I’m currently working on a screenplay of the Reso books and it is proving quite difficult to translate the written word to visual images, despite the fact that I see them as pictures in my head.
In one of the episodes I’m trying to recreate the annui of a wet autumnal Sunday when boredom leeches into the day. This means I’ve got to create thirty minutes in which not much really happens. There is a great TV pedigree to this though, from Hancock’s Half Hour through the work of Clement and Le Frenais on the Likely Lads and Porridge to Alan Bennett and the Jacob’s Cream Cracker underneath the 3 piece suite and the work of Craig Cash and the late, lamented, Caroline Aherne on The Royle Family and Craig on Early Doors.
In putting it together I needed to go back to the old washing tub we had in our kitchen and the stillness of the front room of our next door neighbour with its asthmatically ticking clock and upright piano, garnished with a lace square with pink and mauve flowers embroidered on it.
On the subject of embroidered sheets, the lovely Kathy Skeffington, late of the Reso, mentioned in a comment the words “My mum bought her nets off you!” to a friend and I thought it has probably been a couple of generations since those words were used in that precise order, and then probably in a late sixties episode of Coronation Street. Those words are so deliciously of that time that I must find a way of working them in. Thank you Kathy for taking me back in a single sentence.
Meanwhile another Rhyl lad and émigré, Roger Maltby shared this, which was a second apparition of the sixties…
Ambrose Conway 