One Fine Day

Most viewers know British director Stephen Frears from his later career as a successful commercial director, including for Hollywood with such accomplished work as The Grifters. Less well known are his skillful earlier Tv adaptations of plays written by the brilliant Alan Bennett. Often these Tv plays carry their main strengths in the dialogue and acting but in the case of One Fine Day, with its long stretches of mostly visual scenes where the protagonist is camped out alone in an empty office high rise, with excerpts (strikingly used) of opera on the track, the role of the director in visualizing Bennett's ideas is the factor that makes the difference.

The play is also memorable for stand up comic Dave Allen's unusual role as a melancholy, timid and frustrated estate agent and for its devastating portrait of a sales culture. (in the field of real estate, it gives the more well known David Mamet "Glengarry Glen Ross" a run for its money.)