First Sight – Nostalgia Central

1 9 8 7 (UK)
6 x 60 minute episodes

This anthology of six plays from Channel 4 showcased writers new to television. Six separate ITV companies each contributed a single play by a first-time writer.

The debut play, ‘Who’s Our Little Jenny Lind?’ by Christine Parr, starred Dennis Waterman as Tommy Dixon, a cheeky Cockney comic appearing at a local gala night (pictured), who takes advantage of young housewife, April Bray (Kathy Jamieson), who is aspiring to become a professional singer.

But she’s not daft, and viewers were left deciding who was using whom.

‘Exclusive Yarns’ was written by Gary Lyons and Stewart Permutt and produced by TVS, and starred Maureen Lipman, Patricia Hodge, Lesley Joseph and Sue Devaney, who headed the cast of a soap opera set in a wool shop in Tunbridge Wells.

Four men – gay couple Ian and Terry (Robert Howie and Peter Wright), innocent Harry (Barry Martin) and newcomer Malcolm (Philip Jackson) – put on a drag to re-enact each episode of the soap in a spare room where they have made a replica of the set.

When a father leaves the family home without warning in Julia Kearsley’s ‘Leaving Home’, his wife Phyllis (Rosemary Leach) seems cut up about it, as does his backwards, pregnant daughter Natalie (Jane Horrocks) and most particularly, his daughter from his first marriage, Greta (Caroline Pickles) –  until she learns that he had long since wiped her from his mind.

Son Colin (Spencer Leigh) is the only one who makes no attempt to find his father, and when he brings home a vagrant, Malcolm (Bryan Pringle), Phyllis invites him to stay, resulting in an eventual romance. The play was produced by LWT.

‘Some Day Man’ by Barbara Angell focused on Mik (Joseph Marcell), a black Jamaican living in Britain, unemployed but constantly optimistic about the future.

His dream job materialises out of the blue – but is it a figment of his imagination? Produced by Television South West (TSW).

Kathy (Phyllis Logan) runs the Executive Sauna (a Glasgow massage parlour) for Frank Riley (Ken Hutchison) in ‘Extras’, written by Taggart star Alex Norton. The girls working the shifts are Carol (Pauline Thomson), who is easy-going and enjoys the money she makes; Margaret (Jenny Lee), the eldest, who has a drink problem; Denise (Leila Bertrand), a black Londoner who is a favourite with the clients, and Sheena (Louise Beattie), the youngest and new to the job.

Kathy leaves the sauna to set up her own business down the road, taking Carol and Sheena with her, with the intent of running the business as a women’s cooperative. But Frank Riley is determined that the girls won’t succeed.

The series concluded with ‘The Last of a Dyin’ Race’, a comedy from Ulster Television written by Christina Reid and set in Northern Ireland. When Lizzie McCulloch (Barbara Adair) dies, her henpecked son allows his wife, Sharon (Aine McCartney), to take over the funeral arrangements, which leaves Lizzie to cool off in the local funeral parlour. The neighbours and Lizzie’s half-sister Agnes (Sheila McGibbon) are outraged that Lizzie isn’t to lie in state in her own home.

The bewildered and spineless undertaker (John Hewitt) soon finds his parlour occupied by business-like women who have everything “under control”, and as the men arrive with reinforcements from the local pub, the wake begins.

Episodes

Who’s Our Little Jenny Lind? (5/7/87) | Exclusive Yarns (12/7/87) | Leaving Home (19/7/87) | Some Day Man (26/7/87) | Extras (2/8/87) | The Last of a Dyin’ Race (9/8/87)

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