Series 2 – Episode 4
|
Frank Marker
Michael Gannon Moira Gannon John Gannon Agnes Gannon Con Barney Willie Dunphy Mr Tatlow Withers Mr Arbuthnot Pub singer Barmaid |
Alfred Burke
Jim Norton Maire Hastings Harold Goldblatt Marie Kean David Kelly James Kerry John McCarthy Frederick Danner Richard Curnock Richard Cuthbert John Keenan Carmen Dene |
Uncredited cast:
Thugs People at hotel/ People at pub |
Anthony Colby, John Thenaham Bert Lena, Guy Graham, Bill Swann, Roland Porritt, Steve Brent, John Bright, Raymond Bales, Walter Swash, Jack Duggan, Robert Marshall, Lawrence Archer, Anne Hilton, Philippa Johnson, Vanessa Harris |
Production
Series based on an idea by Roger Marshall and Anthony Marriott
Theme Music composed by Robert Earley Floor Manager: Patrick Kennedy Stage Manager: Betty Crowe |
Production Assistant: Christine Thomas
Designed by Stephen Doncaster Edited & Produced by Richard Bates Directed by Guy Verney |
Rehearsed from 10.30am on Friday 22 April 1966 at Rehearsal Room 3A, ABC Television Studios, Broom Road, Teddington, Middlesex
Camera rehearsed from Wednesday 4 May 1966 at Studio 1, Teddington
Recorded from 6pm to 7pm on Thursday 5 May 1966 at Studio 1, Teddington
Camera rehearsed from Wednesday 4 May 1966 at Studio 1, Teddington
Recorded from 6pm to 7pm on Thursday 5 May 1966 at Studio 1, Teddington
TV World Synopsis
Wed. 10.00: That Irishman, Gannon, phoning again – don’t much like the sound of him. Could be trouble.
Click here for detailed synopsis
Click here for detailed synopsis
Transmission
Monday 18 July 1966, 8pm (Rediffusion)
Friday 22 July 1966, 8pm (Anglia, Border, Channel, Grampian, Southern, Tyne Tees and Westward)
Saturday 23 July 1966, 9.10pm (ABC Midlands, ABC North and Ulster)
Sunday 24 July 1966, 11.05pm (Scottish)
Wednesday 5 October 1966, 8pm (TWW)
Ratings: 4,850,000 (=10th)
Friday 22 July 1966, 8pm (Anglia, Border, Channel, Grampian, Southern, Tyne Tees and Westward)
Saturday 23 July 1966, 9.10pm (ABC Midlands, ABC North and Ulster)
Sunday 24 July 1966, 11.05pm (Scottish)
Wednesday 5 October 1966, 8pm (TWW)
Ratings: 4,850,000 (=10th)
Archive
Rehearsal script – held in the BFI Special Collections and the National Library of Ireland
Story Notes
“There’s a large Irish labouring force in the Midlands,” explained Hugh Leonard (1926–2009) of his first Public Eye script in TV World (23–29 July 1966), “and it’s easy for a man to come over and disappear.”
The dramatist, screenwriter and essayist was born in Dublin as John Joseph Byrne, but was put up for adoption. Raised in Dalkey, an affluent suburb of Dublin, by Nicholas and Margaret Keyes, he changed his name to John Keyes Byrne. He was educated at Harold Boys’ National School, Dalkey, and Presentation College, Glasthule, winning a scholarship to the latter. Byrne worked as a civil servant for 14 years, during which time he also acted in as well as wrote plays for community theatre groups. His pen name came about after his 1954 play The Italian Road was turned down by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. The central character in the play was a young man called Hughie Leonard, so the writer submitted his next play as Hugh Leonard, partly as a private joke and partly because he had criticised Abbey productions under his own name in a civil service journal. When the play (1956’s The Big Birthday, subsequently filmed as Broth of a Boy in 1959) was accepted, the writer found himself stuck with a name he did not really want. For the rest of his life, despite adopting the pseudonym by which he became well known, he asked his friends to call him Jack. His career with the Abbey Theatre lasted until 1994, after which his plays were regularly produced by other Dublin theatres. By 1959, Leonard was also working as a scriptwriter for the twice-weekly Radio Éireann soap opera The Kennedys of Castleross (the cast of which included Marie Kean), earning more from this commission than he did from his civil service salary. Later that year, Granada Television showed an interest in his 1957 play A Leap in the Dark, which, following a trial performance by the Oldham Repertory Company in October 1959, was adapted into a Play of the Week by Jed Purcell in 1960. After this, Leonard decided to give up the day job and write full-time, moving to London with his wife Paule and daughter Danielle. In 1961, he was hired as a script editor by Granada, where he worked on series including the legal dramas Family Solicitor and The Verdict is Yours, which paid for him to commute weekly from London to Manchester. When his contract was renewed for a second year, he relocated with his family to Manchester, but resented being confined to editing other people’s scripts. In 1963, Leonard moved to Barnes in South London as a full-time freelancer, where he became the first major Irish writer to establish a reputation in television, contributing numerous original plays (including entries in anthology shows such as ATV’s Love Story and Granada’s Triangle), thrillers (including episodes of ABC’s Undermind and Rediffusion’s The Informer), comedies (enjoying particular success with the BBC1 sitcom Me Mammy, which ran for 21 episodes between 1968 and 1971), and dramatisations of classic novels and short stories. His Silent Song, a 1966 Wednesday Play adapted for BBC1 from a short story by Frank O’Connor, won the Prix Italia and a Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award of Merit. Also that year, Leonard was commissioned by the Irish broadcaster Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ) to write the eight-part mini-series Insurrection, a 50th-anniversary reimagining of the Irish uprising of Easter 1916 in a contemporary setting. He penned seven plays for ABC’s Armchair Theatre, many of which had Irish themes at a time when such subjects were associated with feyness and parochialism by the British arts world, and all of which were directed by Guy Verney until Verney’s untimely death in 1970. For Public Eye, Leonard also wrote What’s the Matter? Can’t You Take a Sick Joke?, which closed Series 2. His work for British television did much to promote the careers of Irish actors such as Milo O’Shea and David Kelly, the latter becoming a close friend. In 1970, Leonard returned to Ireland, settling with his family in Dalkey. In a career spanning 50 years, he authored around 30 full-length plays, ten one-act plays, three volumes of essays, two autobiographies, three novels, numerous screenplays and teleplays, as well as a regular newspaper column, The Curmudgeon, for the Irish newspaper the Sunday Independent. His final play, Magicality, was not performed in his lifetime – a rehearsed reading of the second act was staged at the Dalkey Castle and Heritage Centre in June 2012.
In common with Julian Bond in his script for I Could Set It to Music, it appears that Hugh Leonard expected Marker’s gas ring to be situated in the main part of his office, as it would be in subsequent Eton episodes. In the rehearsal script for It’s a Terrible Way to Be, when Moira offers to make tea, a direction simply reads, “She goes to the gas ring”, with no mention of the adjoining kitchen alcove that would form part of the set for Marker’s Birmingham office. This has been adjusted in the detailed synopsis.
The dramatist, screenwriter and essayist was born in Dublin as John Joseph Byrne, but was put up for adoption. Raised in Dalkey, an affluent suburb of Dublin, by Nicholas and Margaret Keyes, he changed his name to John Keyes Byrne. He was educated at Harold Boys’ National School, Dalkey, and Presentation College, Glasthule, winning a scholarship to the latter. Byrne worked as a civil servant for 14 years, during which time he also acted in as well as wrote plays for community theatre groups. His pen name came about after his 1954 play The Italian Road was turned down by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. The central character in the play was a young man called Hughie Leonard, so the writer submitted his next play as Hugh Leonard, partly as a private joke and partly because he had criticised Abbey productions under his own name in a civil service journal. When the play (1956’s The Big Birthday, subsequently filmed as Broth of a Boy in 1959) was accepted, the writer found himself stuck with a name he did not really want. For the rest of his life, despite adopting the pseudonym by which he became well known, he asked his friends to call him Jack. His career with the Abbey Theatre lasted until 1994, after which his plays were regularly produced by other Dublin theatres. By 1959, Leonard was also working as a scriptwriter for the twice-weekly Radio Éireann soap opera The Kennedys of Castleross (the cast of which included Marie Kean), earning more from this commission than he did from his civil service salary. Later that year, Granada Television showed an interest in his 1957 play A Leap in the Dark, which, following a trial performance by the Oldham Repertory Company in October 1959, was adapted into a Play of the Week by Jed Purcell in 1960. After this, Leonard decided to give up the day job and write full-time, moving to London with his wife Paule and daughter Danielle. In 1961, he was hired as a script editor by Granada, where he worked on series including the legal dramas Family Solicitor and The Verdict is Yours, which paid for him to commute weekly from London to Manchester. When his contract was renewed for a second year, he relocated with his family to Manchester, but resented being confined to editing other people’s scripts. In 1963, Leonard moved to Barnes in South London as a full-time freelancer, where he became the first major Irish writer to establish a reputation in television, contributing numerous original plays (including entries in anthology shows such as ATV’s Love Story and Granada’s Triangle), thrillers (including episodes of ABC’s Undermind and Rediffusion’s The Informer), comedies (enjoying particular success with the BBC1 sitcom Me Mammy, which ran for 21 episodes between 1968 and 1971), and dramatisations of classic novels and short stories. His Silent Song, a 1966 Wednesday Play adapted for BBC1 from a short story by Frank O’Connor, won the Prix Italia and a Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award of Merit. Also that year, Leonard was commissioned by the Irish broadcaster Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ) to write the eight-part mini-series Insurrection, a 50th-anniversary reimagining of the Irish uprising of Easter 1916 in a contemporary setting. He penned seven plays for ABC’s Armchair Theatre, many of which had Irish themes at a time when such subjects were associated with feyness and parochialism by the British arts world, and all of which were directed by Guy Verney until Verney’s untimely death in 1970. For Public Eye, Leonard also wrote What’s the Matter? Can’t You Take a Sick Joke?, which closed Series 2. His work for British television did much to promote the careers of Irish actors such as Milo O’Shea and David Kelly, the latter becoming a close friend. In 1970, Leonard returned to Ireland, settling with his family in Dalkey. In a career spanning 50 years, he authored around 30 full-length plays, ten one-act plays, three volumes of essays, two autobiographies, three novels, numerous screenplays and teleplays, as well as a regular newspaper column, The Curmudgeon, for the Irish newspaper the Sunday Independent. His final play, Magicality, was not performed in his lifetime – a rehearsed reading of the second act was staged at the Dalkey Castle and Heritage Centre in June 2012.
In common with Julian Bond in his script for I Could Set It to Music, it appears that Hugh Leonard expected Marker’s gas ring to be situated in the main part of his office, as it would be in subsequent Eton episodes. In the rehearsal script for It’s a Terrible Way to Be, when Moira offers to make tea, a direction simply reads, “She goes to the gas ring”, with no mention of the adjoining kitchen alcove that would form part of the set for Marker’s Birmingham office. This has been adjusted in the detailed synopsis.
Production Notes
The production number shown on the front cover of the rehearsal script was 3919, but this was revised to 2205 prior to recording.
The script was rubber stamped as having been received by ABPC’s export sales division on 6 April 1966 (a Wednesday).
Pub singer John Keenan performed numerous traditional Irish songs during scenes set in The Pride of Erin. These included the 19th-century ballad The Rose of Tralee, the authorship of which is contested but which was set to music by Charles William Glover in 1850; Kevin Barry, a rebel song (author unknown) from the 1920s; If We Only Had Old Ireland Over Here, an Australian adaptation of the 1913 Frank Gillen composition If They’d Only Move Old Ireland Over Here; and Patsy Fagan, originally written and composed by Thomas Patrick Keenan, and published in 1913. John Keenan also performed It’s a Great Day for the Irish, written in 1940 by Roger Edens for the film version of George M. Cohan’s Broadway musical Little Nellie Kelly, in which it was sung by Judy Garland (who was one-quarter Irish through her maternal grandmother, Eva Fitzpatrick).
Aboard the cabin cruiser in Act Two, David Kelly as Con and Maire Hastings as Moira sang Johnny Come Down to Hilo, a sea shanty that appears to have developed from an American folk song dating back at least as far as the mid-19th century. The earliest written version appears in a 1914 collection, English Folk Chanteys, compiled by Cecil Sharp, in which the song is referred to as O Johnny Come to Hilo. According to Stan Hugill, a British folk music performer, artist and sea music historian known as the “Last Working Shantyman”, the tune is Irish in origin and its lyrics are a combination of African-American catchphrases and minstrel ditties, together with bits and pieces from other shanties, including Poor Old Man and The Gal with the Blue Dress. Hilo has been variously assumed to mean the seaport of that name on Hawaii or the port city of Ilo in Peru, though some of the earliest known antecedents of the song give the refrain as “Johnny come down de hollow”. There are many variants of Johnny Come Down to Hilo, and the one that appears in the rehearsal script opens with a racist lyric, “I never seen the like since I was born / Of a big buck [N-word] with de sea boots on”. Other iterations refer instead to “A big buck sailor”, “A railroad navvy” or even “An Arkansas farmer”, all of them with their sea boots on.
Library music used in the episode included Noble Personage, written and performed on the organ by Andrew Fenner on a 1964 recording (KPM 171), and the easy listening track Morning Light, composed by Ronald Binge (Mozart Edition ME 544). These were presumably heard playing on Con’s ancient radio during Act Two.
When It’s a Terrible Way to Be aired against a BBC1 documentary about airships entitled Shadow in the Clouds on Monday 18 July 1966, it gained a TAM rating of 41 for Rediffusion and ranked equal fifth for the week in the London region. BBC1’s Friday night schedule continued to change, and this week included the American sitcom Green Acres, followed at 8.25 by Second Honeymoon, a one-off comedy starring Arthur Askey, allowing Public Eye to be rated equal tenth nationally.
The script was rubber stamped as having been received by ABPC’s export sales division on 6 April 1966 (a Wednesday).
Pub singer John Keenan performed numerous traditional Irish songs during scenes set in The Pride of Erin. These included the 19th-century ballad The Rose of Tralee, the authorship of which is contested but which was set to music by Charles William Glover in 1850; Kevin Barry, a rebel song (author unknown) from the 1920s; If We Only Had Old Ireland Over Here, an Australian adaptation of the 1913 Frank Gillen composition If They’d Only Move Old Ireland Over Here; and Patsy Fagan, originally written and composed by Thomas Patrick Keenan, and published in 1913. John Keenan also performed It’s a Great Day for the Irish, written in 1940 by Roger Edens for the film version of George M. Cohan’s Broadway musical Little Nellie Kelly, in which it was sung by Judy Garland (who was one-quarter Irish through her maternal grandmother, Eva Fitzpatrick).
Aboard the cabin cruiser in Act Two, David Kelly as Con and Maire Hastings as Moira sang Johnny Come Down to Hilo, a sea shanty that appears to have developed from an American folk song dating back at least as far as the mid-19th century. The earliest written version appears in a 1914 collection, English Folk Chanteys, compiled by Cecil Sharp, in which the song is referred to as O Johnny Come to Hilo. According to Stan Hugill, a British folk music performer, artist and sea music historian known as the “Last Working Shantyman”, the tune is Irish in origin and its lyrics are a combination of African-American catchphrases and minstrel ditties, together with bits and pieces from other shanties, including Poor Old Man and The Gal with the Blue Dress. Hilo has been variously assumed to mean the seaport of that name on Hawaii or the port city of Ilo in Peru, though some of the earliest known antecedents of the song give the refrain as “Johnny come down de hollow”. There are many variants of Johnny Come Down to Hilo, and the one that appears in the rehearsal script opens with a racist lyric, “I never seen the like since I was born / Of a big buck [N-word] with de sea boots on”. Other iterations refer instead to “A big buck sailor”, “A railroad navvy” or even “An Arkansas farmer”, all of them with their sea boots on.
Library music used in the episode included Noble Personage, written and performed on the organ by Andrew Fenner on a 1964 recording (KPM 171), and the easy listening track Morning Light, composed by Ronald Binge (Mozart Edition ME 544). These were presumably heard playing on Con’s ancient radio during Act Two.
When It’s a Terrible Way to Be aired against a BBC1 documentary about airships entitled Shadow in the Clouds on Monday 18 July 1966, it gained a TAM rating of 41 for Rediffusion and ranked equal fifth for the week in the London region. BBC1’s Friday night schedule continued to change, and this week included the American sitcom Green Acres, followed at 8.25 by Second Honeymoon, a one-off comedy starring Arthur Askey, allowing Public Eye to be rated equal tenth nationally.
Home and Away
Though the episode was set in Birmingham, location filming took place near Teddington, using 35mm equipment on Wednesday 27 April 1966. This covered scenes on a street and in an alleyway (for Marker arriving at the hotel in Act One), the exterior of the pub and a nearby passageway at night (Marker following Barney and Con near the end of Act One), the cabin cruiser exterior at night (Barney climbing aboard in Act Two and Marker seeing the vessel through Con’s window towards the end of the same act), and the tenement exterior at night (Marker escorting Mr and Mrs Gannon into the building and Willie following them a moment later in Act Three).
It is possible that part of the passageway sequence (in which Marker is beaten up by Barney and Con) was recorded in the studio. The scene headed “EXT. PASSAGEWAY. NIGHT. (FILM)” in the rehearsal script only shows Marker following Barney and Con into the passageway. The next scene, which includes the fight, is headed “EXT. PASSAGEWAY. NIGHT.”, notably without the addendum “(FILM)”. Alternatively, the scene break may simply indicate a slight change of location, from outside the passageway to within it.
On the same day as filming, Jim Norton posed for a photocall as Michael Gannon to provide the shot of the missing person given to Marker by Mr and Mrs Gannon at the end of Act One.
It is possible that part of the passageway sequence (in which Marker is beaten up by Barney and Con) was recorded in the studio. The scene headed “EXT. PASSAGEWAY. NIGHT. (FILM)” in the rehearsal script only shows Marker following Barney and Con into the passageway. The next scene, which includes the fight, is headed “EXT. PASSAGEWAY. NIGHT.”, notably without the addendum “(FILM)”. Alternatively, the scene break may simply indicate a slight change of location, from outside the passageway to within it.
On the same day as filming, Jim Norton posed for a photocall as Michael Gannon to provide the shot of the missing person given to Marker by Mr and Mrs Gannon at the end of Act One.
Many a Slip
Con’s Handy Dictionary of Famous Names might not be all it’s cracked up to be. In Act Two of the script, Con claims that George Armstrong Custer lived from 1839 to 1874. In fact, the US military commander was killed on Sunday 25 June 1876, while leading the 7th Cavalry Regiment at the Battle of the Little Bighorn against a coalition of Native American tribes in the Territory of Montana – an event that became known as Custer’s Last Stand. This has been corrected in the detailed synopsis.
Who Wants to Be Told Bad News?
Promoting It’s a Terrible Way to Be, the London edition of TV Times (16–22 July 1966) carried a full-page colour photograph (see above) of Alfred Burke as Marker on a flight of stairs. “When Frank Marker climbs the stairs to a strange door, you might expect him to fight if he had to,” observed the caption writer. “But not Alfred Burke, who plays the private detective in Public Eye.” “I am a pacifist,” explained the actor. “Force has solved few problems. Strength doesn’t prove you right, just stronger.” However, his son Jacob had recently become fascinated by firearms as a result of watching American Civil War films, so Burke had also developed an interest in order to please him. “But,” he emphasised, “I try to steer Jacob’s interest to their historical aspects.”
On Monday 18 July 1966, the Daily Mirror published a picture (see near right) of Carmen Dene, who played the barmaid at The Pride of Erin. It was reported that the model and actress “makes her TV debut in Public Eye”, and the story was subsequently picked up by Staffordshire’s Evening Sentinel (see far right) the following Saturday. Actually, Dene had already had a number of small roles on television, including in The Sunday-Night Play and The Plane Makers in 1963, The Wednesday Play and the BBC1 sitcom The Airbase in 1965, as well as ABC’s Armchair Theatre (Man Without a Mortgage) and The Avengers (Honey for the Prince) in March 1966. |
Following criticisms levelled at British screenwriters by ATV managing director Lew Grade, who had been favouring American writers for his film series, John Lucarotti, the public relations officer of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, wrote a letter to Television Today, which was published on Thursday 21 July. Pointing out that film series were not primarily produced for home audiences but with overseas markets – including, crucially, a sale to an American network – firmly in mind, Lucarotti added, “if Mr Grade doubts that British writers can give him the standard of scripts required for international success with television film series, let him look at some of the taped series which audiences at home watch”. By way of examples, he cited ATV’s own The Power Game, the BBC’s The Troubleshooters, Granada’s The Liars (a series of tall tales – three or four per episode – based on classic short stories), the Rediffusion anthology show Blackmail and ABC’s Public Eye. Coincidentally, the latter three series all had episodes written or co-written by Hugh Leonard.
TV World (23–29 July 1966) publicised It’s a Terrible Way to Be with an article entitled Plenty of Work for Irish Commuters in the Series and Serials section of the magazine, along with photographs of Marker with Con in the pub and Michael at the funeral parlour. “The cast of seven actors and actresses in Public Eye constitutes director Guy Verney’s ‘Irish repertory company’,” explained writer Hugh Leonard. “Guy and I have done a number of plays over the years, for programmes like Armchair Theatre, with the same actors. There are not that many good actors in Ireland and we seem to go back again and again for the same people.” Marie Kean, David Kelly, Maire Hastings and John Keenan would all appear in Leonard’s Armchair Theatre presentation Great Big Blonde, which was recorded at around the same time as the Public Eye episode and broadcast on Saturday 13 August 1966. “I prefer to have my plays performed by actors from Ireland,” the writer added. “Those actors living in England tend to become quaint, like [the stage, film and television actor] Barry Fitzgerald.”
“Alfred Burke’s interpretation of Frank Marker, the seedy but sturdily ethical private detective in Public Eye, is one of the most pleasing characterisations to be seen in any TV drama series at the present time,” wrote ‘K. H.’ of the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph on Monday 25 July. “Without labouring the histrionics, he provides a thoroughly believable character who is as well aware of his own weaknesses as the failings of the people with whom he comes into contact in the course of his far from salubrious work. Saturday’s episode, It’s a Terrible Way to Be, told a tantalising tale that held the interest throughout, so much so that we could forgive scriptwriter Hugh Leonard for leading us up the garden path to a deceiving climax.” Summarising the plot of “this intriguing yarn”, the reviewer concluded that it “had more than a few sly digs at the idiosyncrasies of the Irish.”
Viewer H. Bradley of Glasgow also approved – though it was a backhanded compliment, to say the least. “At last!” wrote the armchair critic, in a letter that appeared in the TV Comment column of Lanarkshire newspaper The Sunday Post on 31 July. “We’ve had an episode that wasn’t totally predictable.”
TV World (23–29 July 1966) publicised It’s a Terrible Way to Be with an article entitled Plenty of Work for Irish Commuters in the Series and Serials section of the magazine, along with photographs of Marker with Con in the pub and Michael at the funeral parlour. “The cast of seven actors and actresses in Public Eye constitutes director Guy Verney’s ‘Irish repertory company’,” explained writer Hugh Leonard. “Guy and I have done a number of plays over the years, for programmes like Armchair Theatre, with the same actors. There are not that many good actors in Ireland and we seem to go back again and again for the same people.” Marie Kean, David Kelly, Maire Hastings and John Keenan would all appear in Leonard’s Armchair Theatre presentation Great Big Blonde, which was recorded at around the same time as the Public Eye episode and broadcast on Saturday 13 August 1966. “I prefer to have my plays performed by actors from Ireland,” the writer added. “Those actors living in England tend to become quaint, like [the stage, film and television actor] Barry Fitzgerald.”
“Alfred Burke’s interpretation of Frank Marker, the seedy but sturdily ethical private detective in Public Eye, is one of the most pleasing characterisations to be seen in any TV drama series at the present time,” wrote ‘K. H.’ of the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph on Monday 25 July. “Without labouring the histrionics, he provides a thoroughly believable character who is as well aware of his own weaknesses as the failings of the people with whom he comes into contact in the course of his far from salubrious work. Saturday’s episode, It’s a Terrible Way to Be, told a tantalising tale that held the interest throughout, so much so that we could forgive scriptwriter Hugh Leonard for leading us up the garden path to a deceiving climax.” Summarising the plot of “this intriguing yarn”, the reviewer concluded that it “had more than a few sly digs at the idiosyncrasies of the Irish.”
Viewer H. Bradley of Glasgow also approved – though it was a backhanded compliment, to say the least. “At last!” wrote the armchair critic, in a letter that appeared in the TV Comment column of Lanarkshire newspaper The Sunday Post on 31 July. “We’ve had an episode that wasn’t totally predictable.”
Nobody Wants to Know
At the funeral parlour in Act One, Michael quotes 1 Corinthians 15:55: “O death, where is thy sting?” In the biblical passage, the text continues, “O grave, where is thy victory?” Here Saint Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, is taunting death by describing the moment when, upon Christ’s return, every one of his believers, both living and dead, will be transformed into glorified bodies to spend eternity with God.
In The Pride of Erin pub, Marker mentions John Ford (1894–1973), an American film director and producer of Irish descent. Renowned for his Westerns, such as Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache (1948), The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Ford also worked in many other genres. He won Academy Awards for Best Director for The Informer (a 1935 thriller, adapted from the 1925 novel of the same name by Irish novelist Liam O’Flaherty, which takes place during the aftermath of the Irish War of Independence), The Grapes of Wrath (1940, based on the 1939 John Steinbeck novel about the Great Depression), How Green Was My Valley (1941, adapted from Richard Llewellyn’s 1939 novel concerning a Welsh mining family) and The Quiet Man (a 1952 romantic comedy-drama based on a 1933 short story by Irish author Maurice Walsh). Con mistakenly assumes that Marker is referring to the English dramatist John Ford (1586–1639), best known for his tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (first published in 1633).
In Act Two, Con informs Michael that he and Barney have put Marker “on National Assistance for a while.” National Assistance was the main means-tested benefit in the UK between 1948 and 1966, paid to people on low incomes. In November 1966, it was replaced by Supplementary Benefit, another means-tested payment, which, as its name suggests, was intended to top up or supplement other benefits.
As one might expect, the characters in Hugh Leonard’s script use a number of Irish slang terms, including the following:
In The Pride of Erin pub, Marker mentions John Ford (1894–1973), an American film director and producer of Irish descent. Renowned for his Westerns, such as Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache (1948), The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Ford also worked in many other genres. He won Academy Awards for Best Director for The Informer (a 1935 thriller, adapted from the 1925 novel of the same name by Irish novelist Liam O’Flaherty, which takes place during the aftermath of the Irish War of Independence), The Grapes of Wrath (1940, based on the 1939 John Steinbeck novel about the Great Depression), How Green Was My Valley (1941, adapted from Richard Llewellyn’s 1939 novel concerning a Welsh mining family) and The Quiet Man (a 1952 romantic comedy-drama based on a 1933 short story by Irish author Maurice Walsh). Con mistakenly assumes that Marker is referring to the English dramatist John Ford (1586–1639), best known for his tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (first published in 1633).
In Act Two, Con informs Michael that he and Barney have put Marker “on National Assistance for a while.” National Assistance was the main means-tested benefit in the UK between 1948 and 1966, paid to people on low incomes. In November 1966, it was replaced by Supplementary Benefit, another means-tested payment, which, as its name suggests, was intended to top up or supplement other benefits.
As one might expect, the characters in Hugh Leonard’s script use a number of Irish slang terms, including the following:
- To be codded is to be kidded, tricked, have your leg pulled or have a joke played on you.
- Cute means shrewd or cunning.
- Gas means fun (in the context used in this episode), or someone or something that is funny, astonishing or entertaining.
- A hawk (usually preceded by an adjective) is a person.
- Jaded means exhausted, very tired.
- A louser is a mean, nasty person.
- A rip refers to a young person who is naughty, obnoxious or mischievous.
- A sleeveen is a sly, smooth-tongued person, a rogue or a trickster.
With thanks to Jonny Davies, Andrew Pixley, Barbara Toft, 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.