Last year I watched a BBC dramatisation of doomed comedian Tony Hancock's affair with his best friend John LeMesurier's wife Joan, little realising that this was the second time the urbane, slightly effete but popular actor, later best known as Sgt Wilson in the long running comedy series "Dad's Army, had been cuckolded. Even more surprising was to learn that his first wife was the apparently sex-less, matronly Hattie Jacques and that her affair, as well as being torrid in the extreme, was with a much younger, handsome and as the phrase is today "ripped" man, her driver John Schofield. Worse yet, she went along with her lover's idea of moving LeMesurier up to the attic room of their marital home so that Schofeld could move full time into her bed and even let LeMesurier take the blame for their inevitable divorce to protect her family image from being tarnished.
Such a remarkable story, featuring the lives of two of Britain's best-loved actors of the 60's and 70's, was always going to have a high curiosity value bordering on prurience but failed, for me, by not taking sides and playing it all too neutrally. Perhaps this was due to pressure from the family and friends of the late Ms Jacques, I would imagine, but in trying to dress her liaison with the otherwise spivvy, on-the-make Schofield as some grand love affair, both are let off far too lightly. Remember that this triangle was played out with two young children in attendance too and unsavoury doesn't even begin to describe the showbiz goings-on here. We're almost directed to have sympathy for the self-deprecating jolly fat lady getting herself a young bloke and her emotional conflict in deciding which of the two Johns to plump (sorry) for when in fact her complicity in the goings-on here is morally reprehensible.
Thus I found it an awkward watch and came away from it by not respecting or liking any of the three leads, even LeMesurier, so much is his "door-mat" impression played out. The acting is good however, Ruth Jones doing a not quite lady-like enough impression of Jacques but otherwise carrying off the physical and vocal transformation well. Robert Bathurst doesn't look much like LeMesurier facially but gets his shrug-shoulders world- weariness down-pat, while Aidan Turner is excellent as the vile Schofield, the unwelcome cuckoo in the nest. The dialogue I did find to be characterful and subtle, histrionics avoided as the situation progresses.
Life-styles of the rich and famous are always morbidly inviting but on the whole I wish I'd looked the other way, rather like Hattie should have before she started on her ill- considered affair.
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