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Clip description
A strict art teacher (Julia Blake) patrols her nude-drawing class offering peremptory advice until she reaches Charles (Norman Kaye). When she admonishes him rudely for including flowers in his composition, Charles fires back at her.
Curator’s notes
One of the pleasures of this comic scene lies in the way that Charles’s presence is introduced so late and so casually (initially at the edge of the frame, as the teacher wanders around the room). Another pleasure lies in the way Charles bites back at the teacher (Cox regular Julia Blake) after she has insulted him. He may be a ‘man of flowers’ but he’s nobody’s fool and he’ll stand up for himself when provoked.
Like several of the film’s minor characters, the art teacher behaves in a way that make Charles’s eccentricities (such as writing letters to his dead mother) appear relatively normal in comparison. He may be slightly strange but we see that the world in which he lives is odder still. Other colourful characters in the film include Charles’s postman (Barry Dickins), his psychoanalyst (co-screenwriter Bob Ellis), and Lisa’s self-absorbed artist boyfriend (Chris Haywood).
