This six-part drama series from London Weekend Television aired on Friday nights in May and June 1973 and presented plays adapted from English short stories written in the 1920s and 1930s.
Writers included Richard Aldington (“Now Lies She There” and “Yes, Aunt”), Sir Osbert Sitwell (“The Greeting”), Evelyn Waugh (“Mr Loveday’s Little Outing”), Jean Rhys (“Voyage in the Dark”) and Sir Hugh Walpole (“The Silver Mask”).
The first play, “Now Lies She There” (11 May 1973), featured Constance Lechdale (Sarah Badel), a gay young thing of the 1930s, who swings happily along with her own set of values – until she meets a lion-tamer’s assistant called Eddie (Stuart Wilson).
“Yes Aunt” – dramatised by Douglas Livingstone – was the tale of Oswald Carstairs (Richard Briers), a middle-class young man with a distinct flair for doing nothing who is advised by his Aunt Ursula (Fanny Rowe) to take up writing – an occupation considered eminently suitable for the idle.
Unfortunately, Carstairs is also incompetent, which undoubtedly accounts for the OBE he collects in government service during the war. He needs a wife to organise him. Needless to say, Aunt Ursula obliges and comes up with Julia (Susan Fleetwood).
In “The Greeting”, Nurse Gooch (Hannah Gordon) arrives at a country house to care for Mrs Tongue (Gwen Watford), the neurotic invalid wife of a tormented colonel (Robert Hardy).
“Mr Loveday’s Little Outing” (pictured above) presented the story of potty peer Lord Moping (John Le Mesurier), who tries to hang himself during one of his wife’s coffee mornings and has been put away, quite happily, in a private loony bin. There he is gently butlered by Mr Loveday (Ronald Fraser), a non-fee-paying fellow inmate who – despite having been inside for 35 years – still knows his station.
His Lordship’s teenage daughter Angela (Veronica Quilligan) visits and meets the faithful and gentle Loveday. Appalled at his continuing incarceration despite his obvious sanity, she engineers his release.
After farewell speeches and the presentation of a silver cigarette box from fond patients and staff, Loveday heads out into the big wide world beyond the iron gates. An hour later, he is blissfully back again and tenderly ministering to his old friends. All he wanted was a little outing – and to repeat the reason for his original committal: the strangling of a passing cyclist.
In “Voyage In The Dark”, young, vulnerable touring actress Anna Morgan (Jacqueline Tong) meets suave and prosperous City man Walter Jeffries (George Baker), who is good for a few laughs, a few meals and a few pounds. But Anna is too soft to milk him, and a casual liaison soon turns into a desperate, destructive affair of the heart. The episode ends with an abortion and the doctor saying, “She’ll be all right. Ready to start all over again in no time”.
In “The Silver Mask”, rich middle-aged spinster Sonia Herries (Joyce Redman) is walking home from a party when she is accosted by a young man named Henry Abbott (Scott Anthony) asking for money for his wife and child. Against her better judgement, he is soon instated as her secretary.
Events snowball: wife and child come to eat at her table, her maid leaves, her friends desert her, his family and friends move in, and it is all too much for her weak heart.
The cast of the hour-long dramas also included Zoë Wanamaker, Shirley Stelfox, Patricia Quinn, Richard Hurndall, Joyce Redman, Ruth Holden, Georgina Cookson and Christopher Benjamin.
Episodes
Now Lies She There | Yes, Aunt | The Greeting | Mr Loveday’s Little Outing | Voyage in the Dark | The Silver Mask
