Vacant Possession

It's an hour of swindling, dodgy dealings and people trying to get one up on the next one. I didn't know the first thing about this series, and randomly chanced upon it on Talking Pictures.

Daphne Heard is wonderful as the stubborn old lady who refuses to move, a young Brian Murphy is also great as the estate agent.

Lots of fun, it was interesting to see just who had the last laugh. I'd love to see more of this series. 8/10

I watched this on Talking Pictures. It is a little gem from the Blackmail series, that I remember watching in the 1960s. The play is a bit dated now, reminding us of what we found so entertaining in the 1960s - low budget programmes with modest production values.

It would be unfair for me to say that television shows have moved on since then, but we must remember that such shows were part of the pioneering spirit of early television, paving the way to what we are able to enjoy today - the show that I watched was even complete with the type of static interference that televisions used to have in those days.

It was nice to see a very young Brian Murphy (of George and Mildred fame) in this film playing a very devious and unscrupulous estate agent, trying to sell off a property, using all the lies and deceit from his repertoire of salesmanship phrases, to make a quick sale. The way he was being economical with the truth and glossing over the unattractive features of the property with the type of veneer remarks that we so often hear on television plays and films like this, reminded us of just how determined salesmen can be in real life.

However, the acting honours go to Daphne Heard, who we all loved to watch playing the part of Peter Bowles's Hungarian mother in that marvellous series, To The Manor Born. Here she played the part of an old, awkward and cantankerous sitting tenant in the property that Brian Murphy was trying offload onto the naïve prospective buyers. Her awkwardness and cantankerousness was displayed by the fact that she would not move out of the property.

I did not know that Daphne Heard was such a versatile actress. She seemed to be able to play any type of part. I almost did not recognise her, due to the comic Irish accent that she used to play this play - a bit different from the Eastern European accent that she used for her part in To The Manor Born.

This television show has recently been recovered from the many lost shows that we would all like to watch again. It even has the same inherent interference, shown with the odd bit of static flashing across the screen, which we all accepted in the early days of television.

So to round this review off, I would like to say that, despite the programmes low production values, gloomy atmosphere, and the style of acting, it was a very original and well scripted little play, with a neat little twist at the end that no one would have been expecting.

9 out of 10.