CLOCKWISE / CERT: PG / DIRECTOR: CHRISTOPHER MORAHAN / SCREENPLAY: MICHAEL FRAYN / STARRING: JOHN CLEESE, SHARON MAIDEN, STEPHEN MOORE, ALISON STEADMAN / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Brian Stimpson (Cleese) is the punctuality-obsessed headmaster of a lower-class secondary school. He’s been invited to chair the annual headmasters’ conference – a prestigious position usually offered to those in charge of more lofty educational establishments but, for the first time in history, it has now been given to the head of a “common or garden state comprehensive school.” When a mishap at the station en route to the conference leads to a missed train and a missing speech, Stimpson enters full Basil Fawlty mode as his journey to Norwich – in a car reluctantly driven by one of his students – quickly becomes fraught with difficulties and disasters in a frantic race against the clock.
It’s all very British in a Sunday afternoon kind of way, with Stimpson and his followers (or hostages) finding themselves in some genuinely believable situations as well as enduring some more absurd encounters, and there are tons of impeccably-timed gags (which you’d expect, considering the theme of the film). Cleese does an excellent job of making you feel his pain as events continue to get more and more ridiculous, and the supporting cast (which include Stephen Growing Pains of Adrian Mole Moore, Gavin & Stacey‘s Alison Steadman, Joan Hickson (Miss Marple) and Peter Cellier AKA the Major from Keeping Up Appearances) play their parts perfectly.
The restoration work on this “first time on Blu-ray” release is perfectly adequate, but whether that’s enough to convince owners of the DVD to upgrade will entirely be up to how much you like the film itself. This one is quite lacking in the extras department, with the only new content being a ten-minute interview with screenwriter Michael Frayn. He’s perfectly affable (as the subjects of these things generally are) and gives the kind of insight into the production that you’d expect someone with his involvement would be able to offer (real life inspirations for the characters, why various names are used, that sort of thing), but the audio is strangely muffled. There’s also a thirteen-minute interview with John Cleese taken from a previous DVD release, and a stills gallery (does anybody ever look at those?). Rather bare bones, but at least hanging around watching all the extras won’t make you late for any important engagements.
