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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spells &amp; Karma" data-source="post: 305561" data-attributes="member: 23">Six Dates With Barker1971: Come in and Lie DownAs with The Odd Job, this episode feels very Hancockian. In fact this feels very much as though it could have been an episode of Hancock's Half Hour. The cynical view of psychiatry feels terribly British. Given that this is a vehicle for Ronnie Barker it's a little surprising that he doesn't play the Blimp in question. That role goes to Michael Bates  (last seen in O'Dramavision as It Ain't Half Hot Mum's Ranji Ram in spring 2020. How time flies).Meanwhile, Barker - as the psychiatrist Dr Swanton - is playing his stolid authority figure. But there's a really interesting arc for him as the episode bubbles away. The writer here is John Cleese and, like a proto-Basil Fawlty, his frenetic demanding guest gradually drives Swanton from mildly irritated to heavily frustrated and - by episode's end - to a complete meltdown resulting in a complete role reversal. It's brilliantly done all round.Bates's reluctant patient - known to us only as "the Gas Man", since he initially pretends to be coming to read the meter in a bid to establish whether or not Swanton routinely has his patients carted away by men in white coats - is a role that Cleese himself could no doubt have played well. The paranoia, edginess, urgency and accusing questions are all traits that would come to be associated with his most iconic role a few years down the line. I'm curious to know why he didn't play in it. Watching Bates here it's easy to envisage Leonard Rossiter in the role as well, since it's the kind of characterisation he's best known for: from Rigsby to Reginald Perrin via Jim the obsessive in Galton & Simpson's brilliant one-off I Tell You It's Burt Reynolds.Michael Bates, though, is nothing short of brilliant. It's a very different role to those of his with which I'm most familiar (Ranji Ram and Summer Wine's Blamire). I'm always incredibly impressed by an actor who can embody each role so completely and so differently, and he really does this. There's a fearlessness to his performance. For all the episode's humour and (as the episode progresses) complete surrealism he never seems to lose sight of the truth of his performance as a man who behind the stiff upper lip and diversionary tactics is truly afraid that he is losing his mind.As I watched I thought it unlikely this kind of scenario would make it to a full series. On reflection, though, I think both premise and characters come with possibilities. Notwithstanding the possibility to see this relationship continue on the Gas Man's weekly visits, there's also no reason why Swanton couldn't be visited by different patients each week. There's even potential for the Gas Man to be paranoid about a different thing in a different environment each week. The surreal element of the "imaginary" stalker isn't something I'd care to watch on a weekly basis, but there are ways to either work with that or omit it entirely. Anyhow, it's all moot, but I do like to consider these little plays in the context of a pilot episode.</blockquote>

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