Norma (Pat Heywood) and husband Cedric (Richard Vernon) are invited by the Historical Society to give a lecture, accompanied by photo slides, about their travels in the Greek Islands. Society leading light Edna (Barbara Laurenson) has roped in her handyman partner Jack (Edward Judd) who has reluctantly agreed to set up the projector and generally help out.
Norma is an attractive forty something while Cedric is clumsy, doddery, and forgetful, a convincing performance by Vernon who was only 49 at the time. Twenty one years previously Norma and Jack were very briefly engaged but she broke it off merely because he had dirty fingernails. He has since become an accomplished artist, is still fit and a ladies man, even flirting with the dowdy Mrs Digby. This is Norma and Jack's first meeting since they were engaged, Jack is pleased to see her again, while Norma is tearful and completely besotted. But it's far too late, he's fairly happily shacked up but she's stuck with a decent but dull old boy who could almost be taken for her father.
There's a touch of Brief Encounter about it, indeed Norma's situation is even more tragic than Celia Johnson's Laura. Laura had an affair but made the right moral choice by returning to her husband. Norma made the wrong choice when she still had the freedom to make the right one.
Norma is an attractive forty something while Cedric is clumsy, doddery, and forgetful, a convincing performance by Vernon who was only 49 at the time. Twenty one years previously Norma and Jack were very briefly engaged but she broke it off merely because he had dirty fingernails. He has since become an accomplished artist, is still fit and a ladies man, even flirting with the dowdy Mrs Digby. This is Norma and Jack's first meeting since they were engaged, Jack is pleased to see her again, while Norma is tearful and completely besotted. But it's far too late, he's fairly happily shacked up but she's stuck with a decent but dull old boy who could almost be taken for her father.
There's a touch of Brief Encounter about it, indeed Norma's situation is even more tragic than Celia Johnson's Laura. Laura had an affair but made the right moral choice by returning to her husband. Norma made the wrong choice when she still had the freedom to make the right one.