Connie

[Toby]

This show has been discussed on the DYNASTY board, but really it deserves a thread all of its own. An 80's "avarice" drama, CONNIE starred Stephanie Beacham in the title role and her performance led to her getting the part of Sable in THE COLBYS.

Plot synopsis is as follows:

"Connie used to own a chain of fashion shops but was cheated out of them. After spending eight years of exile in Greece, she bounces back to the UK determined to pay off some old scores. She's totally broke but looking good, as gutsy as ever, and out to make it into the big time again in the cut-throat world of fashion."

Stephanie B. herself retrospectively defined the show's premise as "Can a single woman make it in Thatcher's England without either old money or corruption?" and said it was pure "80's greed".

A terrific series, with some great dialogue:

Connie, speaking in metaphorical terms, about her typically 80's aspirations to get to the top: "My spoon is going into the gravy. My snout is going into the trough,"

Connie, plotting: "If there are sharks in the water, then they'd better watch out because I am going to be in there with stainless steel teeth! And no one in trousers - or out of them - is going to get in my way again!"

Some poor underling feeling the bite of Connie's sharp tongue: "But I have to face my head of department first thing tomorrow morning!"
Connie: "Tough!"

Connie, offering sartorial tips: "Never wear stripes or checks, unless you're looking for a job in the circus."

Connie, in introspective mode shortly after arriving back in the UK: "I've got fifteen drachmas and a bad hand. Can I make it?"

The message "Connie's back," is passed on to the other characters by phone until the news reaches the evil Nesta, played by Pam Ferris:

Nesta: "What do you mean, she's back? She should be on a beach in Greece being shafted by the wop."


http://www.simplystephaniebeacham.com/Covers/Connie2.jpg

[James from London]

If there's one show that isn't KNOTS LANDING that I'd love to see released on DVD, it's this one. I came across an episode on cable about ten years ago, and visually it looked incredibly drab - it might almost have been filmed in black and white (after all, it was a show about sewing machines set in the depressed Midlands!) - but that didn't matter: CONNIE had fascinatingly stylised dialogue (written by Ron Hutchinson, I think) - sort of Shakepeare-meets-early CORONATION STREET, and Stephanie Beacham brought a wonderfully washed out, faded-tan glamour to her role. (Thinking about it, that's one of the reasons I cherished CONNIE and avoided HOWARDS WAY - both had a limited budget and were filmed in grey, rainy England, yet HOWARDS WAY aspired to the glamorous world of DYNASTY, whereas in CONNIE, it was the characters who aspired to glamour - even in the lyrics of the achingly poignant feem toon written by Willy Russell "I'm dressed in lace, and it's twelve below zero/ I'm blue in the face, but I'm out with my hero/ So I'm putting on The Show.")

Stephanie Beacham cropped up on a Channel 5 clip show, "100 BEST BITCHES", recently and said that when she read the original script of CONNIE, she realised this was a role she could really breathe life into. I think that's possibly Beacham's great skill: like Sable Colby, Connie could easily have been played as simply a fun, larger than life bitch, (much the way Collins or O'Mara might have done) but Beacham was able to pour so much emotion, guts and determination into Connie that she - and it - became incredibly compellling.

[Sabella Scott]

:sosad: bouhouhououuuuuuuuuuu

I didn't had the chance to see it in belgium and I don't think I would!!!!!!!!!!!! :sosad:

I want to see Connie, I want to see Stephanie Beacham in a role she thinks of like one of the best she had. (Is that phrase correct???)

I have to see it, pleaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase, help meeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!! :hello:

[Toby]

If there's one show that isn't KNOTS LANDING that I'd love to see released on DVD, it's this one. I came across an episode on cable about ten years ago, and visually it looked incredibly drab - it might almost have been filmed in black and white (after all, it was a show about sewing machines set in the depressed Midlands!) - but that didn't matter: CONNIE had fascinatingly stylised dialogue (written by Ron Hutchinson, I think) - sort of Shakepeare-meets-early CORONATION STREET, and Stephanie Beacham brought a wonderfully washed out, faded-tan glamour to her role. (Thinking about it, that's one of the reasons I cherished CONNIE and avoided HOWARDS WAY - both had a limited budget and were filmed in grey, rainy England, yet HOWARDS WAY aspired to the glamorous world of DYNASTY, whereas in CONNIE, it was the characters who aspired to glamour - even in the lyrics of the achingly poignant feem toon written by Willy Russell "I'm dressed in lace, and it's twelve below zero/ I'm blue in the face, but I'm out with my hero/ So I'm putting on The Show.")

Ron Hutchinson also wrote the very popular and memorable 80's computer thriller BIRD OF PREY, which brilliantly melded the humdrum world of the civil service with the dramatic potential of high-tech hacking.

CONNIE was featured on the "Top Ten TV Bitches" on Channel 4 a few years ago. Hutchinson was interviewed, claiming that he wrote CONNIE as an allegory of Margaret Thatcher's rise to power in the archaic political sphere, likening both Connie and Thatcher to two strong characters who come into a world and shake it all up. Ron then winked and said: "But don't tell Stephanie that's what she was playing."


Stephanie Beacham cropped up on a Channel 5 clip show, "100 BEST BITCHES", recently and said that when she read the original script of CONNIE, she realised this was a role she could really breathe life into. I think that's possibly Beacham's great skill: like Sable Colby, Connie could easily have been played as simply a fun, larger than life bitch, (much the way Collins or O'Mara might have done) but Beacham was able to pour so much emotion, guts and determination into Connie that she - and it - became incredibly compellling.

Agreed. Beacham is arguably a better actress than either O'Mara or Collins, able to imbue her characters with humour, pathos and psychological complexity. Whether it's the grasping Connie, Californian corporate wife Sable in DYNASTY/THE COLBYS, spoilt socialite Rose from TENKO or conniving con artist Phyl in BAD GIRLS, she is able to project a haughty, defiant facade which conceals a whole range of contradictory emotions barely held in check.

I can see why she is sometimes criticised for being a sell-out, when her performances do suggest that had she gone down the "serious acting" route (RSC, National Theatre etc.) she could've potentially been one of our great British actresses with the right parts. Stephanie did a play a few years ago where she played Queen Elizabeth I and she received excellent reviews, most saying that it was the best thing she had ever done and why she didn't concentrate on theatre.

This to me is specious reasoning. Stephanie ultimately decided to go down a more populist path and grab the cash - and good on her. Besides, all our soap bitches have their roots in such "high culture" artefacts as Greek tragedy and Shakespeare. Alexis, Sable, Abby, Sue Ellen, Caress and co. are arguably new incarnations of Medea, Lady Macbeth etc.

What's also refreshing about Stephanie B. is that she doesn't really come across as the self-important diva she often played. I recently listened to the audio commentary on the DVD of And Now The Screaming Starts, one of the 70's horror films she did, and she is genuinely enthusiastic, reminiscing with great fondness about the genre, and her fellow cast and crew. I previously mentioned on a thread in the DYNASTY forum where an acquaintance met her at the stage door after seeing her in a play, and she was happy to briefly talk about TENKO with him.

This is in stark contrast to Joan Collins, who is rather dismissive of a lot of her past film work. There's an anecdote on the DVD commentary for the Hammer film Joan was in, Fear In The Night, where the director says that Joan acted like a diva on the set and "tried to make out that she was doing us a great favour by appearing in the film, when in fact, we were doing her the favour by giving her a job." He, Jimmy Sangster, goes on to say that the film was a happy experience overall, but "the set was not so happy while Joan was around!"

Whereas JC has always been at pains to suggest that she was some sort of pioneer on TV playing a "feminist icon" like Alexis - Kate O'Mara has also discussed her role in the 70's soap THE BROTHERS in terms of being "in my corner, fighting for women's rights," - Stephanie has never, to my knowledge, explicitly identified herself with any kind of "agenda", referring to THE COLBYS as "The Old Cobblers - lovely escapist nonsense."

Hopefully CONNIE will indeed receive the DVD treatment at some stage and I'm sure we will be getting at least an interview with Stephanie.

[Toby]

If there's one show that isn't KNOTS LANDING that I'd love to see released on DVD, it's this one. I came across an episode on cable about ten years ago, and visually it looked incredibly drab - it might almost have been filmed in black and white (after all, it was a show about sewing machines set in the depressed Midlands!) - but that didn't matter: CONNIE had fascinatingly stylised dialogue (written by Ron Hutchinson, I think) - sort of Shakepeare-meets-early CORONATION STREET, and Stephanie Beacham brought a wonderfully washed out, faded-tan glamour to her role. (Thinking about it, that's one of the reasons I cherished CONNIE and avoided HOWARDS WAY - both had a limited budget and were filmed in grey, rainy England, yet HOWARDS WAY aspired to the glamorous world of DYNASTY, whereas in CONNIE, it was the characters who aspired to glamour - even in the lyrics of the achingly poignant feem toon written by Willy Russell "I'm dressed in lace, and it's twelve below zero/ I'm blue in the face, but I'm out with my hero/ So I'm putting on The Show.")

Interesting analysis of both CONNIE and HOWARDS’ WAY, James. What I do think differentiates them from the likes of DALLAS and DYNASTY was that whereas the American soaps dealt with the rich and glamorous from the outset, their British counterparts actually showed its characters as genuinely aspirational and depicted the way in which they worked to slowly rise to the top, whether it be Connie clawing back control of her fashion house to Tom Howard succeeding in the boat building business. Although HOWARDS’ WAY and CONNIE score in character development, they lose out to DYNASTY, DALLAS and FALCON CREST in terms of showcasing the alluring glamour that the characters went to such lengths to pursue. Generally speaking, us Brits aren’t so good at the kind of flamboyant, high-octane drama that American TV has sent our way over the years, possibly because the realities of British life lack the same exoticism as American culture.

The 1970’s and the 1980’s were a time when British TV schedules were filled with American imports. KOJAK, STARSKY AND HUTCH, THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN, THE DUKES OF HAZZARD, DALLAS and then DYNASTY, BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY, THE A TEAM, HART TO HART, FAME, MIAMI VICE. All hugely popular shows here in the UK, at once familiar and yet seductively suggesting a lifestyle that was just out of reach. It was almost like the G.I.s of WW2 had arrived back in the UK winning over us dull, austere Brits with their flashy, exciting, glamorous haircuts, clothes and cigarettes. The effects of globalisation had really started to bite at British culture, as the American Dream proved as potent with the upwardly mobile London “yuppies” (although it would be a few years before that term was coined) as it did with the workers of Wall Street. The aggressive right-wing rhetoric of Reagan against the Soviet Union’s “evil empire” had found a soulmate in the hawkish post-Falklands policies of Thatcher, and America and Britain embarked on a “special relationship” that was a seamless synergy of ideology and iconography.

It was not surprising then that our own indigenous TV product began to attempt to mirror the American way. Suffice to say the results were very mixed. THE PROFESSIONALS was an action series utilising a “buddy” relationship between its two male leads in much the same way as STARSKY AND HUTCH did, but was unmistakeably fused with a British sensibility. And the cockarnee community spirit of ONLY FOOLS AND HORSES also embraced the new materialist impulses that had crossed the Atlantic, with the acquisitive poseur DelBoy forever telling his plonker of a brother, Rodney, that “you’ll see, this time next year, we’ll be rich.” In referencing the political and cultural sea change that had swept across all walks of life, ONLY FOOLS was particularly engaging thanks to the pathos evoked with DelBoy’s attempts to join the rat race, where the viewer knew that his schemes were inevitably doomed to failure. The mix of comedy and tragedy that underpinned the Trotters’ escapades in ONLY FOOLS prove to be, in retrospect, a remarkably far-sighted critique of 1980’s aspiration and materialism in Thatcher’s Britain, showing that for many, the American Dream of rewards for the hungry and hard-working was a hopeless, unattainable ideal.

Other programmes were not nearly as successful in their negotiation of a contemporary cultural landscape that was becoming an increasingly bizarre amalgam of American and British sensibilities. The soap TRIANGLE, set aboard a ferry, promised myriad maritime high drama, as a kind of British version of THE LOVE BOAT. But THE LOVE BOAT was pure escapism, with glamorous guests and beautiful locations as it cruised around exotic locales such as the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. TRIANGLE (referring to the ferry’s route encompassing Folkestone, Gothenburg and Amsterdam) was firmly set on the North Sea, one of the darkest, dankest, utterly miserable places in the entire world. The first episode, where a visibly shivering Kate O’Mara pretended to sunbathe topless – with her back to the camera naturally – under grey skies, set the tone. The attempt to appropriate American gloss had somewhere along the way become mired with the British reluctance to stray too far away from reliable realism. Whereas THE LOVE BOAT delivered on its promises of romance and adventure, TRIANGLE offered merely tedious storylines involving bickering staff and complaining passengers. When one episode featured a passenger throwing herself overboard, one rather understood how she felt.

Further evidence of the British inability to replicate the American sense of glamour and flamboyance can be found when one compares CHARLIE’S ANGELS with its British reinterpretation CATS EYES. Whereas the Angels had assignments around sunny California and in several episodes, in Hawaii, the plucky heroines of CATS EYES fought crime in such enticing places as Rochester and Maidstone. And whilst THE WEST WING is an utterly compelling portrait of the “corridors of power” in the White House, one can instantly surmise that a British drama revelling in the intrigues of Whitehall and Downing Street simply wouldn’t have the same appeal. Probably because it would inevitably cast David Jason as the PM, Sarah Lancashire as his wife, with Robson Green, Ross Kemp, Michelle Collins and Tamzin Outhwaite somewhere down the cast list. It would bomb, and rightly so.

While one could argue that Ron Hutchinson intended CONNIE to be a sly, contemporaneous critique of Thatcherite values, other shows are not so fortunate. TRIANGLE, in particular, remains one of the most risible and mockable programmes ever screened on British television. A common factor in the British attempts to replicate the glamour of American imports is the desire to move away from mundanity but not quite managing to pull it off. The desire to depict affluent lifestyles and the aspirational spirit of the 1980’s merely becomes an extension of British insularity and reticence. At least BROOKSIDE and EASTENDERS sensibly capitalised on their own strengths, thoroughly integrating their own socio-political commentary into the characterisation and plotting (during their early years of transmission anyway), demonstrating that British TV drama also had its own unique merits, which indeed the likes of DALLAS and DYNASTY could only idly aspire to.

[Mark68]

Wow, this is a blast from the past. I remember watching Connie as it was on before PCBH back when ITV showed PCBH on a Thursday evening.

I'd buy this in a minute were it to be released on DVD.

[Toby]

I think that Network (http://www.networkdvd.co.uk/) would be the DVD company most likely to release CONNIE.

P.S. Welcome to the forum, Mark! :welcome:

[Toby]

I've just been able to listen to the theme from CONNIE. It's fantastic!

Does anyone know the name of the singer?

[James from London]

Rebecca Storm. I have it on a 12" single!

[Mark68]

P.S. Welcome to the forum, Mark! :welcome:

Thank you Toby. :hello:

[Toby]

As I've previously posted, I believe that Network (http://www.networkdvd.co.uk/) is the company most likely to release CONNIE on DVD. They've recently established a deal whereby they have the rights to most of ITV's archive.

A forum will shortly be opening on the site, where people can make enquiries and requests for future releases.

I say that we should do our best to persuade Network to release CONNIE!

[Toby]

The CONNIE theme tune is available for download here. (http://www.tvthemetunes.net/) You have to register, but it's well worth it just for this one theme!

[Toby]

http://www.simplystephaniebeacham.com/Connie/Images/Connie21.jpg

Sultry Stephanie Beacham and slimline Pam Ferris battle it out in CONNIE.

I seem to recall Nesta being a fantastic villainess, and Brenda Bruce was equally good as the formidable Bea.

[Toby]

Re. British "aspirational" drama (of which CONNIE was easily the best), I often wondered why there was never a British series about the aristocracy - the titled toffs swanning around mansions and playing polo etc. It seems after all the perfect British idiom for a glamorous drama. DYNASTY, for instance, was all about American "royalty" but also appropriated more Eurocentric ideas about "class" - and even UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS was balanced by stories told from the perspective of the servants.

I can only think of two shows:

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/B0001M1K92.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

RIDERS was a mini-series based on Jilly Cooper's novel, set in the world of horse racing. This saddles and sex saga starred Michael Praed and Stephanie Beacham.

http://www.mediagems.de/01filmtv/images/gents1.jpg

GENTLEMEN AND PLAYERS was shown in 1988 and dealt with two friends competing in business, using every trick in the "old school tie" book to win out over the other. One character was a self-made rich man, the other had been born into money.

Maybe it's because unlike the Americans, us Brits secretly take a dim view of the wealthy and privileged, with a class structure that is thoroughly embedded into our culture. Yuppies were sneered at and reviled because they were greedy opportunists, with no birthright to the trappings of wealth. And yet we are fascinated by the Royal Family, as the ongoing Windsor family saga - Princess Diana as a breakout icon and Charles and Camilla finally getting hitched - becomes a real life soap opera, a glimpse into a hitherto hermetically sealed world showcasing a secret, unattainable lifestyle.

Both CONNIE and HOWARDS' WAY pitched its lead characters in terms of Everyman and Everywoman. Whilst in reality, Thatcherite aspirational values just saw the rich getting richer, neither Connie or the Howard family were part of an established class set, but were determined, enterprising individuals wanting to succeed. We could happily sit and laugh at "those crazy Americans" in DALLAS and DYNASTY as a bit of escapist nonsense, but there was little likelihood of a similar British series going for full throttle flamboyance and having its characters come across as figures for easy audience identification.

DYNASTY and DALLAS were slickly seductive capitalist fairy-tale fantasies and audiences accepted them - and their American exoticism - on that basis. With CONNIE and HOWARDS' WAY, it was less easy to buy into the success imperative of aspirational culture that these shows were putting forward. Perhaps because a capitalist system set up to produce winners will inevitably produce losers too. Back in the 1980's, so many of the British TV audience knew that to their cost.

[Sybaris]

Network DVD are releasing the series on DVD as a 4-disc set on 31 March 2011.

[janeprice]

:sosad: bouhouhououuuuuuuuuuu

I didn't had the chance to see it in belgium and I don't think I would!!!!!!!!!!!! :sosad:

I want to see Connie, I want to see Stephanie Beacham in a role she thinks of like one of the best she had. (Is that phrase correct???)

I have to see it, pleaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase, help meeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!! :hello:

who sang the theme song to connie

[janeprice]

can anyone tell be who sang the theme song to connie - I'm putting on the show

[James from London]

Rebecca Storm

[john2kin]

hmm yes Rebecca Storm she is amazing .. i am her big fan :)