Brass

I was watching a recent programme highlighting Britain's top 50 sitcoms, and I was extremely disappointed to see that this gem of surreal humour had been overlooked. I wish they would bring the entire series out on dvd, as this was one of the tv highlights of my teenage years. The cast was led by Timothy West playing a northern mill owner, Bradley Hardacre, plus his dysfunctional family, and the working class family led by Agnes Fairchild with the best heaving bosom on tv! I distinctly remember having a crush on her wimpy son who wanted to become a poet instead of a miner, played by Gary Cady. The series poked fun at so many genres and other programmes (my favourite poke being at Brideshead Revisited with the character of Morris Hardacre, complete with teddy bear!) and deserves to be re-aired to a greater audience.

Brilliantly funny!! Part satire on "its grim up north" drama and surreal in a Pythonish way at times. Timothy West has great fun (I imagine) playing an unscrupulous factory owner pulling out all the stops (as do all the cast) to lampoon all the stereotypical traits of such well recognisable characters. Stevenson and Roach (the writers) have pitched the whole thing just right. Not enough people "got it" at the time and it has fallen out of the publics memory it seems. Time for a revival. Search it out, it is still available on DVD I think. " Too much meat in the canteen dinners" is Bradley Hardacres response to any show of spirit from his workers. The workers are so poor, they can only bring a grape (yes A grape) to the hospitalised. Yes its that surreal.Enjoy if you can find it.

A laugh-out-loud parody of overwraught and serious historical drama, a carbon copy of daytime soap, BRASS is full of laughs, wordplay, one-liners and silliness. Totally straightfaced and never letting its mask slip, it destroys the pompous self-importance of DH Lawrence and so many other classics.

Timothy West and Caroline Blakiston as the Hardacres, Barbara Ewing and Geoffrey Hinsliff and the Fairchilds: all perfectly cast. These four lead from the front, with perfect characterisation and totally deadpan delivery of ludicrous dialogue and wildly overblown plots. Red Agnes Fairchild, so proud that she irons her clothes before washing them, sits at her kitchen table with bosom heaving as she sombrely inflates balloons and puts peas into pods for a few pennies a day. Lady Patience Hardacre, confined to her wheelchair since that horrible tambourine accident, genteelly applies spoons of gin to her breakfast, with her hair immaculately coiffeured on one side and totally flat on the other. Humble, cap-wringing George Fairchild worships the ground that hardhearted Bradley Hardacre tramples him into.

Silent But Deadly explosives; plots to destroy the cottage hospital (the former village workhouse, as well you know); a horse called Brass Beauty; patented Truss Flanges; Matt the beautiful-but-dim poet; Isobel with her raging libido; Morris with his teddybear and varsity friends ... every cliché is grabbed, turned around and recycled. It's all so wildly over the top, and played with utter straightness. Agnes's hysterical outbursts of Biblical melodrama never fail to amuse.

There was no need for a third series, though. Returning after more than five years and appearing on a different TV station, with a couple of changes in the cast (Geoffrey Hutchings is a poor replacement for Geoffrey Hinsliff and is actually quite badly miscast), series three is a let down. It feels as if the producers really didn't know what to do with the characters. The spontaneity and oomph has gone, and there are several scenes that have no laughs at all. The joke is beginning to wear a little thin towards the end of series two: series three is quite poor, and there isn't even a proper ending.

BRASS is so gloriously daft, it still remains fresh after thirty years. Definitely worth getting the DVDs.

... as you well know.

You either got it or you didn't. Those who got it absolutely loved it and could not wait for the next episode. Those who didn't get it either thought it was "too daft to laugh at", or did not realize that it was a satirical comedy. Dry, witty humor indeed, but every line that came form Timothy West's mouth and delivered with a straight face was a gem, mostly very dry wit, but occasionally veering into broad farce.

The storyline was a parody of the grim working class drama set in the industrial north in the 1930's. Love on the Dole, Sam, the Master of Bankdam, Dr. Finlay's Case Book, a dash of Brideshead Revisited and a nod to just about every period soap opera and melodrama, all portrayed with straight faced, but hilariously over the top acting, rather like a bad amateur production. The boots and cloth cap wearing poor workers live in grim terraces owned by the exquisitely tailored mill owner, a coarse self made man, who himself lives in a beautiful big house with landscaped gardens and manicured lawns, which the poor can look at to lift their souls. Bradley Hardacre has a finger in every pie: the cottage hospital, the munitions works, the mine, the dismal terrace homes with the tin bath hanging outside the front door. He considers himself a philanthropist, but his aim to improve conditions in the mines is to get by with as few workers as possible and sack the rest. He begrudges the workers the cotton dust they take home in their lungs. When the hospital ran out of cod liver oil during the strike, they appealed for goldfish to press for the oil.

Bradley has had a long standing affair with bosomy strike leader 'Red' Agnes Fairchild and is the father of at least one of her sons. Agnes allows the affair to continue in order to keep her husband and family employed, though she has no love for him, only a hot burning desire. Bradley married up, and his aristocratic wife now pours gin on her breakfast cornflakes and in her soup, causing Bradley to remark that seeing as her class's soup is at least 70% proof, that is why they are called high society.

I saw a couple of episodes of this series during a visit to UK in 1984, and don't think it was ever shown in the US. They probably wouldn't "get it" or so the thinking would go. The PC crowd would have had heart attacks when Morris acquired a golliwog in the last series. It was a long, long wait for the DVD, but it was worth it. I can watch it over and over just to appreciate the wit.

A wonderful satire. Brass manages to take pot shots at every aspect of popular culture and human hypocrisy. A glorious tongue in cheek romp that pokes fun and parodies with delicious precision. I remember watching it when it first aired and oddly, it's lost none of its fizz since then! Sit back, relax and enjoy.