I have not seen this show in a very long time, fifteen years probably, but I still remember it very well. I'm too young to remember "The Nation Theatre of Brent"'s TV appearances in the mid-80s (their hey-day) but after seeing "Revolution", I listened to Patrick Barlow's 1990 radio series "From Lemur to Cosmonaut" (Desmond "Olivier" Dingle with his faithful sidekick "Wallace", played by Jim Broadbent) and - ten years later - their Channel 4 millennial series (without Jim). The idea of a TV historian is probably even more topical now than it was in the 1980s (when Barlow's bad-suited Dingle seemed to be a hazy impersonation of Sir Alan Clarke circa 1969) and it's a shame we can't see Desmond amongst the Simon Schamas of the modern day. "Revolution!" lives long in the memory, straight from the beginning when the intrepid duo set sail to France on the Newhaven ferry to visit the land of Robespierre and The Terror. Always in a grey suit, but with an occasional powdered wig or dagger, Barlow reenacts scenes from the French Revolution as if they're bad am-dram educational plays for schools, with the long-suffering Wallace sometimes cajoled into being a humiliating second fiddle. The scene with Dingle in the bath, as Jean Paul Marat, still in his suit but with a bandaged head, trying to get Wallace to kill him by shouting "now!" is still stuck in my brain. Then there's the street scene with the two of them pathetically trying to reenact huge crowds without anyone else around, but with some dramatic camera angles and much shouting. And at the end there's even pathos, as Wallace rebels against Dingle by over-acting as the judge who executed Danton, and Dingle ends the show with a street-sweeping Napoleon, waiting patients to clean up the mess of La Revolution ...
Review of Revolution!!
