The Loner (ITV, 7-21 May 1975)

Les Dawson is one of those comedians that I’ve never really had a particular opinion about. He didn’t make a huge impression on me when I was growing up in the 1980s, and since his death in the mid 1990s, I’ve only experienced his act second-hand via documentaries, clip-shows and Louis Barfe’s excellent 2012 biography. But along the way, I’ve picked up on the consensus that there was much more to him than droll mother-in-law gags, cross-dressing, discordant piano-playing, and gurning.

The Loner (1975) was a trilogy of short dramas written for him by Plater, in which he plays a fictionalised version of himself. This Dawson character lives alone, half-way up a hill in Yorkshire, and in each episode ventures down for a surreal, frustrating encounter with society, unable to deal with the ways of the modern world – whether it’s the laws of capitalism (in the first episode), the criminal underworld (the second episode), or the unspoken rules of romance (the third).

In his autobiography A Clown Too Many (1985), Dawson describes the character as a ‘man coming from nowhere, going nowhere, and it was about what happens to him in transit’. He goes on to say that ‘like most things I’d done, frankly, it was ahead of its time’. For a start, it went out in the slightly awkward Wednesday 9.30-10pm slot, there was no laughter track, no catchphrases, and few jokes in the traditional sense. Instead, you get a Plateresque ambience of black comedy, non-sequitur, literary reference and - at times - impressively overt political commentary. Rather than an upbeat theme tune, there is pompously dramatic/noir-ish library music. And definitely no mention of mothers-in-law, although there’s a tiny bit of gurning here and there.

What’s more, the star doesn’t even tend to have the best lines. As Dawson described to a Guardian interviewer at the time, his hardboiled character ‘was just a poker-faced catalyst, that was the whole idea’. Dawson also endeared himself to Plater by learning and delivering his script faithfully to the last syllable – a somewhat different experience to Bill Maynard’s frequent deviations from the script in Plater’s other notable comedic star-vehicle project Oh No, It’s Selwyn Froggitt (1974-78).

Dawson’s hopes for The Loner were dashed, in his view, by the ‘wrath of the press’, who apparently didn’t warm to a show that was, in the words of The Guardian’s TV reviewer, ‘more funny peculiar than funny ha-ha’. I’ve only dipped my toes into some of the press coverage, but from what I can see, even where the show was reckoned to be a misstep, Dawson – and Yorkshire Television – were generally applauded for mixing up the formula and trying something new. For example, the TV reviewer of The Daily Mail wrote on the transmission day of the first episode that: ‘to his credit, Les Dawson is one of those comedians who is always prepared to try something new even if it means taking a risk’. In Television Today, James Scott made a similar comment but ultimately felt that Dawson had misjudged his own talent.

Dawson first found TV fame as a comic via the talent show Opportunity Knocks in 1967, and quickly established himself as a major figure on British TV, through his sketch-show/variety series Sez Les (1969-76), and frequent appearances on other programme such as the panel-quiz Jokers Wild (1969-73), and The Good Old Days variety show. According to Louis Barfe’s biography, Duncan Wood, the Head of Entertainment at Yorkshire Television from 1973 onwards, was very keen for Dawson to spread his wings and become a ‘new Hancock’; indeed, Wood had produced/directed Hancock’s Half Hour when working previously for the BBC. He commissioned Hancock’s former writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson to create Dawson's first and only sitcom vehicle, but although Holiday With Strings (1974) went no further than its pilot, Galton and Simpson did go on to write the seven-part Dawson’s Weekly (1975) series of one-off comedy plays, which aired just a few weeks after The Loner. As it happens, The Loner was not commissioned by Duncan Wood, but by Yorkshire’s Head of Drama, Peter Willes, who came up with the idea of pairing Dawson and Plater, now starting to develop a highly fruitful relationship with the ITV company.

The press interviews that the forty-something Dawson did circa 1975 reveal a man uneasy with generic pigeon-holding, and keen to emphasise his literary leanings and inspirations. In his profile for The Guardian, Stephen Dixon identifies him as a rather unusual comedian in his impulse to resist the formulaic, and to try and break new comedic ground. One such example was his one-off Electric Cinema (1975) flop, an odd hour of sketches and film pastiches, where Dawson plays the different members of a family who run a cinema. It was also around this time that he published his first novel, A Card for The Clubs (1974), the first of eight fictional works. Speaking just a few weeks after The Loner had aired, he was clearly stung by what he perceived as a critical mauling:

I did it knowing full well I would incur wrath, but we were trying to shoot comedy as straight drama. Alan Plater’s lines were funny, but we didn’t put on funny voices to say them. I’m not sorry I did it: it got people talking. I’m a great believer in people either loving you or hating you, at least you get a positive reaction from which can draw strength. Maybe it was ahead of its time, a worthy experiment. But comedy like anything must evolve and change to reflect a changing world. Television companies who rely on a tired and trusted formula are holding the art of comedy back. All right, some people resented it: they don’t want you to change. But I’m not going to stand on a stage or in front of a camera, for the next thirty years telling caustic gags about a mythical mother-in-law.

Two years later, Dawson broke company with Yorkshire Television for a contract with the BBC. Even then, he was still harking back to The Loner, telling an interviewer for Television Today in June 1977 that:

The trouble is that in ITV, if you try to break new ground, to get out of the rut, you’re not given a chance. We tried to break into something new with The Loner. It got some good critiques, but it never made the ratings. So it finished. It takes time to build up a big following for something that’s different.

Dawson's thinking was that the BBC was more likely to nurture slow-burning comedy programmes, rather than bow down to initially poor ratings or reviews. The Dawson I remember from the 1980s – of the long-running Les Dawson Show (1978-87) or the host for the quiz show Blankety Blank - doesn’t really strike me as someone advancing the 'art of comedy'. It’s admittedly difficult to imagine how a comedian of his background and style could have done that in the alternative-comedy era, although it's easy to imagine him experiencing a Bob Monkhouse-style re-evaluation in later life, had he not died in 1993.

Still, you can’t help but wonder how his reputation or career might have developed differently had experiments like The Loner been met with a more positive response from critics, audiences and commissioners.

All three episodes have their charms. The first, ‘Dawson’s Complaint’, begins with Dawson confronting a shopkeeper about a faulty pen he has bought. The shopkeeper directs him towards the futuristic offices of the supplier, where he witnesses the inefficiencies and deadly pressures of the managerial classes. He is then directed to the chairman company’s new owner, a Scottish laird who declares he is only a figurehead, and gets Dawson to sign the 'artisan’s visitors book' of his baronial castle. Dawson realises that if he wants a pen that works he’ll have to ‘dismantle the whole structure of society’. We can feel Plater limbering up here towards the more nuanced satire of his comedic masterpieces Middle Men (1977) and the Beiderbecke trilogy.

In the second, and weakest, episode, ‘Dawson’s Connection’, our hero tries to track down the owner of the mysterious package of (fake) banknotes that an Andrew Marvell-quoting stranger has given him in the pub. But the real gem is the final episode, ‘Dawson’s Encounter’, pretty much a two-hander between Dawson and an unnamed character played by Gillian Raine. They embark on a three-week courtship without finding out much about each other or their pre-existing ‘entanglements’ – although Raine's character does reveal she likes Jane Eyre, Gregorian Chants, Humphrey Bogart and the Italian food with the Greek name (whatever that is), and also has an unfulfilled fetish for trampling barefoot on potato crisps. But she doesn’t want to know anything about Dawson, because she prefers the workings of her imagination: ‘it’s like thinking you’ve got a beautiful tune in your head, but when you sing it out loud, it’s just ordinary’.

There’s so much that’s quotable here, whether it’s throwaway non-sequiturs like ‘I can be very dogmatic about Scotch eggs’, banter such as ‘We all have our aspirations’ – ‘I could open the window?’; or the following speech in which Dawson sets out his philosophy of life:

It’s like trying to cross a ploughed field, I keep on getting my trousers caught in barbed-wire fences, and all the time it’s getting darker. I keep hoping for a great shaft of light to show me where I’m going. Like that fella… St Paul, he was, on the road to Damascus.…. He saw this great light in the sky. I thought I saw it once on the way to Oldham. It turned out to be the sun’s reflection in someone’s cucumber frame.

In pre-publicity for The Loner, I’ve seen mention of it running to six episodes – possibly in error, but maybe that was an initial hope for a series that Plater was quoted as saying in a Daily Mail preview was ‘funny, but not always comfortably so’. There are enough connections between the three episodes – most significantly, the re-appearance of a philosophical pub landlord (Reginald Marsh), who sees it as his duty to ‘warn’ his customers – to suggest that Plater was undertaking some careful world-building to sustain a potentially longer run.

The fact that this didn’t happen gives some poignancy to the closing scenes of all three episodes, where Dawson – having experienced some sort of disappointment – trudges his way dejectedly back up the hill to his lonely ‘Pennine retreat’. In his book on Dawson, Louis Barfe acknowledges that Dawson’s ongoing frustration about not getting proper respect as a performer and writer was not helped by unwise career choices and some missed opportunities – not least abandoning his developing collaboration with Plater, a ‘dramatist who understood him fully’, according to Barfe.

Although, as mentioned above, Dawson blamed Yorkshire Television for not committing to The Loner, the BBC ended up being far less fertile ground for him to experiment. After all, Yorkshire were the folk giving carte blanche to Plater himself to indulge his creative whims right through until the early 1980s. ‘This is the story of my failure’, says Dawson at the top of the very first episode.

And yet, there is an unexpected coda here. In ‘Dawson’s Complaint’, the shopkeeper tries to sell Dawson one of his ‘American’ (ie. ‘mucky’) magazines. No thanks, says Dawson: ‘I’m still on with my Trollope’. According to a 1989 Observer profile of Dawson, it was the comedian who recommended that Plater take up the offer of adapting Trollope’s novels into what became the BBC’s Barchester Chronicles (1982), ultimately one of the writer’s most beloved adaptations. Plater hadn’t read the original books, but Dawson was apparently a huge fan, and thus Plater ‘read the lot with Les’s voice in the background’.

What a thought! When I get round to re-watching the Barchester Chronicles, I’m going to see if I can detect any Dawson influence. But it’s not a ridiculous prospect, given how much Plater openly took inspiration from comedians. I can’t quite remember whether there’s any mother-in-law gags, cross-dressing, discordant piano-playing or gurning in his Trollope adaptation, but I promise I’ll report back.

You can find the first episode of The Loner, 'Dawson's Complaint' on Network DVD's 'Alan Plater at ITV' release. The other two episodes are harder to track down... but worth the effort.