Punch, March, 1986
In their early, larky days, before they
got their wives and models mixed up, the Pre-Raphaelites used to exult in
jeering at the anatomical solecisms of professional rivals, especially this
business of wings. The old,
Fundamentalist view seemed to be that a man could get to heaven on the
slenderest of aeronautical equipment, and it was the view of the skeptics that
most of the cherubim and seraphim who featured so heavily in evangelical art
would hardly have got the thing off the ground.
In the pre-series trailers advertising the imminent landing of Mervyn
Peake’s Mr. Pye (Channel Four),
the wings would surely have drawn the derision of Rossetti and company,
who would probably have concluded, rightly so, that Peake’s avenging angel
could hardly have gone from Victoria to East Croydon without coming to grief
somewhere around Clapham Junction. Anyone
who has watched a gull gathering about itself the cloak of its wings will have a
better sense of angelic proportion than those responsible for Mr. Peake’s sad
equipment. However, as divine
beings in religious cosmology generally, and the Christian in particular, do not
seem to be subject to the laws of aero-dynamics, perhaps the criticism is mere
post-Darwinian facetiousness. Perhaps
Mr. Muggeridge could enlighten us.
In any case, Mr. Pye in his opening episode turned out to be anything but
angelic. Having arrived on the
island of Sark in order to convert its inhabitants to the gospel of love, he
reveals himself as nothing more than a psalm-psinging, psanctimonious
psoothsayer whose idea of spreading the gospel of light is to paint people’s
gateposts and warm their soup. This
might sound like a modest start to the millennium, but it is enough to convert
his acidulous landlady, a tightlipped misanthrope who has not smiled since the
Coronation, and whose life is one long battle with everyone else on the island
from the errand-boy to her fat neighbor. In the event, she falls like a ton of monumental masonry for
the oleaginous Mr. Pye, whose technique is so effusive that it comes as a shock
to realize that he is not actually wearing a dog-collar at any point in the
proceedings.
Yet again it is a case of excellent playing redeeming indifferent
writing. As the crusading Pye,
Derek Jacobi seems likely to overcome the terrible problem of portraying a
character whose barometer of temperament is limited to a range of Fair to Fine;
he is especially adept at conveying a sense of innocence by selecting
fruit-drops from a little box. His first challenge, in the form of the embittered landlady,
was a mildly entertaining affair, but would have been less than nothing without
the superlative talents of Judy Parfitt, whose very first utterance in the
series is a bark of bad temper, and yet who has not even reached the end of the
opening episode before she is out in a canoe with Pye for all the world like
Mrs. Claypool being courted by Otis B. Driftwood. I am not sure if Mr.
Pye would be able to sustain the interest for much longer, but if it does,
then the credit should go to the two leading players, a virtuoso partnership
giving the first-rate exposition of the truth that people cannot take too much
goodness at a time.