Who's Who? (1978 Mike Leigh & scr)

Well, the credits read 'devised', but we all know what that means. With its cast of unknowns (made for BBC) the title is an apt one. The proliferation of double-barrelled names had me thinking of one of Mike's favourites, Carlton-Browne of the F.O.

Mike has fun observing (rather than taking the piss out of) the upper classes, with focus on a dinner party hosted by insecure Simon Chandler and buffoon Adam Norton, and attended by womaniser Graham Seed, punk Catherine Hall (actually looking ahead of her time and more out of the 80s) and something-on-her-mind Felicity Dean. These scenes do contain some improvisation as they ran out of time while filming.

Meanwhile Richard Kane plays a petty and desperately boring snob who's obsessed by the upper classes and Joolia Cappelman is his wife and cat breeder (we both thought the door with 'No Admittance' was going to belong to a troubled teenager), selling to Geraldine James. Sam Kelly (from Porridge) is a visiting photographer. Phil Davis, as Kane's fellow worker, is really the only one who seems contented as he constantly winds up the older man. (Even he's got aspirations - he really is looking for somewhere in London to move to.) We think Phil might end up with fellow office worker Souad Faress, but see nothing more of it.

Then another stockbroker Jeffrey Wickham has to deal with his mother's over-spending, with David Neville and Richenda Carey, in awfully upper class circumstances (great writing also references out-of-the-way nanny and daughter).

Mike himself says 'the Ealing comedy roots are closer to the surface than most'. and also reveals that - in character - Kane wrote to famous people and thus the replies you see from Thatcher, Russell Harty etc are real!