Bill Grundy was an erudite, surprisingly intellectual news interviewer who regularly took top-flight British politicians apart on television in the 1960s and 70s – a sort of Paxman of his era who took no prisoners.
But on December 1, 1976 all that changed in a 1 minute 53 seconds interview with an unknown punk rock band the Sex Pistols. The interview was a last-minute replacement for one scheduled to be with rock band Queen.
Grundy, a stickler for research, was wrong-footed. He was regularly drunk on air but this time his intoxication was fatal to his career.
Taking an instant dislike to the group, he goaded then into uttering a string of four-letter words and indeed said one himself in the dying seconds of the interview. His instant notoriety and the complete collapse of his career is chronicled by Bill himself in this 60 minute play – which is really worth a 30 minute monologue but here is dreadfully over-written.
Alex Dee does not look or sound like Grundy but he is on top form as the presenter fallen from grace, now reduced to make daytime unwatched programmes about English castles.
Author Tim Connery gives Dee all the best lines and some of them are poetic, and full some, but it feels like it ought to be a one-man show. Ankur Sengupta as a wet-behind-the ears daytime TV director is given very lame dialogue to feed Grundy’s outrageous but funny diatribes against society, dumbing down, consumerism – you name it.
As I say, it feels like Dee would have made a much better job of it on his own.
After Today runs at the PQA venue, Edinburgh throughout August.
Review by Brian Butler
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