Meanwhile back in Nouvion...

I have now watched again all of Allo Allo.  Previously I had only watched it once.  Well, I say again… I gave up previously some time around 1987 when they did the massive 24 episode series in an attempt to syndicate it in the US… In the early 90s I had no TV.  I saw bits of series 5 and 6.  I’d never really seen but glimpses of series 7, 8 and 9.  The pinnacle of Allo Allo is definitely the series 2 Christmas special "The Gâteau from the Château" with its brilliant reworking of Danny Kaye’s Court Jester tounge twister “The pellet with the poison's in the flagon with the dragon …etc” into the late Sam Kelly’s “Do you not see? That if you kill him with the pill from the till by making with it the drug in the jug, you need not light the candle with the handle on the gâteau from the château” etc… This episode has so many great moments such as Gordon Kaye throwing a bucket of sand over the Gâteau to stop it exploding and explaining that he “did this in memory of the Kaiser’s funeral”.  An explanation everybody accepts.

It is strange that a comedy that is a parody of another program (Secret Army) which was a fictionalisation of war stories can continue the joke for 85 episodes.  Previous Lloyd and Croft collaborations always had one foot in reality but Rene’s Nouvion is an entirely fictitious parallel world to our own.  I would say that it is a pantomime but that doesn’t really do justice to the level of world building going on.  Everyone in Allo Allo is primarily motivated by money and greed and the desire to become a war profiteer – making money out of chaos.  Chaos, constant deception and confusion ensues usually around the location of the “Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies”.  There are so many stand out performances.  Primarily Gordon Kaye as Rene. 

If you sit down and think about it Rene is an extremely unlikable person on paper.  He cheats on his wife with his waitresses and keeps his affairs with the waitresses concealed from each other and his wife and he’s a congenital coward who constantly gaslights his wife when she finds him with one of his mistresses by calling her a “stupid woman”.  But this joke never gets tired and is still funny.  I don’t know why.  Perhaps because Carmen Silvera sells it so well that she’s still besotted with her husband, perhaps because Kaye is a fat gay man who has no interest in women (although I can’t remember if we knew this at the time).  Perhaps …because it’s just so ridiculous.

Second in the line of towering performances is of course Richard Gibson as Herr Otto Flick of the Gestapo.  Gibson’s clipped delivery and ability to keep a straight face in any situation is too funny.  Of course today you probably wouldn’t get away with such a character as the Gestapo killed an awful lot of people but, you know, … it’s not the real world.  Flick is depicted as an incompetent who really isn’t that interested in being in the Gestapo but has been over promoted thanks to family connections (Uncle Himmler). 

I cannot go through every performance in Allo Allo or review every episode but some moments are priceless.  Still as funny today as when it first went out is Officer Crabtree in the wreckage of a pissoir ending the episode with “there is obviously no piss for the wicked”.  And Helga has an interesting role sometimes being on the side of the Colonel and sometimes on the side of Flick.  Her loyalties move further and further away from Flick as the series continues and she seems to twig she’s being used. 

The departure of Sam Kelly left a hole but Gavin Richards as Captain Alberto Bertorelli helped things pick up a bit… where Allo Allo really starts to get unstuck is recasting.  Recasting the Monsieur Roger/Ernest Leclercs thrice over (due to the actors passing on) doesn’t notice much.  Recasting Bertorelli not so much but they kind of get away with it.  Recasting Flick for the final series was just impossible to pull off.  A sign of the lack of faith the producers had in David Janson is that he spends most of his first episode completely concealed in bandages having “undergone plastic surgery”.  The problem cannot be overcome however that he’s not Richard Gibson.  He doesn’t have the same voice, body language …and I’m not sure they’re even the same height… Of course lots of implausible things happen in Allo Allo (a camera in a baked potato) but somehow this breaks the illusion.  But it doesn’t matter because the war is ending …but you still think “if only Richard Gibson”… etc … It’s like wondering what OHMSS would have been like with Connery.  Perhaps it’s the complicated explanation the writers came up with that made it worse.  There was an idea that Lazenby’s replacement of Connery would be explained by plastic surgery but in the end the producers decided not to explain it at all and just have Lazenby break the fourth wall.  Similarly no explanation was ever given for the recasting of Travis from Stephen Greif to Brian Croucher in Blake’s 7 and they kind of get away with it because your imagination fills in the blanks…

Other things I didn’t realise till I watched it back-to-back were... that the timeline is completely unbroken from episode 1 to the end of series 7 with each episode running into the next.  There’s a jump to 1943 at the start of series 8….  Crabtree has a girlfriend for a while but she is dropped... probably something to do with the production gap after Kaye's head accident... Yvette is the only person who can actually understand Crabtree... The two airmen do actually get rescued and their commander has some kind of affair going on with on of their wives.  Erm .. that's it...