Play for Today

Langton:
I remember a bloke once. Saw a girl getting attacked. Pulled the bloke off. Stayed on, raped the girl himself.

[Laurence puts the Shakespeare play back on the bookshelf]

Laurence:
Our nation's culture. Not something you can actually read, of course.

Beverly:
Just because a picture happens to be erotic, does not make it pornographic.

[talking about Beverly's candelabra]

Angela:
Is it real silver?

Beverly:
Yeah. Silver plate, yeah.

Beverly:
Ange, can you take a little bit of criticism? Now, please don't be offended when I say this, Ange, but I can see what you've done. Okay, you've just sat down in front of your mirror and you've just put your lipstick on. Now, next time, will you try this for me? Now, this is something, Ange, I always used to tell my customers, and it always works. Now, next time, sit down in front of your mirror, and just look at yourself. Relax, and just say, "I've got very beautiful lips." Then take your lipstick and apply it, and Ange, you're gonna see the difference. Because then, you will be applying that lipstick to every single corner of your mouth. Do you know what I mean? Will you try it for me next time?

Angela:
Yes.

Beverly:
Just sit down in front of your mirror, look at yourself, relax, and just say...

Angela:
I've got very beautiful lips.

Beverly:
Yeah. And I promise you, Ange, you're gonna see the difference. Okay?

Angela:
Have you ever tried pilchard curry?

Beverly:
No.

Angela:
Oh, that's a very economical dish.

Beverly:
Having to do all that breastfeeding and changing nappies would actually make me heave.

Beverly:
[about Laurence] To be quite honest with you, he's a boring little bugger at times, actually.

Beverly:
Don't you find shopping boring, though, Ange? Oh, I do, I hate it. He takes me down in the car, and I get me wheelie, Tone, and I whiz in, I grab anything I can see, bung it in me wheelie, he writes me a cheque, we bung it in the car and we bring it home, and then it's done for the week, you know what I mean?

Beverly:
Don't get me wrong, Tone, it's not that I can't drive; in fact, I'm a good driver, but... Let me put it to you this way...

[to Susan]

Angela:
Oh it's funny. We were all getting married about the same time as you were... getting divorced!

[talking about Demis Roussos]

Laurence:
We don't want to listen to that fat Greek caterwauling all night.

Angela:
I got very drunk on champagne at our wedding, do you remember?

[Tony remembers it all too clearly]

Tony:
[with feeling] Yeah.

Donald Duck:
[playing house] I should bloody damn and bloody blast and bugger and bloody flaming bloody well think so and all. Give us a kiss!

Donald Duck:
[pretending that he's cut his thumb off at the sawmill] Nine or ten pints of scrumpy, that's what I want; I've lost a lot of blood!

[last lines]

Narrator:
Into my heart, an air that kills from yon far country blows. What are those Blue Remembered Hills? What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content. I see it shining plain. The happy highways where I went. And cannot come again.

Angela:
[talking about Donald] Poor old Quack Quack!

Donald Duck:
[Donald Duck's last words] Burn you bloody bugger, burn! If you haven't, the Japs have won! [the barn is now set alight]

Philip Carlion:
It may not entirely have slipped your notice, gentlemen, that today - Thursday 26th of July - the people of this country have declared war on us. This whole discussion may already be obsolete. Before the year's out, we may all be living in the West Indies on such capital as we've been able to muster from the expropriation of our resources that the socialists have been elected to effect. The ship is sinking, gentlemen. That's water round your ankles.

Dinny Mathews:
The game doesn't belong to the dinner jackets and the frilly shirts. It belongs to the people. Because that's where the fighters come from...

[Denis's father has been rushed into hospital and is not expected to live. Denis discusses him with his father's sister]

Denis Midgley:
What was my dad like?

Aunty Kitty:
He never had a wrong word for anybody. He'd do anybody a good turn. Shovel the snow, fetch the coal in. He was a *saint*. [pause] You take after your mother, more.

[Denis looks dismayed that he has not inherited his father's saintly qualities]

Rab Williamson:
(having just maimed an old man) Don't worry about it son. Gives us all something to do with our Saturday.

Dan:
You can't dupe your environment by running away, because in the end it's yourself your running away from.

Grannie:
Maybe if your Granda had been better to me when I was younger, I would nae be so old so young.

Jake McQuillan:
McAfferty! Your tea's oot.

McAfferty:
Come ahead, McQuillan.

[on the train to Hull]

Reynolds:
Are you travelling to Hull?

Sally Brown:
Yes.

Reynolds:
Going back home?

Sally Brown:
Just for the weekend. How did you guess?

Reynolds:
Experience... plus instinct. People from Hull, they all have this mysterious northern mist behind their eyes.

Sally Brown:
You must be clever.

Reynolds:
Not really.

Sally Brown:
It takes a clever feller to talk rubbish like that.

Reynolds:
No, what it is, it's envy.

Sally Brown:
Fancy.

Reynolds:
I've lived in about a dozen places. You get to envy people who know where home is.

Sally Brown:
"Promised Land", they call it.

[telling Sally about the perils of being a skipper on a fishing trawler]

Mike Thurlow:
I could run the flaming boat on a sandbank ten minutes out of St Andrews. Or get iced up in the Arctic - down like a stone. Anything could happen. Worst thing of all could happen.

Sally Brown:
The worst thing?

Mike Thurlow:
The thing you don't get away with, no forgiveness - if you don't catch no fish. They'll let you run aground - there'll be no comeback if the charts are wrong or the fog's thick. Get knocked-off for poaching round Iceland - they'll maybe let you off. Lose the odd feller over the side - it makes no odds as long as there's a good story. They'll let you off if you sink with all hands - heroes, then, appeal funds. But you try coming home with no fish. Then see what happens.

[Finger and Honky are making a lot noise in their tent. Keith gets up in the middle of the night to tell them to shut up]

Keith:
This is a tent! *I* am in a tent! The walls of a tent are thin. I can hear everything you're saying. Now BE QUIET!

Finger:
Get back to bed!

Keith:
And you get back to your tenements!

[Keith is brandishing a big stick at Finger, to stop him making a fire which is against camp-site rules]

Keith:
[ranting] Get away from me! I'll knock your head off!

Candice Marie:
It's just that Keith and I believe that smoking damages your health. You see, Ray, you can't see the damage that it's doing. But if I could take one of your lungs now, and put it on the table in front of you and cut it in half, I think you'd be absolutely horrified.

Candice Marie:
Keith?

Keith:
Mmm.

Candice Marie:
You know you always tell me to chew everything 72 times?

Keith:
Mmm.

Candice Marie:
Well I don't think that can be right, because, um for instance you're chewing nuts now, and they have to be chewed 72 times because they're very hard. But earlier on I was eating mushroom, and I only got to 31 and it slipped down my throat quite naturally. So it doesn't always have to be 72 times does it?

Keith:
[long pause while chewing] I think the important thing is to uh, use your discretion.

[Keith and Candice Marie are perched next to Corfe Castle, surveying the surrounding countryside]

Keith:
Look at this view, Brownsea Island, Round Island, the Lakeland of Dorset... pity about the power station in the background, never mind... there are the heaths, Newton Heath, Rempstone Heath, Witch Heath... disused railway line going up to Wareham... and the great nimbocumulus rising above it all like great puffs of cotton wool.

Candice Marie:
Look at all this rubbish Keith.

Keith:
What?

Candice Marie:
Isn't it awful, look at all those tin cans.

Keith:
[disinterested] Yes...

Candice Marie:
Just imagine Keith, if all the people who lived here could come back... to all these crisp bags and sweet papers, they'd be horrified wouldn't they?

Keith:
They'd find it difficult to comprehend all the changes that have taken place in the world.

Candice Marie:
Do you think they do come back Keith?

Keith:
What?

Candice Marie:
Their ghosts.

Keith:
No...

[Keith is distracted momentarily by something in the distance]

Keith:
There's a car going up the B3351.

Mr. Briggs:
Linda

Linda Croxley:
What!

Mr. Briggs:
Don't you "what" me young lady?

Carol:
Isn't it horrible, eh, Miss?

Mrs. Kay:
Mm?

Carol:
Y'know, all the thingy like; the dirt an' that.

[pause]

Carol:
I like them nice places.

Mrs. Kay:
Which places?

Carol:
Know them places on the telly with gardens, an' trees outside an' that.

Mrs. Kay:
You've got trees in Pilot Street haven't you?

Carol:
They planted some after the riots. But the kids chopped them down an' burnt them on bonfire night.

[pause]

Carol:
Miss... Miss, y'know when I grow up, Miss, y'know if I work hard an' learn to read and write, would you think I'd be able to live in one of them nice places?

Mrs. Kay:
[putting her arm around her] Well, you could try love, couldn't you eh?

Carol:
Yeh!

Mr. Briggs:
Linda Croxley! If you don't behave you will spend the remaining time of visiting Corwy in the coach!

Linda Croxley:
I don't care - I don't wanna see no crappy castle anyway

Mother:
Watch your tongue.

Tom:
She'd look damned funny if she did.

Horace Rumpole:
I could win most of my cases if it weren't for the clients. Clients have no tact, poor old darlings, no bloody sensitivity. They *will* waltz into the witness box and blurt out things that are far better left... unblurted.

Horace Rumpole:
My brilliant client. They're absolutely brilliant, clients, aren't they, George? I mean, he takes an antique dagger and he stabs a young man in the bus queue, outside Lords, at four o'clock in the afternoon. I ask you. Well, I mean, if you *must* go in for that sort of thing, at least do it during the hours of darkness, and if possible, not in the St John's Wood Road.

George:
Who did he stab?

Horace Rumpole:
Oh, a complete stranger. Someone he just felt like stabbing. Absolutely brilliant.

George:
My man decided to rob a dance hall on the night of the Police Ball.

Horace Rumpole:
Hahaha. We only get the stupid villains, George.

George:
Why is that?

Horace Rumpole:
Well the bright ones are all on holiday in Majorca.

Mr. Winter:
Well you'll have a bit of fun with this one, Mr Rumpole.

Horace Rumpole:
"Fun", Mr Winter? Do you call standing on your hind legs and pleading guilty for a Jamaican teenager who shoves a knife into the first person who crosses his path "fun"? Now what do I say to the judge? "Oh do understand, Your Honour. He'd just seen the West Indies drop a catch. Can I have a ten-bob fine and time to pay?"

[describing the judge who is trying Ossie's case]

Horace Rumpole:
[voiceover] There he is. Giving me a look of vague disgust. Like Queen Victoria with a bad period.

Horace Rumpole:
[to Hilda] They say that crime doesn't pay, but it's a living, you know. Oh, yes, it's a living.

Horace Rumpole:
If it wasn't for crime, the democratic process would grind to a halt.

Horace Rumpole:
[to nick] You can't get born or die in a dignified position... now how can you live in one, OLd Dear?

Vivian Nicholson:
[voiceover] I was born in 1936 in Castleford, Yorkshire. You'll find it on the map - I'm the bugger that put it there. Where we lived, all the fellers were coal-miners. Except me dad - he was a full-time, fully-paid-up, fully-fledged bastard.

Jody:
You get neither chance nor choice. You leave school and straight to work without even thinking about it. Then you get married without even knowing about it. Then spend the rest of your days using both as an excuse for never have done anything with your life.