Play for Today Pilgrimage

Zoë: Kate the Good Neighbour  opens with a series of vignettes of Kate, a tweed-suited elderly woman, as she goes about her neighbourhood, setting various members of her local community to rights. First, a greengrocer who runs a stall in the local market, (this is not yet the world of big supermarkets), is verbally rapped over the knuckles for trying to flog bad tomatoes. Then Kate goes to “help” a recently widowed woman, played by Dandy Nicholls - unforgettable from her earlier role as Else Garnett, aka “the silly old moo”, (especially memorable for me is the episode where, after the Garnetts have the telephone installed, Else sits quietly in the background, steadily reading her way through what look like rather large volumes - which you realise at last, when she exclaims, “Ooh, you’ll never guess who’s in here", are the newly delivered London telephone directories). Kate chivvies Dandy Nichols’ character into crushing her foolish sentimentality, (as Kate sees it), and ridding he