The Chain (1984)

This is quite a cleverly interwoven series of scenarios following a series of people all moving house on the same day. We start at the bottom of the chain and work our way quickly and frequently quite pithily, through to the posh folks at the top of the chain - the ones who want to unscrew the light switches and remove the cemented-in garden furniture! They say moving house is amongst the most traumatic of events that befalls us (in peacetime, anyway) and Jack's Gold and Rosenthal have managed to assemble a solid cast of Brits to take us through their day of trauma and domestic nightmares via an avenue of prejudice, snobbery, kindness and plain mean spiritedness. Nigel Hawthorn takes the cake for me - the supercilious "Thorn" with long suffering wife "Betty" (Anna Massey) who insists on taking the ash from the fireplaces so he can fertilise his garden; but there are also engaging efforts from Maurice Denham, Billie Whitelaw with Bernard Hill and Warren Mitchell holding the narrative together nicely as one set of removals men. The humour is plentiful, but runs too much to stereotype for me. Very much of it's time - Mrs. Thatcher's Britain - it evokes a certain degree of disdain and nostalgia in almost equal measure, but it settles into a routine that becomes a tad predictable after a while. Still, it is an interesting concept that had it lost twenty minutes or so, could have been quite a pointed observation of human behaviour under varying degrees of pressure; self-imposed or otherwise.