So, across hours and hours of television that amounts to millions of pounds worth of building, transportation, costume, sourcing props etc. Also, a word to the wise – don’t become Mrs PJ whatever you do! His succession of wives has it even worse! If you are married to PJ, never get behind the wheel of a car – that’s all I’m saying.Īll the interiors were shot in studios with built sets, all the exteriors on location. It rains a lot and Duttine as PJ has precisely two expressions: shell-shocked and morose, and morose and slightly agitated. That was wishful thinking on their and my part. There is no need to worry though, because the jolly old alcoholic English teacher, Howarth (Alan McNaughton) becomes best friends with PJ and together they strive to bring some socialist reforms to the place.Īctually, no they don’t. PJ is branded a ‘Bolshie’ by some of his less enlightened colleagues, such as the caddish coward Carter (Neil Stacy) who has escaped service in the war thanks to his ‘dodgy knee’ playing him up. Under the tutelage of some of the more kindly masters the offspring of the English bourgeoisie are meant to be thriving and having their eyes opened to issues of the day. She is wearing a gauzy, summery drop-waist dress, light overcoat and sunhat – in what is clearly the middle of winter – it’s actually snowing! So when she gets out of the car she has a line of dialogue that has to reflect how inappropriately she is dressed. There is one hilarious scene when Beth (Belinda Lang) arrives at the school and is greeted by PJ. He still jumps at the slightest loud noise and the sight of boys struggling in a scrum on a boggy rugby field is enough to bring back the horrors of the Somme.Ĭlearly, the BBC was only able to shoot the exterior scenes (at the Milton Abbey School in Dorset) on wet days and during winter and spring vacations when the crew could use the grounds and buildings as it is always raining, grey, dull, and muddy – you can hear the actors’ shoes squelching on the wet ground – thus reinforcing the bleakness of the scholastic surroundings. Evidently the headmaster Algy Herries (Frank Middlemass) considered time spent as a history teacher at this tomb of a school would be the best thing to ‘cure’ PJ’s lingering shakes and nightmares. The main character, David Powlett-Jones (John Duttine), known incongruously as ‘PJ’, arrives in 1918 suffering from shell-shock after three years in the trenches in France. As a public school it’s the sort of institution that the middle and upper-middle classes send their sons to for huge amounts of money – and as some sort of punishment presumably, maybe for something that the poor blighters did in a past life. There is a plot (of sorts) which amounts to bleak, unremitting misery most of the time – set in the dreary Bamfylde School in the South West of England.
So they had the market cornered in this sort of expensive, self-indulgent snoozefest. There were only three television channels broadcasting in the UK when this was made, it must be remembered, two of which belonged to the BBC amounting to a virtual monopoly.
Alcoholic, chain-smoking schoolmasters coughing themselves slowly to their grave is not entertainment but supposedly passed for such at one time. It’s a reminder that when the BBC had almost unlimited spending power for adaptations and commissioned (the now hallowed) Andrew Davies ( Pride and Prejudice, et al) to adapt inconsequential material such as RF Delderfield’s novel the result was certainly not always the artful, lavish, riveting costume dramas that are their trademark. The action veers sluggishly from the mildly diverting to the excruciatingly dull. It’s now presented in a box set comprising six discs. That was one per week for three months back in 1980 when it was first aired.
#To serve them all my days tv series series
This series has 13 (count them – 13!) episodes of almost an hour each.
I for one am thankful it is a thing of the past. It’s a dramatisation of a very minor work of 20th century literature that was only possible when the BBC was an all-consuming Goliath with unlimited budgets and no restrictions on its output. This is a television adaptation from a bygone era and I don’t mean the era between the two World Wars when what must, laughably, be called the action is set.
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