Ade Edmondson: Mr Versatile

While at university, the most popular TV programme amongst fellow students must have been Not the Nine o’Clock News.  It seemed different from anything we’d seen before, with stars not much older than we were. Within six months of graduating, even that iconic show was made to look ancient by the arrival of The Young Ones.

The situation comedy rule book had been ripped up, incinerated and buried beneath a mile of concrete, and yet it was hilarious. Still is. The characters, whilst a tad cartoonish, were nonetheless recognisable amongst undergraduate acquaintances, which was down to the observation and brilliance of main writers Ben Elton, Lise Mayer and Rik Mayall and the cast of then-unknowns, Mayall, Ade Edmondson, Nigel Planer and, once Peter Richardson bailed out, Christopher Ryan.

The series was surreal and subversive yet remaining true to both its sitcom roots and the ‘alternative comedy’ circuit which spawned it. When BBC2 first screened it in November 1982, I recognised a few of the actors from another memorable slice of laugh-out-loud comedy shown on Channel 4’s launch night the previous week, The Comic Strip Presents…Five Go Mad in Dorset. In particular there was the psycho-punk Vyvyan from The Young Ones playing Dick. This was Ade Edmondson, and since then he has rarely been off our screens.

For much of the Eighties and Nineties, he was inextricably linked to Rik Mayall, a crazy double-act to complement their mates French and Saunders who had portrayed Anne and George in Five Go Mad…. To be honest, it’s Mayall who stands out the most. He’s the force of nature with the flaring nostrils, boggly eyes, most extravagant gestures and showy delivery, whether as The New Statesman’s Alan B’stard or Blackadder’s Flashheart. And yet it’s Edmondson who enters my personal lounge of legends. It doesn’t help that Mayall died tragically young in 2014, not by an exploding gas oven or head-on collision with a frying pan, but a heart attack. It’s just that Ade has slowly but surely evolved into one of England’s most lovable, quintessentially British character actors and all-round good eggs.

His stage persona has always been a bit bonkers. In The Young Ones, I tended to side with pompous poet Rik rather than the Hawkwind studded double-denim-wearing Ade but, along with Planer’s hippy Neil, they shared out the best lines, as in this classic routine. He always made the most dramatically violent entrances and of course Vyv was the character who literally lost his head after sticking his head out of a train window – as you do – before kicking it along the tracks.

Slapstick violence was very much his bag. Even when arriving for his interview with Wogan in 1985, Edmondson struck a blow for the new wave by crashing through the studio ‘wall’. Let’s face it, with Mayall, The Dangerous Brothers were constantly behaving – well – dangerously on that other showpiece of mid-Eighties alternative comedy, Saturday Live. And then there was Bottom. Yes, it was frequently crude, rude and showed a shameful disregard for the welfare of TV sets and household implements, but I loved it.

A few years earlier, much of the same Young Ones crew had been involved in Filthy, Rich and Catflap which has survived more as a footnote than a chapter heading in the history of British comedy. Personally I think that’s a shame. Written again by Ben Elton, Ade played the alcoholic minder to Rik’s talentless TV personality in a series which cleverly ripped the piss out of the old-school luvvies like Tarby and Spike Milligan who had so vehemently criticised the alternative comedians who were threatening their careers. Perhaps it lacked the loveable and identifiable characters, but the slapstick was ever-present and I preferred it to Elton’s more successful nineties comedy Thin Blue Line which starred Rowan Atkinson. It also gave us the Catflap catchphrase “Oo-er, sounds a bit rude” which I have been known to trot out on occasions. Thanks again, Ade.

Of course, this isn’t the kind of comedy one can sustain well into middle age. He could also do ‘proper’ acting, be it on screen or stage. Though I watched him star in a 1990 BBC Screen One film News Hounds, I can’t remember him as another lead. While contemporaries like Emma Thompson, Robbie Coltrane, Rowan Atkinson et al made it big, dear old Ade has enjoyed an enduring career as supporting actor and entertaining gameshow staple.

In the Noughties, Edmondson claimed a recurring role in Jonathan Creek and, though I didn’t watch it, Holby City and in recent years I have welcomed his appearance in thrillers like ITV’s 2014 thriller Prey and 2017’s Bancroft (in each case almost unrecognisable as a top cop), the Beeb’s One of Us and this year’s Cheat in which we all willed him not to become the villain’s next victim, not necessarily out of loyalty to his character but because he was Ade Edmondson, for heaven’s sake. He can’t die!

Unsurprisingly he has enthusiastically embraced the modern mania for celebrity challenges, demonstrating along the way what an admirable all-rounder he is. Back in the Eighties I watched Ade sing and play guitar in the guise of Vim Fuego in The Comic Strip’s Bad News, which Ade also wrote. I daresay he was no Eric Clapton but he wasn’t miming when they recorded albums (produced by Brian May, no less) and performed genuine gigs, including the 1986 Monsters of Rock festival. As a mockurockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap was funnier but Bad News got there first.

He didn’t only play guitar. I was in the Orchard Theatre audience when his ‘folk punk’ band The Bad Shepherds played Taunton in May 2009. At the gig, Ade introduced himself on ‘thrash mandolin’ which seemed to require tuning every five minutes. Never mind; the pauses were just as entertaining as the music itself. Unfortunately the ensemble has since been disbanded. According to its website, “We'd prefer to leave the whole project as a brilliant memory, rather than flog it to death, and end up being a bit shit”, a perfectly Edmondson-esque explanation.

Apparently he’d also founded a jazz instrumental band in the early Nineties and directed several pop videos, while his latest musical venture is The Idiot Bastard Band. I haven’t heard any of their material but given that it also features Phill Jupitus, Rowland Rivron and Neil Innes, it probably does what it says on the tin.

What I did experience – and I cannot believe it’s fourteen years ago – was Ade’s contribution to Comic Relief Does Fame Academy. His version of the Sixties standard ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ included a manically chaotic chorus which earned him third place in the final. Then-Radio 1 DJ Edith Bowman won, but I bet few remember her ‘Champagne Supernova’. I know I don’t! In 2011, Ade was back on the charity night, this time triumphant in a tutu, dancing the Dying Swan surprisingly well for a 54 year-old bloke.

Since then he has gone on to win Celebrity Masterchef, certainly not part of my TV repertoire, and predictably took on and beat ‘The Beast’ for £100,000 in a Celebrity Chase show last year, which is. It wouldn’t have mattered had he got every answer wrong but of course he’s no fool and also carried the audience with him through sheer fun and personality. Sadly, though, I don’t think the team won the huge prize.

But that sums up Ade Edmondson. Like his marriage to Jennifer Saunders, he is such a durable character, full of Olde English eccentricity. The Young One may now be a sixty-something grandad but the anarchic spirit of Vyvyan lives on. 

Liz Smith - the greatest granny of them all

On some channel somewhere this Christmas there will be at least one festive episode of The Vicar of Dibley and The Royle Family making us chuckle. Appearing in both you’ll probably find Liz Smith, delivering her lines as ever with perfect timing. 

In each of these classic BBC sitcoms she was at least in her seventies and yet she seems to have been playing grans, nannas and loveable landladies throughout my life.

As a youngster, I felt an affinity with a fellow Smith but I was tickled by her real name. I bet she’d have achieved just as much had she stuck with Betty Gleadle! Liz/Betty would already have been approaching fifty when she made her TV debut. I probably watched her in an early Last of the Summer Wine, No Honestly, David Copperfield and even The Sweeney before she really made her mark on me in 1976 as Mrs Brandon in I Didn’t Know You Cared.

Screened after the Nine o’Clock News this was very popular in our household. It was slightly darker than the typical comedy fare of the era (though nothing like as black as Peter Tinniswood’s excellent source books) but it was good enough to run for three or four series. Robin Bailey’s Uncle Mort was the principal character although a young Stephen Rea was delightfully credible and sympathetic as Carter. Catherine and I particularly loved the doddery Uncle Staveley (Bert Palmer) whose only contribution seemed to be the occasional interjection of “I ‘eard that, pardon?” However, the series turned Liz Smith into a comedy stalwart for nearly three decades and, thanks to endless repeats, probably ‘til the end of time.

She wasn’t only in half-hour comedy, sketch or children’s shows. Her distinctive pinched features and piercing cackle of a voice made a fair few costume dramas bearable for a corset-and-breeches-phobe like me. She was a regular character in the Beeb’s nostalgic country vet series One By One and also cropped up in The Duchess of Duke Street, Fay Weldon’s brooding ‘80s Life and Loves of a She-Devil adaptation and a 1993 Lovejoy episode.

However, her peerless credentials as an elderly eccentric made her in huge demand amongst comedy writers. She was not one but three top-rated BBC situation comedy staples of the Nineties. It’s easy to forget that one of the best was 2Point4 Children, in which she played both Aunt Belle and Bette. I actually attended one of the studio recordings but don’t recall whether Liz featured in that one but in her twelve episodes she proved an impeccable foil for Belinda Lang and Gary Olsen. The latter’s death in 2000 sadly prevented an extension of Andrew Marshall’s hit into the new millennium but not Liz Smith’s career.

By this time she was the typically dotty Letitia Cropley, creator of the most bizarre culinary concoctions in The Vicar of Dibley and Nana Norma in The Royle Family. Even amidst two splendid ensemble casts she would shine as bright as any star. In the latter she would occasionally join Barbara, Denise et al on the crumpled sofa to deliver deadpan observations and non sequiturs to make Jim’s beard crease in amazement and eyes turn somersaults.

The programme’s ‘Queen of Sheba’ was eventually granted a dignified exit, in one of the Royles’ most touching and tear-jerking specials. Like Ronnie Barker’s picture on the wall in Still Open All Hours, the ghost of Liz Smith’s Nana would always haunt the living room, a benign presence and spark of fond family memories.

I did see Liz Smith in real life just once, in February 2001. I can’t quite remember exactly where in London it was, probably Oxford Street or Regent Street near my BBC office, but I can visualise the light-coloured coat and hat to protect from the winter chill. I don’t know whether she was forever pestered by autograph-hunters (selfies were not yet part of everyday life) but I’m sure she would warm the hearts of any of us mere mortals who crossed her path on an otherwise ordinary lunch hour.

Of course, like all grannies and Queens of Sheba Liz Smith MBE inevitably passed away. It was three years ago today when the perennial eccentric old dear died at home in Worthing at the age of 95. Rarely the star but the most glorious of supporting cast members, the one-time Betty Gleadle from Scunthorpe is an unforgettable TV treasure. In a typical understatement, playwright Mike Leigh described her as “a complete breath of fresh air….not your bog standard middle-aged actress”. She may have played so many apparently bog standard characters, but they were usually larger than life, as any family’s nanna should be...

Leonard Nimoy - Fascinating.....

I’ve never been a true sci-fi geek. I’m not actually antipathetic; I’ve enjoyed many TV series set in the future, encounters with weird and wonderful Doctor Who monsters and went through a science fiction book phase in my teens, lapping up books by the likes of Asimov, Wyndham, Anderson and Dick. However, I’m not a fully-fledged student of the genre. It might sound sacrilegious but the Star Wars canon leaves me cold.  

But one TV favourite which undoubtedly gripped and entertained me was Star Trek.

I first watched it by accident. One Saturday teatime in July 1969, immediately following Grandstand, this American interloper appeared unbidden in the Doctor Who slot. At first I was horrified that Patrick Troughton’s archaic Tardis had been usurped by some swanky spaceship. However it quickly won me over.

Even in musty monochrome, Star Trek delivered a splash of colour to the genre, with more action in a single episode than an entire run of Doctor Who. It could also be genuinely frightening to a reserved eight year-old. I can still recall the fear I felt while watching the two-parter The Menagerie, which went way beyond sofa-hiding to avoid a few shiny Cybermen. The series also introduced me to teleportation, warp factor speeds, split infinitives, the intriguingly-shaped USS Enterprise and above all the even more intriguingly-shaped ears of the ship’s science officer Mr Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy.

William Shatner may have been the de facto star on account of his character Captain Kirk being the head honcho aboard the Enterprise but for me and most of my friends it was Nimoy’s Spock who was the most popular. He even made science nerds cool. Kirk was the action man who got the girls but, no matter how much Shatner resorted to sub-Shakespearean over-acting, making every speech resemble Olivier’s Henry V, Nimoy simply blew him off the screen with a single lift of an eyebrow.

Star Trek complemented the real-life space race mania rocking the world at the time. The Apollo missions to the moon may have been forged in the Cold War political furnace but, by 1969, the whole world seemed to be rooting for the US astronauts. Series creator Gene Roddenberry’s vision was an admirable one, featuring lead characters representing the whole planet in Sulu, Chekhov and engineer Scottie. He even defied the ingrained Republican racism of the era by making Lt. Uhura an African American, even if she spent most scenes with what looked like a plug in her ear. And yet Spock went one step further by being half-alien, explaining his resolute adherence to logic and emotionless expression – and of course those pointy ears.

Apparently it was Nimoy who came up with the split-finger greeting - which we youngsters always tried so hard to emulate (I was rubbish) - and also the Vulcan death grip. Both singled out Spock as a calm man of science in contrast to Kirk’s penchant for phaser and fists. Nevertheless his persona did occasionally undergo shocking changes. One or two episodes were more memorable because Spock was afflicted by some weird gas or brain imbalance which allowed Nimoy to release his inner Shatner. I even remember his actually smiling and shouting in a few scenes. Shock, horror!

But we weren’t really content unless Spock was in normal mode, injecting some welcome humour into proceedings. The best dialogue invariably involved Spock and Dr. ‘Bones’ McCoy. Both men of science, they offered great contrasts in emotional intelligence, setting up some brilliant exchanges. For all the memorable images of the boy Spock owning a teddy bear, nothing could really surpass Nimoy’s quizzical eyebrow and the singular word summing up his character’s opinion of human behaviour: “Fascinating”

I did get to see Star Trek in all its colourful glory when constantly repeated throughout the Seventies and beyond. Yet I never really bought into the movie franchise, nor the interminable TV prequels, sequels and assorted spin-offs. Unknown to me at the time the original series was first shown by the BBC, it had already been dropped in the States. Leonard Nimoy was already appearing in another Beeb import which I enjoyed watching in the early ‘70s, Mission: Impossible.

Along with Phelps, Barnie and self-destructing cassettes, I most vividly recall the actor Martin Landau, but he was replaced in the series by Leonard Nimoy as Paris. As with Star Trek, I think the BBC screened episodes, and probably whole series, out of chronological order but whenever I watched a programme featuring Paris, it seemed somehow wrong. Why is Spock laughing? Why the baffling attempts to speak with a Latin American or Japanese accent? And what’s happened to his ears?

For all his numerous TV and film credits, as actor, writer and director, Leonard Nimoy will forever be remembered as Spock. That voice was so rich it was gold dust to any advertising director seeking a voiceover. Sadly he resorted to recording several albums as singer, a few performing as Spock but three delivering excruciating covers of popular songs. At least they weren’t as unintentionally hilarious as Shatner’s efforts! No, we must remember Nimoy for creating the greatest sci-fi character of them all. Even after death, may he live long and prosper….

Benny Hill - more than just the fastest milkman in the west

Nearly three decades after his death, Benny Hill still arouses conflicting opinions. Was he just a dinosaur of sexist comedy or the last in the line of legendary music-hall entertainers? Actually I think he was a bit of both and a lot more besides. Throughout the Seventies he was a perennial ratings winner for ITV but in our household he held a special place in our affections thanks to some shared roots.

Like Dad, Benny – or Alfred, as he was christened - attended Taunton’s School, Southampton. Indeed, they must have overlapped by at least one academic year. Dad may have lost his childhood accent before I knew him but Hill must be the only TV personality who right to the end spoke with an unmistakably Southampton burr. Indeed it was very much part of his persona. I don’t know whether he supported the Saints or Hampshire’s cricket team like Dad but Benny and he seemed to share more than just an educational alma mater. Dad was quite a highbrow opera and book-loving soul but I never forget the sound of him chuckling to Hill’s humour, and it was contagious.

One of Hill’s most appealing traits was a reluctance to follow the celebrity trail, sticking resolutely to his Hampshire heritage and maintaining an air of mystery. Even his scheduling didn’t conform to the light entertainment stereotype. For starters, his shows weren’t broadcast as a series. Each one was An Event. I recall once reading that the reason for the intervals between programmes was the star ‘travelling around Europe in search of ideas’. Whether he nicked those ideas from foreign TV or dreamed them up while sunning himself on the Cote D’Azur, it didn’t seem to matter. Apparently he was a fluent French speaker so wouldn’t have needed subtitles.

Benny Hill also succeeded where many shows in the Seventies failed in that he enticed us to pressing the ‘3’ button. We didn’t watch much ITV but Hill, despite leaving the Beeb in 1969, played a major role in our television repertoire. He wasn’t a ‘Mr Saturday Night’ like a Forsyth, Barrymore, Davidson or Yarwood; The Benny Hill Show was, from memory, a fixture of Wednesday evenings.  So what, apart from the Southampton connection, was the attraction?

Firstly, like all the greatest clowns, he simply looked funny. His features seem lost in that shining moon-face, his cheeky expressions suggestive of a class clown testing his teacher’s patience to the limit, and getting away with it through sheer charisma. He was also quite unusual because his shows mixed visual gags with verbal jokes or musical setpieces, and without an army of gag-writers. Like much sketch comedy, it could be a bit hit-and-miss. After all, when you’ve seen one lot of slapping Jackie Wright’s bald head or saucy chambermaid chasing, you’ve seen ‘em all.

And yet we persevered, because they were the silent equivalent of contemporary catchphrases like ‘Stupid boy’, ‘I’m free!’ or ‘And now for something completely different….’  The extended filmed sequences must have taken a lot of work, setting up the camera angles to conceal the inevitable dribbling hosepipe or the signpost behind the semi-naked woman, etc, etc. There was always something to make you smile. And if it was approaching the end of the hour, you knew it would be rounded off with a sped-up chase to the chirpy staccato tune of ‘Yakety Sax’. They weren’t exactly the epitome of sophistication but appealed to all ages, just as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton had done fifty years earlier.

For anyone of a certain age, that piece of music evokes not only Benny Hill but my whole childhood, and it is still parodied today. Perhaps the funniest instance was broadcast in 1994, not long after the star died, his career end having been hastened by ‘alternative’ comedians such as Ben Elton, who had publicly condemned the casual sexism of Hill and his ilk.  This made the Harry Enfield’s show’s filmed skit of the politically-correct comic as ‘Benny Elton’ even wittier. Some accused the sequence as being disrespectful of Benny Hill, but I disagree.  It not only paid homage to Hill’s memory but also demonstrated that Elton could indulge in self-mockery as much as the next Guardian-reading, right-on leftie.

Unlike Harry Enfield, Benny Hill totally dominated his shows. While he surrounded himself with a supporting cast of comely wenches, Jackie Wright, Bob Todd and the perfectly polished straight man, Henry McGee, Hill filled the screen virtually throughout. He’d play a range of characters but his most recognisable recurring creation was Fred Scuttle.  Anyone aged fifty or above must at some point in their lives have flicked a cap off-centre, placed their tongue behind their lower lip, blinked furiously and given a clumsy-open-palmed salute. Haven’t they? Come on, admit it!

Personally, my Benny Hill highlight has to be his chart-topping single ‘Ernie’ which cheered up our cold December nights in 1971. Accompanied by a tongue-in-cheek promo film, it was a near-faultless novelty song. It related a story, a lively tune building to a crescendo for the dramatic Ernie vs Two-Ton Ted fight to the death and a delightful pay-off at the end. The song contained genuinely amusing lyrics with only a modicum of harmless innuendo so that Catherine and I could gleefully repeat without embarrassment - for either ourselves or Mum and Dad. That Christmas I harboured hopes of seeing Benny Hill perform ‘Ernie’ on his show but in fact he had already done so the previous year. However, it’s not the same without seeing Hill holding Trigger’s reins or exchanging strawberry-flavoured yogurts and rock cakes with moustache-twirling McGee in their bid to win the heart of the widowed Sue.

So was Benny Hill’s humour really sexist? In part, yes. But so was most comedy of the era, from Python to The Two Ronnies, the Carry Ons to the ‘Confessions…’, Jim Davidson to On The Buses. Yet even in these more enlightened times, there is a mitigating factor for Hill. Almost invariably he failed to ‘get the girl’. For all the lascivious grins and bawdy stereotypes, the joke tended to be on him. Even in ‘Ernie’, whilst the stereotypical milkman undoubtedly supplied Sue with more than just a pinta-milka-day, it was he who ultimately bit the dust.

In reality, Benny Hill wasn’t, as far as I’m aware, victim of a stale pork pie catching him in the eye. Apparently he fell victim to a coronary thrombosis at the age of 68. Curiously, whilst the recorded version of ‘Ernie’ had the eponymous dairyman dying at only 52, the original TV song stated his age as ….68. Spooky, or what? Cue Twilight Zone music…..  

As a millionaire TV superstar, Benny Hill spent much of his professional life living in swish Kensington or close to the Teddington Studios where his TV show was filmed. However, with no wife or children to consider, he was buried back in Southampton just a mile or so from Taunton’s School. So is that the end of Benny Hill? I do wonder if late-night visitors to Hollybrook cemetery experience a frisson of fear. Was that the trees a-rustling or the hinges on the gate? Nah. I reckon it’s the late milkman’s ghostly gold-tops a-rattling in their crate.

Renu Setna - The Ageless Asian Everyman

Over the years, I have become accustomed to many actors seemingly being typecast on British television, especially in minor roles. I’ve already mentioned Andre Maranne but if a director wants an elderly Jewish man, he would have to cast Cyril Shaps. Chinese Scouser? Ozzie Yue. Working-class Yorkshireman? Paul Copley. Northern ‘tart with a heart’? Deidre Costello. Soft-voiced Irish professional? TP McKenna. Scottish ‘heavy’? James Cosmo. Generic Eastern European crook? Vladek Sheybal. The list goes on and on.

In the Seventies and Eighties, when the membership of Equity had a considerably less multi-ethnic look about it, reflecting the social and demographic profile of the UK, Asian actors must have been thin on the ground. For casting directors everywhere, prayers would be answered by Renu Setna.

Saeed Jaffrey and Art Malik may have bagged the roles of middle-class Asian businessmen but Setna was the quintessential ‘little man’. During the Seventies and Eighties he would turn up in anything from The Basil Brush Show and Doctor Who to Minder.  

He played Hindu everyman Mr Patel in Are You Being Served, The Bill and The Chinese Detective and predictably umpteen roles in ‘70s sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, the ones for which Michael Bates didn’t black up. His beard became almost as familiar as Windsor Davies’ twirling ‘tache, Be it a clerk, tailor or maharajah, didn’t the British army concert party ever twig that it was the same man every time?!

There weren’t many programmes I can remember in which he had a recurring role. In Sickness and In Health was one example. In 1986 and ’87 he was local shop owner Mr Kittel opposite Warren Mitchell’s ageing racist Alf Garnett. There were some amusing scenes in which he challenged Alf’s pompous prejudices with an easy humility, a common theme in this often hilarious series. Slightly against type, Setna also portrayed a leather coat-wearing gangster Mr Ram in Only Fools and Horses, but of course ultimately he failed to get the better of Del Boy!

Nevertheless Renu Setna is about more than comedy. I was amused to discover that he appeared in the two nurse-based dramas, Angels and No Angels 30 years apart, both of which I used to watch regularly. To extend the coincidence, in each case he played the part of ‘Mr Khan’.  Since then I would have spotted his familiar features in programmes such as Hustle and Silent Witness and his TV credits continue right up to the present day.

These days British Asian actors portray characters which don’t have to be Asians. They are no longer restricted to the niche characters inhabiting corner shops and sitcom slaves. Lawyers, cops, teachers, estate agents, pathologists: apparently they aren’t all posh, white blokes in the twenty-first century, y‘ know. And in the realm of television, they are no longer the preserve of Mr Setna.

Britain boasts such a range of younger class acts with South Asian heritage. Dev Patel, Riz Ahmed, Raza Jaffrey and Parminder Nagra are in demand worldwide so these days are relatively rare on the UK small screen. The Goodness Gracious Me quartet are no longer youthful sketch comedy ground-breakers but Adil Ray (Citizen Khan) could be on the sitcom scene for decades to come. In drama on both sides of the Atlantic, Ace Bhatti (always the smart lawyer the viewer doesn’t know whether to trust), Archie Panjabi, Arsher Ali, Indira Varma, Amita Dhiri (once of This Life), Nabhaan Rizwan and many others are always worth watching, potential TV treasures of the future.

And yet, as long as he’s well enough to work, there’ll always be room for Renu Setna. Now in his silver-bearded dotage, the veteran actor’s appearance at a front door, shop counter or even maharajah’s palace will always elicit a knowing smile by this viewer.