EastEnders<\/a>\u2019 star Anita Dobson plays the frail but fiercely independent Cynthia, who, after collapsing at a funeral, is put into a retirement village by her daughter Amanda (Tracy-Ann Oberman). She hates it, naturally. Shackled within the controlling regime of Nina Wadia\u2019s Heather, the oppressive caricature managing Cedar Wood, Cynthia decides to get kicked out. She looks at the list of rules \u2013 and breaks them one by one. No narcotics? Sure, Cyn will bake some brownies with a secret ingredient. No antisocial behaviour? Pff, Cyn will flash her fellow OAPs in a game of strip bridge. No exotic animals? Of course, Cyn will release a Gaboon viper in the common room. Further complicating things is the presence of Frank (Nigel Havers), a Seventies pop star with whom she had a dalliance half a century ago.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s their dynamic that proves most successful. \u201cIn all the retirement villages in the world, she walks into mine,\u201d Frank tells Cyn, who\u2019s impervious at first to his charms. Later, in a moment of sweet catharsis, their true feelings now apparent, Cyn says Frank has \u201cmore sex appeal in your good arm than any Gen-Z boyband\u201d. On the drawing board, the script no doubt sounded topical, fizzing with hilarity; alas, in execution, it requires the cast to do too much heavy lifting \u2013 even if there is a pleasing melancholy suffusing the production. As Cyn, Dobson is clearly having a ball, threading her performance with skeins of impish humour and mournful sentiment. There\u2019s also an amusing scene in which Frank and his rival for Cyn\u2019s affections slap it out, septuagenarian style, to the strains of Strauss\u2019s \u201cThe Blue Danube\u201d. <\/p>\n
But for a strand that was renowned for tackling thorny societal issues, it\u2019s surprising that it has made its comeback with something this lightweight. If it was hoping to be the new Abigail\u2019s Party, it isn\u2019t. Play for Today has been long-missed and excites considerable nostalgia for a more risk-taking age of single dramas on TV, yet one would imagine that the new series would at all costs aim to avoid appearing dated. It fails. This feels like Play for Yesterday, and that\u2019s a problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":132566,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,411],"class_list":["post-132565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/132566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}