User Reviews

Superb teleplay of Ayckbourn's stage hit taking us to three kitchens of three business associates and their spouses on three successive Christmases (last Christmas, this Christmas, next Christmas). Over the three years fortunes and fates are reversed and the manic laughter of last Christmas turns to surreal abandon next Christmas. Super perfs all-around but of note by Maureen Lipman and Geoff Palmer. Is the ending heartbreaking or hilarious? Both? You decide.

Some programs you never tire in watching and this is one of those gems. Lucky to watch this when it was first broadcast and a year or two later it was repeated so managed to video it. Nearly every Christmas I make a point of watching this and always relish in its excellence. From the superb acting, delicious and witty scripts and the clever way it is shot in such tiny studio sets you can only but wonder why the BBC didn't show this as often on TV as they did; it is an absolute gem of a play. For me Prunella Scales is the star but all the actors interact so well together this is a delicate interplay of different personalities cleverly forged into a ballet of mirth. This program should really be released on DVD or repeated again for future generations. A stonker.

In 1985, the BBC assembled a stellar cast to film a performance of Alan Ayckbourn's play 'Absurd Person Singular'. The result was a triumph. The play is a black farce, taking place at consecutive Christmans parties in the kitchens of three successive host couples each drawn from a different slice of the English middle clsses: the social climbing Hopcrofts, the desparate Jacksons, and the arrogant Brewster-Wrights, and Ackybourn's writing has never been better: brilliantly funny and brutally precise at the same time. Little details delight and appal in equal measure, for example, the scence where the naive Stanley Hopcroft, a man with absolutely no empathy for his own wife's feelings, is nonetheless shocked by the two other men's casual lechery (although of course he tries to play along). It's not a directly politcal piece, and was written before she became Prime Minister, but it's a superb takedown of the Thatcher-voting classes. The patriarchical nature of society is also directly exposed (indeed, the plot might work less well today, reflecting as it does the prevailing form of inter-sexual relationship). After two acts of high comedy, the final chapter is very dark. In a six-hander, it seems almost unfair to single out cast members, but Nicky Henson's Hopcroft is arguably the key character; Maureen Lipman, Prunella Scales and the (recently deceased) Geoffrey Palmer are particularly hilarious. I last saw this as an early repeat, over 30 years ago; it's a delight to discover it still holds up today.