Never mind, Selwyn Froggitt.... Never mind!
Published: Sunday 29th September 2024
We see the rolling Yorkshire hills come into view and the flat, grey, stone cottages in the fictional town of Scarsdale. A man in a donkey jacket pushes his bike up a steep hill, as a mournful brass band slowly starts to play, and we hear the song.... Selwyn Froggitt is his name.... Never mind.
Never mind indeed! Poor old Selwyn. He tries so hard and loves life so much, yet he's surrounded by family, work colleagues and fellow Scarsdale Working Men's Club And Institute committee members, who exclaim 'Oh no!' whenever they see him.
Oh No It's Selwyn Froggitt started life as part of a series called Yorkshire Comedy Pilots in 1974, which led to it - and Rising Damp, another pilot from this strand - being made into full series. However, it would be two years before Yorkshire Television broadcast the first of its three series.
Selwyn was a good-natured, over-enthusiastic, big kid of a man who lived with his mum and brother in Scarsdale. He worked a labourer for the local council Public Works Department and volunteered as concert secretary - booking the turns - for the local working men's club. His massive strength, sense of humour and childlike zeal caused great annoyance to family and colleagues (one hesitates to say friends); and he became embroiled in regular physical mishaps, breaking everything he touched and never knowing his own strength.
The idea for the sitcom initially came from the show's star, actor Bill Maynard, who had worked the clubs as a young lad and became a household name in the mid-1950s in a sketch show with Terry Scott (Great Scott - It's Maynard!), before joining the Carry On gang for four of their early 1970s films.
Maynard wanted to base a sitcom around the characters he knew from a working men's club in his home town of Sapcote in Leicestershire: including Selwyn, who he based on a man he knew called Peter Wright. Maynard said he actually played the character down from how Wright was in real life, otherwise it would be too unbelievable, a remarkable reality to consider once seeing the character in action. Some of the cast, meanwhile, thought Maynard had based Selwyn on himself.
He first took the idea to his friend, the well-respected BBC TV producer Duncan Wood, who sat on it for a while. When chased, Wood told Bill he was leaving the corporation after 25 years, heading to an executive position at ITV's major Northern franchise holder, Yorkshire Television. It was here that Duncan duly commissioned the show.
The 1974 pilot was written by Roy Clarke and featured Daphne Heard and David Lodge as Mrs Froggitt and Maurice, Selwyn's brother, respectively. By the time Series 1 came around, this casting and the writer had changed. Roy Clarke didn't feel he had connected with the character and couldn't write situations he hadn't thought of himself, so Maynard approached Alan Plater, a drama writer then most noted for his work on the hugely popular police shows Z-Cars and its spin-off, Softly, Softly. Although later in his career he became better known for the comedy dramas that made up The Beiderbecke Trilogy, Selwyn Froggitt would remain his only foray into pure situation comedy.
Meanwhile, well-known film face Megs Jenkins, and Robert Keegan, a familiar face from long-running roles in both Z-Cars and Softly, Softly, played the other Froggitt family members.
Vera Parkinson, Maurice Froggitt's girlfriend and eventual wife, was played by Rosemary Martin, who had been in Last Of The Summer Wine. Unfortunately she hated the experience, and in a later interview explained she was 'fed up of playing silly, mindless women', describing being in the show as 'one of the unhappiest jobs I have ever had'. So, for Series 2 and 3 she was replaced by Lynda Baron, in a pre-Open All Hours role. To a modern viewer, a good deal of early no-nonsense Nurse Gladys Emmanuel is detectable in her performance.
The rest of the regular characters consisted of the committee from the working men's club. Richard Davies played Clive, or Taff as Selwyn called him, with that distinctive broad Welsh voice. Richard was another actor Plater knew well from his police procedurals, as were Bill Dean as Jack and Ray Mort as Raymond. Dean also composed the music and wrote the lyrics to the theme tune, which changed every week depending upon the storyline and was sung by The Tony Mansell Singers.
This trio of grown men were like kids in a playground who bullied and belittled Selwyn, often leaving him to do all the work. In an episode from Series 3 called Gala Performance, Selwyn is abandoned to do everything at the local gala day, yet is over-excited and only too happy to be involved. He's taken advantage of by the rest of the committee, who do nothing but drink beer all day and order him about: this cruel treatment can be difficult to watch at times, seeing this kind man who's having the time of his life being ridiculed. At the end of the episode the committee get their comeuppance, but Selwyn takes no joy in it because he's so kind natured.
It's Selwyn's big heart that is the core of the show. Maynard described him as 'a naïve boy who never grew up', and certainly his exuberance annoys and exasperates everyone around him. He means well but sees everything in life as a game, just like a kid does, seemingly unable to fathom that no one else sees the possibilities and opportunities that lie everywhere.
He's full of energy, he's full of ideas and he's a ray of sunshine, yet the world around him is dour, pessimistic and limiting. Selwyn is a dreamer, who thinks he can better himself by reading The Times and talks about doing Open University courses. Selwyn reading such a broadsheet was an important detail to Maynard as he felt it showed that the character was always trying to improve and better himself.
In his book Stand Up ... And Be Counted: The Other Side Of Greengrass, he explained: "By getting him to read The Times and be an ardent student of dynamic word power, we gave him the breadth to spread the comedy over a wide range of subjects. We wanted people to laugh with him, not at him."
"I read that in The Times" quickly became a catchphrase of the show, along with Selwyn ordering "a pint of cooking and a bag of nuts", the cooking referring to the beer just being the ordinary cheaper stuff, like cooking sherry rather than best bitter.
Other catchphrases included the committee declaring that everything was "carried unanimously", and Mum shouting "don't open that cupboard, things fall out". However, one phrase became a bona fide phenomenon, repeated in school playgrounds the length and breadth of the country: you would greet everyone with two thumbs up and a cry of "magic!" or "magic, our Maurice".
In an interview with Northern Life magazine in 2015 Bill Maynard said:
Did you know 'magic' became one of the biggest catchphrases throughout the world? I just copied it from a lad in my local village. He was a hell of a character. All I did was copy him. And all the characters were from the working men's club. So I did that one, playing this naïve boy who never grew up, that was Selwyn.
Alongside this high preponderance of catchphrases, the humour was deeply rooted in Northern characters with their dry, salty wit, a trademark of Alan Plater's writing. There was also a good deal of slapstick and physical comedy, with everything Selwyn touching either falling apart or breaking, and that physicality, along with his naïvety and effortless ability to drive those around him to despair, led to inevitable comparisons to Frank Spencer and Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. Unlike Frank Spencer however, Selwyn had no self-doubt or feelings of not being good enough. He was ever the optimist, believing there was nothing he couldn't do.
Despite Maynard's insistence that he wanted people to laugh with Selwyn not at him, and although the audience may have been doing that, the other characters certainly weren't. Even Selwyn's family don't seem particularly on his side; he was a clumsy annoyance in their lives, someone who lived in a dream world and didn't knuckle down and just accept his lot.
Looking back now, it can be an uncomfortable to watch, especially episodes like Daze Of Hope from Series 2, where Selwyn gets the wrong end of the stick and thinks he's going to be on This Is Your Life. The family has no idea what he's on about, and the committee teases and plays along with the cruel joke. It's an episode filled with pathos, as at the end, when he seems disappointed not to be on the show, he turns to Maurice and says he's actually glad, because once they've done you on This Is Your Life you won't be on again, so you have nothing to look forward to. It's beautifully sad and very well played.
Another episode that shows Selwyn's eternal optimism and resolve is Series 3's A Little Learning, when he discovers that local school bullies call other boys "Selwyn Froggitt" as an insult. He is hurt but renews his attempts to better himself, poring over reference books to gain knowledge, but getting everything in a muddle.
Even his sister-in-law, Vera, joins in making fun of Selwyn whilst working behind the bar at the club. In Episode 5 of Series 2, Alphabetical Orders, she and the committee string Selwyn along to believe he's going to be called up again at any moment by the military, to work on a top-secret mission. The plan becomes so elaborate that Selwyn spends all night in a workman's hut at the side of the road: it ends up as a ruse simply to get him to pay for everyone's drinks.
The second series was a huge success and topped the TV ratings for four out of its seven episodes. ITV had a big hit on their hands and didn't want to let it go, but Maynard and Plater had other ideas. Initially, the critics seemed to like the show, especially Maynard's performance, but some now considered that the scripts and situations had become a little too silly. Maynard feared typecasting and both wanted to stop after two series, but were eventually persuaded into doing a third.
Plater only wrote two episodes of this Series 3, handing the reins over to other writers as he was, in his own words, 'knackered'. Mike Craig, Lawrie Kinsley and Ron McDonnell took over most of the writing duties; Plater was also becoming increasingly frustrated with Bill Maynard, who he described in a 2004 interview with the Independent as having "a constitutional resistance to learning the script".
After three successful series, Maynard really did think they had gone as far as they could with Oh No It's Selwyn Froggitt. Yorkshire Television, however, wanted more, and eventually Duncan Wood persuaded his old friend to the character in a new setting. Ditching the supporting cast and moving to a holiday camp where Selwyn had been appointed entertainment manager, Selwyn, ran for just one series in 1978.
Unfortunately the change was not popular with the public and no more episodes were commissioned. In May 1980, Bill Maynard confirmed that Selwyn Froggitt would not be returning in any form.
Although the show was a huge success for ITV and has been cited as an influence on the writing of Victoria Wood, it has rarely been repeated on our screens since the 1990s, when UK Gold and Forces TV would run it.
There's a good deal of Yorkshire humour in there, with stoic women and daft blokes, that put you in mind of Last Of The Summer Wine, and it's a similarly perfectly clean show, with no swearing or innuendo at all - indeed Bill Maynard once received a letter of praise for being in 'the cleanest show on TV'. Revived thanks to DVD release in the late 2000s, all four series are on show for a whole new audience, reflecting a slice of life and a tone of television comedy that is now all too scarce.
Magic, our Maurice!
Where to start?
Series 3, Episode 2 - Gala Performance
Scarsdale Working Men's Club is organising a gala day but it seems only Selwyn is doing any work. While the rest of the committee is testing the ale in the beer tent, Selwyn is having great fun as a DJ at the kids' disco, doing his best Tony Blackburn impression with a traffic cone on his head!
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Love comedy? Find out moreThe Complete Selwyn Froggitt - All Four Complete Series
Bill Maynard stars as the council labourer, hapless handyman and all-round public nuisance in this classic Yorkshire Television sitcom set from the pen of award-winning writer Alan Plater (Beiderbecke).
Oh No It's Selwyn Froggitt boasts a regular supporting cast featuring Bill Dean (Brookside) - who also wrote lyrics for each episode's individual theme tune - and Robert Keegan (Z Cars), and remained a firm favourite with the viewing public throughout its two-year run, establishing Bill Maynard as a household name. This release brings together all three series of Oh No It's Selwyn Froggitt alongside the one series of sequel Selwyn and the original pilot episode from 1974.
First released: Sunday 10th October 2010
DVD- Distributor: Network
- Region: 2
- Discs: 4
- Catalogue: 7953298
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