With fifteen children, you’d think the Kettles wouldn’t have to keep relying on their eldest, Tom, to provide them with story, but that’s what happens with this one – Tom’s wife Kim is about to have a baby, resulting in her parents coming to visit the Kettles (apparently they didn’t come to the wedding). Mum is a snob – she insists on naming the baby after Kim’s father (played by Ray Collins). But Tom Kettle wants the baby named after himself, which in my book is worse.
Anyway, the Kettles decide to move back out to the farm to get away from their in laws, so they can raise their baby in the new house (don’t Tom and Kim have their own home?). Then people think there is uranium on the Kettle farm – because Pa wears radioactive overalls once used by Long when he watched the atomic bomb tests during the war. (So presumably Tom Kettle isn’t going to live as long as his parents).
It’s a bit too convenient for the mother in law to be a dragon and I didn’t like Kim for going along with the idea of leaving for so long. Horrible misogynistic ending with everyone putting the dragon in her place; “will you behave yourself in the future?” asks Tom of Kim, and she nods.
Fun stuff: Pa’s expression when he thinks Ma is having another baby, Ma trying to be posh at dinner scene, Ma sticking up for her Indian friends to visit the baby. There’s also a vaudeville type routine, 14 x 5 = 25, which is a variation of a popular Abbott and Costello routine, plus a sequence where the Kettle’s friends (the door to door salesman and the Indians) steal a series of babies thinking their Tom Kettle’s – which is kind of funny until you realise that the parents of those babies would be freaking out.
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