Tango for Two (1980)

 

There are British rarities then there is Tango for Two, an unreleased, unloved and up until now undocumented sitcom pilot starring Peter Gordeno and Linda Lou Allen.  He’s a nimble-footed Italian lothario, she’s a rich American heiress...they’re thrown together when they inherit a London nightclub, trouble is everyone else who works at the club is trying to murder them!!

The bastard child of Saturday Night Fever, by way of home-grown disco sleaze like The World is Full of Married Men, Tango for Two sees wide of collar but low on funds ladies man Peter Manchelli (Peter Gordino) sharing the dance floor with aloof American socialite Linda Lou Albert (Linda Lou Allen) thanks to a corpse that talks...well sort of.  Nightclub owner Mr Ross has sadly passed away, but has decided to go out in disco-fabulous fashion by having his funeral held on the stage of his beloved nightclub... while a female dance troupe shake their booties around his open top coffin. 

Mr Ross ‘talks’ to the mourners via a pre-recorded message, dropping the bombshell that he has left the club to his two favourite protégées, Peter and Linda Lou.  It’s safe to say that the club has seen better days, but Manchelli thinks that with his talent for dancing and singing, plus a cash injection from Linda Lou’s father, they can turn around its fortunes and once again make Mr Ross’ place the hottest ticket in town.  The club also comes complete with it’s own ensemble of quirky staff members.  There’s the accident prone Mr Ramsbottom, Waldo the irate waiter, Dotty the cloakroom attendant who dreams of stardom, as well as camp barmen Tony and Louis, portrayed with all the swishy, limp wristedness you’d expect from gay characters in a 1980s sitcom.  Not forgetting the club’s resident femme fatale Hilda, played by Maggie Wright who back in the 1970s had cornered the market in playing ‘sexy older women’ in British sex comedies like The Love Box and Sex and the Other Woman. 

In an attempt to rally the troops, Peter decides to treat the staff to a little bit of the Manchelli magic, by taking to the stage with the dance troupe from Mr Ross’ funeral (played by ‘The Peter Gordeno Dancers’).  Since no one puts Linda Lou Albert in a corner either, she also partners up with Manchelli onstage for an all singing, all dancing rendition of ‘Razzle, Dazzle’ from the musical Chicago.  The result?...the staff decide that they’d be better off trying to murder the pair of them.  A proviso in Ross’ will dictating that if Peter and Linda Lou drop out of running the club, or drop dead, the staff get everything.  Thus Tango for Two temporarily becomes a comedy about how best to kill two innocent people and get away with it.  A surprisingly mean spirited twist that throws a spanner in the works of what was intended to be a light hearted sitcom.  After all would the British public have taken to the staff of Grace Brothers had they planted a bomb under Young Mr Grace’s car, Granville had he sank an ice pick into Arkwright’s head and blamed it on a burglar, or the students of Mind Your Language had they thrown Miss Courtney out of a window.  In a scene reminiscent of the one in An American Werewolf in London where the living dead discuss the best way for David Kessler to kill himself, the staff bounce around ideas of how to do away with their dance crazy employers.  Waldo wants to electrify Peter’s door, Tony suggests cyanide, while Dotty wants to give ‘em pills.  Whatever they’re planning, Waldo advises they need to “strike while the iron is hot”.  At which point Waldo strikes an iron, while it’s hot.  Subtle comedy has no place on this dance floor.  The jokes in Tango for Two do feel like they’ve been pulled straight out of Talbot Rothwell’s dustbin.  “While he’s asleep I’ll wire up his door knob” Waldo tells a confused Dotty.  “Oh, I don’t think that’s fair” she tells him “I mean it might cause him an injury”.

Speaking of the Carry On series, they managed to talk a genuine Carry On star into briefly appearing in Tango for Two.  Step forward, Alexandra Dane who was in five Carry On movies, and whose cleavage you might also remember from such films as The Ups and Downs of a Handyman.  Alexandra was also the woman who discovered a severed head in Peter Cushing’s fridge in Corruption.  I can rattle off Alexandra Dane credits with ease, but I wasn’t aware she was as much of a household name to warrant playing herself in a sitcom.  They were obviously tickled pink to get her though, with Tango for Two allocating Dane the red carpet treatment (not that Tango for Two had the budget for an actual red carpet) as the staff fall over themselves to take her fur coat and address her as ‘Miss Dane’.  Resting her cleavage near the bar, Dane sticks around just long enough to offer a sympathetic ear to Tony and Louis over their American and Italian management.  “All beefburgers and spaghettis, you’ve got problems”.  Dane’s appearance does make you wonder who else they had lined up to guest star in further Tango for Two episodes, who could have possibly filled Alexandra Dane’s shoes?, let alone the top half of her dress?

Despite the cash strapped budget, Tango for Two clearly had its eye on the transatlantic market, conjuring up visions of a globetrotting romp with opening credits that see Gordeno and Allen’s faces transposed over postcard images of Rome, New York, Las Vegas and London.  Only to kill such expectations dead by confiding the rest of the action to a dark, smoke filled club.  Supposedly Tango for Two was filmed at a Chelsea Nightclub called Country Cousin, whose existence I can suspiciously find no other reference to.  In spite of the Chelsea address, I doubt the likes of Joan Collins would be seen dead in Mr Ross’ place, even if Alexandra Dane would.  In a bid for a US sale, Tango for Two plays to American sensibilities by having Dotty do a protracted Mae West impersonation, we also get US pop culture references to Charlie’s Angels (Linda Lou: “gosh, I feel like one of Charlie’s Angels”, Peter: “so do I, but I doubt I’ll get one” ).  Whether a US audience would have known who Alexandra Dane was, or got the bit where Mr Ross, the sort of talking corpse, does a Bruce Forsyth impression, is another matter. 

Hailing from Kansas, as does her near identically named character in the show, Linda Lou Allen managed to calve a name for herself as the token American in British TV shows like The Professionals and C.A.T.S. Eyes.  Building up enough of a profile to show up on Celebrity Squares and Star Games.  It was in 1980, on Star Games, that she was partnered up with Peter Gordeno, presumably giving someone the idea that these two could be the Fred and Ginger for the 1980s.  Taking no chances, in case Tango for Two doesn’t drive that idea home enough, it literally has a character make that observation at one point. 

Tango for Two would turn out to be Peter Gordeno’s only stab at sitcom stardom.  A likeable, and reportedly well-liked, showbiz all-rounder, it is fair to say Gordeno’s true talents lay in the fields of dancing, chorography and singing, with acting coming a distant fourth.  On the set of Carry On Columbus, Gordeno reportedly drove Gerald Thomas up the wall with his constant flubbing of lines.  Gordeno’s history with acting dated back to essentially playing himself- a dance choreographer- in 1966’s Secrets of a Windmill Girl, before achieving his greatest success as an actor in Gerry Anderson’s UFO, then graduating to leading man status in Derek Ford’s swansong Attack of the Killer Computer.  Only for the Ford film to sit on the shelf for decades, never seeing the light of day during Gordeno’s lifetime.  As a singer, Gordeno pitched his stall someplace between Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck, as an actor he is competition for Gareth Hunt and Alan Lake in the ‘women want him, men want to be him’ stakes.  It could just be that Gordeno was having an off day when he appeared in Carry On Columbus, let’s face it, he wouldn’t have been alone there.  Personally, I don’t think Gordeno is too bad as a lead here, with some signs of chemistry between him and Miss Linda Lou, and rarely will you see an entertainer as much in his element as when Gordeno’s singing and dancing skills are called upon here.  Naturally it is Gordeno who sings Tango for Two’s absolute earworm of a theme song “Tango for Two, who’d ever thought I’d bump into a partner like you, there’s gonna be a Tango for Two, we’re headed for an unexpected rendezvous”.  Presumably had Tango for Two gone to a series, the ‘will they, wont they’ question over Peter and Linda Lou’s relationship would have been a running theme.  As this is just the pilot however, Peter stands little chance of draining his disco balls into Linda Lou, with the sophisticated American resisting the charms of the red blooded poor boy from the streets of Rome for now.  So it is the Penthouse suite for Linda Lou, while Peter is consigned to the couch in the dressing room.  “You can swing a cat in there” remarks Peter, as for the couch “you can swing that too”.

Sadly Tango for Two marked the final acting appearance of Audrey Jeans, who plays the eccentric coatroom lady Dotty.  Showbiz veteran Jeans was perhaps best remembered for acting alongside Sid James when he had his fatal onstage heart attack in 1976.  James died in Audrey’s arms.  Tragically, Jeans herself was killed –in a hit and run incident- not long after shooting her scenes in Tango for Two. 

The Tango for Two pilot was the brainchild of Paul Bernard, who was never a household name, despite his name being beamed into millions of British homes from the 1960s to the 1990s.  A prolific TV director, Bernard’s name could be found on Coronation Street, Doctor Who, The Tomorrow People and Z Cars, amongst others.  Aside from his TV work, Bernard was also active in the world of ‘supporting features’ that would prove to be worth their weight in Eady money when they were foisted upon unsuspecting cinemagoers alongside more commercially minded fare.  Bernard’s first foray into supporting features The Contract (1974) pitted white bikers against an African gang for control of the drugs trade in Hounslow.  Coronation Street star Ken Farrington does a remarkable against type turn, shedding his soap opera image to play a leather clad, white supremacist biker who snorts coke, plays Russian roulette and hurls racial insults at his black, female counterpart (Kubi Chaza).  A freakish combo of Scorpio Rising, trashy paperback novels and Love Thy Neighbour, The Contract is the last thing you’d expect from a Coronation Street director.

Bernard followed that with The Tiger Lily (1975) another depiction of a wrecked head trying to keep it together in a nightmarish, urban environment.  The Tiger Lily stars Diane Cilento as a TV personality whose show is on the brink of being axed by her boss (John Gregson, in his last cinema role) and whose relationship with a younger, out of work actor (Leigh Lawson) is also threatening to dissolve.  Set amongst a harsh, brutalist landscape reminiscent of early Cronenberg movies, The Tiger Lily also benefits from a superb psychedelic soundtrack by Alan Blakley, formally of The Tremeloes, and an unknown female singer calling herself ‘Rasputin’.  The Tiger Lily played Soho’s Cameo Moulin cinema in 1977 as the co-feature to Serge Gainsbourg’s film Je t’aime Moi Non Plus (1976) starring Jane Birkin and Joe Dallesandro. 

It’s hard to deny that Bernard had range, going from an offbeat, near unclassifiable movie like The Tiger Lily to middle of the road fluff like Tango for Two in a matter of years.  I do struggle to reconcile the fact that these two were made by the same man.  By the early 1980s, the era of the supporting feature was all but over, turning Bernard back to full time TV work.  Had Tango for Two made it to TV, it might have found an audience with suburban dads who fancied themselves as the next John Travolta, and caused bored housewives to go wild for the disco hips of Peter Gordeno.  Sadly it wasn’t to be, Tango for Two never got the chance to strut onto our TV screens, receiving the thumbs down from the TV execs and failing to go to a series.  The pilot was forgotten about until copies of it, The Tiger Lily and The Contract were rescued during a clearance of Bernard’s home, following his death in 1997.  In defence of Tango for Two, there are worse sitcoms out there that did make it to air, but by rights it is The Tiger Lily and The Contract that you should know Paul Bernard’s name for.  Bernard’s work juggling the supporting features that gave him the chance to flex his artistic muscles with the conventional output of a TV grafter. 

As to how I came to be in possession of Tango for Two, I may have to partially plead the fifth there. Let’s just say it was part of my reward for supplying a boutique label with rare footage of a British exploitation film maverick, whose work is soon set to be reborn in shiny disc form.  We all have our price, now I know that mine is an unbroadcast sitcom pilot starring Peter Gordeno.