Clarence

 

This week whilst wandering through the Ronnie Barker BBC box-set I rediscovered Clarence. I really liked this series when it went out.  The plot is proposterous as Barker plays a removals man who can't see anything with hilarious consequences   It's an obviously silly and implausible conceit - something that seems as though it belongs in a silent comedy or a Viz cartoon strip - but it does allow for a lot of good (if not all politically correct) visual gags.  Comedy also comes from Clarence's inability to admit that he has any disabilities or shortcomings.

However, what I find most interesting about Clarence is that most sitcoms are about people trapped in situations that they cannot escape from.  Clarence, conversely, is about two people who come into some money excaping their humdrum lives.  Domestic servant Jane Travers - Josephine Tewson - inherts a small prefabricated cottage and they decide to escape the city for the countryside.  Perhaps one of the things that makes the series work is that it's a romance which is a departure for Barker who usually plays loveable but scheeming rogues who are more inclined to lust than love.  Not that Clarence doesn't have a few schemes - mainly to get the bolster out of the bed he and Travers share.  Another thing that makes it work is attention to period detail.  There are lots of references to 1930s events from the Cornonation of George VI to the release of Disney's Snow White.  And many of Clarences amusing stories date from his time in the trenches during World War I which would have been accurate for a man of his age at that time.  Barker wrote it himself under the pseudonym of Bob Ferris (a Clement/La Frenais Likely Lads/Porridge in joke) and so it gives us a window into his view of the world which one doesn't always get in his other work.  This is as near as Barker gets to playing himself.  On a bit of a tangent apparently the Two Ronnies sign off "It's a Goodnight from me and Goodnight from him" was an in joke about Corbett being a standup (playing himself) whereas Barker was an actor (playing others so never actually there at all) or something...

Anyway Clarence only ran for 6 episodes but that's enough.  Not everthing needs to go on and on.  It was what it was and resolves with Jane and Clarence marrying in the tradition of most memorable romantic fiction from Jane Austin to the Brontes to Mills and Boon to Barbera Cartland to ...okay but it's not too twee.  Although one does sometimes wonder what happened to Clarence and Travers.  Presumably they lived happily ever after in a prefabricated cottage with an outside toilet and chicken coop and avoided the oncoming blitz soon to be over the London they wisely left...