GOING BACK TO JASPER STREET, by Mark Aldridge #PGat25

IMPORTANT: This review contains SPOILERS. Massive great honking ones. If you haven’t ever seen Press Gang (Seriously?! Are you a KD?!!!  What are you even doing here reading this, you fool?!  Click right on over to Amazon, buy yourself the complete series boxset and remedy that situation immediately before you read any further…)

Press Gang was never shy of character studies – not only of Lynda, but also of the ‘grown ups’ that she encounters, and the assorted collection of (mostly) reprobates who work on the Junior Gazette at some point. One of the best characterisations of the series is one that also goes mostly unspoken, however – the relationship between Lynda and Kenny. Their friendship is fully established from the show’s opening episode, not through awkward exposition, but by the confidence with which they interact. Lynda knows Kenny, Kenny knows Lynda, and they like each other no matter how much they don’t like each other on any given day. There is no sexual chemistry, no ‘will they won’t they’ threads left hanging (oh how easy it would have been for the show to have Lynda choosing between ‘good guy’ Kenny and ‘bad boy’ Spike until the finale, where she inevitably embraces the Junior Gazette’s printing presses instead, only to reprimand herself for messing up the kerning).

Going Back to Jasper Street‘s examination of character is not unusual, then, but the lightness of touch and glimpses into the unseen history of Lynda and Kenny makes it particularly appealing. We see a young Lynda (who was surely not born but created) and Kenny, who likes to give the impression of being put-upon, but knows full well what he’s doing. Our way into this exploration is a MacGuffin, but it’s a good one.

Lynda is haunted by a memory of a carved wooden ornament, and feels genuine guilt over something – but she can’t remember what. Lynda generally avoids the emotive resonance of guilty feelings – even in the next season’s The Last Word, with its shocking denouement – only really allowing herself to explore the question of blame during the fireside chat of the programme’s finale. Resultantly, it’s an uneasy Lynda who realises that she can’t suppress, or alleviate, this guilt until she find out what is causing it. All that she can remember is that it seems to be linked to Kenny’s birthday a decade earlier, when she escaped from her garden and found herself on nearby Jasper Street.This small, but captivating, mystery is the main focus of the episode. Spike and Colin offer the broad comedy this week with their attempts to move the affections of a girl from the former to the latter. More interestingly, Gabrielle Anwar’s Sam spars with Kenny using dialogue no doubt originally intended for Lucy Benjamin’s Julie, but played entirely differently. When Sam says that she doesn’t understand the words Kenny uses, Anwar plays it with a twinkle in her eye (is ‘I don’t understand’ code for ‘I’m not interested’?, the audience wonders), whereas Benjamin’s Julie would have been genuinely confused. Both actors offered strong performances in the two roles, but they also present very different readings of what could have been an identical part, which is credit to them both.

For a younger audience the mystery surrounding a vague memory of a carved wooden figure maintains the interest, but the reinforcement of the friendship between Kenny and Lynda provides the real delight for older viewers. Knocking on the front door of the Jasper Street house in question, Kenny asks, “Remember we used to do this and run away?”, to which Lynda replies: “I ran away. You stayed and apologised”. In one tiny, neatly remembered memory we not only get a joke but a reinforcement of the characters – Lynda’s headstrong persona versus Kenny’s polite keenness to do the ‘right’ thing.The opening ‘Ten Years Ago’ flashback allows us to see the genesis of a friendship that would mature (a little) over the coming decade. It’s Kenny’s birthday, which a six year old Lynda refuses to acknowledge – even going so far as to hide the present she is supposed to give him. Nevertheless, Kenny covers for her when Lynda’s annoyed mother tries to track her down, setting up the dynamic of their future friendship. Such young actors cannot be expected to offer a great deal of depth in their performances, but the younger Kenny’s constant smile offers a deflection of Lynda’s meanness, while he also acknowledges it by verbally challenging her claims.It’s perhaps surprising that Lynda is particularly obnoxious as a young child, raising the horrifying prospect that the Lynda we know and love from the ‘present day’ has, in fact, mellowed over time. For the teenage Lynda, it’s not that she enjoys being mean, it’s just that she doesn’t get anything out of being nice. By contrast, in the flashback she’s borderline sociopathic, casually lying to her mother for no particular reason in the opening scene. Given that he protects Lynda without a second thought, even as a young child, we can draw one of two conclusions – either Kenny was either a glutton for punishment from a young age, or (preferably) he sees through it as a defence mechanism. In the end, Kenny’s emotional maturity is more than a match for Lynda’s stubbornness.

When, in the flashback, Kenny literally turns up as Lynda’s knight in shining (plastic) armour, he is met with her riposte: “He followed me! He always follows me!” She may be ungrateful on the surface, but when we see the young Lynda and Kenny walking down the path at the episode’s conclusion, we see that she is really rather pleased. A decade later, on the same road, Lynda says “Sometimes I think I’m not a very nice person”. “Well I like you”, Kenny responds, only to be met with Lynda’s dismissive claim that “You like everyone!”. She may give the impression of being as dismissive as ever, but this time, when Lynda realises that Kenny is following her, she can’t hide her smile…