RADIO DRAMA REVIEWS ONLINE

For Better or for Worse by Mike Craig

Home
AUTHORS A-J
AUTHORS K-R
AUTHORS S-Z
DRAMATISTS A-Z
Contact Us

BBC Radio 7, 20 October 2010
 
Originally broadcast on Radio 2, this sitcom brought together two of Britain's best-loved comedy actors from the Perry-Croft-Lloyd stable - Su Pollard (Hi-De-Hi) and Gorden Kaye ('Allo 'Allo), as a married couple striving for a 'normal' life. In this episode Bernard (Kaye) is drafted in at the last minute to make up the numbers for the local cricket team in their annual match against the Rotary Club. Although boasting about his supposed aptitude for the game, Bernard turns out to be a rabbit, who has never played with a hard ball before. However all ends happily, as he goes in at No. 11 and hits the winning run, even though he knocks himself out in the process.
 
For Better or for Worse now seems strangely old-fashioned, with its gallery of Lancashire stereotypes - the muddle-headed father, the dominant mother-in-law - recalling the music-hall world of Norman Evans, which was vividly revived by Les Dawson in the 1970s and 1980s. 
 
This episode also drew upon familiar behavioural rituals characteristic of the game of cricket: the desire not to lose face in front of one's peers, the notion of "play up, and play the game;" and the exciting last-ball finish. We know that Bernard will triumph in the end, even if this is chiefly due to his father tripping up the bowler as he comes in to deliver the last ball. Such images, which actually date back to the Victorian and Edwardian period, when cricket was considered one of the best ways to enforce British colonial rule, are as important today as they have always been. Only recently Kevin Pietersen has been criticized by the England coach Andy Flower for going home to have a hernia operation, rather than "playing the game" for his country during the World Cup.