Plotting - A chink in Roy Clarke`s armour?

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Nicko12345

Dedicated Member
I should state straight away that I am a huge fan of Roy Clarke`s writing. Not just on Summer Wine but also Keeping Up Appearances and Open All Hours (and I intend to seek out several of his other shows in the near future).

However, would it be unfair to say that sometimes the plots for his shows are not as strong as the dialogue and the characters?

For example, I would say that Keeping Up Appearances has pretty much the perfect set-up in terms of the characters. The story lines themselves though can sometimes be a little samey.

Open All Hours had some lovely characters and nice dialogue too (along with a couple of famous running jokes) but it didn`t have the most powerful plots. I`m sure some would say that is part of its appeal.

For Summer Wine I guess it depends very much on the episode. I was thinking though about why Roy Clarke may have been able to come up with such a superb trilogy to cover Compo`s funeral. Partly perhaps down to the fact that this gave him a really solid ready made theme to base the episodes around and he obviously rose to the task magnificently.
 
Possibly similar to Roy Clarke's script for the 1993 motion picture, A Foreign Field. As in the trilogy for Compo's passing, there was a solid theme to build from. In the case of the film, it was World War II veterans returning to Normandy to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Very different from his having to pull a theme out of thin air.

Marianna
 
Nicko12345 said:
I should state straight away that I am a huge fan of Roy Clarke`s writing. Not just on Summer Wine but also Keeping Up Appearances and Open All Hours (and I intend to seek out several of his other shows in the near future).

However, would it be unfair to say that sometimes the plots for his shows are not as strong as the dialogue and the characters?

For example, I would say that Keeping Up Appearances has pretty much the perfect set-up in terms of the characters. The story lines themselves though can sometimes be a little samey.

Open All Hours had some lovely characters and nice dialogue too (along with a couple of famous running jokes) but it didn`t have the most powerful plots. I`m sure some would say that is part of its appeal.

For Summer Wine I guess it depends very much on the episode. I was thinking though about why Roy Clarke may have been able to come up with such a superb trilogy to cover Compo`s funeral. Partly perhaps down to the fact that this gave him a really solid ready made theme to base the episodes around and he obviously rose to the task magnificently.
Click to expand...

I think it reflex a lot of real life, we go through our everyone lives and we all have laughs in between the boring/sad bits. Our everyday lives don't have plots or themes yet we all have funny stories to tell. I quite like some of the quieter episodes, they tend to be funnier like Nowhere In Particular that seemed to bob about a bit and in my opinion was a great episode. The more true to life a program is the easier we can relate to it, well I can anyway, you can well imagine living next door to Edie and Wesley or Nora and Wally because they are believable.

Great topic for a thread :D
 
index4u said:
Possibly similar to Roy Clarke's script for the 1993 motion picture, A Foreign Field.
Click to expand...

Oh Yes!! One of my all-time favorites. Just recently watched
it again, partly just to see Leo McKern (Rumpole of the
Bailey). That and Railway Children really do it for me.
 
I think there is a certain charm to the redundancy to episodes in KUA and Summer Wine. It is comforting sometimes to see episodes like When You Take a Good Bite out of Yorkshire, It Tastes Terrible, Short Back and Palais Glide, and Dried Dates and Codfanglers. These are what I call the "aimless wondering" episodes. Then there are mixed in with wilder episodes like Ballard for Wind Instruments and Canoe and Full Steam Behind.

Like Pearl said, it might be a bit too unrealistic if every single episode was really eventful. Clarke also keeps it interesting by mixing in the travelling episodes and wedding and funeral episodes. I think it is a great balance.
 
I agree that sometimes having slower episodes or `busy doing nothing` episodes suited the show well. Maybe there were too many of them as the show went on though and too many similar episodes.

I had forgotten until this thread as well though that on Keeping Up Appearances they had to bring in a script editor to heal the rift between Roy Clarke and producer Howard Snoad as Snoad felt there were problems with the scripts. I haven`t heard about whether there was a script editor for later series of Summer Wine or who it was though...
 
As others have said, comedies don't have to be about anything particular to be funny. What we enjoy are the characters as much as anything, not how the story unfolds. In fact, one of the things I like about LOTSW is that the episodes are not formulaic in the way most American comedy programs are. Sometimes Summer Wine episodes end abruptly or on a quiet note, for example.

But I think a lot of that is due to show not being a diary of the characters lives. It's just snippets of what they are up to that we see. That's why, with the exception of the Compo passing trilogy, we didn't see episodes around the deaths of other characters, even when they were significant to the show. It was sometimes years before the show acknowledged that they were dead. You wouldn't see that on most TV shows.
 
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