Out Of The Woods But Not Over The Hill (2010) - Plot & Excerpts
Caroline Fields, from the BBC Radio 2 programme, Friday Night is Music Night, delighted her audience with sketches and songs written and once performed by the inimitable Joyce Grenfell. There was the brilliantly written ‘A Terrible Worrier’ and the hilarious ‘Old Girls’ Reunion’, but the show-stopper for me was the unforgettable ‘Nursery School Sketches’, delivered superbly by Caroline. Joyce Grenfell’s perfectly observed nursery school teacher keeps a simmering control over her temper when trying to deal with the recalcitrant infants. As the children’s behaviour deteriorates, the teacher’s tone becomes jollier and falser, or, as Joyce herself writes: ‘the bright, bluffingly calm, cheerful encouraging manner becomes increasingly desperate.’ Those of us who have spent a lifetime in the company of children know only too well how she feels, faced with the little Shirleens and Chardonnays, the Georges and Sidneys of the world. Joyce Grenfell loved what she called ‘young children’s observations, discoveries and individualities’, and was fascinated by the way that ‘young children can invariably surprise, confound and delight’.
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