A few years ago I went on a pilgrimage to West Lulworth in Dorset. My wife, Linda, came with me. I stood on the shore beside the geographically fascinating Stair Hole and shouted: “Candice Marie, you are standing on sedimentary limestone!” To which Linda, who had walked up to the top of the cliff, duly replied: “I can’t hear you, Keith.” After which we went to Corfe Castle and had a theatrical row about who got to hold the guidebook before going in search of the dungeons.
To be clear, this was no marital tiff – rather, it was a reenactment of one of our favourite movies, Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May (Internet Archive). The story of a would-be idyllic camping holiday that turns into a social nightmare for pompous Keith Pratt (Roger Sloman) and his infantalised wife, Candice Marie (Alison Steadman), Nuts in May, first broadcast as a BBC Play for Today in January 1976, is one of the funniest films I have ever seen. Linda bought me a copy on VHS after I’d had back surgery in the 90s and could do nothing but lie on the floor. I laughed so hard I nearly put myself back in hospital.
