Brimstone and Treacle (Barry Davis, 1976/1987)

"I recall writing (and the words now make me shudder) that the only meaningful sacrament left to human beings was for them to gather in the streets in order to be sick together, splashing vomit on the paving stones as the final and most eloquent plea to an apparently deaf, dumb and blind God." - Dennis Potter

"Tell him it isn't Play for Today.  Tell him it isn't political!" - John Nathan-Turner

Emerging from the same opening Play for Today montage - a flurry of gritty and sombre monochrome photographs of such drama stalwarts as John Hurt looking concerned and/or perplexed - as classics from the same stable such as Robin Redbreast (James MacTaggart, 1970) and Penda's Fen (Alan Clarke, 1974), Dennis Potter's typically idiosyncratic Brimstone and Treacle is a diabolical delight.  What if something truly daemonic walked amongst us, and what if it was polite, respectful and helpful?  What would it profit a man if he gained a carer for his disabled daughter, but to lose his own soul?  I don't know if anyone had heretofore asked that question but here Potter gives us... if not an answer, then at least an amused rumination upon the quandary.

"There resides infinitely more good in the demonic than in the trivial man" - Soren Kierkegaard

Penned by Potter in the lacuna betwixt biographical drama Where Adam Stood - an adaptation of the autobiography of Edmund Gosse starring Alan Badel and Bread Bowell matriarch to be Jean Boht - and his 1978 floruit which saw a star-studded seven-part adaptation of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge and hos own musical opus Pennies from Heaven, Brimstone and Treacle presents us with the everyday life of Tom Bates (Denholm Elliott) being interrupted by a seemingly chance encounter with Martin Taylor (a young Michael Kitchen, post rocking to the music of Stoneground in Dracula A.D. 1972 but a long time before hanging around M's office in Bond movies or starring alongside the delightfully named Honeysuckle Weeks in longer than World War II drama Foyle's War).

"A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down" - Julie Andrews

Inveigling his way into Tom's good graces after their not at all accidental meet-Faust, the infernal Martin indulges in some con artist level cold reading and portrays himself as an old boyfriend of Bates' daughter from art college and feigns an anxiety attack-induced collapse on heaing the news of the incident two years previously that rendered her disabled.

Making his way into their home by smiling and being a villain, he meets Tom's put-open and sttessed wife Amy (Patricia Lawrence) and the purported love of his life, daughter Patricia (Michelle Newell, who essayed her Esmeralda opposite Warren Clarke's Quasimodo in the same year's adaptation of Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame for director Alan Cooke at the BBC) who has been reduced to the state of a gurgling vegetable - at least in the harsh words of her father, who opines that the driver responsible for the hit and run that resulted in her condition be strung up.  Volunteering to help with Pattie's care and relieve some of the stress on Mrs Bates, the outwardly charming and on the face of it quite plausible Martin - who insists that he and Pattie were close to being married at one point - beguiles 'Mumsy' as he nicknames her and quite quickly his black magic has her under his spell.

Humans are such easy prey, as Dr Praetorius from From Beyond so wisely and eloquently taught us, and none seem so easily tempted and led as right-wing reactionary types.  Tom's hang 'em, flog 'em rants and racist outbursts mark him out as a mark ripe for the plucking, and Martin preys upon these leanings.  After Tom drunkenly confesses to being a member of the National Front the daemon pushes him toward further extremes of "send them back" and "put them into camps" rhetoric that would make Naziferatu Stephen Miller engorged, to the extent that Tom baulks and forswears his membership - crying that he didn't want anyone killed or hurt, he just wanted to turn the clock back and freeze the past in aspic. Like the sad reactionary he is.

Of course the crux of it all, the "repugnant" climax - so the speak - is Martin's rape of Patricia which has the effect of "curing" her by snapping her out of her catatonia and triggeing a flashback to the night of the hit and run when she caught her father in bed with her "lower class" friend Susan, whom Tom decried as "slutty".  Perhaps the real evil is that which hides behind the doors and net curtains of suburbia and polite middle class manners.  No wonder the devil himself flees that household into the night with his shirt tails between his legs.

"You have to be smug or very frail, to believe that no man has a horn or tail" -  Martin Taylor

Scheduled for broadcast on the 6th of April 1976, it was withdrawn from transmission and remained unaired for eleven years, finally gaining a broadcast on the 25th of August 1987.  Described (or decried) by then incumbent Head of Broadcast Television and future BBC Director General Alasdair Milne as "brilliantly made" as well as "nauseating" and "repugnant", this shadow ban was celebrated by Mary Whitehouse types as "taking a stand" against what the God fearers called a "rising tide" of "filth" and "blasphemy".  You've got to laugh, really.  Potter would have the last laugh however as he not only successfully adapted it as a stage play (premiering at the Sheffield Crucible in late 1977 and transferring the following year to the West End) but also to film, once again starring Elliott as Tom opposite tantric sex fiend, lovely Feyd and model for occult private dick John Constantine Sting (Gordon Sumner to his mam) as Martin.

The 1982 film version had the name of the mother, now played by Joan Plowright, changed from Amy Bates to Norma Bates.  We all go a little Psycho sometimes, I suppose.