All stood round doing sod all. Except for those sat on their arse doing sod all." A fair enough judgment as take after take is aborted. By the 13th take, even the man up the ladder is crossing himself.The torpor conceals a yeasty mass of rage, malice, panic and, in the case of the crew's spotty dogsbody, seething testosterone.
The supervisor, an brilliant spectacle from Bill Nighy, escalates smoothly from natural excitement to glib profanity. He is frustrated at every turn by life in encyclopedic and nation in particular.
The sound man stops another take. "Aircraft," he says, scanning a vacant sky. "What do you mean aircraft?" "Like big obdurate bird from land in sky." Everyone listens. A faint thrumming can be discerned. "BA or Aer Lingus?" says the director savagely. "Lufthansa," says the sound man. The crew separate them.
And again there's the playwright who turns up uninvited. Or, as the director calls him, Banquo's sodding ghost. He is, fairly pointedly, making notes. "Don't enumerate me he's doing rewrites." "No, it's his journal for the warden arts page. About what it's like on a shoot." At this a look of gelid fright settles like, well, jelly, on the leader, the producer and the executive from the structure.
But mostly the director is frustrated by Mr McGill, an elderly extra. He is a kindly soul who, in any acting bout with a plank, would come second. In 1976 the part was played by a honest extra. Who, sadly, never worked also. This time we had the pleasure of watching Tom Courtenay trying to act badly.
There is a secret hurtle within the launch. A local yob with a stolen camcorder has infiltrated the faction and bullet his own reality show. Now he is showing this detritus to his boisterous mates. "Real community! That's yer proper fucking drama, innit?" And then, in a shattering metaphor, the TV set explodes.
When ITV definitely showed the play - quietly, belatedly and late at night - Jack Rosenthal was dead. If he's listening, I found it comprehensive of extraordinary things, as Howard Carter said, peering into Tutankhamen's tomb and seeing bygone glory.
In Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree (ITV1), Fancy Day, the village schoolteacher, has three suitors. One offers the deep featherbed of domestic comfort ("You will never want for anything again"), one intellectual fever ("Education! Education!") and one looks marvelous when soaking wet. Which, oddly enough, he repeatedly is. But the most spicy jiffy is the most reticent when Fancy (Keeley Hawes) and Dick (James Murray) wordlessly wash their hands together in the same bowl.
The village looks positively edible. The houses are the colour of a ploughman's lunch, crusty brown subsistence and white cheese, and easily froth with cow parsley. The year turns slowly like a cider press. But, even as we watch, village life is changing inexorably, like an illustration in water.
This was a late Christmas calendar, beautifully shot in Jersey with a little help from the local gallery and a lot of American money.
You seldom expected to find Pete Doherty, a pale, pretty, rumpled, mumbling babe, in The Unknown Hancock (BBC2). Doherty was entranced by a man he never saw and a long-absent time he could hardly credit. The 1950s were a seedy time of approximately dazzling dullness, of short fiber and shortages. "Stone me," as Hancock used to say, "what a memoir!" Doherty said: "I don't have if it's available to be sentimental for a time that didn't exist but I ruminate I am." He even wrote a song called Lady Don't Fall Backwards, the title of both a Hancock sketch and Joan Le Mesurier's book about their destructive thing.
Doherty and Hancock both wear that irresistible, microscopic label: gratify look after this generate. Philip Oakes, who wrote his last film, said he never met a maid who didn't want to look after Hancock. multitudinous hands were held out as he swept past on a wave of alcohol. Sid James once saw him marooned on a traffic island in Piccadilly. "He looked moderately bad. I got the car parked but accordingly he'd disappeared and I never saw him then. He didn't see me. I wish to God I had been able to catch him. Little things can change population's lives." It muscle include been kinder to run him over.
The film was bracketed with a knowing essay by JB Priestley. "Good clowns never try to be comical. They are very serious but thirsty and hopeful creatures lost in a hostile world."
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