Crew
Director – Michael Darlow, Teleplay – Donald Churchill, Based on the Novel Mr Pye (1953) by Mervyn Peake, Producer – Judy Marle, Photography – Nick Gifford, Music – Ken Howard, Production Design – Tony Abbott. Production Company – Landseer/T.S.I. Films.
Cast
Derek Jacobi (Harold Pye), Judy Parfitt (Connie Dredger), Robin McCaffrey (Tanty), Betty Marsden (Agnes George), Richard O’Callaghan (Gerard Thorpe), Patricia Hayes (Kaka), Trevor Cooper (Charlie)
Plot
Harold Pye arrives on Sark, a small island in the UK’s Channel Islands, and rents a room with Connie Dredger. Mr Pye is determined to do good works, saying he is in service of The Great Pal. He helps solve conflicts, including a long-running one between Miss Dredger and Miss George. Mr Pye is then startled to find that he has sprouted angel wings from his back and that these are growing larger with each good deed. Doing everything from trying to hide them to consulting a doctor, he comes to the conclusion that the only way he can get rid of them is to start doing works of evil. After conducting assorted mischief-making around the island, Mr Pye then finds that he is starting to grow devil horns on his forehead.
Mervyn Peake (1911-68) is one of my favourite writers and greatly underrated. Peake was a painter (who did reside on the island of Sark for several years) who took to writing in the post-War years. He published several books of poetry and several other novels. However, the work he is most remembered for is the mammoth Gormenghast trilogy consisting of Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950) and Titus Alone (1959), a work set in a rambling castle world filled with eccentric characters. It is a sublime work of fantasy and should be regarded as more of a classic than it is. This was an adaptation of Peake’s novel Mr Pye (1953) produced for Channel 4 in four episodes of 45 minutes each intended to fill a one-hour timeslot. The Gormenghast books were later poorly filmed as the tv mini-series Gormenghast (2000).
At the time Mr Pye was made, Derek Jacobi was then known as a stage, primarily Shakespearean, actor, before having the huge breakout hit playing the title role in the tv series I Claudius (1976). Jacobi plays the part of Mr Pye like a perfectly earnest but dully ineffectual country vicar, running around as a determined do-gooder, helping Judy Parfitt rake her drive and organising singalongs with him playing the electric organ. It is comedy that seems very rooted in a parochial 1950s British time and place in look and tone.
The lines accompanying Mr Pye’s development of the angel wings and devil horns come droll and understated: “Being an angel in paradise is one thing; it’s quite another to be angel in a tax haven like Sark.” There are all the hilariously banal problems of coping with his conditions – trying to sleep with wings on his back, having to pin them down with elastic, or wearing a towel as a turban to hide his horns.
Mr Pye is at its most hilarious when Derek Jacobi turns to the dark side and we see him running around a hotel trying to do mischief by snipping the sleeping landlord’s mustache ends, cutting the heads off flowers in a vase, leaving a note (signed) that he isn’t going to pay his bill, and walking off down the street muttering “must do evil, must do evil.” Or later scenes snatching a child’s ice cream cone and running along the beach kicking in sandcastles, throwing stones through glasshouse windows and setting haybales on fire, even letting the air out of bicycle tires.
All of this swings around with droll complication and is played in perfect deadpan by all involved. The story never particularly comes to any solution to Mr Pye’s dilemma. The show simply ends with him falling off the cliff and flying away using his angel wings.
The theme of people developing angel wings and devil horns has surprisingly appeared in a number of other works including Bill Plympton’s Idiots and Angels (2008) and the horror film Horns (2013).
Full mini-series available beginning with Episode 1 here