VISION ON SOUND EPISODE 224 - TX JANUARY 19 2025

SANDY McGREGOR talks about VACUUMING COMPLETELY NUDE IN PARADISE.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on January 19th 2025.

It’s perhaps a bit of a strange one this week, or maybe it’s just a bit of an obscure one. Anyway, our old pal SANDY McGREGOR got in touch and told me that he really fancied talking about VACUUMING COMPLETELY NUDE IN PARADISE, which seemed an odd request at the time, but, well, you know what they say, live and let live.

Anyway, after my initial bafflement, it turns out that VACUUMING COMPLETELY NUDE IN PARADISE is a film for television first broadcast in September 2001 written by JIM CARTWRIGHT and directed by DANNY BOYLE, just under three months after the broadcast of another hard-hitting collaboration on STRUMPET which starred CHRISTOPHER ECCLESTON.

VACUUMING starred TIMOTHY SPALL in a barnstorming BAFTA winning performance as the aggressive high-performance salesman TOMMY RAG, alongside MICHAEL BEGBY as the reluctant trainee PETE, alongside a whole cavalcade of the kind of appalling characters conjured up to represent the hard-selling cutthroat business of selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door at the turn of the century.

What was it that drew SANDY towards this obscure televisual delight, you may well be asking yourselves? Well, theatrical representations of Salesmen had been very much on his mind after he’d recently been watching GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS by DAVID MAMET in the theatre, and, after making comparisons with the rather more subdued American Classic DEATH OF A SALESMEN by ARTHUR MILLER, he decided to complete a trilogy of sorts with this TV movie that, in many ways, ploughs very similar storytelling furrows as the weekly television dramas of PLAY FOR TODAY did in the last century and might very much be considered part of the continuation of that proud legacy, which often made for television that could occasionally be just as shocking and challenging in its own way in perhaps less liberated times.

Running at seventy-five minutes, this stylistic, high-octane, and sometimes terrifying tour-de-force pulls few punches, and portrays a seedy, sleazy world that doesn’t hold back on the language and attitudes that were commonplace in that sort of business at that time, and, as a very dark tragicomedy, can leave you feeling both tainted and exhilarated by the experience of watching it.

Anyway, having hopefully kept his clothes very much on, SANDY joined me to talk about his experience of watching this television curiosity, and I hope you’ll stick with us across this next hour despite the hard-hitting nature of the subject matter, and I do hope you enjoy it.

PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.