GEOFFREY Palmer's face is his fortune, for sure, but Fairly Secret Army (Channel 4) owes its allure, also, to a typically daft British sense of humour, in which the real, the surreal and the fantastic mingle with sardonic merriment.
Harry (Geoffrey P.) has os- tensibly stopped being a fairly secret fascist and has subversively joined a Marxist cell — the sort he fancies (and many of the rest of us fancy) is used as a training ground for the looney Left power base.
At first, he seems ill-briefed. and his dog-faced cheerfulness is soon met by suspicions of bourgeois sentimentality. (This is the kind of nuttiness that is real: I have a friend who was thrown out of the Communist Party for ‘bourgeois bohemianisnU)
But he soon learns to stop saying things like 'Good Morning’ — on a day when the rich are still rich and the proletariat still ground under — and coasts along nicely. 'Can't seem to get into Lenin today — think I’ll switch to Dick Francis,’ he remarks, stifling a yawn over Comrade Ilyichs tome.
'Lots of capitalist skulduggery — exploitation of jockeys and animals — powerful revolutionary stuff,’ he hastily explains the Francis oeuvre. You have to laugh.
Among the cast of Marxist revolutionaries is one dour Liverpudlian, an upper-class County gel (who likes the rough trade element among the proletariat plotters) — and Harry’s son who is an implausible litnp-wristed Red. Oh. I know they exist — I’ve seen the Gay Left, too — but it is all played for laughs here.
The comedy is ludicrous, and yet its skill lies in the way that droll accuracies are inter- woven into the story.
Thanks to Maree Wilson for sending this article which appeared in the February 28, 1987 Daily Mail TV Mail column.