Choices (KNOTS, 29 Jan 81) v The Christening (KNOTS, 17 Oct 85)
Following on from
China Dolls,
Choices is another Gary Behaving Badly episode. But instead of a wildly exciting affair with sexy Abby Cunningham, he is caught in an joyless, angst-ridden entanglement with clingy Judy Trent. In
China Dolls, it was apparent to everyone at KLM that Gary and Abby couldn’t keep their hands off each other and in
Choices, KLM is once again a showroom for infidelities as well as cars. Rather than Joe Cooper making veiled remarks to Gary about Abby, here it’s Abby herself making them to Gary about Judy (“Too bad she doesn’t smile more”). Abby’s own married man of the hour, Richard Avery, also shows up, acting just as needy as Judy. Even Sid gets in on the act, albeit unwittingly, when perky mechanic Linda propositions him and he accepts, without really knowing what it is he’s agreeing to. “Half the time I forget she’s a girl,” he tells Karen. In
The Christening, Mr Karen is now Mack and the woman in a man’s world he is quasi-involved with is governor’s assistant Jill Bennett. Unlike Sid, Mack does not forget Jill’s a girl and flirts outrageously with her. She calls his bluff by kissing him full on the mouth. (Well, that’s one way of dealing with sexual harassment in the workplace.)
Just as Gary did in
China Dolls, Richard broods at home in
Choices, ignoring his wife and listening for the sound of Abby’s car. Laura then watches from the window as he walks over to her house, just like Val did Gary. When Laura suggests they see a therapist, Richard says he’s already got one who lives next door and she doesn't charge (nor does she have a collection of china cats). Laura gets treated no better by men in
The Christening — Greg yanks her out of a car and accuses her of seeing other men and Joshua pointedly closes the door in her face when she arrives for a party at Val's.
“I can’t imagine my life without you,” a cheating Gary tells Val in
China Dolls. “Val, there’s no me without you,” a cheating Gary tells her in
Choices after Abby has arranged for her to see him having dinner with Judy.
Whereas Val had to march over to Abby’s house in
China Dolls to ask if she was having an affair with her husband, Judy helpfully comes to her door in
Choices and tells her straight out: “We’re lovers.” This is followed by a wonderfully excruciating dinner party at the Fairgates where, still reeling from Judy’s bombshell, Val fails dismally at polite conversation and ends up fleeing in tears. It’s the kind of scene that’s hard to imagine later on in the series when the characters know each other too well to worry about politeness. Indeed, by
The Christening, Val and Karen have grown so close that the Mackenzies become the twins’ godparents. Mack attends the ceremony in a pair of tartan trousers (a nod to his father’s belief in the importance of the family kilt, perhaps?). The sight of Kevin Dobson clowning around and having fun at the post-christening party — at one point, he’s holding Bobby and improvises a line about him needing a nappy change that makes Ted Shackelford burst out laughing — suddenly feels quite poignant.
After Val runs out of the Fairgates’ dinner party, Gary knows intuitively that he’ll find her on the beach. The scene between them that follows, in which she recounts their history, slaps him across the face and then forgives him, all underscored by the sound of the ocean, is G&V at their most primal.
“The way she sees me is the way I measure myself,” says Gary of Val as he's breaking up with Judy at the end of
Choices . “I see him the same way I’ve seen him since I was fifteen years old,” Val tells Abby in
China Dolls. In both episodes, Abby claims to see Gary for what he is and for what he could be. “Gary is growing by leaps and bounds … He just outgrows his little country girl more every day,” she tells Judy in
Choices.
Five years later in
The Christening, Val is still living in the same house, but otherwise her domestic situation has changed beyond recognition. She no longer has a husband, but has instead acquired a sad-eyed lover, an eccentric mother, a megalomaniacal brother, an unhappy sister-in-law and two twin babies. Instead of Judy Trent standing on her doorstep and trying to take her man, Harry Fisher is standing there instead. He explains that he and his wife Sheila don’t want anything from Val, just to say goodbye to the babies they raised. And so they do, in an unfathomably sad and awkwardly staged scene which could only ever be sad and awkward.
And the winner is ...
Choices
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