The Late Mrs Merton and Malcolm

I haven’t posted on this blog for a while due to being busy with bigger things like watching television so I thought I’d review some of it.  Recently I have been watching “Mrs Merton and Malcolm” from 1999 which I found remaindered in Poundland for …well, a pound …some years ago and has been sitting on the shelf for about 5 years waiting for me to get round to watching it.  Strangely compulsive viewing it is.

A project of  Caroline Aherne, Craig Cash and Henry Normal it inhabits a strange period of time between the end of the Mrs Merton Show and the start of the Royle Family.  The sitcom itself inhabits an even stranger time period with Mrs Merton (Aherne) and her son Malcolm (Cash) living in a terrace house that appears to be simultaneously in both the 1960s and the 1990s.  Malcolm is a bit simple and has never grown up, is introverted and works in a pet shop (unseen).  Most of the episodes take place in Mrs Merton’s house.   The episodes follow a day in their life which is interspersed with a visit from the elderly Arthur Capstick (Brian Murphy) who has a “dodgy ticker” and comes round to see his friend Mr Merton – a never fully seen lump in a double bed upstairs who eventually dies.  Each week Arthur brings him an antiquated sweet of some kind (like pear drops or Victory Vs) and sings him a pop song acapella.  Arthur remembers next to nothing and has no meaningful conversation - his catchphrase being "I don't know, eh?" 

Remarkably for a show about “nothing” with no studio audience the plots can become quite compelling.  Possibly the strongest episode is the one where Malcolm and a young and child called Justin (who they have to look after for the day as his pregnant mother is in hospital) become engaged in a games contest.  Justin is a truly odious brat who has appeared on Junior Masterchef in the Lloyd Grossman era… the battle to find a game simple enough that Malcolm can win at is truly glorious.  

Second to this is the episode where Malcolm asks the seemingly equally shy Judith (Ursula Holden Gill) from the chemist out on date.  Mrs Merton appears to encourage him in this but there’s an undertone that she’s not really that enthusiastic – or perhaps they’re both socially inept?  Critics read incest into the relationship which Aherne and Cash denied.  Of course an over bonded relationship with a mother and a distant relationship with a father is a classic scenario as in many serial killer's childhood relationships... but then Malcolm's father is so incapacitated we don't know what... That aside... Possibly more sinister is the implication in several episodes that Mrs Merton is murdering her husband (or slowly euthanizing him by neglect) implied in lines such as “Oh, don’t bother.  He’ll have to learn to [use the oxygen machine] on his own or he won’t learn.”  This is made even more sinister by the seemingly upbeat nature of many of the episodes – the enthusiasm Malcolm has about his birthday party is strangely infectious.  Until Mrs Merton says something like “Nobody but you, Arthur.  Just like last year.”   

In one surreal episode Mrs Merton’s red-haired Scottish sister comes to stay – how they grew up as sisters with different nationalities and accents remains gloriously unexplained.   Despite the fact the house appears to be stuck in the 50s and 60s all the TV and Radio programs seem to be from the (then) present day.  Unlike like kitchen of Mrs Brown in "Mrs Brown's Boys" which is stylistically set in 80s aspic ....

...Mrs Merton's kitchen is actually very modern (for the period) with expensive inbuilt handles.... Sorry for this odd tangent but that's the trouble with selling furniture one becomes obsessed with set design...

... anyway the point is...  Unlike, for example, Ronnie Corbett's "Sorry" ...it's the attitudes but strangely not the sets that are old fashioned.  And the aspirations.  Or lack of them.  

"Can I be an airline pilot, mam?" 

"No, Malcolm."

To save the show which is just people in a house most of the time becoming too sedentary in most episodes Mrs Merton and Malcolm have a choreographed dance number while listening to the wireless – these dance satires cover Riverdance, Hey Macarena and even Glen Miller's Pennsylvania 6-5000... which is a very neat why of raising the tempo...

I don’t think it’s too big a spoiler to reveal that series ends with the long awaited death of the terminally ill Mr Merton whose apparel Mrs Merton disperses to Arthur and the local vicar (Steve Coogan with big teeth) with inappropriately generous glee.  Possibly one of the reasons the series was not re-commissioned and an upcoming Christmas special was canned.  Dark stuff.

Very strange it is.  Riding high on the success of the Mrs Merton Show one wonders if Cash and Aherne thought that anything they put Mrs Merton in afterwards would probably be commissioned and decided to see what they could get away with… a world of trifle, spam, pass the parcel and Mrs Merton and Malcolm repeating phrases that one can imagine have been lifted straight from their own childhoods and yet...  It is in many ways a Peter Pan like story of a man who never grew up trying to remain a child for ever … or an exploration of what it would be like if a man stayed a child? … or something …? and like J. M. Barrie’s parable  actually very sinister underneath the jollity.

But one can see how the Royle Family evolved from this… of course it’s made ever more sad now when one ponders on the fact that the troubled Caroline Aherne who spent so much time dressing old as Mrs Merton never actually became an old lady herself – dying tragically young of cancer aged only 52…

Craig Cash is now the voice of Gogglebox...