Weirdly, about the only thing I remember about All Or Nothing At All is the theme song.
It opens dramatically, with a young boy at private school being summoned to see his mother, who tells him she thinks his father has killed himself.
Then we immediately flash back (I assume) to a happier time, with Hugh Laurie, the father in question, hosting a summer party.
Caroline Quentin is at the party
with husband Steve Steen
He lives a life of luxury that appears to be out of step with his salary. His brother begs him for whatever financial secret he has, assuming there’s some kind of investment thing going on, and asks him to invest £50,000 for him.
But there’s no secret market trick, just Laurie spending more than he has, so he does what every man would do, and puts it all on a horse.
But more people start to sniff money and start ‘investing’ in his fund, and he still keeps putting it on the horses, mostly losing. His boss is played by Bob Monkhouse, and when he sees all the unfamiliar faces visiting Laurie, he gets him to tell him what’s going on. So Laurie spins him a tale of offshore funds, liquidity and other financial bullshit, until Monkhouse allows him to run ‘the fund’ as part of the business.
This is so hard to watch. It’s horrible watching someone you like (and let’s face it, we always like Hugh Laurie) continually making terrible decisions.
Now he’s in so deep that he’s asking his wife to let him sell their house and ‘invest’ the proceeds.
In the next episode, Phyllida Law comes to him, asking for him to invest her money so she can improve the lot of her charity. She’s blind, and she brought the money in a holdall. Phyllida Law, I will remind you, is the mother of Emma Thompson, making Laurie’s crimes even greater.
He walks in on Steve Steen having sex with his secretary – a surprisingly explicit scene in this otherwise genteel programme. It mirrors flashbacks of a young Laurie walking in on his vicar father fiddling with a woman congregant.
This leaves Caroline Quentin rather distraught, as Steen owns everything.
He gets sacked from his firm, and he spins this as leaving to run the fund on his own. But at the end of the episode poor Phyllida Law is found dead at the bottom of the office stairwell, possibly due to a heart attack, possibly something else.
He’s called to his son’s school, where his son stole money that he was owed from a bet – something Laurie himself did as a boy. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
I’m including this screenshot merely for the BBC Micro on the desk in the background. Shut up, it’s my blog.
Soon, two more potential clients are in his office, but he soon realises they are from the Fraud Squad.
He runs, and meets up with the woman at the telephone betting company who used to run his account. He tries pretending he works for her company in security, and when she sees through that, he tries to get her to help him get out of the hole, by setting up another account. We also have a final revelation from his childhood, where he discovers his vicar father hanging from a noose, but not quite dead. He believes his father never forgave him for not letting him die.
Except that’s not the last revelation from his past. The whole flashback story started with him getting £15 from his father to buy a watch. When asked later why he hadn’t bought one, he said he was still looking, and he ends up making a bet with a schoolfriend for his watch. My assumption was always that the original £15 was just spent on nothing, but the final flashback shows the young Laurie putting his £15 in the church collection plate.
This comes during a scene where the fraud squad have turned up at his parents’ house looking for him, and his father angrily tells them how much he loathes his son. Then Laurie appears in the door behind him, having been there all the time. Suddenly I’m crying like a baby. Father and Son stories will do that to me.
Well, that was a revelation. As I said at the start, I didn’t remember much about it beyond the theme song, but that was honestly very good. Really hard to watch, though, as I didn’t like seeing Hugh Laurie continue making the same mistake, but the programme really works. I should hate it for making me sympathise with a con man running a Ponzi scheme, but you cast Hugh Laurie in that role, I’m going to sympathise. Hell, I even sympathised a bit with his monstrous arms dealer in The Night Manager.
And the final scene, where he gets a fiver from his cellmate, then burns it, just underlines the nature of his character.
The recording stops immediately after the last episode.
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