The credits and 'Got To Be Free' playout. The use of this footage of a fox running free (as spoken of by Ray's character throughout the play) was apparently called an 'unbelievably trite piece of symbolism' by Phillip Purser in the Sunday Telegraph according to Simon Farquar's piece. Farquar says this footage is stock taken from the 1970 film Lisice, but having scanned through (what I think is) that film twice on Youtube I can't find any scenes of a fox contained therein. Also Farquar says the footage is of a 'rabbit' so I've no idea what's going on there.
I first discovered this on this very forum some years back, but there was a later Play For Today in 1979 that had a Kinks connection: an episode entitled 'Waterloo Sunset' starring renowned cockney actress (wish I could be like) Queenie Watts in one of her last roles. And the old girl opens it up by bashing out this BRILLIANT knees up version of the titular song on the old Johanna! Magical!
My two reflections on the Long Distance Piano player.. 1) Ray plays a musician called Pete driven to the his wits end by a hard taskmaster.... hmm, wonder what P. Quaife would have made of this show had he caught it? 2) Something they would have to have lampshaded in a modern show but I presume went unmentioned as an unmentionable by the broadcasting standards of 1970.... HOW WAS RAY MEANT TO GO TO THE TOILET?????!!! Maybe THAT was what finally drove him to breaking point!
I thought the scene with Ray, the two guys, and the two privacy screens was supposed to be Ray going to the toilet... they had some kind of receptacle... looked like a clothes basket or something.
An interesting little show. It seems like the story was pointing towards the idea of the piano player just being another worker drone following directions. Giving us an, even in the music industry the stars were just caught in a job where dignity was something easily removed by a hard taskmaster. Ray does a very good job of the acting, and I think his character was believable. Some of the acting on there was a little melodramatic, but that seems to line up with the times. The wife's parts seemed a little over the top on occasion, and we never got a resolve on the greasers. The manager initially seems a likable enough fella, until we see his true colours exposed over the course of the second half. Not something I would probably go out and buy, but certainly a decent little show that seems to make its point.
But did anyone go to the toilet in TV shows before the 2000s? Which reminds me of that Rowan Atkinson sketch as the Devil where he answered a question from one of the assembled sinners about toilets: 'If you had read your Bible you would have seen that it was damnation [pause] without relief." much like long-distance piano playing
The whole play was just unremittingly bleak - the bleakness of late-60s Britain overlaid with the bleakness of the premise, amplified by the fuzzy black & white picture. It certainly wasn't a bundle of laughs. I thought that scene near the end was dealing with the toilet situation as well. The alternate version of "Got To Be Free" sounded good, though - I suppose we can discuss this more when we get to the album track in a couple of weeks.
Yea, I remember folks getting all bent out of shape about shows not being realistic because nobody ever went to the toilet.... i personally never found it interesting enough to care.... i mean they're tv shows lol, that's not really where I go for reality
On "All in the Family" (based on the UK's "Till Death Us Do Part" TV series, of which Ray wrote the theme of the movie adaption!), Archie flushed a toilet. According to this site, that was the first sound of a toilet flushing. "Leave It to Beaver" was the first to just show a toilet. Boy, this thread has really gone down the crapper...
Quick, any Kinks tracks we've covered that mention the throne? I dread to think of what we'd find in Dead End Street...
I have been jumping up and down, frothing at the bit, for two weeks now waiting for Lola vs Powerman!!!! But I must admit, last night I finally got a chance to listen Muswell Hillbillies. Previously, I had only put it on a few times before, and only with half an ear. It wasn’t doing much for me. ….until last night, then just Wow! One close listen through headphones late at night with no interruption and I got it! what an album! ….so now I am jumping up and down waiting for Lola and Muswell!!!!!
Long Distance Piano Player was much better than I expected. The performances were good, especially the manager, and the production was creative; in particular I enjoyed the way it was directed and edited, the staging of the scenes, the framing of the characters, e.g. the shot from above of the manager collapsing into the chair in the empty room at the end. It occurs to me that there could be a larger metaphor in the story, one of the human condition, the will to keep struggling through life against the freedom of non-existence, in which case the manager represents the unexplained will to exist that drives all living things, and the worker is the human who has developed the intelligence to ask for what reason, to what purpose? - to the brink of rebellion. As the song in the credits says, "gotta get out of this life somehow". There is a perspective that says the fox isn't necessarily free, it's driven by fear, pleasures, hunger, the need to reproduce, the need to care for it's offspring, to need to perpetuate the species, and it doesn't have the capacity to examine these motives. In short the Long Distance Piano Player inspired me to think, and any art that inspires me to do that, in my opinion, has value. Thank you for posting the play!
A very good & percepive review, Avid Luckless Pedestrian, probably the most profound thing ever written by someone w/an avatar of Homer Simpson w/his eyes buggin' out (still giving me the laughs). Also, Avid All Down the Line, thank you very much for the shout outs in two other threads, although ironically, I'm a CD guy myself.
