6 Television satire in 1976 and 2005: Ready When You Are, Mr McGill

Comic self-referentiality, and satire at the expense of television, are staples of Rosenthal's television writing throughout his career. In the situation comedy Sadie, It's Cold Outside (1975) Sadie Potter only finds happiness at the end of six episodes when her husband Norman promises to sell the television set. In an early episode, she sits unwillingly watching a television play with her husband and daughter. We see only her astonished reactions, her face bathed in television's unearthly blue light, since the reverse-shot to the television screen is withheld, but we learn that, as she says, ‘Now they’re taking all their clothes off! It must be a serial. (Pause). What's on BBC?’. Norman responds, ‘This.’ The exchange hints at a truism of television history: having been set up with an obligation to ‘inform, educate and entertain’, in the words of its Royal Charter,¹ the BBC's output gradually started to resemble that of commercial television. In the first Ready When You Are, Mr McGill of 1976 schoolchildren mob the film-set looking for autographs and when they learn that an episode of an ITV series is being made, impishly shout, ‘BBC forever!’ Although the schoolchildren also appear in the 2005 version and cause a take to be abandoned, they do not bother to inquire for which channel the television play is being made: the era of simple binary rivalry has ended.

Rosenthal wrote two versions of his television play Ready When You Are, Mr McGill, which were broadcast respectively by Granada on 11 January 1976, and by ITV Sky on 26 December 2005 after Rosenthal's death. The earlier play was one of a seven-part Granada anthology called ‘Red Letter Day’, originated by Rosenthal himself, in which the common theme was an outstanding occasion in someone's life. The first Ready When You Are, Mr McGill gained such accolades as the television critic Richard Last's description of it as ‘a clear contender for the funniest television play of 1976, even though the year is less than a fortnight old’.² It won a Rio Film Festival Best Play Award and was nominated for a British Academy Best Play Award. The later play, by contrast, was not broadcast until two years after it was made, and was then shown on an extra-terrestrial network in the graveyard slot of 11.05 pm on Boxing Day. The earlier play combines a story about an individual with a focus on what Last calls the ‘mishaps of location filming’.³ The later play has a more divided focus: on Joe McGill, the hapless extra, but also on the television industry itself. Critics of the later version saw in it darker elements than in the earlier one. Daphne Lockyer described the 2005 play as ‘a broadside against the television industry and a kind of valediction’ on Rosenthal's part.⁴ Nancy Banks-Smith noted of Rosenthal's update of the 1976 play that it ‘was still a comedy. Which, in the circumstances, is remarkable’; while Thomas Sutcliffe argued, rather more cynically, that, ‘It could probably best be filed under “Biting the Hand That Doesn’t Feed You Anymore.”’⁵

There are two reasons for the differences in transmission fortunes of the Mr McGill plays. First, the earlier Mr McGill was a funny and genial single play about the making of a play, broadcast at a time when audiences were accustomed to watching such fare. In 1976 alone, the year of Mr McGill, two other Rosenthal plays were broadcast: Well, Thank You, Thursday, also included in Granada's ‘Red Letter Day’ anthology, and Bar Mitzvah Boy as a BBC Play for Today. The later Mr McGill, on the other hand, appeared at a time when the single play itself was a rarity, let alone one which implicitly criticised that very fact and the institutional reasons behind it. Second, as Maureen Lipman put it, ‘Maybe [the powers-thatbe] distrusted a drama which gives a hearty two-fingered salute to the current commissioning policies of their drama departments’.⁶

In both versions, the plot of Ready When You Are, Mr McGill concerns sixteen words spoken by Joe McGill, an extra in a television drama. The ‘outstanding occasion’ of the original Granada anthology is his having landed a speaking part in a play. However, a combination of repeated takes and his own exaggerated expectations cause Mr McGill to fluff his words and they are cut from the broadcast version. In his autobiography, Rosenthal describes the earlier version of the play as a product of his ‘writing storm’ of the 1970s, completed between The Evacuees and Bar Mitzvah Boy. He characterises the 1976 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill as ‘A TV film about a TV film…a satire’.⁷ Maureen Lipman also observes that the earlier play ‘lifted the lid on filmmaking’ by ‘removing that fourth wall’ and taking the ‘innocent’ television audiences of the 1970s ‘behind the scenes’.⁸ In other words, the 1976 version was a satirical metafiction, exposing the workings of television drama. By contrast, the 2005 version has extra layers of self-consciousness and the satire targets much more specific elements of television in the new millennium, particularly the control exerted over broadcasting by producers and television networks. Lipman sums up the focus of the second version of the play: ‘”Jack's thinking was that TV had become producer's choice and star-driven. He wanted to say what this had done to writers and the quality of TV.”’⁹ The differences between the two versions range from changes in camera-work, characters’ names, and topical references, to details of dialogue and the roles of central characters. An examination of these differences can provide a fascinating insight into Rosenthal's view of the changes in television production and reception over thirty years.

The 1976 version of Ready When You Are, Mr McGill was commissioned by the Granada TV producer Michael Dunlop and directed by Mike Newell, who went on to such big-screen successes as Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005).¹⁰Ready When You Are, Mr McGill was shot in Rusholme, Manchester, during March and April 1975, and the mise-en-scène is satisfyingly bleak as a result. The vagaries of the weather are prominent in both versions of the play, and take on an almost personified role in the dialogue in the earlier version, drawing attention to the fact – innovative for the 1970s – of its location shooting.

As well as predictable differences between the two versions of Ready When You Are, Mr McGill – in 1976 Joe McGill plans to go and watch the episode in which he stars on his son's colour television, while in 2005 he aims to buy a widescreen set – it is revealing to trace the origins of significant plot details in the 2005 play from tiny hints in the earlier one. This is not simply a matter of textual comparison, but is revelatory of changes in television production over three decades. Further, the later play flaunts its own status as television drama in ways that the earlier one did not, in many instances simultaneously criticising and deploying particular developments.

The mise-en-scène of the later play, directed by television veteran Paul Seed, contrasts strikingly with that of the earlier one. It opens on ‘A street of desirable residences’¹¹ (Elgin Crescent in west London) on a sunny day. Colour contrast is high, and the play's look ironically resembles that of the type of modern, high-production-value series it is about. Rather than seeing Joe McGill memorising his lines in bed in the first scene, as we do in the earlier version, here we see the actor Amanda Holden leave one of the ‘desirable’ houses and get into a waiting car. The driver, Henry (Mike Hayley), makes constant reference to Holden's television appearances in EastEnders and The Grimleys – although his knowledge is compromised, as she implies, by his mentioning only her earliest work. This makes clear that Holden is playing herself, and introduces a comically unstable division between Holden the actor and Holden the character. Throughout the play Holden's star status is used to ironise and demystify the very notion of televisual stardom. As Maureen Lipman phrases it, ‘Amanda Holden sends herself up beautifully as TV star Amanda Holden.’¹² The casting of Tom Courtenay as Joe equally ironises the televisual star system, although, unlike Holden, Courtenay is emphatically not playing himself. As the inconsequential extra he is variously referred to as ‘the old fart’, ‘Jimmy’ rather than ‘Joe’, and, finally, ‘Useless old bugger’; yet the audience knows that Courtenay has indeed been cast on account of his fame. This metafictional ploy contrasts with the filling of Joe McGill's role in 1976, of which Lipman pithily says: ‘“The chap [Joe Black] who played Mr McGill was an extra himself, and the poor sod never worked again!”’¹³

When we do see Joe McGill leave the house for his day's work in scene 10 of the later play, his conversation with the milkman includes comment on the series in which he is an extra: the milkman has never seen it, but Joe claims that it is ‘very popular with the viewing public’. This is the first hint at the play's divided conception of contemporary television audiences. While the milkman in the earlier play simply remarked on the confusing plots of contemporary drama – ‘Has it got a beginning, a middle, and an end?…Never bloody do have, do they’¹⁴ – here it is also implied that ‘the viewing public’ is more discerning than television bosses give them credit for. They may not even be watching the very series aimed at them. This explains the change in the nature of the play being made in Ready When You Are, Mr McGill. In the 1976 version, it is a single play, a period drama set in a village in 1940, and scene 54 focuses on the budding romance between a soldier and a young woman whom we see dressed for tennis. Mr McGill's lines, which are crucial to the plot, cast suspicion on the soldier's admiration of this ‘prettiest girl in the village’ when he says, ‘I’ve never seen the young lady in my life before. And I’ve lived here fifty years.’ The implications of the romance gather political weight – we wonder whether the young woman might be a German spy.

In the 2005 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill we see instead the filming of episode 19 in a series called Police Siren. The series is a cross between a hospital and a police drama, as the painter watching the proceedings from a nearby ladder describes it: ‘It's some hospital-crime-thrillerpolice-mystery rubbish.’ An ambulance driver has been killed at the wheel of his vehicle, and Mr McGill, acting as a hospital porter, injects a note of mystery into the proceedings by observing, ‘I’ve never seen the young man in my life before, and I’ve worked here forty years.’ A second scene indoors is filmed in both versions of Mr McGill; in the earlier one, it concerns Bernard (William Hoyland), the male lead, calling for Betty (Marty Cruickshank) the following Saturday. In the later one, however, it shows Amanda Holden's character coming upon an illicit tryst between the characters played respectively by Michael (Richard Lintern), the male lead, and the extra Babs (Joanna Page). Such a plot-line satirically exemplifies the playwright David Edgar's observation that ‘all of television drama has a natural tendency to biodegrade into soap opera’,¹⁵ as we see in this episode of Police Siren. It descends from a generic focus on solving crime to representing the private life of the police, in the opposite way to the relationship between personal and public in the earlier play. Such small alterations to the 1976 play dramatise changes in television priorities over thirty years, as the producer Roland's speech in the 2005 play shows: ‘TV is quizzes or cooking or gardening or DIY or drama. And drama is either handcuffs or stethoscopes.’ In the later play, the handcuffs-stethoscopes hybrid is set in the grounds of an institution named The Oxley Hospital Trust, suggesting that competition and deregulation in the new millennium are features of both television culture and public health-care.

The dramatis personae in the 2005 Mr McGill have proliferated to convey the fragmentation and specialisation of television production. Everyone has an assistant. The decorator, surveying the production scene, comments sardonically into his mobile phone: ‘Yeah, bloody hundreds of ’em. All stood around doing sod-all. Except for the ones sat on their arse doing sod-all. No wonder the licence fee goes up.’ In the 1976 play the joke at the expense of Unit Manager Ronnie Skidmore is the brevity of his visit to the shoot. By 2005 Skidmore has metamorphosed into two figures: Roland Henshaw (Tom Ward), the producer, and Elliot Nichols (Stephen Moore), the ‘be-suited Network Executive’. Both characters linger on the set for much of the day demanding alterations for the sake of a putative audience, as if embodying Tony Garnett's analysis of the ‘power-shift towards the producer’ following the current separation of that role from the director’s.¹⁶

Several characters arise from small details in the first play, most notably the scriptwriter Gilbert Dean. Gilbert's role in 2005 emerges out of an exchange in the 1976 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill between the director Phil and the assistant cameraman Geoff at the play's end, about an unnamed and unseen writer. Phil tells Geoff he has decided to cut Mr McGill's scene from the play and put the information into reported speech:

GEOFF:

But isn’t it the writer's intention to –?

PHIL (Opening one eye):

Whose intention?

GEOFF (Sorry he's ever started):

The writer’s…

PHIL:

What's it got to do with the writer?

This fleeting reference to an embattled relationship develops into a central element of the plot in the later play, emphasising the polarity between the creative and technical elements of television production. For instance, Phil responds to Gilbert's wish to keep his work as he wrote it with, ‘Sorry, Gospel, not script. The Gospel according to St Gilbert’, and marvels at the sight of ‘A writer doing rewrites without a Catherine wheel up his arse’ (in fact Gilbert is writing a diary for the Guardian). The writer's lesser status is satirically confirmed within the play when Phil transmits the recommendations of a ‘focus group’ for changes to Gilbert's script:

PHIL:

The dialogue needs gingering up a gnat’s. That's [Roland], not me. We have our audience to think of. The younger end. Roland thinks.

GILBERT:

The audience want effing and blinding??

PHIL:

Not every sentence. In moderation. P’raps slip in the odd ‘Oh, shit’, or ‘Cute arse’, or something, now and then. Just to show we’re not dinosaurs. He says.

Gilbert's presence also represents a self-ironising gesture on Rosenthal's part, as the latter's attendance at the shooting of all his plays was legendary. Gilbert is played by Stephen Mangan, who was cast on the strength of his physical resemblance to Rosenthal. Mangan also played Rosenthal in a radio dramatisation of Rosenthal's autobiography¹⁷ in which, according to Maureen Lipman, Mangan showed that he ‘understood’ Rosenthal's ‘wry amusement and his melancholy’.¹⁸ The greatest irony against Gilbert can also be seen in metafictional terms. The episode of Police Siren which he has written is inane, to judge by the premise of the film itself, not to mention the dialogue in the seemingly endless takes of scene 23 and by Amanda Holden's speech in the final version, which is simply a collection of police-movie clichés:

AMANDA:

Right, sunshine, the way I see it, that night you’d had it up to here with his verbals, everything went pear-shaped, you reckoned he’d lost the plot and wanted him sorted. Now forget good-cop-badcop. What I do is bad-cop-very-bad-cop. You won’t be asking for your lawyer – you’ll be screaming for your mother.

Gilbert is a figure for the contemporary television writer in general as well as a representation of Rosenthal himself. His unsympathetic demeanour complicates the play's satirical focus, since no one – from Joe McGill to Elliot Nicholson – emerges untainted by self-delusion.

However, the 2005 play's self-referentiality is not an instance of television focusing reductively on an ‘intertextual’ rather than a social reality.¹⁹ Instead, it is an aspect of the later play's consistent focus on the boundaries between reality and fiction – both within the world of the play and outside it – as a way of investigating the social and cultural changes within television production. In his introduction to the screenplay of the 1976 version, Rosenthal refers to the making of a ‘film within a film’ as a ‘Chinese Box made of mirrors’, and this effect continues to be strategically ‘confusing’ for viewers of the final product.²⁰ In both plays, Phil glances at a pair of women watching the proceedings and frets that, ‘They look too much like extras’, until Geoff points out that they are not the ‘gossiping housewives’ of the script but ‘two housewives who happen to be gossiping’. The central episode of both plays is the confrontation between Phil and Mr McGill, and again this takes place in terms of an opposition between fiction and reality. In the later version, Mr McGill loses his nerve in take 13 and after much aggressive insistence by Phil, utters his words correctly but with a delivery that is ‘rigid, parrot-like and completely unnatural’, ruining the take. Phil berates Mr McGill cruelly, agitating the older man into an outburst against acting itself:

JOE (exploding):

This isn’t real life, lad! It's pretend! It's all pretend! You’re pretending! The whole damn-fool film's pretending!

A long pause. Everyone around is embarrassed.

PHIL (gently):

Real life is how well we pretend, isn’t it, sir? You, me. Everybody in the world.

A helpless pause.

Although Joe's words do represent a corrective to the over-valuation of the television world by its inhabitants, not only has he himself been guilty of ‘pretending’ in various ways during the day, but he has it the wrong way round: Ready When You Are, Mr McGill shows that there is, if anything, too much hard-headed realism in television circles.

In 1976, we never see the fruits of Phil's threat to ‘cut the Old Man in the Street completely’. The 2005 play, however, concludes with a scene six months later in which Joe and Nancy McGill watch episode 19 of Police Siren – from which Joe's lines have been cut. In the episode, Joe approaches the ambulance, then the action shifts abruptly to scene 24, showing Amanda Holden in a police station. This represents Phil's choice of revenge over technology: Kelly (Sally Phillips), the script supervisor, points out that he can ‘re-voice’ Mr McGill in the dub, to which Phil sharply replies, ‘Can but won’t.’ Phil acts as if he were bound by the constraints of the earliest, least filmic television productions which were broadcast live and possessed no leeway for the post-production manipulation of sound.²¹ The ending of the 2005 version is preceded by a surreal scene in which ‘Young Mal and the Yobs’, who disrupted the process of filming until Young Mal began to make his own film of events, also watch Police Siren episode 19. Their verdict is that it is a ‘Load of cobblers’ since ‘nothing happens’, and they prefer to watch the video footage that Young Mal took of the Unit Base. As if in protest at what the stage direction describes as ‘disjointed, badly framed, out-of-focus shots of total banality and pointlessness of crew members’, the television blows up. In this way, the 2005 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill delivers a double blow, against both formulaic drama – Young Mal and his cohort are supposed to be its intended audience – and a version of reality TV which Young Mal describes with enthusiasm: ‘I mean, this is what you call telly, innit? Real people. Doing real fucking stuff’. An uncertainty about terminology which remains in Rosenthal's stage direction neatly summarises the symbolic nature of Young Mal's television-set, which has given way under the pressure of competing demands: ‘the TV screen explodes (implodes?)’.

While the scriptwriter Gilbert represents a commitment to the exigencies of art – or at least to his own script – the director Phil's cynicism is the result of having to go along with executive decisions despite his ‘scorn’ for them, as the following exchange between him and Kelly shows:

PHIL:

That's how you get a BAFTA nomination. For doing crap well.

KELLY:

And you’ve had two.

In the 1976 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill, Phil was played by the young Jack Shepherd, aged thirty-six at the time in contrast to Bill Nighy's fifty-four-year-old director in 2005, whose character has undergone darkening as well as ageing. The younger Phil is simply afflicted by tiredness, cold and ennui after two weeks’ shooting, rather than the older one's career-long disenchantment with the industry in which he works. While the first Phil stamps his foot because of pins and needles, the second one does so because of an impending hip replacement; the force of a passer-by's remark, made in both plays, that the director is the ‘half-dead one’ who ‘thinks he's God’, is thus quite different in each.

In the 2005 version, in contrast to their subordinate Phil, Roland and Elliot are shown to be entirely reconciled to their roles. Roland accepts a backhander of food from the location chef, which the latter describes to his disapproving assistant as, ‘Producer's perks. So we get hired on his next film’ – an indication of the casualisation of labour in the industry. Elliot is so keen to keep on the right side of the ‘lovely leading lady’ Amanda Holden that he offers to assert his authority on her behalf by saying of Phil, ‘Would you like me to fire him or anything?…If you do, consider it done – he’ll be back flogging the Big Issue in Piccadilly by three o’clock.’ Roland and Elliot share a vision of contemporary television which they express in counterpointed dialogue to would-be scriptwriter Ted, the on-set rigger:

ROLAND:

Sod the story. Who are the stars? The big names?…

ELLIOT:

Stars, police and doctors.

ROLAND:

And shagging.

ELLIOT:

And shagging.

The role of the contemporary television audience, on whose behalf Roland and Elliot allegedly speak, is debated throughout the later Mr McGill. The television crew disparage the very people for whom they are making the series, ranging from Geoff, who says of the ‘yobs’ hanging round the set, ‘I think they’re what's known in the trade as “Our Audience”’, to Elliot, whose recommendation for a combination of stars ‘and shagging’ as the ideal television product emerges from his sarcastic mantra, ‘Never underestimate the intelligence of the viewing public.’ Ted's idea for a play about bridge-building engineer brothers is dismissed out of hand by Phil, Roland and Elliot as ‘a bit too avantgarde’. Yet, as well as Mr McGill's milkman, we hear some passers-by assert their own preferences as an audience when they recognise the series being made:

FIRST HOUSEWIFE:

Oh, right. Rubbish, isn’t it?

SECOND HOUSEWIFE:

What isn’t?

The decorator, who paints a wall during the course of the day, says to someone on his mobile phone, ‘The Amanda Whatsername one. No, I don’t think David Jason's even in it. Pauline Quirke, neither. Peculiar, that, isn’t it? You’d think one of ’em would be. P’raps they’re on holiday.’ Rather than swallowing uncritically the diet of stars offered on television, here the decorator recognises the ‘peculiarity’ of a drama with only one recognisable actor in it. Another passer-by reacts in similar fashion:

FIRST WOMAN:

(peering at Michael): Isn’t that whasisname? He's been in something.

Although it is as if star aura is a recognisable end in itself, even when divorced from matters of quality or the star's name, such dialogue suggests that audiences see through this.

Further, Bruno (Ben Whishaw), the Third Assistant Director – whose role is that of general dogsbody and provider of the director's food – acts as a personification of one of Elliot's truisms about contemporary television. Bruno is described as, ‘about 21, the most naïve and ineffectual chatter-up of girls in history’, and we see him make advances to almost every female member of the television crew which are so transparent that he puts off everyone he approaches. However, it turns out that Bruno is a very attentive watcher of television rather than a serial stalker, as a conversation with Kelly reveals:

KELLY:

You don’t ask [girls] for sex upfront.

BRUNO:

(puzzled) You do.

KELLY:

You don’t, Bruno.

BRUNO:

They do on the telly. All the time. In every episode of everything. ‘Morning, pleased to meet you, fancy a quick shag?’ ‘Certainly, I’ll just get my knickers off…’

Bruno's first attempt after the discussion with Kelly not only succeeds, but disproves her advice, when he asks out Maggie, the assistant to the Wardrobe Mistress. Maggie's incipient or actual tears have been the subject of concern throughout the day's filming, and eventually it emerges that they were caused by an apparently unreciprocated interest in Bruno. This scene provides an answer of sorts to an unresolved plotline from the 1976 play, in which Jean, the Wardrobe Girl, Maggie's equivalent, is on the verge of tears or engaged in ‘helpless sobbing’ on each of the few occasions we see her. The reason is never made clear and Jean's grief seems existential, as this exchange suggests:

(terry starts the [car] engine. And jean starts crying. terry hears her, and swivels round, apprehensively.)

TERRY:

What's happened?

SHIRLEY:

(Drily) Nothing.

(The car drives off, jean sobbing her heart out.)

The script for the later Mr McGill includes a coda, which was not filmed, showing Maggie, six months pregnant, settling down with Bruno at their flat to watch the broadcast of Police Siren, episode 19. Even in its truncated form in the televised play, the overly neat resolution to Bruno's lovelorn behaviour and Maggie's apparently unmotivated weeping reveals how it substitutes satire for the surrealism of the earlier play. The later Ready When You Are, Mr McGill both shows and resolves matters where the earlier one was content to leave them open, as shown by the concluding dialogue from 1976 between Phil, Geoff and the cameraman Don:

EXT. camera car. evening

As it drives away from us…

PHIL:

(Voice over) There's nothing at the end of it all, anyway, is there?

DON:

(Voice over) Not a lot.

GEOFF:

(Voice over, confused) At the end of what?

This is a tongue-in-cheek existentialism which likens the end of a play to the end of life itself – and emphasises the non-specific nature of the earlier play's satire.

The more experimental nature of the earlier Ready When You Are, Mr McGill is clearest in its style of camera-work. The opening scene is not reassuringly recognisable, as is that of Amanda Holden leaving her London house on a sunny day in 2005, but humorously disorienting. We see the outlines of bodies in bed in a darkened room, hear the ticking of a clock and a voiceover which intones, ‘I’ve never seen the young lady in my life before. And I’ve lived here fifty years’, as Joe McGill practises his lines. Shots throughout the film are frequently composed in a crowded and jumbled manner. The central characters in a particular sequence may be shot between other characters’ shoulders, stand still while blurred figures walk past in the foreground, or are shot in deep focus to show the crowding of one character by several others; characters’ faces are obscured by pieces of film equipment or even the caterer's kettle. While this kind of composition emphasises the chaotic and unsystematic nature of the day's filming, it also brings particular relationships to the fore. In 1976, the director Phil and the Floor Manager Terry (Mark Wing-Davey) are of a different generation and class from Don (Stanley Lebor), the cameraman, and Kenneth (Fred Feast), the sound-recordist, both of whom are older and their Lancashire accents more pronounced. Phil and Terry wear, respectively, a parka and a long afghan coat, emphasising their vogueishness and youth; bad feeling develops between Phil and Don over the latter's high standards – ‘I refuse to shoot it. I just refuse. I’m sorry, I refuse’, he says as the sky darkens – and between Phil and Kenneth because Phil values only the film's visuals, as the following dialogue shows:

KENNETH:

It was good for me.

PHIL:

(Turning): Eh?

KENNETH:

It was good for sound.

PHIL:

(Couldn’t care less) Oh. Fine.

These tensions are symbolised by a shot in which we see a close-up of Phil's hands and an eye as he melodramatically squares up for the day's set-up – behind his hands are visible, in deep focus, the sceptical and grinning faces of Don and Kenneth. Pattern is valued in the earlier film over narrative, for instance in the case of the decorator, whose persona is not developed as it is in 2005 – in 1976 he does not speak, let alone act as a chorus on a ladder, and the close-ups are not of his face but of his hand, briskly painting. It is not the decorator's character that is revealed here, but a smart visual joke about watching paint dry.

The later Mr McGill is in many ways a richer film than the earlier one. It features complex layers of self-referentiality and satire, and its more diverse cast is orchestrated with both attention to detail and a sharp sense of overall plot. Yet the simplicity of the earlier play is sacrificed in the person of Joe McGill himself: it seems clear from the outset of the 2005 version, when we see Amanda Holden in the first scene and then learn what kind of a venture is being filmed, that he cannot hope to compete. By 2005, Mr McGill has become much more of an extra than he was in 1976, where the scene he stars in is crucial to a whole play, not just to an episode in a series.