Gushoneybungirl Neil Pearson Upline

Up Line : Wednesday Channel 4
A funny thing happened on the way up the pyramid

NEW SERIES
Life is short... Now’s the time... look at us… We’re moving up line... (to the persuasive beat of a catchy tune).

But, to begin with, it’s a rum time in the big city. Anxiety is rife and life is bleak. The clientele of the Brasserie Brassai are a shmoozers (a Yiddish word for people sitting around having a chat). Alex, the black cabbie, is losing The Knowledge. He’s just forgotten the way to Abbey Road, London NW8, and, anyway, all he really wants to do is play jazz. Alex’s wife, Camilla du Bois, is a mere waitress at the bar, with faltering dreams of a singing career. The policeman wants to be Frank Sinatra, the casting director cant get cast herself, the would-be West End star is running a keep-fit class in a most unhealthy basement.

In the midst of all this a comedy trio called Targett and Technology are going Targett is a victim of urban stress, in the spiky shape of a punk attacker. His girlfriend, Patti Technology, is the driving force behind the act, struggling to revive Nik’s flagging spirit. Her brother Victor has a tortoise farm in the front room, and a social worker boyfriend to contend with.

The trio are heading for their last gig: after the show in King’s Cross, their equipment is blown up by Indonesian extortionists. Don’t be caught.. Left behind... Come with us. We’re moving upline (the beat gets catchier).

THE NEW C4 series Up Line, a four-part comedy-drama with songs, starting on Wednesday, is the invention of Howard Schuman, creator of the ITV series Rock Follies and writer of numerous plays with a satirically comic edge.

It is about a gaggle of lost souls, ripe and vulnerable, ready to be drawn in by the glitter and promise of Pathway, a pyramid-selling organisation of dubious repute.

Pathway is fiction, but pyramid-selling is all too real, as Schuman discovered when he made a trip to his native New York, looking forward to the lively company and conversation of a favourite cousin and her boyfriend. ‘I was told not to rush over and see them because they’d be talking a lot about saucepans. They’d got involved in a pyramid-selling scheme. When we
met, they talked obsessively and without humour, for seven hours about selling and money. They said it worked on lines. You were recruited by people who were up-line of you, and when you recruited people they were on your down-line. This couple had changed completely, and I got very nervous, because this sounded cultish, like the Moonies.

‘But the writer part of me couldn’t get away from the term up-line.’ Schuman returned to England thinking he’d left pyramid-selling behind — just another American folly. Back home in London, he immediately who’d been hooked by a similar organisation. ‘I decided then to write the story. It seemed ideal material for a comedy with the American influence on this
country. All the talk in the Eighties of money and success is very un-British.’

As Targett and Technology, and the rest of the shmoozers become Pathway devotees, the mysteries of up-line gradually revealed. Up-line lies ever greater wealth and a blind faith in happiness, and a strong hint of some unsavoury activity.

Pathway deals in seductively packaged life-extension products. Pills and creams for a better and longer tomorrow.

As it sells the products, Pathway sells itself to new recruits with all the brash razzmatazz of a bad TV commercial.

Up Line is directed by Bob Spiers, who has worked on The Goodies Fawlty Towers and The Comic Strip Presents... It fell to Spiers to capture the gaudy style of Pathway’s exploits.

The trick, he says, was to make ‘sheer, disgusting propaganda’.

As he knows from research with Howard Schuman, ‘in real life, the pyramid-selling people are very slick and seductive, and you can fully understand people falling for it.

Nik Targett, the central figure, is played by 27-year-old Neil Pearson, who was Andy Sykes in Drummonds, and a skinhead in Trevor Griffiths’s Oi for England.

Patti and Victor, the Technologists, are played by Caroline Quentin and Paul Bown.

Alex and Camilla are played by Clarke Peters and Angela Bruce.

The most familiar face belongs to Alexei Sayle, as Melvin, a simple lad heading... UP LINE.

David James Smith

The following was taken from the excellent TV Cream Website which is well worth a visit, especially for those of us with a good sense of humor who still like to harp back to all those brilliant TV progs we watched when we were nippers! Check it out by clicking here.

"NEIL PEARSON stars as a hard-done-by down-on-his-luck recently-made-doleite guy musician guy stuck for something to do but with long-suffering girl by his side. Until, that is, he finds salvation in a pyramid selling scheme dishing out cleaning-products and morale-boosting druggy foodstuffs. Instantly becomes a yuppie success, with girlfriend losing faith in "not the guy I fell in love with anymore" sort of a way. Culminates in weird multi-coloured tub climbing frame malarkeys with Pearson and HUGH LAURIE outwitting each other in a warehouse who-can-get-to-the-top-of-the-pile battle with Pearson winning the day, but ultimately doing a "Prisoner" and deciding that he'd rather be a nobody than king of an arseheap "upline". Smashing organ drudge theme tune, backing animated credits of cartoon people (cf PIGEON STREET) going up an escalator and then falling off the top."