After our slightly confusing watch of the fourth and fifth episodes, here’s the first three episodes of Your Cheatin’ Heart starting with 1: Throwing Up in the Gorbals. And immediately, the tables are pre-turned, with visiting time in prison between Cissie and husband Dorwood.
But it’s Dorwood in prison, and Cissie is wearing that suit because it’s the uniform at the club she’s waiting tables at. The piano player (and owner) tells her she should smile more.
Billie McPhail (Katy Murphy) is driving Frank (John Gordon Sinclair) around in her taxi. He’s a journalist, a fact that didn’t come up in the episodes I watched.
Fraser Boyle (Ken Stott) turns up at the club, apparently selling fish, although I suspect this might be a cover for drugs. He also punches Frank in the face as he’s throwing up in the toilet and singing Elvis songs. Then he talks to Cissie and asks about the money, which she doesn’t know anything about.
The McPhail sisters sing a number.
Fraser leaves his invoice book in the toilet, and Frank picks it up, but then leaves it outside the club on a wall, where a homeless man finds it. Fraser is rather animated when he finds it missing.
BBC Genome: BBC One – 11th October 1990 – 22:00
The next episode is 2: The Eagle of the Apocalypse And the Sidewinders of Satan. Cissie gets Frank to help investigate husband Dorwood’s case, to try to find evidence that would get him off.
Fraser turns up looking for his notebook, and he trashes the flat while Frank cowers behind the bathroom door. Ken Stott is really good at the quiet menace.
Frank investigates a tattooist who is mixed up in Dorwood’s case, somehow. The actor Tom Watson is credited as two different characters. I’m still at a loss as to whether he is, in fact, two different characters, the same person, or the same person in disguise.
Back in her own flat, Cissie discovers Dorwood’s stash of cash hidden in a Gene Autry radio. I think this means that she thinks he must be guilty of the crime.
Dorwood gets onto the roof of the prison.
BBC Genome: BBC One – 18th October 1990 – 22:00
Finally on this tape, episode 3: This Could Turn Septic on us, Ya Big Ungrateful Midden. Helen Atkinson Wood makes her first appearance as a radio reporter. Dorwood wants to talk to Cissie. He tells Wood that he’s put his redundancy money in the Gene Autry radio.
Frank remembers the band that Fraser was meeting was Jim Bob O’May and the Wild Bunch. He thinks that if he offers to play with the McPhail sisters, along with Cissie, they can get information about Fraser and possibly clear Dorwood’s name.
The Owner of the bar is having a shave at a barber’s. The barber is also played by Tom Watson. This is just wilful confusion on the part of the programme makers. I find it difficult enough to differentiate between different generic looking men, never mind the same man as several characters.
Peter Mullan and partner turn up, and shoot the club owner in the head.
There’s a guest appearance by Jonathan Ross, on a recorded programme interviewing Dorwood.
Cissie burns the money. Then two police officers arrive to tell her that her husband is fine – which is the first she knows about Dorwood’s rooftop protest, now at an end after he fell off the roof, landing on a prison officer.
Remember when so much of drama consisted of people trying to contact other people?
I have to say, the plot is still feeling very slow moving. Even knowing what’ll be happening in the next two episodes, I still don’t feel like I have much of a clue what’s driving the main characters. I’m definitely not feeling this a tenth as much as Tutti Frutti.
BBC Genome: BBC One – 25th October 1990 – 22:00
After this, there’s a trailer for New West, BBC2’s attempt to make country music happen.
Then, Question Time starts, and the tape ends.
VHiStory 