May Contain Nuts

“Keith… what does it mean, Keith?”

This single line of dialogue was the first I knew of Mike Leigh’s classic BBC play Nuts in May, delivered in a surprisingly accurate impersonation of Alison Steadman’s wheedling tones by a (male) friend of mine. He was wont to quote chunks of the play’s dialogue at appropriate moments, usually on car journeys. I hadn’t the slightest idea what it was all about until he explained it to me.

Play for Today was a series I never bothered with, indeed tended to avoid. It was angst-ridden, issue-driven, bleak and contemporary – at least that’s the way I saw it. Even today, I find it hard to work up any real enthusiasm for the long running strand of BBC television plays, with one or two notable exceptions. My aversion to the series meant that I failed to see Nuts in May on any of its original three broadcasts – 1976, 1977 and 1982 – following which it was left to gather dust in the archive for over a decade.

By the time I finally got to see it – as part of an evening of television curated by Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer – I already knew about half the dialogue, courtesy of my friend’s imitations, and I was intrigued to see it done for real. The plot, such as it is, needs little or no explanation – a self righteous couple go on a camping holiday in Dorset. The names of the two protagonists, Keith Pratt and his wife Candice-Marie, tell us all we need to know about their personalities. They are, simply, a pair of Pratts. Keith, memorably portrayed by Roger Sloman, is a neurotic obsessive with a controlling personality, who has planned their holiday down to the smallest detail. When a road closure scuppers his plans to drive to Lulworth Cove, he won’t alter the schedule and go tomorrow instead: ‘we’re going to a quarry tomorrow,’ he patiently explains to Candice-Marie.

Candice-Marie, on the other hand, is a drippy passive-aggressive who can’t pronounce her ‘R’s and nags at Keith constantly. When a fellow camper, Ray, pitches nearby with a noisy radio, Keith feigns ignorance and tries to read a book. But Candice-Marie, like the externalised voice of his own righteous indignation, keeps urging him to do something about it. When Keith’s efforts come to nothing, Candice-Marie still won’t let it go: ‘he’s just ignored you, Keith.’

The pair are vegetarians, of course, and earnest proselytisers of their ‘better’ way of living. They chew their food 72 times – although, as Keith explains when Candice-Marie takes less time to masticate a mushroom, “the important thing is to use your discretion.” When Ray is finally invited over for a cup of tea, Keith lectures him on the various types of sugar: “glucose, sucrose and frucrose. Did you know that, Ray?” His tiny slip – frucrose instead of fructose – reveals that Keith isn’t quite as knowledgable as he likes to think he is. He takes a keen interest in the weather, and can later be heard marvelling at the ‘nimbo cumulus’ clouds towering above the landscape. He means ‘cumulo-nimbus’ and he’s wrong in any case. When he assures Candice-Marie that the rainy weather is just passing showers from low stratus that will be over soon, it’s a safe bet that the rain won’t stop. He’s the type that knows everything but understands nothing.

Having conceived a manic jealousy when he sees Candice-Marie visiting Ray to innocently show him some pebbles collected from the beach, Keith’s true nature begins to show itself. When Candice-Marie won’t stop talking about Ray’s problems with his college course, Keith angrily stomps across to Ray’s tent to demand he explain things for himself. Candice-Marie insists that Keith apologises, which he eventually does – in the middle of the night, shining a torch through the canvas of Ray’s tent. This is a man who, in modern parlance, has issues.

A power relationship has now been established, and Keith begins to take control, clearly in his element. The play’s best remembered scene has Keith and Candice-Marie coercing Ray into singing along with their inane ditty about visiting the zoo. Keith laboriously explains the structure of the simple song, leaning in manically towards Ray every time his turn to sing comes around: ‘ready Ray? Your turn now!’ Meanwhile, the camera cuts tighter and tighter in on Ray, so that the audience really gets to share his squirming embarrasment.

With this, the play’s first sequence reaches a peak. Candice-Marie and Keith have attained a kind of simple nirvana, strumming away together in a rendition of Careless Love. What can possibly go wrong? Plenty. They haven’t even finished the song before a motorcyle arrives in the field, ridden by a pair of cartoonish Brummies, ‘Finger’ and his girlfriend Honky. Despite there being acres of open space in the camp site, they elect to pitch their tent only a few feet away from Keith and Candice-Marie (who have already moved once to avoid Ray’s radio).

Finger and Honky are the polar opposites of the Pratts. They put up their tent inside out, and have less than no idea about the niceties of camping. Finger is surprised when he finds the ground wet the following morning. ‘It’s the dew’, Ray explains. ‘Lot of ‘em about,’ laughs Finger, in a joke I’d like to bet gets cut from any future BBC broadcasts. Morning brings the clash of values between the Pratts and their new neighbours to a head. Finger goes off gathering wood with the intention of getting a fire going. Keith attempts to advise him – ‘for your own good’ – that open fires are not permitted on the camp site. When Finger ignores him, the situation spirals out of control. All pretence at civilized behaviour is stripped away as Keith grabs a huge branch and goes after Finger, bellowing “I’ll knock your head off!” The pair have become cave men, arguing over the right to gather wood and make fire. Deep down, behind his veneer of thoughtful, civilized existence, Keith is just like any other animal – fiercely territorial.

Ironically, for all his insistence on upholding the letter of the law, it is ultimately Keith who falls foul of the boys in blue when a bored patrolman decides to look over his elderly Morris Minor. The spare wheel is found to be in a bald condition. “You know that’s an offence?” the policeman advises. By this time, the Pratts have been driven off their original camp site, and ultimately end up in a field belonging to a dairy farmer. While Candice-Marie strums a ditty about litter and pollution on her cheap guitar, Keith goes off with a shovel to do his toilet. Our last glimpse of him is as he crosses a barbed wire fence into a field inhabited by pigs – a final metaphor for all that has unfolded during the past hour and twenty minutes.

In the 70s, when Nuts in May was filmed, proto ‘new age’ types like the Pratts were an easy target, with their obsessively healthy lifestyle and rigidly middle class morality. A similar family was depicted in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, and viewers were left in no doubt as to the absurdity of their priggish behaviour. Mike Leigh’s attitude toward his own characters is crystal clear. They are laughable, ludicrous, comic stereotypes. Leigh would explore similar territory the following year with Abigail’s Party, again featuring Alison Steadman (Leigh’s then wife) playing a middle class grotesque of an altogether different stripe.

Watching Nuts in May in 2023, it’s easier to find oneself in agreement with some of the Pratts’ values. Keith is right to be upset at the failure of others to consider anyone else, an attitude that has become endemic in modern society, helped along by the ‘me-first-and-screw-you’ mindset that emerged from the Thatcher years. These days, Candice-Marie would probably be singing songs about climate change. One can’t imagine the Thunberg generation finding anything to laugh at here. Po-faced eco friendly attitudes are no longer quite the ‘legitimate target’ they must have appeared in 1975 when the play was written, and coincidence or not, it’s now almost ten years since Nuts in May last had an outing on BBC television. One senses the Corporation’s own values are closer, in the twenty first century, to those of Keith and Candice-Marie, and that should the play be broadcast again, it will come prefaced with the now obligatory warning about ‘attitudes and language of its time.’ May contain nuts, indeed...