User Reviews

First broadcast in 1979, Mike Leigh's 'Who's Who' is another episode of Play for Today he wrote and directed for the BBC. It isn't one of his more well-known works, possibly because it is a rare (for him) satirical look at people on both sides of the class divide and class envy. Unusually, none of the characters are overtly working class and as a result, he feels somewhat out of his comfort zone, but the play is not only entertaining in spite of that, it is frequently very amusing.

'Who's Who' broadly follows three people who work at different levels in a brokerage house: the middle class Alan; the upper-middle class Nigel; and senior partner Francis, who moves in rather higher circles when he is asked to help out Lord and Lady Crouchurst. The main protagonist is Alan, played by Richard Kane. Obsessed with Royalty and the peerage, Alan is a buffoon, a sycophant who idolises those he sees as his betters, and whose pomposity is the source of much humour, along with his cat-obsessed and rather dim wife Ethel. Alan shakes with emotion when he receives the signed photograph of Margaret Thatcher - "a very handsome woman" - that he ordered through the mail, and on sensing that Ethel's visitor Miss Hunt is posh, he becomes astoundingly obsequious. He subsequently insistently shows his signed photograph collection to an increasingly bored and agitated photographer Mr Shakespeare (played the great Sam Kelly), completely oblivious to the effect his having. His bubble of self-importance is only punctured by the mischievous mocking of his young co-worker Kevin, played by a very young (and cast against later type) Phil Davis.

The other characters don't work quite as well, partly because Leigh - and of course the cast members who as per his usual approach helped to develop their characters - stereotype the upper-middle and upper classes in a way that might have been decried had the working classes been the target. Thus we have the uptight Nigel and his slovenly flatmate Giles, both of them young, posh and vastly less intelligent than either of them would like to believe. Nigel spends much of the episode organising a dinner party, which turns into a humiliating embarrassment when he is forced to serve tinned soup and sets the cutlery out wrong. Lord and Lady Crouchurst are reserved and dull, leaving their nanny to mind their child whilst they compare their diaries, but unfortunately their scenes as dull as they are.

In spite of this, the cast members are all excellent, Leigh's traditional approach really allowing them room to literally make their characters their own, and whilst the characters might feel like caricatures, the performances are somehow all still believable nonetheless. It helps of course that Leigh's knack for directing is in evidence, with an episode shot largely on location and camera work that focuses almost exclusively on the actors. Close-ups of cats and objects are used to emphasise their importance to the story. 'Who's Who' is not essential Mike Leigh by any means, but for fans of his work it is certainly worth watching.

Mike Leigh's Who's Who isn't the best of his works for the BBC, often seeming rather ungainly and strained both in its individual devices and in its contrasts and juxtapositions; still, Leigh being Leigh, it still hits a generous number of targets. The film's central character is Alan, an administrative worker at a London stockbroking firm, weirdly obsessed with the world of nobility and titles from which he's inherently excluded, but of which he receives ample glimpses via the more highly-bred and better-connected professionals at the workplace; these in turn divide between the practiced if distant courtesy of the old school, and the crasser younger generation who cross into sexually harassing the female staff and holding loud obnoxious conversations in the office hallways. Unstable and pitiful as this all is, the film sometimes seems to be carrying multiple regrets for a bygone age in which these distinctions were better defined and more rigidly observed: Alan's delusional notion of self-elevation through osmosis (he bores everyone with his knowledge of Royal family trivia; his other main hobby is writing requests for signed photographs of celebrities) is somewhat pathetic, although, in a way, indicative of the desire for greater affinity and transparency that's contributed to transforming the notion of Royalty in subsequent decades. It's all laid on a little thick at times though, and the film's main set-pieces (including a misfiring dinner party attended by two of the young stockbrokers, at which for example the host chef ends up serving canned celery soup because the guest who was supposed to bring the avocados didn't show up) don't entirely cohere. At the end, although no doubt only temporarily, Alan succumbs to more accessible pleasures, joining his colleague in watching through the window a rather creepy ongoing flirtation in a nearby building; in the circumstances, this might actually constitute a healthier form of voyeurism?