Plot
After the lack of success of the sitcom Selwyn (sequel to Oh No, It's Selwyn Froggitt!), Maynard's next character could not have been more different from the bumbling Selwyn Froggitt. Fred Moffatt is a survivor - just. Bearded, wearing a battered hat and a crumpled suit, his car a rusting wreck, he runs a struggling engineering firm and is constantly trying to avoid his creditors, the tax man, the bank manager, and indeed anyone who might want him to pay for something. The series' background accurately reflected the precarious condition of many small businesses of the era and added a dark undercurrent to the comedy. Unlike the physical comedy of Froggitt, the scripts for The Gaffer were wordy and sardonic and the plots relatively complex, with Moffatt usually managing to outwit at least some of the people who were chasing him for money.
The cast included (the late) Russell Hunter as the radical union shop steward whose interest was in parting Moffatt from as much money as possible to better pay his members, and Pat Ashton as his ineffectual secretary Betty.
Read more about this topic: The Gaffer (TV Series)
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“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
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—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)