BLESS THIS HOUSE (1972)
The early 1970s saw a wave of successful British
sitcoms come to the big screen, and in 1972 the highly popular BLESS THIS HOUSE
joined them. The brainchild of Vince Powell and Harry Driver, creators of
eleven shows including the other 70s monster hit LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR, this show
about suburban familes lasted for six series on Thames TV.
For the cinema, they bolstered the comedy by bringing
in the CARRY ON team of producer Peter Rogers and director Gerald Thomas. This
influence is most obvious in the casting additions of the film series regulars
like Peter Butterworth, Terry Scott and June Whitfield to support the much-love
Sid James and most of the original sitcom family, but also the over-use of the
duck whistle to unsubtly hammer home a sight gag. It’s colourful, pleasant
enough and thankfully lacks the crass racism of LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR. The most
obvious change to fans of the TV show was the replacement of Robin Stewart as
Sid and Diana Coupland’s son Mike. He was unavailable due to a summer season
booking. Instead we have the likeable bundle of energy Robin Askwith, surely an icon of the 70s as
readily identifiable and nostalgic as Spangles and the Bay City Rollers, and
later to find infamy in the bawdy CONFESSIONS sex ‘comedies’.
Sid and Diane are the perfect TV suburban couple. She
gets her way around her husband, he displays the sexist, sarcastic curmudgeon
qualities which make an ideal foil to her needs and the idealism and foibles of
his student children. Whilst Askwith creates a haphazard iron skeleton of art
school awfulness in the garage, and drives around in a psychedelic smoke-belching
literal old ‘banger’, the lovely Sally Geeson is also retained as his sister
Sally. Her main role is to cause friction with her radical politics, which
interestingly here foreshadows the environmental concerns we take for granted
today about recycling – back then it served as a comedic device for creating a
‘crank’ opposition to staid older-generation reactionism. Sally also
inadvertently gets on one’s nerves further by the way she delivers her lines.
She explains them with such earnest, squeaky innocence, she seems to be in a school’s
programme for teaching English to foreigners.
Rogers and Thomas cleverly recruited CARRY ON stars
(and later TV’s ) ‘Terry and June’ as the new neighbours, an instant chemistry
package which also allows Terry Scott to play well an aspirational snob angle.
The wives in BLESS THIS HOUSE are without edge - it’s the husbands who are the
endless schemers. Speaking of which, it’s nice to see Peter Butterworth
dialling down the furtive chiseller he essays so well in CARRY ON movies to
play Sid’s best mate Trevor. Other welcome supporting players include Janet
Brown as neighbour Annie Hobbs, Bill Maynard as Oldham, the sleazy stall
landlord who likes to hands-on with his female talents; a brief turn from Frank
Thornton as a client of Sid’s, and Tommy LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR Godfrey as Murray
the plasterer who leaves Sid high and nowhere near dry as he tries to cover a
hole left from removing an over-mantle from the wall at his new neighbours’.
Another member of the Rogers/Thomas stable of co-opted
talent for this film is Carol Hawkins as the neighbours’ daughter Katie. She
was often labelled the posh crumpet in both their films and the PLEASE SIR
series - before admirably avoiding the atrociously cheapjack CARRY ON ENGLAND
due to its’ excessive nudity – surely only the most convenient reason!
After Sid and Trevor’s explosive attempt at a whisky
distillery in the garden shed, it’s up to the young ones to provide the
skulduggery as Mike and Katie covertly enjoy a Romeo and Juliet clandestine
romance while their gently seeething Capulet and Montague-like fathers feud –
until the cat is out of the bag and they are wed. This sub-plot from first
meet-cute to marriage is rushed, the only breathing space given is when the
parents uncover their children’s deception by going to the greasy spoon where
both Katie and Mike work. This allows an amusing gag where Mike tries to
perform short-order cooking on his knes so only his chef’s hat and hands are
seen the work surface.
BLESS THIS HOUSE is inoffensive painting-by-numbers
comedy played with energy. I’d like to have heard a better version of the jaunty
theme tune from the TV show, but even so it harks back amiably to a more
innocent time, especially in the lack of post-millenial modern cynicism by the
student-age children!
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