Dreamchild (1985)

There are many works that presume to continue the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) story, but Dreamchild is different in that it offers a fictionalised account of the girl for whom the famous tale was created in the first place, Alice Hargreaves (Coral Browne), as she nears her eightieth birthday. It's by Dennis Potter and is primarily in his voice, not Carroll's.

It follows her as she travels to America for the centenary of Carroll's birth. She dislikes the bustle and lack of tact she finds there, but she abhors even more that they want her to give an account of what it’s like to be the fiction.

Her memories of the telling of the story given to her as a child by the author revisit her as an aged woman in the present, brought to life in a different world by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop as twisted representations of buried truths about the complicated relationship between the adult and the child.

3 corner shadows out of 5

Cream in My Coffee (1980)

If the traditional British ‘summer holiday’ ever really existed outside of postcards and creative nostalgia then by the year 1980 it was long into retirement. But the hotels endure and it’s to one of them that an ageing couple return, having spent time there in 1934. Past and present weave together to paint a bigger picture, and through extrapolation we can write the forty-six summers that fell in-between.
Potter's venomous wit lightens some scenes, but mostly it’s a serious study of the destructive nature of secrets, the ennui that often follows marriage and the promises that love makes to please itself.
Lionel Jeffries is good as the old man who wants to live in the here and now but can’t help referencing the past. Peggy Ashcroft is hand on heart amazing as the sympathetic wife who fears to ruffle feathers.

4 pennies dropped out of 5