Ever Decreasing Circles, cricket and quiet English despair

Jon Hotten is struck by an old English sitcom’s “quiet, unacknowledged and deep-running despair”, which features, naturally enough, a game of cricket…

You might remember Ever Decreasing Circles, a British – make that English, because it could only be English – sitcom of the early 1980s, the fading final years of a genre that quite often looked at notions of class and aspiration and then gently took the piss out of them.

Ever Decreasing Circles, like Terry and June, The Good Life, Brush Strokes, Keeping Up Appearances and several others, featured the nascent middle classes, dwellers in the cul-de-sacs of the 70s boom-burbs; commuters, middle managers, golf club members, with their dreams of conservatories and souffles and the company dinner-dance. These pretensions were easily speared, but not often as darkly as they were in Ever Decreasing Circles.

It’s contextual, of course: the show is a thing of its time, written by John Esmonde not Chris Morris, but there’s a quiet, unacknowledged and deep-running despair to it that in retrospect seems quite daring. Richard Briers plays Martin, a pedantic, obsessive-compulsive valve salesman with a photocopier in his garage and moral code as inflexible as a periodic table. In 2012, he would reside somewhere on the autism spectrum; back then he was just funny, and not unrepresentative. Most people knew someone like him.

His neighbours were Howard and Hilda, a couple that seem weirder now than they ever did then, a middle-aged, guileless pair who wore matching jumpers and thought the same thoughts at the same time. In 2012 they would have been hounded to death by Jeremy Kyle kids or under the care of social services. The jeopardy came from Paul, a new arrival in the close who was handsome, urbane, funny, good at everything, and – most shockingly of all – the owner of a successful hair salon. Martin loathed Paul of course, not just for who he was, but for what he represented. There was a darker subtext, too. Martin’s wife obviously fancied Paul, to which Martin was oblivious (thus making any hint of betrayal all the more devastating).

Ennui, boredom, acceptance, resentment, disillusionment, loyalty – it was all there, just alluded to rather than highlighted. The other day I stumbled on an episode, in three parts, on Youtube (above, and continued below). It’s a about a cricket match. The set-up is classic; like all sitcoms, it telegraphs its ending while allowing it to be savoured. Martin is the team’s skipper. He has run the side for 14 years, dreaming of promotion to a division where they could play a club that has ‘under floor heating in the dressing rooms’ (another impossibly glamorous idyll of the 1970s). He is also the fixtures secretary and the man responsible for looking after the kit, which he has just whitened and varnished.

He’s desperate to stop Paul playing, of course, because he knows he’ll be better than everyone else. The rest of the team all want him in, even if it means they can’t play themselves. There is a tremendous little scene around this in Martin’s garage, where Paul arrives to confirm his availability (he’s told he’ll still have to fill in and return the postcard that Martin will send to him); Here Martin recalls Denis Compton, (‘I always get emotional when I think of him’), and Compton’s captain at Middlesex, FG Mann, ‘Not so great a player by many a long chalk,’ Martin says, ‘but nevertheless his captain. ‘Never ever did you see Denis question FG, slight FG or demean FG.’

‘What are you trying to say?’ Paul asks, disingenuously.

‘I’m not trying to say anything,’ says Martin. ‘I am saying it’.

It’s kind of funny, but kind of awkward too. It has heart, and it has another twist for the ’80s cricket fan in that the actor playing Paul is a dead ringer for Phil Edmonds, that most haughty of Middlesex players.

The story runs its inevitable course: Paul isn’t playing until a bloke called Curly (he’s bald of course, as all people in sitcoms called Curly are) is injured in the warm-up. The opposition bat first and rack up 200, partly because Martin won’t bowl Paul. In reply, they’re 46-7 when Martin is out in ridiculous circumstances, leaving Paul to bat with Howard, a man who, it’s revealed, proposed to his wife while stoned on endorphins after making his highest ever score of 11. Paul gets the runs.

There’s a sting, though, in the last scene. Martin is in the dressing room with his wife, avoiding the jollity of the bar, where Paul is holding court. The opposition skipper comes in and announces he won’t be accepting Martin’s offer of a jug for his lads. ‘That bloke who got the runs played for Cambridge University. If you want to win that much, we won’t be drinking with you’.

It could have ended there, with Martin proved right. Instead, his wife suggests they go into the bar, where Martin always plays the piano and everyone has a sing-song. Just as they go to open the door, the piano starts up. Martin’s wife looks through. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘it is him…’

It’s equivocal and bittersweet, and for the time, brilliantly done. The cricket match is equally well observed: it rings with scenes and characters familiar to any club player – bored wives on the boundary, no spikes in the pavilion, the crooked, unchallengable away umpire; even those distant and  long-gone tropes the home-knitted jumper and the club kit bag. I’d say John Esmonde was a fan: alongside the Compton/Mann scene, Paul walks into bat with a Jumbo, which in the early 80s was the bat du jour. Martin makes do with a Fearnley.

The ‘action’ is badly filmed, another faded tradition. Cricket would appear quite often in shows like this, because it represented something, and how the characters reacted to it said something about them. No-one’s used the game in this way for a long time, and it would take a good writer to make it work in these more atomised days. Writers now might be more savage, funnier, but they don’t often have such lightness of touch.

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About Author Profile: Jon Hotten

Jon writes about cricket all over the place, is the author of Muscle and The Years of the Locust and also has his own fine cricket blog called The Old Batsman.

7 thoughts on “Ever Decreasing Circles, cricket and quiet English despair

  1. Wormstir@gmail.com'
    Worm
    April 20, 2012 at 18:10

    Great read Jon. who knows, cricket might work in film – after all there’s a very popular film about fly fishing aimed at women about to hit the big screen (salmon fishing in the Yemen)

  2. Gaw
    April 20, 2012 at 19:19

    I love this sitcom which is a brilliant evocation of, as you say Jon, a very English time and place (as well as being very funny). Martin is one of the great English characters of the aspiring middle, in a line that goes back to Pooter at least. Great to know that others appreciate it. I’m sure that even if we no longer find it funny it will live on as an illustration of social attitudes, along with the other classic sitcoms.

    • andrewnixon@blueyonder.co.uk'
      April 21, 2012 at 22:05

      The scene with Briars photocopying (“I’ll be sending you a postcard” etc) is pure Pooter.

  3. jonhotten@aol.com'
    April 20, 2012 at 19:54

    Thanks Worm, yes I believe there’s a film version of Netherland in the works, which will be interesting. i really liked the book.

    I watched a few more on youtube after finding the cricket one. As Gaw notes, it was very much about those attitudes, and it was a lot darker than I remembered. There’s one where Martin thinks he’s been unfaithful to his wife at a conference and feels obliged to leave her. That says it all really.

  4. john.hh43@googlemail.com'
    John Halliwell
    April 20, 2012 at 20:17

    “Curly Baldwin’s broken a finger!” It just had to happen. Poor Martin. Thanks for the reminder about this programme, Jon; I really enjoyed it, the cricket sequences were very good, Briars was brilliant and Penelope…….well, gorgeous.

    Cinema and TV really do struggle to present sporting events as drama/comedy. I vaguely recall a television film or series from the eighties titled ‘Bodyline’. When it was advertised, I looked forward to watching the depiction of leg-theory strategy, the roles of Jardine, Bradman and Larwood, and the aftermath of the tour. For the life of me, I can’t recall how good or bad the programme was as drama; what stays in my mind is the very poor re-creation of Larwood’s bowling. It was like watching the opening bowler of our local 2nd Xl suffering with a double hernia and still trying to get it away at 95 mph. (If you’ve ever tried straining to the edge of existence to get it away at anything above 80, you’ll know the sense of anti-climax as it drops, limp, half-dead, at your feet). There was absolutely no sense of the menace contained in the wonderfully fluid action of the great bowler. But then it must be a technical nightmare for film makers to capture such action. Perhaps Puttnam, via his director, would have managed it if his proposal to make a film of the 1932/33 tour had come to fruition.

    The only programme about cricket I have enjoyed was ‘Outside Edge’, from the early nineties. It was about two completely different married couples brought together by village cricket. It had the massive advantage of a fine writer: Richard Harris, and four superb actors: Brenda Blethyn, Robert Dawes, Timothy Spall, and Josie Lawrence. I recently managed to buy the DVDs through Amazon. Wonderful.

  5. meehanmiddlemarch@googlemail.com'
    jane
    April 21, 2012 at 01:59

    Thank you for mentioning this – it’s really Alan Ayckbourn-esque. And ‘Outside Edge’ written by Richard Harris was brilliant as John mentions – Robert Daws superb as ever fully in the Arthur Lowe/Captain Mainwaring tradition of a very particular kind of English comedy. This show represents one of the many peaks of Richard Briers’ career. The only reason I didn’t see more of it was because I found its pathos unbearable. And I saw Richard Briers and Peter Egan together on the West End stage around that time, playing a simlilar dynamic. His family lived opposite the flat my parents now occupy in Raynes Park and he went to Rokeby School. I think growing up in this environment helped him portray the internal life of those who live in the English London suburbs. His daughter Lucy is currently reading the Book at Bedtime on Radio 4. p.s. Penelope Wilton – good value as ever.

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