The History of Mr Polly ITV1, 9pm
Someone, somewhere in executive tellyland had plainly developed cold feet about The History of Mr Polly, which arrived on screen four months late. ITV's version of H G Wells's minor serio-comic Edwardian classic was due to go out on Boxing Day until pulled from the schedules without explanation.
Perhaps TV bosses feared the wrath of Wellsian literary purists, who have consistently complained that Lee Evans, playing the drama's underdog hero, Alfred Polly, is much too much the knockabout prole.
Then again, no TV exec ever paid any heed to literary purists, as the latter are mostly blinkered, vinegar-faced, nit-picking plonkers who do nothing but complain - as I know from having incurred such folks' wrath in reviewing Jane Eyre (at this point, allow me to wave two fingers at all the blinkered, vinegar-faced, nit-picking plonkers who run the website bronteblog).
Sadly, the truth was more mundane: TV bosses realised their History of Mr Polly was slow and meandering, and it misunderstood what the book was about. As a result, poor Lee Evans (a comedy deity whose face and movements you can't help loving) was left with little to do that wasn't overblown comic mugging.
Slow and meandering? The History of Mr Polly wasted 40 minutes establishing with numbing veracity how stultified and straitjacketed its central figure felt in his marital life. Proceedings should have begun bang on that 40-minute mark much more profitably - and at an involving clip.
Yup, we should have started with the stinging little rebuff that Mr Polly's shrewish wife, cousin Miriam, administered as he sought to convince her of the attainable paradise that lay ahead just over the threshold of his new, ultimately doomed small-town drapery business.
"Our new lives!" Polly eagerly beamed, staring at his shop. "Bacon for breakfast! Muffins for tea! And long walks in the country of a Sunday morning!"
Miriam's prim riposte - "It doesn't look well to go traipsing about the country on Sundays" - was the one memorable line uttered by Lee Evans's feistiest co-star, Anne-Marie Duff. From here on in, Lee was on his own.
Sure, he had wur ain Julie Graham with him, playing Sussex pub landlady Nancy Potter. Unfortunately, all Julie was required to do was either look stern or vaguely scared, while muttering portentous stuff such as "'Snot what a man's 'appened to do makes 'im truly bad, it's destroyin' 'is self-respect does the mischief" in mild working-class cockney.
And here, in this re-routing of H G Wells's presentation of class, some ITV drama wallah made their biggest mistake. Shopkeeper Alfred Polly was plainly from the inferior trade class - but he wasn't working class.
As a novel, The History of Mr Polly addressed the emergence of a bookish, cerebral, dreamily aspirant middle-class, who didn't want their education wasted on becoming quotidian wage slaves. Alfred Polly was a man in love with fancy words, the interior life of the undergraduate and living every day as if it was a holiday from commerce.
Sadly, whenever Lee Evans was required to utter one of Polly's coinages - "I'm not one of your Herculaceous sort; nothing very wonderful bicepitally" - he never quite sounded as though anyone had told him what it meant.
What else was wrong? Baddy Uncle Jim never frightened, merely looking like an unshaven Mr Bean with dyspepsia. When Polly met Nancy for the first time, you could see the foam-covered boom-mike at the top of the shot - in 1910.
Speaking as a blinkered, vinegar-faced, nit-picking plonker who's a purist fan of The History of Mr Polly, this could have been a rival to the brilliant 1949 version, starring John Mills. But it wasn't. Booo!
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