Dull Drama

 

There’s a genre of television that you just don’t see any more, yet in the 1970s it was all over the small screen. I’m talking about the kind of low-key, contemporary drama, often with comic overtones, that occupied the hinterland between soap and the single play. I’m just reacquainting myself with a prime example, in the shape of Thames Television’s Moody and Pegg, which ran for two short series in the summers of 1974 and 1975. I call it ‘Dull Drama’ – a contradition in terms which I use not entirely pejoratively, ‘dull’ referring to the everyday, contemporary setting favoured by series like this.

How does one recognise Dull Drama? For a start, it was always set in the present day. It was shot on videotape, often going so far as to include VT exteriors (always the mark of a low-budget production); it was stagey, studio bound and talky. And not a lot happened.

On the whole, I never bothered with this kind of television, which for some reason seemed to belong mostly to ITV. It was middle class and suburban in its settings and attitudes, and usually focused on characters who were always slightly larger than life in situations that were almost but not quite believable. Other prime examples include The Crezz (1976), an anthology series which focused on the residents of a ‘typical’ London street; Red Letter Day, a series of one-off dramas centred on pivotal moments in its characters’ lives; and Village Hall, which used the titular location as the focus for a series of light comic dramas.

Dull Drama saw itself as a cut above soap, and had aspirations towards the single plays that were pre-eminent on television during the 1960s and 70s. Many of its writers and producers came from a single play background, but the typical Dull Drama fought shy of the emotional highs of the single play. If anyone could be said to have invented the genre, then it would have to be Jack Rosenthal, who came up through the ranks at Granada Television, starting out on Coronation Street before branching out into comedy and what might best be described as ‘thoughtful’ drama. Dull Drama avoids the momentous, and instead drills down into the minutiae of its characters’ mundane lives.

Moody and Pegg was the creation of writers Donald Churchill and Julia Jones. Churchill divided his time between acting and writing, and had contributed scripts to many television series, often with a comedic slant. He was, regrettably, responsible for the worst ever episode of The Sweeney, Hearts and Minds, which became a comic turn for Morecambe and Wise; and he also wrote for two of the Dull Dramas mentioned above – Village Hall and Red Letter Day. Julia Jones started her TV career in the same year as Churchill and was active until 2001, turning in numerous one-off plays during the 60s and 70s and, like Churchill, contributing a single script to Granada’s Village Hall.

Moody and Pegg is perhaps the high watermark (or should that be mid tidemark?) of Dull Drama. Its setting is urban and contemporary, its attitudes anything but. The comic drama centres on unwilling flatmates Roland Moody (randy, dandy antique dealer) and Daphne Pegg (dowdy northern spinster just arrived in London) who are thrown together when they end up accidentally renting the same flat. Each has a valid lease, so neither party is in the wrong. While the unlikely legal mess is sorted out, they agree to share the flat, with, it must be said, mostly predictable results. It’s not unlike a diluted Man About the House, amiable, mildly amusing, featuring the kind of characters you know don’t really exist outside of comedy drama. They talk endlessly to themselves as they potter about, revealing their personalities for the viewers’ benefit: and they never quite manage to break out of speaking in the voice of their authors. Over on the BBC, Roy Clarke built a career on the same kind of mildly contrived settings and characters. 

ITV can’t have had great expectations of Moody and Pegg, as it was scheduled during the summer, traditionally a fallow period for new series, when fewer people would be watching. It was well promoted in the TVTimes, even making it onto the cover for the week of 10-16 August 1974.

The series must have done relatively well in its unpromising slot, as it returned the following year, at exactly the same time, with a second series beginning on Thursday 24 July. This time, it got a mention in my diary. I’d seen an episode, more by accident than design, in the appropriately dreary surroundings of a seaside guest house TV lounge. Maybe that’s why it clicked? Either way, I found something in the low-key comic drama that appealed to me sufficiently to warrant tuning in for the second series when it showed up. Dull Drama somehow seemed the ideal thing to watch on weekday evenings during the school summer holidays, but aside from this one brief interlude, I never took much interest in the many other examples that peppered the schedules duering the mid-70s. As a rule, the TVTimes preview would be enough to put me off watching. 

Dull Drama – or to be channel specific, Dull ITV Drama – was a mainstay of the Network DVD label, and our releases allowed me to catch up on a few examples from the 1970s that I’d missed at the time. I say this, yet the titles have mostly lain unwatched on the shelf for the past decade or so. I’ve only just removed the shrink wrap from another example, Nightingale’s Boys, which may well prove to be the dullest of the lot. An anthology series in all but name, this seven-part drama, first airing in January 1975, focused on a group of schoolboys, the so-called ‘class of 49’ now come to middle age and dealing with the varied emotional and marital crises that mid life brings with it. The scripts came from various hands, including the ever reliable Jack Rosenthal, but on the evidence of the first episode, it’s unlikely to be high drama. Long-serving schoolmaster Bill ‘Tweety’ Nightingale encounters one of his old pupils and is inspired to reunite his class of ‘49. Each subsequent episode then focuses on one of the group. The first, penned by Arthur Hopcraft, does the heavy lifting of setting up the series, but frankly, not very much happens. ‘Tweety’ meets an old pupil and arranges a dinner party. He visits the daughter of his estranged wife, and has a mild contretemps with his live-in lover (Pauline Yates) when she announces she’s applied for a job in Slough, prompting ‘Tweety’ to quote Betjeman’s famous line at her. As Dull Drama goes, Nightingale’s Boys is entirely true to type: contemporary setting, middle class characters, nothing really dramatic going on – and lots and lots of talking.

Series like this really evoke the time and place in which they were made, to say nothing of the white middle class values that suffused all British television in the 60s and 70s. They belong to the age of studio-bound videotaped production, and have much in common with the single plays of the same era. Many of them were, indeed, single plays in all but name, wrapped up in anthology packages to appeal to an audience who would tune in for a series but had no interest in the heavy drama strands like Armchair Theatre or Play For Today. They serve also as a reminder that British television production had its roots in the theatre rather than film, and would not entirely throw off the conventions and manners of the stage until much later. 

If you want ‘slow’ television that evokes the rather drab domestic asethetics of the 1970s, then this is the genre for you. To subvert an old police recruitment slogan: Dull it most certainly is.