Peter Viney's Blog

The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer

1970

Written by Peter Cook, John Cleese, Graham Chapman & Kevin Billington
Directed by Kevin Billington
Produced by David Paradine (aka David Frost)

Peter Cook as Michael Rimmer
Denholm Elliot as Peter Niss, opinion poll guru
Ronald Fraser as Tom Hutchinson, Conservative leader
Vanessa Howard as Patricia Cartwright, show jump star and Rimmer’s wife
Arthur Lowe as Ferrett, moves from boss to servant
George A. Cooper as Blacket, Labour prime minister
Harold Pinter as Stephen Hench, TV Presenter
James Cossins as Crodder
Ronald Culver as Sir Eric Bentley
Dudley Foster as Federman
Dennis Price as Fairburn
Ronnie Corbett as Interviewer
John Cleese as Pumer
Diana Coupland as Mrs Spimm
Michael Bates as Mr Spimm
Graham Chapman as Fromage
Valerie Leon as Tanya
Graham Crowden- Bishop of Cowley

The 60s films revisited series continues… 

The images online remind me that in 1969, cinema lobby cards were often black & white for colour films. They would have been taken with a proper quality stills camera on set, not taken from the film itself, and were then higher quality prints which wouldn’t fade rapidly outside a cinema on a sunny day – as colour still would have.

The film was conceived in 1967, filmed in 1969 then had the release delayed to miss the Summer 1970 Election. As the poster says The film they wouldn’t let us show until after the election.

Arthur Lowe as Ferret, head of the advertising agency peruses Tanya, his secretary

Peter Cook is the mysterious charismatic Michael Rimmer who appears to be an efficiency expert sent to observe at an advertising agency run by Ferrett (Arthur Lowe). Ferrett is fired, or rather demoted to a servant. The agency is old-fashioned England, wing collars, dirty old men, peeling wallpaper. As soon as Rimmer takes over it becomes high tech white walled fashionable. Yes, it is an “England” metaphor.

Rimmer (Peter Cooke) is watching employees in the Gents. John Cleese as Pumer.

Rimmer takes over the company, converts it to a major polling firm. He fiddles polls to prove his company’s forecasts correct, recruiting Peter Niss (Denholm Elliot) from the rival polling company. Niss becomes his chief sidekick.  Rimmer acquires a wife, Patricia, the second most popular woman in England. She is a champion show jumper – show jumping was a very popular TV sport in 1969.

Rimmer with Patricia (Vanessa Howard)

Rimmer then interferes with politics, helps the Conservatives win the election, gets himself elected MP for Budleigh Moor (Dudley Moore!) then becomes prime minister, swamps the populace with referendums on a daily then hourly basis and becomes President and dictator.

It stands the passage of time better than Peter Cook in Bedazzled. It’s laden with direct parodies. Cook admits he based the character on his producer, David Frost right down to the catchphrase Super to see you. Jonathan Miller had said of Frost that ‘he had risen without trace’ just like Rimmer. A “rimmer” is slang for arse licker (literally), as the later writers of the Red Dwarf TV series realized in naming the hologram Rimmer.

The Labour Prime Minister, Blackett, has a pipe clenched in his teeth, Harold Wilson style. He’s played by George A. Cooper, then still on TV as the dodgy businessman in Coronation Street … so we know he’s untrustworthy.

George A. Cooper as the Labour Prime Minister, Blacket.

The Conservative leader plays piano Edward Heath style (and we see no wife). A leading Conservative grandee is prey to photos of him dressed in women’s clothes being whipped by a tart. There were a few of those.  Ranjit X, the agitator is dressed and moustached like Tariq Ali. Steven Hench’s show is labelled top to bottom Steven Hench Is Talking To You (S-H-I-T-T-Y). Hench is played by Harold Pinter … but the whole thing is star-laden.

Rimmer (Peter Cook)and Peter Niss (Denholm Elliot) first meet on the Hench talkshow.

Rimmer knows that sex sells – the political slogan he suggests, mocking Harold Macmillan’s You’ve never had it so good is You’ve never had it so often. 

The mint humbug advert – that is a B&W sequence as some TV ads were then.

The mock advert Rimmer makes for “Scorpios” which are hard nasty-tasting humbugs is so rude that I’m amazed it got past the censors, though come to think of it actual Cadbury’s Chocolate Flake adverts were basically a girl fellating a chocolate flake. But not in a tube so lovingly fondled, nor is it lain in a fur lined make-up bag shaped like a vagina at the end of the advert.

Arthur Lowe as Ferrett with Tanya’s bottom

Throughout girls are groped, ogled, touched – especially the gorgeous and tall Tanya with a tiny mini-skirt. The housewife in the survey immediately invites the pollster in for a romp. Sexism is extreme, but so it was in 1969, and the film lampoons the ogler (like Arthur Lowe as Ferrett) rather than the ogled.

The poll in Nuneaton: L to R: Valerie Leon as Tanya, Ronnie Corbett as interviewer, John Cleese asking the time, desperately hoping to be questioned

Tanya and the interviewer – lobby card. As with seaside postcards, the British never tire of comedy with little blokes and big women.

When Rimmer subverts a rival opinion poll survey on religion, bells start to ring in 2019 and all the years in between on poll credibility. The sample is 1000 people in Nuneaton. Many polls work on around a sample of 1300 (there must be some mathematical reason). Rimmer buses in people to stand around the then spanking new shopping precinct and be questioned – John Cleese trying to persuade Ronnie Corbett to interview him is one of the film’s moments. So it turns out that 42% of Nuneaton are Buddhists, destroying the rival polls credibility. I thought back to how the independent record labels discovered which shops gave returns for the Top 30 (a small number), and bussed people there to buy the records. Same era. There’s something sad about that gleaming 1969 shopping precinct. I’d bet it’s now a third full of charity shops.

Peter Cook could run over the top into silliness, as could the future Pythons co-writing with him. Some stuff works well today in spite of the inevitably creaky “hi-tech” of 1969 … Rimmer is fond of hi-tech. Election Grandstand fifty years ago has it all – starting an hour before any count could possibly be in. A swingometer with nothing to show until it swings wildly on just the first vote. Gurus in various countries are cut off without speaking. The reporter at the would-be first count in Clitheroe is standing there unable to hear a word from the studio. It’s still accurate.

Rimmer becomes MP for Budleigh Moor.

When the Conservatives take over after winning the election, they find Labour has spent the lot … what was the jokey note Chancellor of the Exchequer Ed Balls left in his office for the incoming Tories in 2010? I’m afraid there is no money. So the election promise to reduce income tax and purchase tax and increase pensions is impossible. As the Tory grandees debate what to do, Rimmer suggests “Say we’re staggered and horrified, then blame it on the last lot.”

Ronald Fraser as Conservative leader Tom Hutchinson, with Rimmer and Niss on Worthing Pier for the party conference

It veers over a line when a Scottish regiment set off in kilts across the snow to rob Switzerland of its gold reserves to make up the deficit. The kilted skiing sequence is very reminiscent of The Beatles Help. Silliness takes over from satire and undermines the whole.. Rimmer then announces that Britain has discovered North Sea gold – not far off what oil did to our economy in the next few years, I guess. He manages to despatch the poor Prime Minister.

Rimmer and the liberal Tory have just seen the new prime minister fall to his death

Immigration is the issue the Conservatives run on. This all refers back to Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech. The liberal Tory Home Secretary who protests about racialism* gets mugged by a black man immediately he leaves the building. We guess Rimmer, as with every other manipulation, set it up. The identity parade has the black attacker or rather “the one in the green shirt” lined up with over a dozen white people. Then with an incredible fifty year leap into the future, we have a 1969 Rees-Mog lookalike at a garden party suggesting his “boat race” solution to immigration: “£5000 for the first West Indian to row back to Jamaica.” Maybe the Tory party always had chinless Rees-Mog lookalikes. Or they just came back to haunt us. The Torys are told of an old English lady who was locked in a lavatory for fourteen hours by “immigrants” and poked with sharp broomsticks until she agreed to use a newspaper photo of Enoch Powell for an unmentionable purpose relevant to her place of confinement.

(* Yes, the words are RACIALIST and RACIALISM in the film. I was taken to task for using those terms by an editor looking at my 1967 novel quoted below. The editor thought it should be RACIST and RACISM, but as the film confirms, what we said in the late 60s was indeed RACIALIST / RACIALISM.)

I’ve seen the film quoted so much over referendums recently that I decided to review it as part of the 60s Revisited series (sorry, pedants, referenda is a step Mr Quelch the Latin master too far for me). Yes, it emerged in 1970, but it’s very much of the 60s. Rimmer introduces referendums as the “new democracy” the solution to everything.

Soon-to-be-president Rimmer with his wife, Patricia (Vanessa Cartwright). She was a show jumping champion and he married her because she was “the second most popular woman ion England)

People like it at first, then they have to answer constantly on ever more boring and minor questions until eventually Rimmer introduces the final referendum, to make himself President and all-powerful dictator – seen with wife on a beach in soft focus, still manipulating. In his motorcade parade down the Mall as president, the much put-upon  Ferrett adopts a Lee Harvey Oswald pose with rifle in a tall building. No plot spoilers.

So does it echo in 2019 politics? Yes. The British Constitution has no formal role for referendums. They can only be advisory. My politics professor at Hull, A.H. Birch, was the author of Representative & Responsible Government (1964), then the key book on the subject. I recall his lectures. A popular vote (referendum) would have always shown a vast majority in favour of capital punishment.  However, whichever the party is in power, MPs have maintained a majority against capital punishment. So we don’t have capital punishment. That’s because we elect representatives not delegates. A delegate votes the way they’re told in advance (as with trades union conferences). A representative makes up their mind having listened to the full debate. We have to trust those we elect to make the final decisions without coming back to consult us. As we know (especially if we read The Sun), on a popular vote a child murderer would be disembowelled and tortured slowly in the town marketplace. Representative government doesn’t do that. That’s why (e.g.) those MPs who switched to Change UK don’t need to resign and have a by-election. Legally, we vote for the person as representative NOT for a political party. One of Rimmer’s acolytes explains in the film What you don’t realize is that 90% of the population are idiots.

I wonder how to apply that to the Brexit vote? Same situation … most MPs are Remainers. Is “referendum democracy” the same as Rimmer’s “New democracy” as in the film?  Is 51.9% on a 72.2% turnout a valid reason to change the country so radically? How many “leavers” (far more among the elderly) died in the last three years? How many young people (likely “remainers”) have been enfranchised to add to the 48.1% of us who wanted to stay? Jonathan Coe’s novel Middle England has a politician pointing out that the referendum took place during the Glastonbury Festival which could have cost 100,000 remain votes!

Yes, I’m for a second referendum … whatever I’ve just said about referendums! BUT referendums are not a valid or sensible system of government. As the film proves.

According to Halliwell’s Film Guide, a fat yellow book we used to refer to before the internet, it’s only patchily funny, but marks two things. First the rise of Pythonesque comedy, and second “it marks the death of the Swinging Sixties.”

It’s still worth re-watching. The cast is filled with major comic actors – Ronnie Corbett is a survey interviewer. Arthur Lowe’s descent from dirty-minded old ogler to put-upon butler and chauffeur points forward to his role as the butler spitting in the soup in The Ruling Class.. Denholm Elliot is the almost equally smooth sidekick intent on seducing Rimmer’s trophy wife. Graham Chapman’s tiny cameo as Fromage, the owner of the humbug company stands out, as does John Cleese trying to pee while Rimmer observes with a clipboard and stopwatch. Ronald Fraser is hilarious as the Conservative leader.

Rimmer & Niss. Peter Cook and Denholm Elliot. Manipulative bastards rule.

The manipulative political bastards genre has been popular in recent years – House of Cards, West Wing, or for a comedy treatment, Rick Mayall as The New Statesman. Peter Cook is a particularly cold version of the Mandelson type.

TECHNICAL

Lip-synch is poor on our DVD.

PETER COOK

I met Peter Cook in the late 60s, probably 1968, an encounter fictionalised in a Dart Travis novel. He was about the coolest guy I’d ever met at the time. He exuded likeability. The dialogue is probably the least fictional thing in the whole book (yes, we mix imagination with a peppering of real events). It’s just as I remembered the real meeting:

‘Talking of Private Eye …’
‘We weren’t.’
‘We were. I met Peter Cook once. At university.’
‘Don’t say that name around Stanley. He doesn’t like the modern comedian, as he calls them. What was he like?’
‘Different than I expected. He had amazing clothes, Petrol blue flares with white pinstripes and a sort of short tan leather jacket. Checked shirt.’
‘Ah, I shall know him by his attire then.’
‘OK. OK. I had to take him for a coffee in the buttery before a debate.’
‘In the what?’
‘The buttery. It’s what they call the canteen. Christ knows why. Anyway, he was all right. Very funny. And he insisted on paying for the coffee. I told him I could claim it back from the students’ union, and he said, “You do that. Good idea. But I’ll pay for the coffee. Learn to fiddle your expenses, son. It’ll come in useful later in life.” So he paid.’
MUSIC TO WATCH GIRLS BY – The Summer of 1967, Dart Travis (LINKED)

DVD CASE:

THE 60s REVISITED REVIEWS …

A Taste of Honey (1961)
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963)
Tom Jones (1963)
The Fast Lady (1963)
Cat Ballou (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
Darling (1965)
The Knack (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966)
Alfie (1966)
Harper (aka The Moving Target) 1966
The Chase (1966)
The Trap (1966)
Georgy Girl (1966)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
The Family Way (1967)
Privilege (1967)
Blow-up (1967)
Accident (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name (1967)
How I Won The War (1967)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Poor Cow (1967)
Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (1968)
The Magus (1968)
If …. (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride) (1968)
Work Is A Four Letter Word (1968)
The Party (1968)
Petulia (1968)
Barbarella (1968)
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Bullitt (1968)
Deadfall (1968)
The Swimmer (1968)
Theorem (Teorema) (1968)
The Magic Christian (1969)
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970)
Performance (1970)