HO-DE-HO

I’ve been watching my DVDs of ‘Hi-de-Hi’ again. I can’t bear much contemporary comedy, which seems to be just witless cruelty and scarcely funny at all, so the Maplin’s sitcom fills some dreary hours as the icicles hang like stalactites, if not stalagmites, from the gutters, and the snow lies almost two feet deep on the ground.
I love the Jeffrey Fairbrother episodes, and his hopeless relationship with the gorgeous and amorous Gladys Pugh. When she bursts into tears in front of camp comic Ted Bovis and declares her love for the hapless Entertainments Manager, it is as convincing as any soap drama.
Even in comedy there must be tension and conflict and putting a stuffy archaeologist in charge of holiday camp entertainment over the much better-qualified camp comic and then getting the chief Yellowcoat to fall for him so despairingly was such clever writing, and bound to add to the dramatic tension. Fairbrother is misguided enough to believe that the working-class punters who visit the camp would prefer weekly classical music recitations of Shostakovich to the knobbly knees contest. He is as suitable for the job as Brian Blessed would be playing Monsieur Hulot.

Fred Quilley smells of horses and Mr Partridge of liquor, and these two renegades have to share a chalet. Conflict again. Barry Stuart-Hargreaves loathes his co-dancer and wife Yvonne, a cold, frigid broom-handle of a woman who loathes the working-class and the conditions in the camp that the pair has to endure, for example having to ask permission to tack their tasteful wallpaper onto the chalet walls. Conflict heaped on conflict.

Then there is Peggy Ollerinshaw, the potty chalet-maid. Her desire to be a Yellowcoat is unquenchable and the way she is constantly rejected is heart-rending. She’s not the sharpest blade in the razor, either. When Joe Maplin is considering opening a holiday camp in the Bahamas and the staff discover that they may have the opportunity to obtain jobs there, sweet-natured Peggy says ‘I’ve never been to the Bananas.’
One of the funniest vignettes is when she meets Max Tewkesbury (Fairbrother’s estranged wife’s ex-lover, played by the brilliant John Fortune). She mistakes him for the new entertainments director, Glover, from Head Office. She collars him:
‘I want to be a Yellowcoat. I can do impressions, you know.’
‘Can you?’ (Tewkesbury is utterly bewildered by being accosted by the potty chalet-maid).
‘You bet. What’s this?’ (she screws her face up in what she takes to be a Marilyn Monroe pout, but her eyes cross with the effort).
Tewkesbury looks at her for several seconds before replying:
‘A goldfish?’

When Ted Bovis is heckled by a member of the audience for making an anti-Jewish joke, he complains to his sidekick Spike ‘He called me anti-semitic. I don’t even know what it means. I thought it was something they put down the drains.’

Thank you, Perry and Croft for writing situation comedy that is both funny, tense and poignant, something that is entirely lacking from ‘My Family’ and the other dross the TV companies churn out these days.