Sugar sugar archies special edition driver#

The paper became Top Pops/Music Now on 20th September 1969 it re-launched as Music Now on 21st March 1970, the size of sample expanded to between 30 to 40 stores. Bostock-Smith phoned to a dozen branches of Smiths for each list of best selling records. The chart was compiled by its first editor Colin Bostock-Smith from branches of W.H Smith and Son after the paper gave advertising space to the firm. The paper was still a bi-weekly then, but it went to a weekly issue on 22nd June 1968. It only started to run a chart on 25th May 1968. (The title, by the way, does indeed relate to the hit song by the Archies, though what it has to do with the play is anyone’s guess.Top Pops began in May 1967 as a bi-weekly, sometimes every three weeks. In the end, the play is best appreciated for what Bent chooses to tell - Steven’s out-of-left-field confession, for instance, that “I’ve given up beef” - rather than for the dramatic architecture that he cannot provide. Nor is the cloud of mystery under which Dennis rather opaquely exists. Although Joe suggests that he and Dennis have some kind of history, what that is is never made clear. Steven and Shirley both popped up in an earlier Bent play, “Bad Company,” seen at the Bush in 1994, and the new work seems considerably less focused than the same writer’s pleasantly anarchic “Goldhawk Road,” premiered at the Bush in 1996.

Sugar sugar archies special edition driver#

Wanting to make his own peace with Val’s daughter is minicab driver Steven (Nicolas Tennant), whose persistent appeals to Shirley don’t prevent him from joining Joe for a drunken evening in the local gay pub. (America comes in for its fair share of Len’s invective.) His misogynist rant finds an ally in Val’s son Joe (Andrew Lincoln, who is, like Johnston, a star of English TV), a volatile lad still reeling from his ex-wife’s decision to take custody of their little daughter. His arrival in a clearly unfinished home - Jess Curtis’ apt set suggests that the final coat of paint may never be applied - brings various emotions to a boil, not least those of Val’s daughter Shirley (Deborah McAndrew), who has embarked separately on an affair with a married man.Ĭasting a caustic eye on events is Val’s fierce-tongued brother Len (David Daker), who “could fill a supermarket,” we are told, with all the people he wants killed. Having had three children by different men, Val currently has her eye on a new lodger, Dennis (Jonny Phillips), a good-looking drifter and would-be gardener with a scar on his chin that hints at a no-good past. It helps that the figure of the landlady has long been a British theater mainstay, which allows Val (Sue Johnston) to take her place in an honorable spectrum of sex-starved matrons dating back at least as far as Meg in Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” 40 years ago.