Talk:Mrs Dale's Diary
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[edit] General Practitioner
Mrs Dale's husband was a General Practitioner (family doctor) in the British sense, not a Physician in the American sense. This was essential to the comfortable middle-class milieu in which the series was set. Dr Dale's forename was Jim.
A regular feature of the "diary" was a brief spoken introductory passage, as if Mrs Dale was speaking aloud what she was actually writing in her diary. A stock expression was "I am very worried about Jim". It seemed as if this cropped up every day, and the phrase was avidly seized upon by caricaturists. Indeed, the phrase was a staple of many "comedy" programmes, radio and television, in the early Sixties aiming to poke fun at safe, staid and undemanding middle-class lifestyles.
In particular, this was the basis of Mrs Wilson's Diary in the fortnightly satirical magazine Private Eye. The writers presented Mrs Wilson as seeing herself as comfortably middle class, in contrast to the middle class pretensions as opposed to working class actuality of her husband, for example the Wincarnis (a brand of tonic wine) and the worsted suits with two pairs of trousers (Wilson was from Huddersfield, famous for the manufacture of worsted cloth).
[edit] More on Mrs. Wilson
The Mrs. Wilson column in Private Eye was a satire on the wife of Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Maybe someone should start a new wikipedia entry for that topic.
Also, I think the introductory diary comment above should be added into the main article. Was this the first soap opera to use this form of introduction?? JXM 00:14, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
SOAP?
It is misleading to describe Mrs Dale's Diary as a "soap opera". The phrase was not in British usage then, and contemporary usage to describe East Enders or Coronation Street misses by a million miles. The essence of soap opera is that the characters' main function is to do each other down. Mrs Dale and her family and friends (and Captain the cat, named after the character in Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas) all got along together in almost perfect harmony. It was respectable, comfortable and middle-class. The nearest thing to a scandal was the character Jago Peters, played by a young Derek Nimmo, who was an artist, one of whose exploits was to use a neighbour's Scandinavian au pair as a nude model for some project, if I remember rightly it was a grand portrait of Britannia (like on the old penny coin) for the Town Hall or a similar institution. Very Bohemian for those days. Guy 03:34, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
I'm not sure I agree that essence of soap opera is that characters "do each other down", although that may be fairly common in American soaps. True, the phrase wasn't in contemporary isage at the time of MrsDD, but we're writing the Wikipedia entry using today's terminology. I think it'll be beyond our powers to convince Wikipedians that EastEnders or Coronation Street are anything other than soap operas (LOL). Maybe we can compromise by changing our entry to refer primarily to a radio serial drama. In any case, we seem to have gathered useful material in the Talk page so, with people's agreement, I'll copy some of the text to the main page. JXM 16:52, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
- I think you have said it yourself here, in today's understanding of the term "soap opera", which mainly relates to television, Mrs Dale was not soap opera. It is like using the term "comedy" of Little Britain when the term also includes Keeping Up Appearances not to mention Terry and June. Mrs D was a radio serial, as was The Archers and other contemporary programmes. It is impossible to describe what it was like in its context, just as it is impossible to describe the impact of the Beatles or Rolling Stones in terms of the 2006 music scene. Mrs Dale's Diary was a cornerstone of quiet and respectable middle-class family life in the years after the Second World War. It was reported at the time that the Queen Mother was among its millions of regular listeners. In that context, the satirical transposition of imagined family life at Number 10 into the format of family life as represented by the popular radio serial was a masterstroke. I think it is fair to say that the relevance of Mrs Dale's Diary and the fact that anybody can still be interested in it is very largely due to the Private Eye piece and its successor, including the current St Albion Parish News. The main article does need a massage and if you can do it without losing what is there and here, then fine. ;-) Guy 15:33, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Sally - Who she?
The article refers to "Sally", but it does not say who she was. If I remember rightly, she was Mrs Dale's sister, but this needs to be ascertained and included in the article.
- Yes, Sally was Mrs. Dale's sister. Mike H. I did "That's hot" first! 21:31, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Handling homosexuality
There was no "and thus" about it. In the context of the times this feature of the programme was a bold departure. Things were different forty years ago, and the point has to be made and commented upon. It was always a popular legend back then that movers and shakers of the BBC numbered a disproportionately large number of homosexuals amongst them. This was supposed to be one of the influences upon their programming choices (the emergence of That Was the Week That Was, for example). The legend had a certain amount of Round the Horne ribaldry about it, as that was the way that homosexuals were portrayed (if at all).
