This line from "Ever Decreasing Circles" almost made me feel sorry for brain-locked right-wingers

Until eerily close to air time, the show didn't have theme music, or even a name. Then somebody, or probably somebodies, thought of (a) Ever Decreasing Circles and (b) No. 15 of Shostakovich's 24 Preludes for Piano, Op. 34 (played by pianist Ronnie Lane). In Part 1 of the pilot episode, "The New Neighbour" (Part 2 is here), Richard Briers is Martin Bryce; Penelope Wilton is Ann Bryce; Peter Egan is Paul Ryman, the new neighbour; and Stanley Lebor is old neighbor Howard Hughes (no, a different Howard Hughes).

"No, no, what we mustn't do, Martin, is deprive ourselves of the sheer excitement of not knowing what we might end up with."

-- Paul Ryman (Peter Egan), in "House to Let," Episode 3 of
Series 3 (aired September 1986) of Ever Decreasing Circles

by Ken

I love that phrase "the sheer excitement of not knowing what we might end up with." I can't tell you who exactly wrote the line, because Ever Decreasing Circles was written by one of the great TV writing teams, John Esmonde and Bob Larbey. In one of the DVD audio commentaries, recorded some 20 years after the series (1985-87, plus a 1989 special) finished, the actors recall Esmonde as a "dark" writer and Larbey as contrastingly "light," one of the things that, obviously, made them such a good team. In case you don't instantly recall the names, they had written the classic series The Good Life -- which we in the U.S. got as Good Neighbors, for some name-conflict reason -- with the great team of Richard Briers, Felicity Kendal, Penelope Keith, and Paul Edding. (The DVDs were released in 2007, at which time, by great good fortune, Richard Briers, Penelope Wilton, and Paul Egan were all still available and eager to participate. The audio commentaries are spectacular.)

To illustrate the brilliance of Esmonde and Larbey: After they've concocted that wonderful line about "depriv[ing] ourselves of the sheer excitement of not knowing what we might end up with," the writers have "what we might end up with" turn out to be the Danbys, the tenants Paul has found for the the house he's bought, as an investment, in the close where he and the Bryces live. Martin is deeply concerned about the effect of a new tenant on the perfect equilibrium of the neighborhood. (Of course what Martin fears most of all is another Paul.)

Dan Danby -- borderline nuts?

As it turns out, Dan Danby is, well, borderline nuts, or perhaps over-the-border. Since his nuttiness is in the service of absolute social orthodoxy, Martin loves him, while both Paul and Martin's wife Ann are horrified. Sometimes what we end up with, after all that excitement of now knowing, turns out to be our worst nightmare. (Ann guesses correctly that what Martin assumes was an intensive search for just the right people was in fact Paul signing up the first people who looked at the place.)

The point here is that nobody could be less interested than Martin in the sheer excitement of not knowing what we might end up with, or in ending up with anything other than exactly what he expects, and approves of. The key to Ever Decreasing Circles, of course, was Richard Briers, who was one of the few actors (if there have ever been that many) who could make a character like Martin anything other than unbearable. He had spent his estimable career charming the pants off of audiences, and the show's creators reckoned that he could make Martin not only bearable but likable, but likable only in his utter impossibility. In one of the DVD commentaries, Penelope Wilton -- now best known to us as Downton Abbey's Isobel Crawley, mother of the unexpected heir to Downton, the now-late Matthew Crawley -- mentions that she used to get letters from viewers asking how she could be married to that man.

This is where comedic genius, in both the writing and the acting, comes into play. I always think of Seinfeld and the character of Kramer. Sometimes it has been pointed out to me that our Kramer, Cosmo K, was ripped out of the real-life existence of Larry David's and Jerry Seinfeld's old acquaintance Kenny Kramer, and certainly Kenny Kramer felt ripped off. But I ask the obvious question: Does anyone suppose that anyone ever found the real-life Kenny Kramer funny? I have a strong hunch that he drove acquaintances stark staring crazy, and probably night unto unbearable, about as far from amusing as you can get. The genius of the Seinfeld team, it struck me, was to have made their Kramer both hilarious and deep-down charming.

So it must have been with Ever Decreasing Circles's Martin Bryce. Martin is almost limitlessly exasperating, and the viewer often wonders, as those correspondents of Penelope Wilton's wrote her, how her character could have remained married to Martin. But, almost incredibly, the team of writers Esmonde and Larbey and actor Briers made Martin both entertaining and, infuriating as he is, sympathetic. He means so well, after all, and after all what could have produced a person so deeply damaged?

So maybe it was because of this context, the context of Martin's hopeless befuddlement, that I was able to hear Paul's line -- the line about "the sheer excitement of not knowing what we might end up with" -- so vividly. And heard it as something like a textbook description of the far-right-wing mind. For the adherents of right-wing orthodoxy, what matters more than never having to be uncertain about what to expect, and that what they expect is all their old certainties.

And suddenly I found myself feeling sorry, almost, for all those right-wingers who have been denied, or have denied themselves, the saving human grace of curiosity, of looking at the world around them with a passion to understand and explain -- and to reserve for themselves the sheer excitement of not knowing what they might end up with.

Ironically, they can't ever get their wish to always know what they're going to end up with, because reality doesn't allow it. Reality insists on behaving according to its own rules, showing hardly any respect for the protocols of institutionalized hokum.

There's a lot more to talk about in this connection, but for now let me just feel a little bad for those people who deny this fundamental aspect of their humanity, the deep-rooted need to explore and try to understand.

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