“On any boat, there can only be one skipper. Okay? One guy who gives the orders. All right? It has to be that way otherwise it's bedlam. Like it was just now. Now, I don't mind taking the job, I don't mind the responsibility but I must have your support. Okay? Make sense? Okay?”

And there you were, thinking the oeuvre of Alan Ayckbourn would likely never be represented on this website. How wrong you were.

Way Upstream may not be balls-to-the-wall nightmare fuel, but it has its moments (mostly in the last few minutes).

As a mid 80s made-for-TV comedy drama film with a few horror flourishes, it may fail on the comedy, and the drama, but there’s at least two effective jump-scares in there for the unwary.

Feeble Alistair (Nick Dunning) and his scared-of-everything wife Emma (Joanne Pearce) have found themselves on a canal holiday with Alistair’s overbearing business partner Keith (Barrie Rutter) and Keith’s trophy wife June (Marion Bailey). Alistair is all apologies, curly hair and sensible jumpers. Keith is an argument with a moustache and a mullet. Meanwhile June clearly hates her crass husband, and Emma hates the way June’s crass husband treats his supposed equal Alistair as an inferior. Let the middle class high-jinks ensue. Keith insists that all boats, even shitty little ones on canals, can only operate effectively with a captain at the helm. Preferably one wearing a captain’s hat. And clearly, there’s only one Keith for the job. Meanwhile there are rumblings that while the swinging dicks of the boardroom are on their boating holiday, back home the workforce are revolting.

As the holiday progresses, it becomes more and more apparent that Keith is utterly unsufferable and someone really should give Alistair’s arse a good kicking.

When Keith is lured away to deal with the rumblings (leaving Alistair behind because he’s useless, and pretty much admits so, much to Emma’s chagrin), the group meet up with Vince (Stuart Wilson). Vince appears to be a knight in shining vest, but there’s a madness behind his perfect smile. He somehow becomes skipper and starts whipping the three remaining holidaymakers into shape. But some of his commands seem a tad extreme, and his nonsensical names for parts of the boat are odd, and likely to change on a whim.

Keith comes back to his boat to find a new captain in charge and his position as alpha-est male very much in jeopardy. As it becomes clear that Vince really may be a few barnacles short of a fo’c’sle, the question becomes who will stand up to Vince and his increasingly deranged captaincy?

Yes, alright, this is just about as 1987 as you can get, and comes across as a mish-mash of Keeping Up Appearances and Cape Fear (if you can imagine such a thing). But as a screen psycho, Vince certainly has his moments. And even before the actual horror kicks in, his rain-lashed speech where he details exactly what he is going to do to the out-of-his-wheelhouse Alistair is chillingly brutal.

(And on this re-watch, there’s certainly the suggestion that shortly before Vince arrives he may have been doing something unspeakable in the other boat he appears to have hidden in the nearby reeds… he certainly seems very keen to leave it behind)

Of course, everyone who saw this peculiarity on its one-and-only TV outing back in ’87 remembers it for the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it full-frontal nudity at the end, which now seems remarkably coy. But before you get to that, there’s a weirdly out-of-place lurch into horror which took a lot of people completely by surprise. And let us not forget Ayckbourn’s version of the Chekhov’s gun rule, which states that if a can of beans is shown at the beginning of a made-for-TV film, said tin of beans must be put to violent use before the female protagonist takes her bra off. Such is drama, kids.