Clerical Error

Very British plot, delicious to watch and appreciate. I hope you will the same way I did. From the very beginning, you are stuck, glued to this story, and you strongly try to guess how the twist ending will look like for those two swindlers. Several possibilities exist, and if only a few - if not none at all - were available, the same suspense would have been here, present, waiting to fulfill your expectations. Those two crooks, blackmailers are so nasty, especially because of their presence, looking, faces, you have the strong desire to see them being punished...I won't reveal the end, don't worry. Just find out by yourself. We can suppose those two characters are gays.

I watched "Clerical Error" only because David Webb appeared in it, and after his death I set up a website based on the theatrical and related memorabilia he had collected during his lifetime; this site having now expanded somewhat to become in part a fan site, I have decided shortly to add a few film clips to it.

David Webb made over seven hundred television appearances, many of them cameo or very minor roles, but in this one he is given top billing along with Richard Pearson and Hugh Fraser; indeed there are only four characters in it, the last being Evelyn Laye, whose role is minor but not that minor, if you get my drift. Likewise this was a tale of the unexpected that has a not very unexpected ending.

Two brothers, middle aged or so, run a bookshop, they are also con-men, scouring the obituaries columns for reports on the deaths of wealthy men whom they then invoice for expensive works of obscene literature, the idea being that the widow will pay up to avoid embarrassment. This is actually a well-known con; in 2009, self- styled fun-loving criminal Dennis Stafford boasted of carrying out a variation of it in the 1950s.

In this case there is not only a widow, but a son, and the con-men get their comeuppance. If the minutiae are not predictable, the viewer is surely expecting something similar.