If you want to see the area around Waterloo and Lambeth as it appeared forty years ago, then watch this, but be aware it is a little bit politically incorrect in places.

It's worth it though for the wonderful Queenie Watts, in the last year of her life, who is marvellous as Grace, the old woman who finally decides to break the shackles of her old folks home to go back to the streets of her birthplace.

Now a largely West Indian neighbourhood, Lambeth is alien to Grace but better than vegetating and watching the telly, waiting to die. She smokes pot with a chap she meets after he's been attacked in the subway, and bandies words about her late…

Watts was a good actress/singer and sorely under-utilised. There was a whole generation of ‘comedy’ actresses (actors too to a lesser extent) who were generally stuck in that rut but could just as well do serious work given the chance. 

I would love to have seen women like Hattie Jacques, Joan Sims or Watts in straight roles - they’d have understood and interpreted Shakespeare, Trollope or Dickens with ease. Beryl Reid and Hylda Baker convincingly broke through but that was about all from that time. That’s not to say comedy is inferior - far from it and I’d like to have seen Peggy Ashcroft cope with a randy vicar - but the outlets for these performers were so much more…

Watts was a good actress/singer and sorely under-utilised. There was a whole generation of ‘comedy’ actresses (actors too to a lesser extent) who were generally stuck in that rut but could just as well do serious work given the chance. 

I would love to have seen women like Hattie Jacques, Joan Sims or Watts in straight roles - they’d have understood and interpreted Shakespeare, Trollope or Dickens with ease. Beryl Reid and Hylda Baker convincingly broke through but that was about all from that time. That’s not to say comedy is inferior - far from it and I’d like to have seen Peggy Ashcroft cope with a randy vicar - but the outlets for these performers were so much more…

If you want to see the area around Waterloo and Lambeth as it appeared forty years ago, then watch this, but be aware it is a little bit politically incorrect in places.

It's worth it though for the wonderful Queenie Watts, in the last year of her life, who is marvellous as Grace, the old woman who finally decides to break the shackles of her old folks home to go back to the streets of her birthplace.

Now a largely West Indian neighbourhood, Lambeth is alien to Grace but better than vegetating and watching the telly, waiting to die. She smokes pot with a chap she meets after he's been attacked in the subway, and bandies words about her late…