A great novel should capture the atmosphere of it time, but comedy needn't do the same. Think of Father Ted: it didn't have a pious, restrained feel which we might expect to find on an isolated, religious island. On the contrary, it was manic and weird and brilliant.
So if comedy is drawn from confounding our expectations and working against the grain, Up The Women (BBC2) must be trying out some new theory. It depicts Britain in 1910 where ladies were supposed to be soft, delicate and empty-headed, and that's exactly what this comedy is like. It perfectly gives us the cliche of the time.
We see some polite, well-bred ladies who meet in a church hall to sew and enjoy some tea and treacle loaf. The setting is mild and genteel and so is the material. It's dull, ineffectual and prim, just as Edwardian ladies were supposed to be.
The women of the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle meet to do their sewing, but tend to get distracted and dabble in the campaign for Women's Suffrage. This is also where the comedy falls flat: they chatter about it, and sometimes get excitable, and might even hatch some little plans, but nothing ever comes of it, and they usually just content themselves with tea and cake.
In this episode, they intend to travel to London meet an anti-Suffrage intellectual and jolly well give him a piece of their mind. However, some real Suffragettes have tried to hand an exploding pie to Winston Churchill at the local train station, meaning it's been closed off to all women whilst the police track the culprits. Churchill was Home Secretary at the time, and this gives rise to the absolutely killer line 'He should've stayed at home!'
With ladies banned from the station, they decide to dress up as men so they can sneak aboard a train and still make their London appointment. Isn't cross-dressing now considered to be the hallmark of shoddy, pantomime comedy? It may have been funny when Les Dawson and the Pythons were doing it, but now it's more of a Mrs Brown's Boys thing. Oh, but this time it's women dressing as men, so it's subversive! No, it's simply unimaginative. The women apply false beards and wear waistcoats and bowler hats and are told to walk as though they have a 'septic upper leg'. They go limping and waddling around and it was tiresome to watch.
And these Edwardian women, wouldn't there be laughs in having one of them turn out to be a loudmouth or a ruffian? Instead, every cast member conforms to a female stereotype: there's the clever one - and she wears glasses to signal that she's 'clever' - there's the bimbo one, the pretty one, the strict one and the old one.
So we have such stereotypes of different kinds of Edwardian womanhood, and yet the cast are excellent. How have they found themselves in such a dull comedy? Maybe it's because the cast are so good (Jessica Hynes, Vicki Pepperdine, Rebecca Front) that our hopes are raised, and then dashed, meaning this is the only area in which this bland sitcom confounds the audience's expectations.
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