Play for Today (TV Series)

Sunset Across the Bay (1975)

Harry Markham: Dad

Quotes 

• [Mam and Dad are on a coach] 

  Mam : It's one of them buses with a lavatory. Are you going to go?

  Dad : I don't want to go.

  Mam : I do.

  Dad : Well go then.

  Mam : I don't want *everybody* to know I'm going.

  Dad : [looking across at another passenger]  She's been in twice already. She were in there before we got to Stanningley. Anyway, what's does it matter what folk think? We're retired now.

  Mam : All right. Hold me bag.

  [Mam walks to the back of the bus, goes into the cubicle and comes back a few minutes later] 

  Mam : I went. It's very ingenious. They've got it in above where they generally put the luggage. You want to go.

  Dad : I don't want to go.

  Mam : That's your trouble - no spirit of adventure.

  [pause] 

  Mam : I wonder where it goes.

  Dad : What?

  Mam : You know... I expect it's scattered on the central reservation.

  [Man and Dad chuckle] 

• [having been woken in the middle of their first night by a barking dog, Mam and Dad have a cup of tea] 

  Mam : Tea has a right funny taste here.

  Dad : It's the water, so you'd better get used to it.

  [pause] 

  Mam : Have we done right, d'you think? It's like being able to have a choice that makes it so difficult. We've never had a proper choice before. It's always been Leeds. There wasn't anywhere else we could have gone, was there? We couldn't have stopped *there*.

  Dad : Where?

  Mam : Leeds. Well, we *couldn't*, could we? I wouldn't go in one of them tall blocks. Moortown, Seacroft: I don't want to be dumped on the outskirts. New estates - they're all hooligans. You find all sorts in them lifts. If we'd had a lass it'd have been different - lasses are always popping in.

  Dad : [chuckling]  Well it's too late to start now.

  Mam : [talking about their landlady]  Shhh. She'll wonder what's happening.

• Dad : [to Bertam]  We once went Windermere on a Wallace Arnold when you were right little. There were this woman with a little lad. A right bad little beggar he was, and he did nowt but eat, eat, eat, all the way from Leeds. In t'finish, we was wanting to be sick. But the driver wouldn't stop. So they opened the door and his mother held him while he was sick. Only just as he was doing it, the coach overtook this cycling club. They never knew what hit them. Three of them fell off.