It would be easy to take the first episode here in which Edmund Gwen walks out on a shrewish wife after years of nagging as a steal from Noel Coward's one-acter Fumed Oak but it would also be wrong. Coward wrote - and starred in - the nine (originally ten but one was dropped after one performance) that together comprised Tonight At 8.30 in 1936, close to a decade after Priestly wrote The Good Companions as a novel and some three years after the first film version was released. If we allow for the limitations that obtained in 1933 this is a charming and simplistic valentine to the Lost Empires that Priestly would write about decades later. Today the supporting players draw the eye, none more so than Mary Gwynne, now totally forgotten, whilst Jesse Matthews around whom the film is clearly built, appears mannered and OTT. It remains a charming curio.
Review of The Good Companions
