Living In The Bottle: Timeless Time (One Foot In The Grave)

Let's talk about another television staple that holds particular fascination for me: the bottle episode. Like our old buddy, the clip show, the budget-friendly nature of the bottle episode has made it a popular go-to across the decades for producers looking to squeeze out an installment or two with as little fuss as possible. The term "bottle episode" was coined by Outer Limits producer Leslie Stevens, who likened the experience of creating such an episode to coaxing a genie out of a bottle - the idea is that you're looking to generate magic from extremely limited resources, with bottle episodes typically restricting their action to a single location and to non-extra cast members (although there are no hard rules about what you can and cannot do). As such, there tends to be something about them that resembles the aura of theatre as much as television, with their slow-burning, minimalist emphasis on enclosed spaces and intensive character dialogues, and there is often tremendous relish to be had in seeing how they rise to the challenge. TV shows of all stripes have tried their hand at the form, and there are certain shows that consist of nothing but bottle episodes (eg: the anthology series Inside No. 9, which was directly inspired by the enjoyment its creators Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton had in making a bottle episode for their preceding series, Psychoville) - I can, however, think of relatively few series that perfected the art of the bottle quite so beautifully and as hauntingly as David Renwick's classic BBC sitcom, One Foot In The Grave.

One Foot In The Grave follows Victor Meldrew (Richard Wilson) a sixtysomething ex-security guard forced into premature retirement (aka redundancy), who now spends his days attempting, entirely in vain, to reassert his value in a society that has callously discarded him, butting heads with just about everyone he encounters and frequently getting the goat of his similarly peevish but more reserved wife Margaret (Annette Crosbie). Other recurring characters include Jean Warboys (Doreen Mantle), Margaret's insufferably scatter-brained best friend, Patrick and Pippa Trench (Angus Deayton and Janine Duvitski), the younger couple next door who seem sadly fated to become Victor and Margaret later in life (giving a healthy shot of irony to the long-running enmity between Victor and Patrick) and Nick Swainey (Owen Brenman), the Meldrews' other neighbour, a deeply eccentric, excessively upbeat charity worker who presents as if he were the bastard love child of Ned Flanders and Norman Bates (and was compared to the latter in the episode "In Luton Airport No One Can Hear You Scream"). The humor blends absurdism (Victor is often the victim of freakishly bad luck) with periodic morbidness - the topic of mortality was an oft-explored one (in fairness, the series title is a dead giveaway), and the series demonstrated just how squeamish it was prepared to get on the matter right from the second episode, "The Big Sleep", when the Meldrews have an emotionally scarring experience at a yoga class. One Foot In The Grave could get very dark in places, to a point that regularly tested the sensibilities of its viewers (my own personal threshold was reached in the episode "We Have Put Her Living In The Tomb", which is the one episode I cannot bring myself to revisit; I do not do dead pets, sorry). A particularly laudable aspect of the series was its willingness to stick to its guns in its thoroughly unsentimental depiction of ageing, relationships and humanity in general (the first Christmas episode, "Who's Listening", being a glaring exception where it surrendered to sentimentality wholesale...on the flip side, you've really got to admire the balls of any sitcom that would exhibit a story as horrific as "The Man Who Blew Away" as festive entertainment).

It's become something of a cliche to point this out when discussing the series, but Victor is a misunderstood protagonist, in that he's often represented in popular consciousness as an unpleasant old man taking knee-jerk umbrage with everyone and everything around him. No question that Victor has a mean temper. But he does not, in all other regards, strike me as a mean person. The thing about Victor is that he's actually quite good-hearted underneath it all. He has a strong sense of justice, and a large deal of his indignation at the general indifference and inconsideration of the world (in his words, "the bloody-minded soddishness of people") is honestly righteous - it's more that he doesn't make life easy for himself with his tendency to leap head-first into confrontations he can never win. On occasions where Victor is excessively cruel (as he was to a bereaved video store clerk in "Who's Listening" and to his brother in "The Broken Reflection") he will end up recognising this and feeling remorse. On top of which, the more closely you watch the series, the more apparent it becomes that Margaret is actually the more bitter and cynical of the two - living with Victor and the perpetual calamity he brings is certainly no picnic, but she's cold to Victor in ways that he does not reciprocate. Then again, Margaret has suffered some pretty appalling misfortunes in her time (and would continue to do so throughout the course of the series) - misfortunes that extend well beyond her marriage to the impossibly accident-prone Victor, and of which the initial bottle episode, "Timeless Time", merely scratches the surface.

One Foot In The Grave debuted on 4th January 1990 and ran for six series, the last of which aired on 20th November 2000 (note: there was a long hiatus between Series 5 and 6, although a number of stand alone Christmas specials appeared in the interim). From Series 2 onward, it became a tradition to have one bottle episode per series, and these were typically written to a formula - they took place in real time, with Victor and Margaret trapped in some kind of unpleasant or claustrophobic situation that, toward the end of the episode, they would reflect on mournfully as an apt metaphor for the trajectory their lives had taken in general (usually foreshadowed in the episode title). Inevitably, the central situation was never resolved, and the episode would fade out with it still continuing. The series liked to mix up this formula - one such episode, "The Trial" of Series 4, dispensed with Margaret altogether and consisted simply of Victor murmuring to himself in his living room for half an hour (it wound up being one of the funniest episodes of the series, too). An advantage of bottle episodes, besides their frugality, is that they allowed for more in-depth character contemplation - with all this dead space to fill, Victor and Margaret were given the opportunity to expand on their backstories in greater detail than a regular episode would have had room for. "Timeless Time", which debuted on 15th November 1990 as the closing episode of Series 2, is notable not only for being the very first of the bottle episodes, but also the only occasion in which the Meldrews openly discuss a personal tragedy from their past that, while never brought up again, inevitably puts a whole new lens on our interpretation of the characters in the present. Not a lot happens in "Timeless Time", and yet it feels like one of the most monumental of all the series.

"Timeless Time" takes place entirely in the Meldrew's bedroom in the early hours of the morning; Victor is suffering from a bout of insomnia (potentially triggered by a bad reaction to the dubious dish of Spaghetti Al Pacino served the previous night at his mother-in-law's), and as an inevitable knock-on effect, so is Margaret. In its sleep-deprived state, Victor's mind begins wandering into all kinds of ludicrous territory, as he attempts to make sense of some of life's most troubling paradoxes - namely, the elusiveness of time, and the inexplicable teaspoon he always discovers while draining the sink after washing up (Victor's fixation on the matter is such that at one point he even drifts off long enough to visualise the Loch Ness Monster as a 60-ft teaspoon). Naturally, "Timeless Time" is a mostly dialogue-driven affair, although it does incorporate some elements of the absurdist slapstick for which the series is well-known - most notably, when Victor is forced to venture outside to turn off his car alarm, loses a slipper and accidentally puts on a semi-decayed hedgehog carcass (I noted that the series could be quite brutal in its treatment of animals, but at least in this instance the hedgehog would have been long out of its misery before Victor got to it; not so much the cat who later has the disintegrating hedgehog dumped on it). Which does make me wonder what kind of cheap and nasty slippers Victor must be accustomed to wearing, if he seriously couldn't tell the difference. "Timeless Time" also contains (I think) the first reference to Ronnie and Mildred, a couple of "friends" of the Meldrew's who would later appear in person (much to the Meldrew's revulsion) in the Series 3 finale, "The Worst Horror of All". Here, it's established that the Meldrews have a stash of unopened Christmas presents from Ronnie and Meldrew in their closet; Victor's boredom reaches such unendurable heights that he seriously contemplates tackling this, but ultimately decides that he hasn't the stomach for it. In the 1996 Christmas special "Starbound" it was revealed that their hoard of unopened gifts has only increased and that, worryingly, one of them has started to smell.

The scenario of "Timeless Time" entails the Meldrews lying still, both literally and figuratively, as time continues to pass them by. With their prospects of a restful night's sleep seeming increasingly doubtful, they're left with only two options - gaze helplessly into the darkened void all around them, or jabber inanely about whatever of life's various annoyances or banalities happen to worm into their fatigued heads. All five of the series' bottle episodes deal, to some capacity, with Victor squaring off against stagnation, but "Timeless Time" may be the entry in which that stagnation is most saliently reflected in his surroundings, with a predominant feeling of nothingness. Nothing, so Victor tells us, is all that exists, before elucidating his theory on why time is merely an illusion - "The future doesn't exist, because it hasn't happened yet. The past doesn't exist, because it's already over. And the present doesn't exist, because as soon as you start to think about it, it's already become the past." Victor's frustrations on the impersonal nature of time, along with his seeming inability to seize the moment and live meaningfully within it, are entirely relatable. And yet what he and Margaret articulate throughout the course of the episode would appear to disprove all of his assertions. Clearly, the past and the future are very existent, as two equally oppressive states between which the Meldrews are perpetually sandwiched. They are haunted by the emotional baggage they have accumulated in their six decades on Earth, and by the inevitability of their own demises - and Victor is troubled to hear that he has already been consigned to the grave, or rather his cremated remains to the floor of Allied Carpets, in the distorted perception of a former acquaintance. Or perhaps it's more a case that Victor and Margaret live in the Eternal Now, the eternity of that now having become more inescapable as time has gone on. From their assorted journeys down memory lane, there are numerous ways in which their present situation seems largely unchanged from its humble beginnings - at one point, they reminisce about the first night on which they ever slept together, which was also defined by its sleeplessness. For Victor, the standout memory of the evening was being kept awake by a dripping tap, while Margaret recalls Victor's bed-hogging inconsideration as the source of her own insomnia (although at the time she had somehow convinced herself that this was all part of the romantic ritual). The paradox at the heart of the episode is how Victor and Margaret have remained trapped in their personal inertia while still feeling the onslaught of the relentless flow of time. Time has taken its toll on themselves and the world that they once knew, just as it has taken its toll on the world in which "Timeless Time" itself takes place (referenced in "Timeless Time" and no longer with us: Stephen Hawking, Mike Hope, Albie Keen, Reg Varney, Allied Carpets). The world may keep on turning, but where have they actually gotten in any of this?

The major revelation occurs toward the end of the episode, when Victor, ranting about the indignities of tabloid journalism, makes some flippant reference to the Biblical slaughter of the innocents ("no British babies believed to be involved") followed by an awkward silence where he realises that he's broached a forbidden subject and has upset Margaret. He apologises for going too far. Margaret responds by admitting that, "I was thinking about him just this morning," and talks about her chance encounter with a man named Michael, who works for an insurance firm and has a daughter just starting at secondary school. She then refers to somebody named Stuart and wonders if he too would have pursed a career in insurance. It's never explicitly stated, but we're given enough information to piece together that Stuart was Victor and Margaret's son, who died as a child. Michael, meanwhile, was the baby of another woman Margaret met in the maternity ward where she gave birth to Stuart; seeing him as an adult decades later has clearly been an eye-opener for her, not just as a further reminder of the unabating passage of time, but because he provides a ghostly mirror to the point in life where Stuart would have been if he had lived.

As noted, the loss of Stuart and the grief with which the Meldrews have lived ever since was never touched on at any other point in the series. The closest we'd previously gotten to addressing the matter of their apparent lack of descendants was slightly earlier in Series 2, in the episode "Who Will Buy?", when Victor rebuffed a door-to-door salesman, whose sales pitch contained a reference to their hypothetical grandchildren, with the rejoinder: "How do you know I've got grandchildren? I might be completely sterile!" Which at the time might have passed as nothing more than your typically churlish Victor-ism, although with this information in mind it's easy to see how the salesman's presumptions might have touched a nerve in him. Surprisingly, Stuart is not brought up in the one episode where some reference to him would have felt entirely pertinent, ie: the 1991 Christmas special "The Man In The Long Black Coat", where Pippa is pregnant but ultimately suffers a miscarriage. From what little we learn in "Timeless Time", it seems that this is a subject the Meldrews prefer generally not to talk about; life has gone on since Stuart and their bereavement is something they've had to accommodate in that, but the rawness of that loss is still every bit as potent, demonstrating how the past is indeed alive and kicking in the present. It is unknown how old Stuart was when died, but Margaret's line, "she was coming out just as I was going in", gives me the ominous feeling that he possibly didn't even make it out of the hospital. It's in Michael and his mother and the wistful feelings they inspire in Margaret that we see another facet of time not factored into Victor's earlier equation - namely, the future that once might have been - and how this too has heavy bearing upon the now. Judging by the tenderness with which Margaret describes her encounter with Michael, the meeting has been of some comfort to her, as if she has glimpsed vicariously, through Michael's entirely prosaic existence, a parallel universe in which Stuart survived to adulthood and the two of them were able to enjoy a relationship that spanned so many touchstones in both of their lives. There is, nevertheless, one element in which his mother's life seems to synch up hauntingly with Margaret's own - Michael will soon be leaving the area, prompting the empathic remark that: "She'll miss him; she never had any others". Life is comprised of meetings and partings at all stages, but perhaps in this statement we also see an indirect acknowledgement of Margaret's own need to come to come to terms with her loss and accept that this outcome never was.

The mention of Stuart segues into a broader discussion about how easy it was for the characters to take life for granted when it seemed that they had all the time in the world. Margaret makes a particularly astute observation when she recalls that, "A year was an eternity when you were a child. The time between one Christmas and the next." In the end, the absent Stuart seems emblematic of the more general sense of thwarted potential that pervades the episode. The central problem of a sleepless night becomes a metaphor for grand life plans that never came to fruition; Victor's frustrated tallying of the number of prospective hours' sleep he still has remaining an acknowledgement of his increasingly limited time on Earth. Meanwhile, the rattle of distant milk bottles that Victor bemoans as "the beginning of the end" is a comical shorthand for the cold hand of death slowly but surely crawling its way toward him. There is something wryly paradoxical in seeing the dawning of a new day, more conventionally interpreted as a symbol of renewal, posited as a prelude to impending oblivion. This duality is emphasised in a visual gag at the end of the episode, when we see the light of dawn through the bedroom window, accompanied by the last of the intrusions they have to deal with from the neighbourhood fauna, a sparrow energetically heralding the new day. Having plumbed the depths of the Meldrews' darkest, most tightly-guarded sorrows, we are apparently being offered our light at the end of the tunnel - Victor is quick to dismiss the sparrow (who has apparently woken him on previous mornings) as yet another in his endless list of daily annoyances, but Margaret suggests that the bird's singing might hold the key to their salvation. And as affecting as that fleeting talk of Stuart is, it's in its final three minutes that I personally feel that "Timeless Time" comes into its poignantly understated own, as Victor and Margaret figure out where to go from here.

The sparrow at the end of "Timeless Time" recalls the titular Darkling Thrush described in Thomas Hardy's 1900 poem (originally titled "By The Century's Deathbed"), in which Hardy relates his apprehension on approaching the end of a cultural era. The narrator of Hardy's poem describes walking through a barren winter landscape, in which most of the natural world appears to reflect his own nihilistic outlook. The song of a solitary thrush provides the sole contradiction, a twitching of life in overwhelming decay, causing the narrator to ponder if perhaps there is a small glimmer of hope that lurks beyond his comprehension:

"So little cause for carolings

      Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

      Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

      His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

      And I was unaware."

 

Like Hardy's thrush, the sparrow sounds out at what the Meldrews presume to be the irrevocable waning of their time, and Margaret shares the narrator's romantic interpretation of the significance of birdsong, as a beacon of hope amid a wasteland of endless despair. Ostensibly, "Timeless Time" might ultimately be perceived as a meditation on finding the courage to face a new day in an ongoing cycle in which monotony, misery and mortality are all so omnipresent. This seems to be the conclusion Margaret points toward when she suggests that the sparrow's life is no less gruelling or humdrum than their own: "All he does is eat burned bits of toast and a few worms...still got plenty to sing about, evidently." It is an observation with which Victor does not disagree. Nevertheless, the episode's fade-out offers a disturbance to this glimmer of optimism, in characteristically sardonic One Foot In The Grave fashion. Margaret chooses this moment to raise with Victor the first of the many (we presume) troubles he can expect to face in the incoming day: "You won't be able to have porridge for breakfast tomorrow. We're out of milk." The dwindling resources in the Meldrews' food larder serves as further indication of the ever-decreasing cache of things they have to look forward to in life, but Victor isn't quite willing to throw in the towel. He insists that he'll settle for the powdered milk they had previously discussed receiving as a free sample, whereupon Margaret drops her final bombshell: "We're also out of porridge." Victor then proposes that he might try worms on toast "for a change", having previously ruminated on whether the bird's unpalatable diet was directly responsible for its morning enthusiasm - this, though, registers less as a resolve to find a brand new outlook on life than it does a grudging resignation to his miserable lot; in his own bitterly sarcastic way, Victor conveys a Zen-like acceptance for the drudgery that undoubtedly lies ahead. "We'll open a new can in the morning," says Margaret stoically. "Yes," Victor murmurs, "We always seem to...", and the episode ends. 

The final punchline of the episode is a play on the idiom "to open a can of worms", meaning to create a whole new set of problems in attempting to solve an existing one; a closing expression of pessimism that naturally tempers whatever willingness the Meldrews might have displayed in bracing themselves for the imminent new day. Rattle of distant milk bottles aside, the new morning brings not oblivion, but a continuation of their daily routine, and the need to go out and engage with what Victor had only just described as pure ritual. The real horrors that Victor anticipates, however, are to be located in life's unpredictabilities - the assortment of opportunities for things to go spectacularly wrong as he and Margaret attempt to make the most of their ostensible new beginning. The quest for variety, and the possibility of a fresh start, so "Timeless Time" tells us, is all worms. And it makes for one heck of an unappetising breakfast on burned toast.