User Reviews

Simon Day plays Alf Garnett in a one off remake of a lost episode of Till Death Us Do Part.

Alf is at home upset because his dinner is burnt in the oven and the coal fire is out while Elsie has gone to the pictures. When Elsie and daughter Rita return he is angry that he has had no dinner after flogging his guts out at work which includes doing overtime. In the meantime they will be having a fish and chips as Mike, the Scouse git has gone to get at the chippie but they have left Alf out thinking he would have had the dinner in the oven.

Alf tries to get hold of Mike from the phone box outside his house but he can hardly get on as a local girl is hogging it.

The show was filmed in a studio bound way like the series Mrs Brown's Boys. The script is exactly like the one from the mid 1960s as written by Johnny Speight.

The whole thing was rather pedestrian and stilted with a few mild laughs. I remember the original series with Warren Mitchell. New fans would had been hopelessly lost. Simon Day catches the frustration of Alf but lacks the seething angry voice of Mitchell. Day sounds too whiny.

I think a script editor was required to maybe tweak the script a little and jazz it up a bit. I admired the way Speight constructed the episode but it would had been better if they had updated Alf Garnett and brought him to the 21st Century with new stories.

Remade from the original Johnny Speight script, with the original telecast having been lost in the bowels of the BBC archives, "A Woman's Place is in the Home" showed just what has been lost from the art of sitcom writing over the last half a century or so.

The story was a straightforward one: Alf (Simon Day) returns home from work late to find that his dinner has been spoiled in the oven. He berates Elsie (Lizzie Roper) and daughter Rita (Sydney Rae White) for their neglect of his material comforts, but is buoyed up when he discovers that son-in-law Mike (Carl Au) has gone to the chippie to buy fish and chip suppers for the whole family. Needless to say things do not run smooth, and Alf is left hungry and embittered by the whole experience.

In terms of attitude, Speight's script is redolent of mid-Sixties attitudes, when women were expected to remain homemakers and look after their spouses. The setting - Wapping High Street - evoked a long- gone world of red telephone boxes, tightly-knit terraced houses and a largely white population. In that sense this episode was a period-piece.

Yet what lifted it above the ordinary was the quality of the writing. The actors had the chance to take pauses in between their lines, so that the audience could discover the true relationships between them - despite his surface bombast, it was clear that Alf had no real control over his spouse, and the knowledge of that fact made him even angrier. Rita remained largely silent, but her occasional interjections made it clear how much she loved her father. The Garnetts were always a close-knit family, despite their struggles.

Alf also had great fun with an anonymous telephone caller (Victoria Bainaves), who was continually exchanging words of love with her unseen boyfriend in the phone box, thereby preventing Alf from ordering his supper. Although powerless to intervene, the sheer colorfulness of Alf's rhetoric was a wonder to listen to.

Filmed in front of a live studio audience, in a deliberate pastiche of how sitcoms were once made, Ben Gosling Fuller's production proved how the greatest sitcoms can stand the test of time. I do hope the BBC commissioning editors go ahead and remake some more of these episodes; they are definitely worth watching.