012 Contemporary Comedy - Old
Believe it or not, we’re still in Christmas-themed audio
drama as we drift back to mid-January when I was still listening to drama from
30 days previous. To that end, Second Thoughts- “The Fight Before
Christmas” made me laugh. There are a
lot of British sitcoms of this type, though I found this quite festive and fun
(and evidently did a lot of people as this series was very popular and transferred
to TV). Lynda Bellingham plays, not the
Inquisitor in Trial of a Time Lord, but Faith, a middle-aged divorcée now
involved with Bill (James Bolam). Faith
is determined to have a traditional Christmas, which means having Christmas
lunch, making bread sauce because Bill likes it, and using “tatty old paper
chains” as decorations. She gets
increasingly harried as characters wander in and out of the kitchen, not
helping her prepare food and generally hindering her. Julia Sawalha is delightful as her daughter,
who keeps changing her mind about being a vegetarian. Bill’s dramatic decorations get on Faith’s
nerves but by the end she has to admit they are an improvement on
tradition. The comedy was punctuated by
some nice musical flourishes including the Corelli Christmas Concerto, which I can’t ever remember hearing in a drama
before. Originally from 1992, it was written by Jan Etherington and Gavin
Petrie, and directed by Paul Schlesinger.
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