemporary written evidence suggests that the title was punctuated with a comma, as My Life, That’s a Marriage.
Scottish critic Alan Stewart did not much care for the unhurried pace that Public Eye had settled into. In the TV Comment section of Glasgow’s The Sunday Post on 12 September 1965, he predicted that “The case of the missing husband will have nothing on the case of the missing million viewers unless we get something a bit snappier.”
Nobody Wants to Know
Not surprisingly, given the setting of this story and his own training, Michael Hastings’s script contains a few specialist tailoring terms:
The script states that Basher is “The dues collector from the garment workers’ union”. This is a reference to the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers (NUTGW), which had been founded as the Tailors and Garment Workers’ Union (T&GWU) in 1920 through the merger of the Scottish Operative Tailors and Tailoresses’ Association and the United Garment Workers’ Union. In 1932, the trade union was joined by the Amalgamated Society of Tailors and Tailoresses, and renamed the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers. It absorbed the United Ladies Tailors’ Trade Union in 1939 and the Manchester-based Waterproof Garment Workers’ Trade Union in 1972. The NUTGW faced a long-term decline in membership during the second half of the 20th century as the number of people employed in the British clothing industry dwindled. The organisation was dissolved in 1991, when it merged with the General, Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Trades Union (GMB). The headquarters of the NUTGW were located at 14 Kensington Square, in West London, which is presumably where Marker visits Basher during Act Two.
Once again, Marker is likened to a certain legendary righter of wrongs from English folklore. The ABC press release for My Life, That’s a Marriage notes that the inquiry agent “is playing Robin Hood among a small community in London’s East End.” In Act One of the script, Ruth ridicules Alice’s naivety in believing that the private detective might not charge her for his services. “She lives in a dream world,” Ruth tells Basher, “everyone whiter than white. What does she think – the world’s full of Robin Hoods waiting to run around looking for her old man?”
In Act Two, Alice says George has “Burtoned off” – her own version of the slang expression “gone for a Burton”, meaning to die or go missing. The term was popularised by the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. The etymology of the phrase is uncertain, but one theory, that it is a reference to the suits made by the tailor Sir Montague Burton, who supplied the majority of the demob suits offered to British servicemen after completing military service, would be especially fitting (no pun intended), given George’s profession. Another popular hypothesis is that the expression refers to beer brewed in the Staffordshire town of Burton upon Trent, which is famed for such beverages, including Burton ale. RAF pilots who crashed, especially those who splashed down “in the drink” (i.e. in the sea), were said to have “gone for a Burton”.
No photographs are known to exist for this episode. The image at the top of the page shows Avis Bunnage as Mrs Bessie Cowan in the Gideon’s Way episode Big Fish Little Fish, which was filmed shortly before the production of My Life, That’s a Marriage, in October 1964.
- To baste (verb) is to tack parts of a garment together using long basting stitches, while a baste (noun) is a garment roughly assembled in this manner for its first fitting.
- Kipper is tailoring slang for a female tailor or tailoress, so called because, when women first entered this profession, they tended to work in pairs in order to ward off unwelcome advances from male colleagues.
- Shantung is a crisp and slightly shiny silk fabric, historically from the Chinese province of Shandong.
- A sleeve head is a rectangular strip of wadding used to give support to the sleeve at the shoulder and thus improve the shape of a garment.
- Worsted is a high-quality type of wool yarn, the fabric made from this yarn, and a yarn weight category. Its name derives from Worstead, a village in the English county of Norfolk with a history of manufacturing such material.
The script states that Basher is “The dues collector from the garment workers’ union”. This is a reference to the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers (NUTGW), which had been founded as the Tailors and Garment Workers’ Union (T&GWU) in 1920 through the merger of the Scottish Operative Tailors and Tailoresses’ Association and the United Garment Workers’ Union. In 1932, the trade union was joined by the Amalgamated Society of Tailors and Tailoresses, and renamed the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers. It absorbed the United Ladies Tailors’ Trade Union in 1939 and the Manchester-based Waterproof Garment Workers’ Trade Union in 1972. The NUTGW faced a long-term decline in membership during the second half of the 20th century as the number of people employed in the British clothing industry dwindled. The organisation was dissolved in 1991, when it merged with the General, Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Trades Union (GMB). The headquarters of the NUTGW were located at 14 Kensington Square, in West London, which is presumably where Marker visits Basher during Act Two.
Once again, Marker is likened to a certain legendary righter of wrongs from English folklore. The ABC press release for My Life, That’s a Marriage notes that the inquiry agent “is playing Robin Hood among a small community in London’s East End.” In Act One of the script, Ruth ridicules Alice’s naivety in believing that the private detective might not charge her for his services. “She lives in a dream world,” Ruth tells Basher, “everyone whiter than white. What does she think – the world’s full of Robin Hoods waiting to run around looking for her old man?”
In Act Two, Alice says George has “Burtoned off” – her own version of the slang expression “gone for a Burton”, meaning to die or go missing. The term was popularised by the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. The etymology of the phrase is uncertain, but one theory, that it is a reference to the suits made by the tailor Sir Montague Burton, who supplied the majority of the demob suits offered to British servicemen after completing military service, would be especially fitting (no pun intended), given George’s profession. Another popular hypothesis is that the expression refers to beer brewed in the Staffordshire town of Burton upon Trent, which is famed for such beverages, including Burton ale. RAF pilots who crashed, especially those who splashed down “in the drink” (i.e. in the sea), were said to have “gone for a Burton”.
No photographs are known to exist for this episode. The image at the top of the page shows Avis Bunnage as Mrs Bessie Cowan in the Gideon’s Way episode Big Fish Little Fish, which was filmed shortly before the production of My Life, That’s a Marriage, in October 1964.
With thanks to Jonny Davies, Andrew Pixley, the BFI Special Collections, the British Newspaper Archive and Network Distributing.
The Missing Markers is a not-for-profit fan website written and edited by and copyright © Richard McGinlay. All rights reserved.
Public Eye (the ABC years) is copyright © StudioCanal. No attempt to infringe this copyright is intended.
The Missing Markers is a not-for-profit fan website written and edited by and copyright © Richard McGinlay. All rights reserved.
Public Eye (the ABC years) is copyright © StudioCanal. No attempt to infringe this copyright is intended.