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Clip description
Col’n Carpenter (Kym Gyngell) arrives at a date’s house to pick her up. The door is answered by her father (Mark Mitchell).
Curator’s notes
As a low-budget production, The Comedy Company faced the huge task of generating an hour’s worth of comedy with limited resources. This is apparent in the Col’n Carpenter sketches – Col’n appears in different locations in different episodes but almost all of these locations are depicted using the same set – this blank wall with a slight shadow of venetian blinds. Though Mark Mitchell always appears, he plays different characters.
This simplicity becomes part of the fun, requiring us to understand the environment and situation purely through dialogue. Performance carries these sketches. Kym Gyngell is a terrific character actor and both comic and convincing as vague, vacant, dedicated underachiever Col’n. While Mitchell plays nominally different characters they are all essentially the same – he is the ‘straight man’ or foil, deadpanning normalcy and seriousness as he tries to understand Col’n.
