Review of Running Late: Steve Grant, Time Out, October 7th 1992

In 1975 Simon Gray wrote a wonderfully acerbic stage comedy called Otherwise Engaged about an egocentric publisher whose attempts to commune with stereophonic Wagner are continually interrupted by intrusions from the outside world, in the shape of various loved and not so loved one who are invading his ‘space’.

In an oblique was, Gray has returned to the same themes in Screen One: Running Late, his latest TV film, produced by Verity Lambert’s modestly titled Cinema Verity company, and starring Peter Bowles in what may well be his finest ever performance. For those of you who don’t read to the end of this article, I must quickly and highly recommend this drama. I can’t think of many better ways to spend an autumn Sunday evening—and all of them involve Michelle Pfeiffer.

Bowles plays one George Grant, a high-powered egocentric media mega-prick whose idea of a crisis is having to ask his secretary to cancel his credit cards or trying to find a cab ten minutes before a five-star lunch. He’s a familiar figure on the London scene, a tough TV interviewer with too much power and too little time, a man who cheats on his wife and exploits and bullies his colleagues. A monster, but, in Bowles’s hands, never a caricature. Then he receives a message that said wife wishes to see him urgently. It’s a matter of life and death. And how.

There is a twist in the tail of this excellent film, directed by Udayan Prasad, which it would be politic not to reveal (having watched it twice I can say that there are cunning little plotted clues throughout). What’s more important is the increasingly bizarre odyssey that Grant takes through the streets of London, by methods of transport that range from taxi to bus to bicycle to a police speedboat powered by two hooligan rozzers chanting ‘Here we go, here we go.’

It’s a piece that’s both light-fingered and multi-referenced, dark and hysterically funny, with hints of everything from Kafka and Homer to Don’t Look Now and John Cleese’s Clockwise. And Gray, always a master of the comedic, presents us with a splendid array of grotesqueries and signposts: Renee Asherson as a deceptively kindly old lady prone to singing folk songs in the back of cabs; a Jehovah’s Witness motorcyle-messenger boy who thumps Grant as a protest against ‘violent language’; a Jewish pair from Golder’s Green outraged at the way Grant’s teenage, house-sitting daughter has trashed their home; and finally, a remarkable bank manager in the shape of Roshan Seth’s Mr Humphry, a veritable Admirable Crichton of the financial world who wears a yellow rose in his buttonhole and proffers champagne and calming advice on the philosophical and spiritual before reverting suddenly to type.

Critics may say that Gray’s bitten off more than he needs to chew by the end. Defenders would say that this is a wonderfully heady and entertaining way to look at the problems of the successful menopausal male. Very London-media as well—but then, who does it better than Simon Gray?