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Dola Darcy (Kaarin Fairfax) has offered her mother (Anne Phelan) the money to have her teeth done, as part of a campaign to help her look attractive so she can keep her husband from having affairs with other women. Dola is trying to help Mumma to get ready, but her mother keeps finding strategies to avoid going, such as hiding her hat. Dola finally succeeds in getting her mother to the dentist.
Curator’s notes
Anyone who grew up in the immediate postwar era remembers a trip to the dentist for the primitive experience it was, so Mumma’s terrors, although hilarious, were very real to many of the TV audience.
One of the stigmas of the underclass even today is lack of dental hygiene. With regular dental care still beyond the reach of really poor Australians, there’s no more obvious sign of poverty than a mouthful of bad teeth. Until the 1970s and the advent of fluoridation, it was still common for a poor family to offer their prospective son-in-law the present of a new set of false teeth for his bride. The idea was to save the husband the expense of any future dental work for his wife.
