Alan Morrison on

Two recent BFI releases

Dead of Night: ‘The Exorcism’ (1972)

By Don Taylor

Starring Anne Cropper, Clive Swift, Edward Petheridge

Robin Redbreast (1970)

By John Bowen

Starring Anne Cropper and Bernard Hepton

Red of Night

These two Seventies supernatural plays recently released by BFI are both excellent genre-examples of what to my mind is the atmospherically unsurpassed pinnacle decade of British television drama. The Exorcism is one of three surviving episodes from the portmanteau serial Dead of Night, which was very much the anthological complement to the BBC’s classic Ghost Stories for Christmas; while Robin Redbreast, though stylistically indistinguishable from both aforementioned portmanteau series –the usual video-studio/film-location split typical of Seventies television– was nonetheless a one-off teleplay (the colour print of which, slightly annoyingly, no longer exists), as was also, for example, the truly unsettling, uncannily authentic and atmospheric masterpiece Schalcken the Painter (1979), which was broadcast a year after its natural anthological home, Ghost Stories for Christmas, had officially ceased. 

It would seem appropriate perhaps to also include in this review the equally eerie portmanteau series of the same era, Supernatural (1977), which includes some truly spine-chilling episodes, but the reason for focusing here on just two specific teleplays from among this nostalgic BFI crop is twofold: firstly, both star the almost-forgotten but prodigiously gifted actress Anne Cropper –who first shot to notice with her compelling portrayal of a young schizophrenic in the David Mercer and Ken Loach’s remarkable Laingian teleplay, In Two Minds (1967; which was later remade for the cinema as Family Life, 1971); and secondly, both are in different ways forms of ‘dialectical drama’, a scriptural style almost unique to Sixties and Seventies television.

Don Taylor’s rather deceptively titled The Exorcism –which truly deserved a much more specific and evocative title to do justice to its thematic complexity– is that even rarer thing: a ‘socialist ghost story’, or what one might term, a dialectical immaterialist dramatisation. Taylor was an openly political playwright and director of the Sixties and Seventies who claimed at one point in his career to have been blacklisted for his Marxism. He collaborated with fellow socialist dramatist David Mercer on a number of hugely significant socialist-realist teleplays and screenplays during the Sixties, including Where the Difference Begins (1961), A Climate of Fear (1962), Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment (1962) and And Did Those Feet? (1965). 

The four achingly middle-class but reasonably cultured and intellectualised ‘champagne socialist’ protagonists serve as a kind of dialectical quartet representing the incipient collapse of the socialistic post-war consensus, personifying the nascent acquisitiveness only just asserting itself in the early Seventies, which wouldn’t reach full philistine ripeness until the following decade, so was, at this point, at least still as intellectually as it was materialistically acquisitive. And this vestigial tilt towards egalitarian instincts, in spite of dialogic signs of incipient cupidity and propertied aspiration, is the redemptive pivot for Taylor’s social morality tale over which the supernatural aspects are almost superimposed more for metaphorical effect than anything else. 

The Exorcism is essentially a parable for poverty in the midst of plenty which ingeniously uses an almost time-travelling narrative device of a haunting in a refurbished Jacobean house to impress the point that “the poor are always with us” –not only those of our own time, but the ghosts of those from our cultural past; and, symbolically, that these spirits still inhabit the very stones and beams of the once-peasant but now prestige-properties of a future bourgeoisie. Taylor’s ghosts are Marxist skeletons rattling in the closets of the renovated retreats of contemporary conspicuous consumption. 

The script to The Exorcism is perhaps the most openly politicised of any ghost story before or since: in what other ‘ghost’ story would one encounter two characters deconstructing their own ‘champagne socialism’ over aperitifs –in this case, the two males of the quarter, the host, Edmund (played impeccably by Edward Petheridge), who shows some contrition for his Marxist father’s distaste for his capitalistic occupation in Public Relations, and his more sanguinely epicurean, cosmopolitan socialite guest, Dan (a bravura performance by a side-burned and neck-scarved Clive Swift –his name presumably a reference to his Dandyish dress-sense), who somewhat complacently, not to say contradictorily, recommends to Edmund that one should focus on “how to be socialists, and rich”. 

The Exorcism’s very pointed ‘politics-on-the-sleeves’ aside, the emphasis on moral retribution and sacrificial redemption in Taylor’s script does echo some former socialistically-tinged ‘covert supernatural’ polemical literary works, such as Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and J.B. Priestley’s play An Inspector Calls. While its peculiar depiction of gustatory-haunting, employed to emphasise a polemical juxtaposition of peasant-class starvation in the mid-seventeenth century with the moral poverty that underpins the conspicuous consumption of both past and present, which manifests in the protagonists’ physical repulsion at the taste of the food and drink they’re attempting to consume (the male host spits out the red wine declaring that it’s blood, while the other eaters suffer throat-burning convulsions after eating some of the food) and their growing realisation that they are inexplicably trapped inside the house, recalls aspects to Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s magical realist polemic on bourgeois decadence, The Exterminating Angel (1962, Mexico), in which the privileged guests at a mansion dinner party become psychologically imprisoned in a music room and almost starve to death (these influences are pointed out by BFI National Archive curator Lisa Kerrigan in her critical analysis for the brochure). Significantly, too, both of these psychical incidents –or supernatural happenings– appear to be presaged by female characters tinkling wistful tunes at pianos, which seem to alter the respective atmospheres. 

The historical period chosen by Taylor, apparently –though not implicitly in terms of scriptural reference– that of the English Civil War is quite deliberate, being the difficult birth of English mercantilism, which in turn mutated into modern capitalism, the rarefied fruits of which are being conspicuously appreciated by the four protagonists prior to their psychically spoilt appetites and subsequently retributive abstemiousness (which, as the narration details by the end, leads to their own fatal starvations). BFI curator Kerrigan also picks up on the situational and atmospheric similarities between Taylor’s teleplay and the Nigel Kneale-penned During Barty’s Party, which he directed for the later anthology series Beasts (1976). 

But it will also be clear to those who are familiar with the supremely atmospheric and unsettling ATV series Sapphire & Steel (1979-82) that some key aspects to The Exorcism formed perhaps an unconscious template for aspects to P.J. Hammond’s pseudo-sci-fi series: specifically, an old isolated country house which appears to subtly warp into some form of time disruption (S&S Adventure One/ ‘Escape Through a Crack in Time’, 1979), an overlap of the modern day (late Seventies) with, again, the English Civil War period, triggered by parents’ sudden disappearance after a recitation of the ‘Ring a Ring O’ Roses’ nursery rhyme; and another isolated country mansion which also seems to slip back in time, to the 1930s, which is the theme of a fancy-dress dinner party, and where the protagonists also become inexplicably trapped inside the house which is engulfed in a starless darkness, as happens in The Exorcism (S&S Adventure Five/ ‘Dr. McDee Must Die’, 1981; the only S&S story, however, not penned by Hammond, but by Don Houghton and Anthony Read). 

The impeccable character actor Clive Swift, staple of Seventies supernatural chamber-drama, puts in another of his effortlessly nuanced performances as the almost implausibly likeable, wine-ruminating, dapper-suited Dan, the epitome of suburban boho-chic in neck scarf and broad-lapelled jacket. The almost Plantagenet-profiled and underrated Edward Petheridge also puts in a brilliant performance, particularly when trying to grasp the prospect of his own insanity at being the only person at the table whose glass of Châteauneuf-du-Pape tastes like haemoglobin; Petheridge is an inexplicably neglected actor whose most prominent roles in the Seventies were as the prime minister’s son in John Bowen and Jonathan Hales’ 1971 dystopian serial The Guardians, and as the eighteenth century landed inheritor of a witch’s curse in the 1975 David Rudkin adaptation of M.R. James’ The Ash Tree, part of the Ghost Stories for Christmas portmanteau series. 

But undoubtedly the acting honours go most conspicuously to Anne Cropper, an actress who really should have become much more recognised than she was, and whose frankly astronomical acting talent is often absurdly overshadowed by her having been married to the better-known but comparatively lightweight actor William Roache, and mother of actor Linus Roache. Cropper has impressed me in everything I’ve seen her in –particularly her staggering portrayal of a young schizophrenic in In Two Minds (1967), but her performance in The Exorcism comes a very close second. Of particular note is her long and rambling possession-soliloquy which is shot in the most intrusive and protracted close-up I think I’ve ever watched, the anguished, spittle-mouthed Cropper acting ‘her socks off’ while intoning an agonisingly tragic monologue of the spirit of a peasant woman who died of starvation along with her children in the 1640s. The lingering spirit of this woman has willed the very bricks and beams of the house never to forget the partitioned perishing of herself and her children, which wasn’t even noted by anyone local at the time it happened –as is often the case, painfully gradual death through abject poverty is often made all the more iniquitous by a cruel circumstantial obscurity, which, metaphysically speaking, would indeed leave a very bitter spiritual aftertaste. 

The climax of The Exorcism is quite possibly the most shocking I have ever seen in any television dramatisation of the period, or even beyond it: the middle-class quartet enter a room which appears to be a portal into the past aftermath of the woman and children’s deaths by starvation, and the BBC effects department came up trumps with some chillingly realistic corpses replete with brittle frizzes of hair, presumably made from wax or some similar substance –and the zoom-in on the mother’s cadaver is truly disturbing, her dead eyes staring up at a thatched ceiling in an eerily dim-lit attic bedroom, mouth locked wide-open in rigor mortis as if gasping for air or for the nourishment so chronically denied her. 

Cropper proves her versatility as an actress in her more pivotal role in John Bowen’s Robin Redbreast (Play for Today, 1970), which was released by the BFI around the same time as the Dead of Night and Supernatural portmanteaus last year. Here Cropper plays the metropolitan Norah Palmer, a script editor, very much the self-determining middle-class ‘career woman’ of her time, who seeks some emotional respite after a relationship breakdown by staying at a detached country cottage she’s recently purchased as a holiday retreat. No sooner has she arrived at her countrified retreat –of indeterminate location, though possibly meant to be somewhere in Norfolk– Norah is greeted by her granite-faced housekeeper, Mrs Vigo, who has a habit of disembowelling chickens by hand in the kitchen sink; and by a rather impertinently proprietorial local man called Fisher (played with supremely restrained rustic menace by the slit-eyed, high-cheekboned and bony-nosed Bernard Hepton) who lets himself in through the garden gate asking if he can potter about the rockeries in search of some “sherds” (‘potsherds’, a type of prehistoric pottery). 

Rather antediluvian in tweed-suit and hat and old countrified manner and accent (not to say vernacular), and apparently proud of the fact that neither he nor his the last few generations of his family have ever set foot outside the village, Fisher is very much a “sherd” himself, and his unfalteringly fixed, slanting gaze and rather ill-mannered habit of perpetual oral-rumination on some indeterminate cud –presumably a blade of grass?– furnishes the impression of a man who is inseparable from his rural environment, and in an unspoken conspiratorial partnership with the very landscape. Hepton’s perfectly pitched portrayal of the inscrutable “sherd”-nosing Fisher arguably overshadows even Cropper’s highly nuanced performance, and to some extent prefigures the similar, though more sympathetic, character he played in the spine-chilling 1989 television adaptation of Susan Hill’s Norfolk-located ghost story, The Woman In Black. 

Fisher’s countrified ‘gentleman’-cum-druidic-conduit is of a character-type which crops up in a whole pedigree of similarly Wicca-preoccupied serials (part inspired by a resurgence in pagan ideas which came with the publication of Witchcraft Today (1954) by Gerald Gardner (or ‘Scire’ as the ‘Wiccan’ was also known) following the repeal of the Witchcraft Act of that decade – teleplays and screenplays of the period from the late Sixties through to the mid Seventies, but which reached its apex during the early Seventies in particular (and in this sense, Bowen’s play was something of a trend-setter): Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man (1973), Iain Cuthbertson’s equally menacing country squire Hendrick in Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray’s Children of the Stones (HTV, 1976), and the Michael Aldridge’s Merlin-esque Professor Young in Raven (ATV, 1977). 

There are also of course echoes in Robin Redbreast of other near-contemporaneous depictions of the clash between modern metropolitan ‘permissive society’ and the ironically even more ‘permissive’ rural pagan past, as in Sam Pekinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man (1972), David Rudkin’s Play for Today, the Manichean masterpiece Penda’s Fen (1972), and Clive Exton’s teleplay Stigma (Ghost Stories for Christmas, 1977); while Bowen’s template was adumbrated in earlier supernatural films featuring the incursions of witchcraft into the modern day, such as Night of the Demon (1957), Night of the Eagle (1962), The Witches (1967), The Devil Rides Out (1967), and Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), with which Robin Redbreast shares the central theme of a pregnancy shrouded in weird superstitions (these observations noted by BFI curator Victor Pratt in brochure contribution). 

Similarly to Lord Summerisle’s ceremonial self-revealing in bizarre pagan garb near the end of The Wicker Man, Fisher in Robin Redbreast is finally revealed in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it parting shot in a long cowl with stag antlers protruding from his head (alongside Vigo and other locals who are apparently more than simply the proverbial coven, but actual pagan demiurges, as signified by their similar garbs, one clutching a Reaper-like scythe) –while earlier in the play, during a dream sequence, Fisher is depicted staring through cracked spectacles and holding a dead hare. The rather strange montage of stills of dead animals, harvest crops, barley, corn, straw and large elaborately decorated loves of bread laid out at the foot of the local church’s altar also strikingly prefigure the montage of eerie stills of similarly adorned harvest offerings in a scene during The Wicker Man.

It is in the cultural treatment of Norah’s pregnancy, the result of a purely carnal dalliance with a young Aryan karate-training yokel called Rob (i.e. ‘Robin’), that Robin Redbreast has its most shocking polemical kick: contemplating an abortion, Norah’s un-empathic iciness towards the innocent young Rob on his pleading with her not “to kill his child” is quite disturbing to witness, even if she subsequently breaks down with proleptic remorse for what she is planning to do –and, finally, relents, and decides to carry the child. Here Bowen’s polemic on the ethical quandaries of then only recently legalised foetal terminations (re the Abortion Act 1967) packs a real punch; while contraception is depicted in a similarly clinical way, as if to emphasise the sterile pragmatics of contemporary secular culture, as we witness Norah rifling in her dresser and producing a plastic container significantly missing its Dutch cap (quite a graphic scene of social-sexual realism for 1970). But Norah’s decision not to interfere with Nature’s process is made all the more ironic, in the end, by the revelation that, as with the father, Rob, the child, if a boy, will also one day be ritually decapitated so that the spill of his blood should replenish the barren soils and bring an abundance of crops for the village. And here again the parallels with Rosemary’s Baby and The Wicker Man can be seen in the narrative terms of foregone offspring and pagan human sacrifice, respectively. 

Both The Exorcism and Robin Redbreast, linked not only in terms of narratives and style, but also by the central performances of Anne Cropper, are two exceptional examples of the atmospherically and scripturally peerless ‘television as theatre’ of the Seventies. To my mind, The Exorcism is marginally the superior of the two, mainly for its more claustrophobic and entirely studio-bound scenario, nuanced characters, aphoristic script and almost unique splicing together of Marxist dialectics and the paranormal. Taylor’s play also has slightly more sympathetic –if still moderately irritating– characters who at least demonstrate a transformational remorse through their very empirical lesson in under-consumption; while it says much about the dearth of sympathetic characters in Robin Redbreast that the most likeable and perversely endearing is a rather simple-minded bumpkin whose favourite coffee-table topic is the hierarchical structure of the Third Reich. 

Robin Rebdreast is also of course part of the Dead of Night portmanteau, and one of the other two existing episodes, Paul Ciappessoni’s morosely engrossing A Woman Sobbing, featuring a spectacular performance from the inimitable Anna Massey, is another excellent slice of Seventies supernatural drama well worth viewing –as well as being a compelling feministic reworking of the ‘mad woman in the attic’ literary form, arguably piloted in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), distilled in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s harrowingly poetic The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), both of which works were revisited, in Daphne du Maurier’s Jayne-Eyre-esque Rebecca (1938), and Jean Rhys’s Jane Eyre-prequel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), and the latter, partly, in Ingmar Bergman’s film Through a Glass Darkly (1961); while later still, Fay Weldon’s teleplay Watching Me Watching You (her contribution to the Leap in the Dark portmanteau series 1973-80) furnished a similar neurotic-cum-supernatural female-centred scenario to A Woman Sobbing. The Recusant recommends both BFI releases, which are perfect complements to one another and come with exceptionally in-depth accompanying brochures. 

The Exorcism: 10/10

Robin Redbreast: 8/10

A.M. 7 May 2014

©

Alan Morrison on

An Englishman’s Castle

By Philip Mackie

Directed by Paul Ciappessoni

BBC, 1978

(Simply Home Entertainment)

1990

By Wilfred Greatorex

and Edmund Ward, Jim Hawkins, Arden Winch

Directed by Alan Gibson, David Sullivan Proudfoot, Kenneth Ives, Rob Bird, 

Peter Sasdy, Roger Tucker

BBC, 1977-8

(Simply Home Entertainment)

Memories of the Future

Nostalgia TV distributor Simply Home Entertainment recently released two exceptional yet never-repeated BBC dystopian television drama serials, the uchronian An Englishman’s Castle, set in an alternate Seventies when England is governed vicariously by a victorious Nazi Germany which defeated and occupied it some time in the early Forties; and 1990, advertised at the time with the strapline ‘1984 plus 6’, set in a near-future ‘socialist’/statist England under the constant intrusive surveillance of the Public Control Department (PCD). 

Each of these nightmarish visions, one an alternate history morality tale, the other, a dystopian prediction of the shape of things to come, is a typical example of the richly written, brilliantly acted dramatic standards of their era, the Seventies, when edgy, controversial and intellectually challenging scripts competed for more committed audiences swamped with far more diversity of programming over just three television channels than one can find in the hundreds of indistinct channels at our disposal today.

In many ways An Englishman’s Castle (BBC, 1978) could act as a more armchair-inclined sequel to Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s gritty 1964 documentary-style film, It Happened Here –whereas the latter depicts the wartime occupation of England by the Nazis (though it’s hinted at towards its end that the English resistance might be getting the upper hand), the former TV serial depicts England three decades on from its initial occupation, ostensibly self-governing again, but really just a Vichy-style vassal state of a still-existent and triumphant Nazi Germany (or, more probably, Fascist Europe). 

Philip Mackie’s supremely subtle dramatisation feels all the more chilling and eerie for the invisibility of the Nazi overlords: there are no stomping jackboots or swastikas or Gestapo nor even any particularly Nazi-like characters –only Anthony Bate’s admittedly very Aryan, but British, television controller, Harmer, who ends up paying an ultimate price for failing to persuade his most popular scriptwriter, Peter Ingram, to drop a controversially sympathetic Jewish character from his popular eponymous soap opera, which is set in London in 1940 just at the point that England falls to the Germans. 

(Ingram is played by an excellently restrained Kenneth More, halcyon screen stalwart of stiff-upper-lipped British types, but whose performance here is a revelation –and also adumbrates the similar part of a middle-aged television presenter manipulated into hosting a new right-wing evangelical TV station, played by his screen contemporary, Dirk Bogarde, in the similarly dystopian BBC drama, The Vision, broadcast ten years later, and also recently released by Simply Home Entertainment).  

Ingram’s seeming obliviousness to the shady workings of this dystopian England serves as a metaphor for the collaborationist mentality, while the character buries his head in the last-gasped nostalgia of his soap opera’s pre-Nazi setting. Indeed, Ingram’s antiestablishment insurgent son accuses him of being what is termed a ‘delator’, or collaborator; certainly Ingram could be seen as a creative apparatchik of the status quo through his part-propagandist soap opera (his other, more conformist, son is –presumably by nepotism– its producer). But gradually the traumas of the nation’s past start to affect Ingram again as reality seeps back in through the greasepaint like a damp residue of despair, and ultimately he makes a stand against the unacceptable present. 

That the fascism is camouflaged throughout, and the English characters by and large attempt to go about their lives as if nothing has really changed, in a kind of national and cultural denial of the long-term traumatic effects of invasion, occupation, a failed resistance, and associated retributive atrocities perpetrated against their numbers by the victors, gives An Englishman’s Castle an all-pervasive air of thundery unease and repressed dread. 

It’s almost as if the fact of England’s vassalage to Nazi Germany isn’t something to be completely admitted to, while any mention of the extermination of the English Jews has become a taboo never to be verbalised, and whenever it is in some sense, the characters have a tacit mutual understanding that they mustn’t delve too deep into the topic since officially it has all been ‘forgotten’ (this seems like a subtle counter-play on the post-Censorship Spanish Historical Memory Law, which purposed to proscribe cultural recriminations from the Spanish Civil War, recognising victims and atrocities on both sides, albeit openly condemning Franco’s regime). In this context, the Jewish character Ingram brings unexpectedly into his soap opera to the exasperation of his boss can be seen as an expression of this repressed cultural guilt borne by all English Gentiles. 

The drama has an almost uncanny, dream-like quality of barely-disguised nightmare in its blending of the contemporarily familiar with more disturbing and unfamiliar aspects, and in atmospheric terms looks forward to the similarly eerie adaptation of John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids just three years later (itself taking much from the equally apocalyptic Survivors, 1975-77): in both series, there are moments of normality during which the characters seem to almost forget the nightmares that adumbrate their days, only to be suddenly reminded of them again. But there are no Triffids in An Englishman’s Castle, no visible fascists or ghastlies, only certain words, phrases and terms that trigger sore memories of a ghastly past which haunts the faintly traumatised present, and which gradually gnaws away at the self-protective complacency of the main protagonist. In An Englishman’s Castle, it is language that is the gatekeeper of the past, and the jailer of the present.

Wilfred Greatorex’s 1990, adapted from his own novel and broadcast on BBC 2 for two series from 1977-8 –so contemporaneous to An Englishman’s Castle– is a very different take on a near-future England. In 1990, Britain has become a superficially ‘socialist’ state but is in practice anything but: it is still deeply stratified and a person’s status is determined by their ‘LifeScore’ and underlying every aspect to this dystopian society is a detectable eugenicist rationale. For instance, dissidents are ‘re-educated’ in ‘psychiatric pseudo-hospitals’ called ‘Adult Rehabilitation Centres’ where they are ‘cured’ by ECT; many prisoners are sent there after having been forced-fed ‘misery pills’, or ‘Oral Swallowing Induction Devices’, which render them clinically depressed, the guinea-pigs for which have been sourced from inmates at Ashworth Asylum for the Genetically Defective (basically Broadmoor); and the Genetic Crimes Act 1985 re-established capital punishment, but only for sexual offences. 

The snooping Public Control Department (PCD) is the Stasi-like institutional monolith of Greatorex’s nightmare society, whose unscrupulous Controller, Herbert Skardon, is played with great relish by the gravelly-voiced Robert Lang. The press is state-owned, and thus censored –at least, all of it except for The Star, one of whose rogue reporters, Jim Kyle (Edward Woodward), is also a dissident. This is a bureaucratic union-dominated dictatorship which it would seem is Greaterorex’s personal projection of how Britain might have become had the then-perceived union-manipulated mid-to-late Seventies Labour Government continued through the Eighties. In this particular alternate future history, Britain became bankrupt in 1981, fell to Martial Law, followed by a rigged election in which only 20% voted. It is a society of ‘three day weeks’, ‘closed shops’ (Seventies’ realities), ubiquitous wintry shopping precincts, Brutalist architecture, austerity, rationing, and illicit perks for those in power, most notably the employees of the PCD. 

It is perhaps a great irony that Greatorex’s vision for a future Britain has proven uncannily prescient at many levels and in many prophetic details but with one single adjustment: the oppressive bureaucratic ‘austerity’ dystopia predicted in 1990 has at least partially come about not under a ‘socialist’ government but under a capitalist Tory one, and a particularly right-wing one at that. But in terms of bureaucratic brutalities against marginalised and vulnerable citizens and ‘hostile environment’ we are very much there in Greatorex’s anti-society. 

The parallels to our post-Crash austerity Britain of today are chilling: for just one example –though intended by Greatorex as a comment on the ‘three day week’ of the time he wrote in– the government claims full employment by enforcing job sharing, which foreshadows the ‘zero hours contracts’ and general insecurity of so many of today’s exploited ‘precariat’ part-time workforce. 

In the opening episode, ‘Creed of Slaves’, we witness a scapegoat society exactly like ours today, which stigmatises the unemployed as “scroungers”, the temporarily sick as “malingerers”, and tars all those claiming state benefits while apparently ‘fit for work’ with “parasitism” (unfortunately, even in the mid-Seventies under a Labour Government, the phenomenon of ‘scroungerphobia’, promulgated then as it is today by the right-wing red tops, reached its first peak, so much so that it inspired a brilliantly powerful Play for Today, The Spongers (1977, Jim Allen/Roland Joffé), and was tackled extensively in Pete Golding’s polemical book Images of Welfare (1983)). 

But what makes for particularly compelling, uncomfortable and uncanny viewing amid our horrendous modern day pestilence of the notorious DWP brown envelope, is one particular episode of 1990, from its second series, titled, ‘Ordeal By Small Brown Envelope’. While the focus of this episode isn’t specifically about correspondence for the unemployed, its symbolism of spirit-crushing bureaucratic missives gradually grinding down its citizen victim speaks volumes today against the backdrop of our contemporary brown envelope spectres. 

The victim of these vicious missives is Kyle’s manipulated superior at The Star, the chain-smoking Tom Doram, a formerly truth-telling reporter who was frightened into submissiveness by the PCD and put in place to not so much edit as censor Kyle’s stories, played superbly by Clive Swift. Doram is targeted by the PCD as a guinea-pig in the implementation of its prototype policy of ‘Authorised Systematic Harassment’. ‘ASH’, as it is abbreviated, basically involves a campaign of government correspondence sent to a selected victim which incrementally informs them of unexpected vicissitudes such as impossible debt repayment demands prompting repossessions of goods such as cars, occupational demotion and thus income diminishment, and general downgrading of status which involves having to move into shabbier accommodation and ultimately to be ostracised as a ‘non-citizen’ and become an outcast. 

ASH also involves very subtle but intrusive visible harassment such as having Doram’s wife and children followed about by men in suits when out shopping, and being visited and intimidated at home by uninvited government bailiffs. In the end, realising that they will inevitably be driven out of society as ‘non-citizens’, Doram and his wife decide the kindest thing for their children is to put them to sleep on barbiturates in the back of a car and top themselves afterwards on carbon monoxide fumes. The terrible irony of these particular methods are that Doram gets the sleeping pills from Kyle, and borrows his car for the purposes (having had his own repossessed). 

This macabre conclusion to the episode also echoes that of the aforementioned The Spongers, where the impoverished single mother whose disabled daughter has had her invalidity benefit cut by the state on spurious grounds, ends up poisoning herself and her children with an overdose of sleeping pills dissolved in a nightcap of warm milk. Both characters are the victims of bureaucratic persecution, fatalities of premeditated and merciless government correspondences. The likes of Iain Duncan Smith and Esther McVey should be made to watch these Seventies depictions of our DWP-menaced present by means of ‘re-education’. 

There are some particularly poignant moments in this particular episode: a scene when arriving home, Doram’s greeted by his ground-down wife clutching a pile of more brown envelopes gloomily intoning that she couldn’t face opening them; another scene in which the PCD Deputy (and, somewhat implausibly, love interest of Kyle) who came up with ASH –although as a dummy policy intended to be leaked to The Star– disapproves of her boss’s implementation of it, referring to it as an authorised version of ‘Chinese water torture’ preceded by the phrase ‘drop, drop’ in response to Skardon’s poetic but distinctly un-ironic trope: ‘The slow and noiseless steamroller of the state. The daily brown envelope dropping on the mat’. 

And so Dorman is ‘harassed to death’, or ‘murdered by the state’, as Kyle phrases it in his follow-up story. The only concession made to the resulting tragedy by the chief operator of the ASH experiment, the spectacled Gestapo-like Chief Bailiff Hayes, is that future targets of ASH should be psychologically vetted first to lower the risk of suicide, so that they are made ‘to approach the edge but never pass it’. Perhaps this is the rationale of our modern day DWP in relation to welfare cuts, sanctions and the Atos-facilitated work capability assessments for the sick and disabled, all of which have so far, since 2010, claimed the lives of over 90,000 of our most vulnerable citizens, inclusive of hundreds of suicides (likely now to be much higher since death statistics are no longer recorded by government, apparently, since around 2014). 

Fortunately, Kyle and his dissident associates exact a fitting revenge on ASH operator Hayes using precisely the same bureaucratic methods to destroy him and his entire family, including even distant relatives –in one scene, the mock-‘socialistic’ ethics of this State are subtly hinted at when one of Kyle’s avenging associates, masquerading as a PCD operative, informs one of Hayes’ cousins claiming privileged status because of his familial connection that in their society ‘privilege is something always subject to re-examination’. 

It is only the occasional line such as this, and the emphasis on Soviet-style Statism, that reminds the modern viewer that this is supposed to be a ‘socialist’ state; it also betrays Greatorex’s limited interpretation of socialism –his masterful depiction of pernicious bureaucracy is very much in accordance with Max Weber’s seminal analysis (based on the German civil service), what he termed the “iron cage”, the impersonal paper prison of proscriptive correspondence and protocols which control all of our lives, and which is every bit as prevalent in capitalist society as it is/was in socialist or communist societies.

It’s open to speculation as to whether Greatorex had seen The Guardians (LWT, 1971) prior to writing 1990, but the similarities are striking: Rex Firkin and Vincent Tilsley’s dystopian vision of the near-future, although oppositely set in a fascist Britain (so in that sense something in common with AEC), policed by the eponymous government militia, but featured some very similar themes and memes to those later depicted in1990, such as political dissidents and subversives being impounded in pseudo-psychiatric hospitals where they are doped on drugs (in this case, cannabis, so as to render them apathetic) and subjected to ECT and other forceful methods of ‘re-education’. But one curious difference between the two settings is that in The Guardians, far from stigmatising the unemployed, the fascist government appeases public discontent among a large population of long-term unemployed by raising state benefits. But I direct readers to my previous extensive review of The Guardians on The Recusant here. 

It remains an interesting and probably very telling fact that none of the excellently polemical and challenging dramas mentioned in this article were ever repeated –were they perhaps too near the knuckle for the powers that be of the time to permit them to be shown to the public a second time round? Well, thanks to the ambitious distributors at Simply Home Entertainment, all bar The Spongers (which was mysteriously ‘removed’ from YouTube some years’ back) can now be viewed on unlimited repeats via DVD.  

Both An Englishman’s Castle and 1990 are strongly recommended for all lovers of politically engaged Seventies dystopian drama. 

An Englishman’s Castle 10/10

1990 10/10

Alan Morrison © 2018

David Nobbs R.I.P.

The Recusant wishes to pay brief tribute to novelist and television writer David Nobbs, who passed away on the 9^th August 2015, aged 80. we can think of no better way of paying tribute to Nobbs’ sublime gifts at polemical black comedy fiction than reminiscing a while on perhaps his most acclaimed and certainly greatest achievement, the chronicles of nervously-exhausted middle-management, chalk-striped Surbiton commuter, Reginald Iolanthe Perrin (initials R.I.P.), played by the inimitable, raven-profiled comic character actor, Leonard Rossiter (to this writer’s mind, the Peter Sellers of the small screen). 

This writer grew up on such brilliantly written, bittersweet television fare as The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976-79), a series which, in his infant years, rather perplexed and even disturbed him. For Reginald Perrin was no ordinary Seventies sitcom (a la the originally satirical but later more routine and cosy The Good Life), but was, essentially, the chronicling of a middle-class, middle-aged man’s gradual descent into barely contained nervous breakdown and ‘controlled’ disintegration of identity, which leads up to a now legendary ‘faked suicide’ by drowning off the Dorset coast (in seeming homage to Thomas Hardy’s Sgt. Troy, in Far From the Madding Crowd, who also faked his own suicide by drowning off the Dorset coast). The eponymous character also reminded him quite uncannily of his equally nervous father who was commuting from Worthing to London every day on British Rail, replete with trademark pinstriped suit. 

Oddly, what used to disturb me the most as a child viewer of Reginald Perrin was the seemingly impenetrable, distant-eyed, almost Stepford Wives-insipidness of his suburban housewife Elizabeth (played by Pauline Yates, who passed away in January this year). Her insouciance strikes a formidable stumbling-block for authentic emotional contact with her husband “Reggie”, and the two continue to drift, almost dream-like, through a suburban existence of mind-numbing routine and ritual (a small glass of Sherry every evening after work before settling down with orange napkins for dinner). Even Reggie’s perpetual lateness arriving at the office every day due to train delays becomes something of an implicit ritual, always “fifteen minutes late” for such gloriously alliterative reasons as “juggernaut jack-knifed at Gerard’s Cross”.

But Elizabeth displays hidden depths of intuitiveness further into the series, particularly during the second, when she knowingly pretends to be mourning her apparently ‘late’ husband, while secretly realising that her new suitor, Martin Wellbourne, a hitherto un-talked about ‘old friend’ of Reggie’s who emigrated to Peru (which triggers an hilarious exchange at Reggie’s ‘wake’: “What’s it like in Venezuela in the winter?” “Peru” “Okay, so what’s it like in Peru in the winter?” “Chilly”) is in fact Reggie returned disguised in a wig, false beard and spray-on tan. Reggie morbidly revels in being a witness at both his own funeral and wake, even if it simply drums home how relatively little he is actually being ‘mourned’, since most of his relatives and old friends appear relatively sanguine, albeit still affectionately nostalgic about him. 

The three series of Reginald Perrin are ingeniously thought out: the first, and probably the best in many respects, charts his gradual office-bound decline into mid-life crisis and suicide-faking anomie; the second charts his return, initially incognito,  and the birth of his surprisingly successful anti-capitalist shop empire, Grot, which sells completely useless albeit distinctive products (a kind of satire on the built-in obsolescence of capitalist manufacturing); and the third, and perhaps most underrated, charts his last ditch attempt to circumnavigate materialistic existence through a suburban-based commune experiment for the “middle-class, middle-aged and middle-minded” seeking to get out of the ‘rat race’. 

In an almost Hardyesque –even Sophoclean– temporal paradox, the circularity of Perrin’s destiny mirrors that of the daily mouse-wheel commute from which he struggles to extricate himself in the first series: his community, the self-effacingly named Perrin’s, is ultimately packed up after too many NIMBYish neighbourhood petitions, and Reggie ends up back in a dead-end office job and once again under the thumb of his original boss (at Sunshine Desserts) –and briefly his own employee at Grot– the dome-headed, gimlet-eyed ‘C.J.’ (revealed only in the original novel as initialling ‘Charles Jefferson’), played supremely by John Barron. C.J. has a fetish for giant cigars and farting chairs for his employees to squirm in as he bears down on them with his inscrutable screwed eyes from his raised altar-like desk, and has passed into popular legend for his indefatigable catchphrase, “I didn’t get where I am today….” (also later used by Nobbs as the title of his own autobiography), which precedes practically every single sentence he utters throughout the three series. The comedy chemistry between Rossiter and Barron as they frequently exchange razor-shop dialogic relay-races throughout the three series is among the most accomplished of any comedy pairing in television history.

But by the end of the series, ‘C.J.’ is himself subordinate to a higher boss, his own older brother, the even gruffer ‘F.J.’, while Reggie is in an inferior managerial position to his days at Sunshine Desserts, and similarly shackled with two excruciating younger executives whose catchphrases are “Smashing”/ “Terrific”. 

Reggie ends up, on a particularly sour note to the conclusion of the series, apparently arranging his own more certain suicide on the phone to his new secretary, his last lines –and those of the series– asking for the train times to the Dorset coast before mournfully placing the receiver back on the phone (though Nobbs’ brief revival of the series, the posthumous The Legacy of Reginald Perrin, revealed that Reggie had survived into the 90s, only to be killed by accident when a hoarding advertising the insurance company he was signed up to fell onto his head). 

It’s not only the three-dimensional characterisation of the eponymous ‘hero’ which distinguishes Reginald Perrin from any other ‘comedy’ series before or since (it was briefly ‘revived’ with Martin Clunes as a more lugubrious Reggie, and actually was fairly witty in its way, but not a match with the original), or, indeed, the multi-layered ‘journey’ of the narrative, but it’s also the almost neo-Dickensian ‘caricature’-style of the numerous incidental characters (indeed, the likes of C.J. might not have been completely out of place alongside such capitalistic parasites as Pecksniffe and Montague Tigg in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewitt). 

Nobbs had an undeniable genius for blackly comical creations, each with their quirks and personality-type-denoting catchphrases. Elizabeth’s hapless ex-military brother Jimmy (played superbly by hound-jowled Geoffrey Palmer) always starts his lugubrious monologues with “Frankly, bit of a cock up on the catering front…”; C.J.’s two young executives, the neurotic David and smug Tony, punctuate conversations with “Super” and “Great respectively; and even the incidental-incidental characters, such as the verbose Irish drifter Seamus, unlikely business genius employed for his perceived unsuitability to an executive role by Reggie, frequently alludes to his origins as being “from the land of the bogs and the little people”; while lard-faced curmudgeonly self-made Yorkshireman, Thruxton Appleby, constantly harps “If there’s one thing I admire it’s bare-faced cheek”; and psychopathically prickly, incomprehensible Scots Chef, McBlane, periodically complains about “Scrunges”! (Reggie: “How very distressing for you”). But these ‘Nobbsian’ caricatures are more than mere ciphers, just as Dickens’s were: they personify certain social types. 

At this juncture the reader may be aware that this writer is genuine fan of Reginald Perrin: on its repeats he caught the series again as an adult, taped it, and since watched the series several times over, in fact, almost ritually every other year, a ‘tradition’ rendered even more enjoyable by the DVD releases, which restored some of the slightly less ‘politically correct’ scenes to one or two later episodes. Ironically, as an adult, he appreciated the wit of the scripting and laughed far more than when he’d detected in it something almost subliminally unsettling as a child viewer. 

This writer really could bang on for pages about the multifarious aspects to Reginald Perrin which he’s grown up to admire so much for sheer genius of comic invention and comical polemic (the only comedy series which, in his opinion, comes close to the sheer majesty of Perrin, but for completely different qualities, is John Cleese’s frequently hysterical farce sit-com Fawlty Towers). And he’s no doubt that David Nobbs truly was a writer of ‘genius’ –largely observational genius, but genius nonetheless. Hectic narratives apart, it’s the sheer dialogical gold of the lines and poetically description-rich monologues in Perrin that stands the test of time and greatness (most notably of all perhaps, Reggie’s drunken/drug-induced soliloquy on nihilism at a fruit dessert conference, and his and Jimmy’s relay-race monologues on the social types likely to be alternately attracted to or baited by the latter’s newly conceived “secret army”; “long-haired layabouts… criminals… rapists… papists… papist rapists…” etc.). 

This writer uses the term ‘polemical’ very deliberately: for Perrin is nothing if not a gorgeously imaginative comedy polemic on the propensity of so many human beings to live completely in neglect of the imagination; Reggie is an example of a man whose imagination simply cannot be labelled, compartmentalised (excuse the semi-paraphrase from The Prisoner) and put away in a drawer for the daily grind –it has to have its belated vent, and when that begins, there’s no stopping it. Such office-bound polemic on clerical boredom and suited futility has since been tried again, but in more conventional sit-com guise –and perhaps most notably with It Takes A Worried Man (1981-83), written by and starring the talented Peter Tilbury– and none of these have ever bettered Nobbs’ supreme invention.

Reginald Perrin the TV series was of course adapted from David Nobbs’s original –and blacker– novels, The Death of Reginald Perrin (1975, later reissued as The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin), The Return of Reginald Perrin (1977) and The Better World of Reginald Perrin (1978), which this writer has read years ago and for the only time in his reading experience, genuinely laughed out loud throughout all three. 

In many ways, in my opinion, Nobbs’s Perrin novels are strongly reminiscent in clipped aphorismic prose style, polemical tone and sublimely figurative depiction of the suburban and mundane, of George Orwell’s early novels, particularly the blackly comical Keep the Aspidistra Flying! (1936), and the more serious Coming Up For Air (1939), in which the middle-aged protagonist, George Bowling, revisits childhood haunts in the village he grew up in, only to find it completely changed; interestingly, there’s a scene in the book when Bowling meets an old girlfriend ‘ravaged by time’, who doesn’t recognise him, while during the second series of Reginald Perrin, Reggie-in-disguise visits an old haunt of his childhood where he meets an old girlfriend serving behind the bar whom he doesn’t recognise). 

Had Orwell not lived in such momentous times and been diverted into more serious polemical material, one cannot help thinking that he might well have eventually churned out something even more similar to Nobbs’s Seventies creation. What is certainly clear today is just how prescient, even visionary, Reginald Perrin was, anticipating as it did the rise in bargain-basement and thrift stores selling essentially useless, or at least, worthless, products (Poundland, Poundshop, Poundworld et al), and in its irrepressibly anti-capitalist spirit. 

It only remains to say that Nobbs also wrote a number of other significant novels, most of which also became television series and spin-offs: A Bit of a Do (1986),

Pratt of the Argus (1988), and his last book, The Second Life of Sally Mottram (2014), as well as the non-novelised Perrin spin-off (‘Jimmy’’s solo outing), Fairly Secret Army (1984-86). 

David Gordon Nobbs, born on 13 March 1935, died 9 August 2015

Educated: Marlborough College and Cambridge University

Alan Morrison © 2015

Alan Morrison on

The Innocents

1961

(99 mins)

Directed by Jack Clayton

Cinematography Freddie Francis

Screenplay William Archibald, Truman Capote and John Mortimer

Music Georges Auric

From the short story The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Cast: Deborah Kerr, Michael Redgrave, Peter Wyngarde, Megs Jenkins, Pamela Franklin, Clytie Jessop, Isla Cameron

Since this truly haunting and deeply poetic masterpiece was recently revived in arts cinemas throughout the country, I thought it was an opportunity for me to briefly eulogise on what is quite possibly my favourite film of all time. As a child I remember my father talking with shivery nostalgia of The Innocents, a film he’d first seen as a young man when it was released in cinemas in 1961 (for me, one of the most interesting years for film), and in particular, he always spoke of a scene in which the main character, a sexually repressed governess, played with effortless neurotic élan by the pearl-skinned Deborah Kerr (in, for me, her single best performance, bar perhaps Black Narcissus (1947)), is sitting in a room when she is suddenly disturbed by a faint sobbing from behind her, only to turn her head and glimpse the shadowy figure of a lady sat at a desk framed by the light of a latticed window. This is one of many masterfully subtle and genuinely chilling scenes (many of which correspond perhaps the most authentically to real life accounts of paranormal experiences than practically anything else produced through cinema) throughout this exceptionally atmospheric ‘supernatural’ film, based on the Henry James short story The Turn of the Screw (1898); and having read the original story, I would say that the formidable writing triumvirate of Capote, Mortimer and Archibald more than do it justice in terms of adapting it for the screen, as do Jack Clayton and Freddie Francis as director and cinematographer, respectively. 

To my mind what stands out most strikingly in filmic terms in The Innocents is the beautifully haunting cinematography, and Francis already had prodigious cinematographic form prior to this film, being intensely gifted in both colour and black and white mediums (disputably, in this, only rivalled in cinema by Ingmar Bergman’s second and most iconic cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, who excelled in such stark chiaroscuro as Through a Glass Darkly (also 1961), as well as in the colouristic intensities of Cries and Whispers (1972) and Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976)): ironically his earlier work, in the 1950s, was significant for its rich use of colour –The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) and Moby Dick (1956)– whereas in the Sixties, Francis cultivated a talent for some of the most hypnotically poetic applications of crisp black and white, light and shadow, in the two ‘kitchen sink’ films, Room at the Top (1959) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), and pastoral, period settings of Sons and Lovers (1960) and The Innocents (and would later revive his singular gift for eerie and atmospheric chiaroscuro on David Lynch’s haunting The Elephant Man (1980) . 

Clayton would only ever come remotely close to his work on this atmospheric tour de force with The Pumpkin Eater (1964), but whereas that film is rather languorous and rambling, The Innocents is anything but: it is exceptionally purposeful, focused and disciplined, in spite of its poetically rich parabola and deeply ambiguous Freudian symbolisms. Indeed, the running subtext throughout the film is that it might just be possible the governess, Miss Giddens, who apparently alone can perceive the various apparitions about the house and grounds of her ‘situation’, is imagining them, and subconsciously sublimating her own repressed erotic passions vicariously through her two infant wards, whom she believes to be possessed by the nefarious spirits of two deceased servants –Miss Jessel (the aforementioned woman by the window) and Peter Quint, previous valet to the uncle-guardian and owner of the house – in turn, attempting to re-enact their doomed mortal love affair vicariously through the two children (the boy being disturbingly precocious in his very ‘adult’ and masculine manner towards the beautiful governess).  

And this is where The Innocents is particularly controversial, not to say, ahead of its time, in touching subtly but constantly on the almost unspoken taboo of ‘child love’, whereby it is suggested throughout the film that Miss Giddens harbours some strange kind of romantic attraction to the small boy (and this aspect inspired Kate Bush’s song ‘The Infant Kiss’ from her 1980 masterpiece Never For Ever). Clayton provides prolific symbolic nods to this disturbing subtext throughout, playing much on the ambiguity of subtle gestures and facial expressions among the main protagonists, such as dare not speak their names, thoughts that mustn’t ever be uttered –and Miss Giddens’ primness and scrupulosity of ‘responsible’, over-protective conduct towards her charges expresses much of this repressed feeling in an absolutely fascinating and mesmerising meditation on the murky interface between the erotic and the neurotic. 

The ambiguities as to whether the ghosts of Miss Jessel and Quint are actual manifestations sensed and/or seen by all in the house, or only, as it sometimes seems, by Miss Giddens, and perhaps simply phantasmagorical symptoms of her own sexual repression and psychosis, are what makes the film so affecting on so many different levels. The apparitions might also be phantasmagorical symptoms of the children’s past traumas at the depraved hands of Quint and Jessel; certainly there are hints in the script that Jessel’s wards might have been exposed to her and Quint’s sexual acts, or even sexually abused by them. It is in the suggestions, the hints, the rumours, the unconscious whispers of associations made in the imagination that makes The Innocents so psychologically haunting – “something whispery and secretive”, as Giddens says at one point. There is also the following chillingly omissive exchange which brilliantly typifies the script’s power of suggestion: 

GROSE: Rooms … used by daylight … as though they were dark woods…

GIDDENS: They didn’t care that you saw them? [GROSE shakes her head]. And the children?

GROSE: I can’t say Miss … I don’t know what the children saw… But they used to follow Quint and Miss Jessel, trailing along behind, hand-in-hand, whispering… There was too much whispering in this house Miss…

The apparitions continue to haunt the house and its grounds –one particularly memorable and genuinely unnerving scene being when the governess seemingly alone can see the dark figure of a woman dressed in widows weeds stood in the bulrushes at some distance, whereupon she almost hysterically attempts to force the young girl with her to stare back at the figure and admit she can also see her. From this point on the film, the possibility that Miss Giddens is essentially suffering a form of nervous breakdown (or hallucinatory psychosis) –possibly induced through sexual repression– seems to come more to the fore; although towards the end of the film, the alleged ‘ghosts’ (or figments of Miss Giddens’ fevered imagination) become more visible –most shockingly in a shot which first exposes Quint’s viscerally malignant face peering impudently through a window, staring straight at the governess as if ocularly undressing her, courtesy of the imposingly sculpted, tawny Peter Wyngarde (in a much more memorable, albeit mute, appearance in a supernatural film than his lead role in the following year’s fairly risible Night of the Eagle); and even grow more tangible, with the revenant valet’s grasping hands towards the tragic climax. 

In the end, Miss Giddens, driven consciously by the most honourable and protective of instincts towards her young ‘possessed’ charges, is depicted as potentially not only delusional but also inadvertently responsible for a kind of psychical infanticide via obsessive salvific fervour: her feverish attempt at ‘saving the soul’ of the young boy, forcing him to face Quint’s apparition while clutching his small body tight to her own, seems, almost unavoidably, to also involve the very relinquishing of his life force –almost like a symbolic purification through psychical immersion, and drowning. This is of course precisely the opposite outcome the governess wishes for, and Kerr expresses Giddens’ horrified disbelief after realising the price that has been paid for ridding her charge of the malevolent Quint’s spirit, or, as is also suggested, for following her own morbid suspicions through an ultimate ritual which is perhaps more about achieving her own psychological catharsis (or repressed erotic tensions via vicarious, ‘spiritualistic’ orgasm) than venting any possessive evil incubated in the boy. 

Georges Auric’s eerie score lends much aural texture to the photographic and mood atmospherics of the film but without ever being intrusive or over-elaborate. The casting of Deborah Kerr in the lead role was a superlative move by Clayton, her definitive ‘English Rose’ looks and demeanour mingled with the actress’s natural facility for flinty femininity, perfectly suited to the ambivalent part; the quite phenomenal performances of the two child actors apart, the ever-reliable, ever tremulously toned Michael Redgrave, who only appears at the beginning of the film as the detached and disinterested uncle and absentee owner of the house to which he appoints Giddens as governess, nevertheless makes his own ambivalent mark on everything that follows, being clearly a man bedevilled by some nervous reticence towards his precocious nephew and niece, as well as to the shadowy personality of his house, and its ‘influence’ on them, something to which, it is hinted, he is at least partly aware. This Rochester-like character is clearly a man of secrets, whom we assume detects something amiss of a nature not rationally explicable at the house which he chooses to be absent from; and here there is an adumbration of the duplicitous and cowardly solicitor who assigns his young employee to document the affects of the late Mrs Drablow at her eerie Eel House isolated at high tide at the end of a marshy causeway in Susan Hill’s The Woman In Black (1983; shockingly adapted by Nigel Kneale for TV in 1989, and more recently, with equal but very differently chilling overtones, in James Watkins’ 2012 cinema version) –because the senior solicitor has himself visited the place before and experienced the intense presence of Drablow’s predeceased sister, Jennet Humfrye. The Woman In Black borrows much from the haunting imagery of The Turn of the Screw; most significantly in its 1989 television adaptation, where at the climax, the eponymous spectre is witnessed standing in the middle of a lake, as if on the water, draped in her customary widows weeds, which recalls the aforementioned shot of the deceased Miss Jessel, also in a black dress, stood staring amid the reeds by a lake in The Innocents. 

But, in cinematic terms, if any film has borrowed most obviously from the broad scenario of The Innocents –and, to some degree, from The Woman in Black too– it is Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001), which for its first half at least is almost a remake or re-adaptation of both the 1961 film and Henry James’ original novella: a lone woman in a shadowy house, isolated in mists, who has in her charge two young precocious children (in this setting, her actual children) who appear to be if not ‘possessed’, at least highly receptive to apparent supernatural presences. But to give The Others its due credit –and it is in itself an excellent piece of work, albeit in some aspects derivative (also in some metaphysical aspects of The Sixth Sense, 1999), and still not a patch on Clayton’s film– it does take some unexpected twists and turns in terms of scenario (these children are kept indoors permanently in windowless rooms due to suffering severe light sensitivity) narrative, resulting in a highly ambitious but very imaginative subversion of audience predictions by its end, which lifts it significantly above simple pastiche. 

The Innocents’ most closely related offshoot, however, was shot only two years later, again in black and white, though to my mind, a much less crisply poetic type, Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), a film which in recent years had benefited from some critical revisionism but which I watched not long ago and found largely wanting in many respects, both aesthetically and scripturally. The atmosphere is just about there, and there are some reasonably disturbing scenes and moments throughout, but I found the protagonists slightly irritating, almost like an angst-ridden live action adumbration of the Scooby Doo Gang (two men, cardboard Richard Johnson, popcorn-haired Russ Tamblyn, two women, psychic sensitive Julie Harris, and sultry Clare Bloom), and feel that perhaps had I watched it prior to watching The Innocents, I might have thought it much better than it actually is. But after seeing The Innocents, frankly, most supernatural films pale by comparison –if not in terms of atmosphere, fright or chill factor, then in terms of poetry. The only later films I can remotely compare it to in terms of genuinely unsettling moments, a constant sense of mental unease, of unuttered dread, and haunting atmosphere, is Peter Weir’s truly unsettling, sublime poetic-masterpiece, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), and to a slightly lesser degree, Nicholas Roeg’s supremely eerie Walkabout (1971). In terms of strictly ‘supernatural’/‘psychological horror’ cinema, however, I would cite probably only Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project (1999) as conveying a comparable –albeit it very different and much more visceral– sense of unnerving dread and chilling ambiguity. 

The Innocents was not without its fair share of contemporary competition in terms of standing out as a film at the time it was released: 1961 was, in my opinion, one of the most artistically interesting years for cinema, particularly in terms of producing some of the most strikingly shot black and white films of the period: Through a Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman), Judgement at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer), The Misfits (John Huston), Viridiana (Luis Buñuel). And yet, to my mind, only Bergman’s contribution to that year –a profoundly emotive exploration of schizophrenia, which also briefly pays homage to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s piercingly poetic novella The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), as does, to a less emphatic though detectable extent, The Innocents. Taking in the slightly wider lens of the early Sixties, The Innocents still stands out among other chiaroscuro masterpieces of its period, such as Stanley Kramer’s Inherit the Wind (1960), Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960), Winter Light and The Silence (both 1963), John Huston’s Freud (1962), François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962), Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962), Joseph Losey’s Eva (1962), Arthur Penn’s The Miracle Worker (1962), John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving (1962), Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964), Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964) and The Hill (1965), and countless others. 

For me personally, The Innocents is not only disputably the most perfect depiction of supernatural/psychical experience ever put to celluloid, but also close to the perfect film: and I mean this in the sense of it being as perfect as its subject could expect it to be, so sensitively and meticulously directed, photographed and acted as it is, but also a film which fascinates and stimulates at so many varied levels, psychically, emotionally, poetically. 

Alan Morrison © 2014

 

To Walk Invisible

BBC 1 Dec 29 2016

Refreshingly for the festive period, the BBC did not inflict yet another saccharine Jane Austen adaptation or cosy and snowy Dickens drama, but instead treated us, at the sweetly sickliest time of the year, to a two hour television film about the tempestuous literary greats, the Brontës. I say ‘treated’ in the broadest possible sense of the term, since this was about as gritty a period piece as one might get outside of Emile Zola, Dostoevsky and Hardy at his most morbid. Except, of course, the story of the Brontës, as strange, harrowing and dramatic as fiction itself, is a true story of three –if not four– prodigiously gifted creative minds of the same family. In writing this, Sally Wainwright gave herself the unenviable task of attempting to produce something to match the superlative 1970s episodic serial, The Brontës of Haworth (reviewed on its belated DVD release elsewhere on this site), one of this writer’s favourite period dramas.

There’s no doubting the depth and period detail of research gone into the imaginatively titled To Walk Invisible; the same sort of near-tactile authenticity that compares to, for example, the film about John Keats, Bright Star. And it is simpler to compare To Walk Invisible with an actual cinema film since, after all, modern television period dramas are uniformly produced on film and in an indistinguishable manner to cinematic films. This writer thinks this a pity as it really negates the point to television if it is simply a means of broadcasting what are actually custom-made films; this also means no modern drama can come close to the theatrical intimacy of past triumphs of the Seventies –in this context, the aforementioned Brontes of Haworth, by way of one striking example. 

But in visual terms, To Walk Invisible couldn’t have been more detailed and authentic, so there’s really nothing to criticise on that score. The casting was interesting, with the three Bronte sisters satisfactorily cast and all deftly performed by the actresses. Jonathan Pryce, as ever, put in a sterling performance as the neckerchief-swaddled Rev Patrick Bronte, but even an actor of Pryce’s calibre couldn’t quite match the astonishingly subtle performance by Alfred Burke in the 70s equivalent. Far more revelatory was the stunningly believable performance of relative unknown Adam Nagaitis as the tormented Branwell Bronte, even if the actor was directed to press a tad more Northernish testosterone into the part than Michael Kitchen in same role alongside Burke. Nagaitis’ towering performance aside, the actor also pretty well looked the part with his tuft of flam-red hair and wiry spectacles. 

However, this writer would have much preferred To Walk Invisible without the “fuck offs”, “twats” and left-right-and-centre expletives which Wainwright overegged, thickly coating the period dialogue with strikingly modern-sounding swearing. Of course the Brontes might well have cursed in their rather wretched private lives, but one feels, as with the distinctly unsubtle feminist overtures throughout, that Wainwright was trying too hard to make a period piece seem ‘relevant’ and ‘street’ to a 2016 audience. (So ‘modern’ at times did the Bronte sisters come across that one half-expected a scene to pop up in which they were sat at their writing table prodding iphones). And this is where To Walk Invisible was much less successful than it was in its excellent naturalistic performances and visual attention to period detail: its actual writing –which is quite a big matter, especially given how much Wainwright has been ‘talked up’ and praised for previous dramas she’s scripted, and certainly her choice of title for this period piece was refreshingly imaginative. 

But for me the script was really pretty run-of-the-mill and overly casualised in general, and, bluntly, not a patch on that of The Brontes of Haworth (even though that series had five episodes during which to indulge itself). There just didn’t seem to be much that was distinctive or particularly authentic-seeming in the actual dialogue itself. Perhaps the towering performances and strikingly authentic sets and visual compositions –art lovers would have noted the obvious visual homage to famous Pre-Raphaelite painting The Death of Chatterton in one shot of Branwell lying intoxicated and deathly pale on his crumpled bed, for instance –overshadowed the actual writing. Not that there weren’t moments of interest in the script: a slightly presumptuous allusion made by Emily to the inspiration behind the rakish alcoholic Hindley in Wuthering Heights being her tempestuous and intoxicated brother: while in part this might have been the case, there’s also as much argument to be made that Branwell part-inspired the weak, sickly valetudinarian son of Heatchliff, Linton, too. There was as well a nice moment when the two most fiery of the Bronte siblings, Branwell and Emily, sat together howling at the moon over Howarth –evidently these two siblings were temperamentally and emotionally close (and imaginatively –which partly fuels the theory that Branwell contributed to the writing of Wuthering Heights).

Where the visuals were less convincing was in the beginning and end scenes in which the four children, oddly shown in a vast hallway of a mansion, are depicted with flaming halos hovering from their heads to symbolise, somewhat clumsily, their creative gifts. As for the hallucinatory sequence in which the paranoid Branwell finds his family sat down together laughing at him as he enters as they sit in audience watching a man having sex with Branwell’s ex-lover, the less said the better –suffice it to say, this seemed shoehorned-in for shock value and titillation and was simply out of place within the mood of the piece. The other moot point, assumed arguably a little excessively by the director, is whether the lower-middle-class Brontes would have had Yorkshire accents. Wainwright and the director clearly think they did, judging by the hefty dose of local accent and dialect shared by the Bronte children; while Patrick Bronte retained the same whispery faintly Irish accent as portrayed previously by Burke.

Another point of criticism was something frequently problematic, for some unfathomable reason, with contemporary BBC dramas, and that is the often near-inaudible dialogue due to either an insistence on ‘atmospheric’ whispering among the characters, and/or the infuriating intrusion of –often unedifying and unremarkable– orchestral incidental music. When not shouting their heads off, many whispered scenes of the film were almost inaudible, and I actually had to put on the subtitles to follow the dialogue!

Nonetheless, warts and all, To Walk Invisible worked remarkably well, in spite of its sporadic modern excesses which one comes to expect from contemporary period drama these days (even so, compared to the last film version of Wuthering Heights, To Walk Invisible is relatively gentrified), and the rather strange depiction of the outside of the Bronte Parsonage seemingly isolated up on a hill even though it’s actually supposed to be at the centre of a cluttered village, as other angles show in the film, what lingers about this drama is, more than anything, the simply staggering and deeply affecting performance of Nagaitis as the tortured Branwell. 

Ironic, to say the least, that the main point of the drama was to emphasize the far more productive and even superior genius of the three sisters to their profligate brother, and also to communicate a top-heavy –though by no means unjustified– feminist narrative, but that the end result actually stamps our consciousness more with the brittle temperament and tragically wasted potential of Branwell. Indeed, it was the brother’s torrid story that inspired Daphne du Maurier to write the compelling semi-biographical book, The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte –a spellbinding read which helps one reassess the legacy of this often half-forgotten member of the Bronte family (who, of course, famously painted himself out of the sibling portrait he composed). 

Unfortunately the film was somewhat undermined at the end with a thoroughly pointless promotional appendage of the modern day Parsonage as a Bronte Museum. This came across as a pretty shameless sales pitch on behalf of the museum. 

For those Bronte lovers craving a depiction of the literary family at its grittiest and most stupefying, and more muck ‘n’ brass, then To Walk Invisible is for them; but for those who prefer a bit more subtlety of writing and performance, rather more convincing versions of the sisters (especially Emily), and a definitive Patrick Bronte in Alfred Burke, then this writer would direct them to The Brontes of Haworth. 

8/10

Alan Morrison

Gareth Thomas

12 February 1945 in Aberystwyth – 13 April 2016

Welsh television character actor and eponymous star of classic British sci-fi series Blake’s 7, Gareth (Daniel) Thomas, sadly passed away on Wednesday 13^th April 2016 aged 71.

Some of this writer’s earliest television memories were of this talented Welsh actor’s portrayal of the dissident figurehead Roj Blake in Terry Nation’s dystopian space opera Blake’s 7 (BBC, 1978-81), even if his regular viewing of this series coincided with the sudden disappearance of the main protagonist for the remaining two seasons dominated by Paul Darrow’s Machiavellian Kerr Avon, but always marked by the mighty absence of Blake. Thomas made two further appearances in the series, in the final episodes of each season, culminating in the climatic and tragic denouement on Gauda Prime in Blake, which saw the near-mythical lost hero return as a seemingly embittered, grizzled and scarred bounty hunter. The rest is television history…

But much as this writer is a long-standing fan of Blake’s 7, it would be a gross disservice to the memory of Thomas to only wax lyrical about –inescapably– his most famous television starring role, without mention of his many other significant leads in numerous other television series of –in particular– the 1970s, that still-unchallenged golden era of character-and-script-based theatrical television drama. 

After cameos in some late Sixties series such as Z-Cars and a recurring role in Parkin’s Patch, Thomas began to land leading parts in some highly significant TV plays and serials of the Seventies and Eighties. He won acclaim for his portrayal of a Welsh policeman sent to break a strike of tin miners in Cornwall in the superlative Play for Today, Stocker’s Copper (1972). He appeared in the film of Harold Becker’s The Ragman’s Daughter (1973), as foil to Iain Cuthbertson in Sutherland’s Law (1973), and in the TV adaptation of David Copperfield (1974). One of Thomas’ most memorable roles was as the community-oriented clergyman Mr. Gruffyd in the excellent 1975 adaptation of Welsh mining saga How Green Was My Valley (miles better and more authentic than the much-lauded by highly flawed Hollywood film version of the Forties). Thomas also appeared in Who Pays the Ferryman? (1977). 

There then came a kind of hiatus of science fiction parts, all strangely overlapping one another in that, time and again, Thomas was cast as futuristic rebels/radicals/dissident leaders in dystopian series. This tended to belie the impetus behind his later retiring from his biggest role, in the aforementioned Blake’s 7, for fear of being typecast; indeed, one might argue his getting the role of Blake was in itself related to perceived ‘type’. In 1976 he appeared as rebel Shem in the rather garish gender-politics sci-fi series Star Maidens (ITV); then, in 1977, he headed the cast of the remarkably eerie and quite extraordinary children’s serial Children of the Stones (once more opposite Iain Cuthbertson), in which he played a scientist, Adam Brake, whose surname uncannily prefigured that of his most famous role, acquired the following year…

Blake’s 7 was an ambitious melange of Robin Hood- and/or William Tell in space and George Orwell’s 1984 all mingled with polemic on the contemporaneous Troubles and conflicting perceptions of terrorism and perceived fanatical causes, with the only genuine nod to US sci-fi series Star Trek, to which it is so erroneously compared, being the use of teleport (though Blake’s 7 had much more in common with its cousin series Doctor Who: its sets, costumes, writers and producers were all borrowed from Who). 

Otherwise, Blake’s 7 was a highly charged studio-video Jacobean chamber piece drama which just happened to be set in the future and have film-location insert action sequences to attempt to compete with the Star Wars momentum of the time; it was gritty, unpredictable, character-driven drama, almost, one might say, costume-drama of the future, in its combination of Shakespearean actors in the leads and the imaginatively cod-medieval costume designs for the main protagonists; Blake, for instance, often wearing leather jerkin and billowing doublet shirt-sleeves. In spite of Paul Darrow’s enigmatic turn as leather-clad, crop-haired, Plantagenet-nosed Avon, who inherits the super-ship Liberator after Blake disappears on an alien planet, the series was never quite as gripping again as it had been when Thomas took centre stage, grounded by Avon’s Ricardian antagonism.

Thomas went on to appear for a time in cameo roles in other notable series of the period: he was acclaimed for his portrayal of a Welsh hill farmer in Morgan’s Boy (1984), also making a cameo appearance the same year in the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ episode, The Naval Treaty, as the villain, opposite Jeremy Brett. He also appeared in the supernatural portmanteau series Shades of Darkness (1983), and the TV adaptation of C.P. Snow’s series of polemical novels, Strangers and Brothers (1984). 

In 1987 (though actually filmed in 1985), Thomas starred opposite ex-Doctor Who actor Patrick Troughton as a futuristic King Arthur-like figure –and, again, dissident leader– Owen, in the dystopian Wales-set sci-fi drama Knights of God. This role was almost a combo of his previous roles, Blake and Morgan. Somehow the curly-haired Thomas always seemed to fit the shoes of the rugged-but-gentle-hearted, rough-hewn outcast, and his inherent Welshness fitted this well, as it also gifted him a memorable and impressive gravel-voice. In many ways, Thomas was almost made to play Thomas Hardy’s Gabriel Oak on television (indeed, there are some similarities in ruggedness of physiognomy and physique with Alan Bates who played Oak in the 1967 film of Far From the Madding Crowd).  

Perhaps Thomas’s least sung but one of his most interesting roles was as Roundhead Major General Horton, a romantic-heroic part, in the second series of English Civil War costume drama By the Sword Divided (1985). As an amateur scholar of this particular historical period, this writer can vouch for the aforementioned series’ unrivalled authenticity of the period it depicts, in his opinion, never bettered before or since (save in the Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s consummately authentic Winstanley,1975), not least by the rather perfunctory 1970 film Cromwell; but it is the lesser known second series, in which Thomas’s character figures large, which is of particular note in its detailed depiction of the late Civil War, post-Caroline and Commonwealth periods.  

In many ways, Thomas was the kind of actor who could probably only have acquired lead and sometimes romantic roles as he did in the Seventies, a decade peculiarly open-minded in its notions of what constituted lead role material, often going for the gravitas of an actor as opposed to his good looks. For Thomas was a modestly handsome actor, not particularly striking, yet still always memorable, gently masculine in presence and voice. These were key qualities which marked him out for some significant heroic roles in spite of his fairly average looks. Contrary to the popular image of Thomas, of his virile ruggedness and Welshness, he was actually educated privately at Canterbury, and even spent a year at Oxford, before entering RADA. But ultimately he was, as his most popular roles – Gruffyd, Shem, Blake, Horton, Owen– portrayed, a man of and for the common man. Indeed, in his most iconic role, Blake, Thomas’s gravelly intonations immortalised many lines: “Not until power wrests with the honest man”, or “The lightning rain snatched me from the jaw’s of death doesn’t quite ring true this time”. His passing marks the end of an era of halcyon folkloric television heroes. 

Alan Morrison © 2016

 

A Field In England 

Direction Ben Wheatley

Cinematography Laurie Rose

(Film4 5/7/2013 multi-platform release)

It might have a somewhat underwhelming title with a faint echo of Rupert Brooke’s iconic trope from his poem ‘The Soldier’ (‘If I should die, think only this of me;/ That there’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England’), but Ben Wheatley’s A Field In England, grittily shot in chiaroscuro by Laurie Rose in more than a hint of homage to Ingmar Bergman’s exemplary cinematographer Sven Nykvist, is far from just another quaint historical outing for the US-bound export market. It is, in terms of ominous atmosphere, brooding tone and, particularly, cinematography, much more of an ‘art house’ production –but is almost entirely of interest in such technical and compositional respects, as well as its atmospheric evocation of the gun-smoked aftermath of a bloody skirmish in the English Civil War, and brilliant attention to costume detail, which lends more than the usual verisimilitude of felt authenticity. This visual authenticity is also complemented by some sporadic snatches of dialogue alluding to the various pills, potions and ointments composed –with pinches of superstitious ‘wish’-craft, ‘magical thinking’, scrying, divinations and general quackery– seemingly at random by seventeenth century apothecaries for various plagues and agues of the time –the time being almost exactly two hundred years before the foundation of the National Health Service; and, broadcast for the first time on Film 4 while simultaneously debuting in cinemas and DVD, on 5 July 2013, eve of the Tory-neutered NHS’s 65^th anniversary, one is left to wonder whether the timing is some sort of unconscious national sublimation for the more pressing issue of our own time. 

Just how unique, singular or original Laurie Rose’s exceptional cinematography really is, is open to debate among those who will quickly spot what could be defined as riffs from some fairly obvious foreshadowers. The wide sunlit monochrome skies skudding with striations of cloud call immediately to mind Sven Nykvist’s startlingly stark tonal work for Ingmar Bergman’s more landscaped outings (The Seventh Seal and Through a Glass Darkly spring to mind). While the slightly documentary-style use of hand-held camera and, of course, the particular historical period, instantly draw comparisons with Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s equally low-budget and all-location 1975 film Winstanley, also shot in stark black and white –although, curiously, Wheatley and Rose have divulged a debt to another leftfield director of the Sixties and Seventies –and very much the progenitor to Brownlow and Mollo– Peter Watkins, in particular his gritty black and white documentary-style historical re-enactment, Culloden (1964) (later The War Game (b&w, 1965) and the painterly, exceptionally intense Norwegian-produced film Edvard Munch (1976), whose expressionistic use of colour is strongly reminiscent of Sven Nykvist’s on Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1973). 

It is not clear whether Wheatley and Rose have actually seen Brownlow and Mollo’s Winstanley, but one suspects they might have done, given the similarities in style and setting, and is perhaps the most appropriate work with which to compare Wheatley’s film. Winstanley depicted, for this writer, the far more sublime, beguiling and historically-specific story of the experiment in common land-sharing of the proto-communist Diggers movement, the eponymous leading light of whom is quoted almost verbatim from his contemporaneous writings (albeit via David Caute’s novel Comrade Jacob). And it is in the narrative –and scriptural– paradigm that A Field In England fails to impress to anywhere near the degree that, for instance, Winstanley does, or, for that matter, Caryl Churchill’s as-yet-un-filmed play about the Diggers, A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, staged the year after aforementioned film (1976). Both Brownlow/Mollo/Caute’s film and Churchill’s play are also written in the authentic parlance and diction of the period they mutually recreate; though naturally Winstanley, entirely scripted from the eponymous Digger pamphleteer’s own writings, is the most verbally authentic. 

Amy Jump’s script completely bypasses attempts at dialogical authenticity by lifting the verbal embargo normally imposed on such atmospherically and visually evocative productions, allowing her picaresque crop of characters –deserters Jacob (Peter Ferdinando) and Cutler (Ryan Pope), incongruously witty and effete alchemist Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) and satanic magician O’Neill (Michael Smiley)– the full throttle of expletive-driven modern day patois, replete (in the case of Jacob, Cutler and their anonymous ‘friend’ (Julian Barrett)) with Cockney/estuary accents. For this writer, this seems an attempt to pointlessly accommodate the less historically oriented of modern viewers, which feels particularly out-of-place in a film which is otherwise taking such pains to recreate a real time and place rather than simply projecting a backdrop. Would, for instance, even the most coarse-tongued and viscerally-minded of 17^th century brigands have injected the word “Fuck” into practically every single sentence they uttered, even if the situation these characters are in isn’t too complementary to gentler verbiage? The collective Tourette’s Syndrome of the rougher protagonists aside, there is also a very visceral, scatological focus on bodily functions: only a few minutes into the film one of the brigands announces he is going to “take a shit”, and we then witness him screaming out, as if in agony (indeed, we later discover he suffers from hemorrhoids), as he attempts to dispatch a stool at excruciating length, while squatting in a patch of nettles (“COME ON!” he shouts at one point, and one of his comrades shouts back at him, “Is it a boy or a girl?”).

The class differences between Whitehead –who is, however, a ‘kept man’, raised from poverty to be apprentice to an alchemist who perceived a spark of promise in him– and his three commoner companions, is played on well, providing both the most nuanced pieces of dialogue –Whitehead: “Some would say knowledge is its own payment” (and this ‘knowledge’ is later cited again as the true “treasure” buried somewhere in the field, which O’Neill enslaves the men to dig for)– as well as some of the funniest (and reminding this writer of a similar use of class-based banter by Lee Hall in The Pitman Painters); one of the most affecting lines is when the quieter and most simple-spirited of the commoners remarks on Whitehead’s smooth white hands, which, to him, indicate their owner is a man who is careful about what he picks up. As mentioned, the scripting for Whitehead provides some faint adumbrations of the Shakespeare comedy, especially in a scene when he investigates the infected nether regions of one of the brigands (perhaps inevitably starting out with an uncompromisingly head-on shot of a warty penis), listing with excellent if ill-fitting comic timing the legion ailments afflicting them, including venereal disease, scrotal inflammation and haemerrhoids –in terms of direction and delivery, this scene is perhaps more Blackadder than As You Like It.

But unfortunately such periodic flourishes of more thoughtful dialogue are few and far between in Jump’s script, while the swearing is prolific –indeed, saturates whole swatches of dialogue at times; and an apparently dying commoner’s soliloquy on his having “had” his sister-in-law on many occasions “from behind” (followed by allusion to the rear end of a “sow”) seems not only misplaced but needlessly prurient given that the trope is, so we think at that moment, the speaker’s last words. This writer is aware that he may be coming across as a bit prudish by this point, but there’s something about a felt shoehorning-in of very ‘colourful’ sexual references, especially if phrased in anachronistic modern day vernacular, that always niggles at him in period dramas; something about it feels scripturally cheap and populist. That said, Jump’s script is still some cuts above the standard period soap pulp of most contemporary costume dramas (the latest culprit of which being of course The White Queen, one of a long line of historical travesties stretching back through The Tudors, Desperate Romantics to ’Enry the Aiff –though Ray Winstone’s gravel-toned Cockney locution is paid tribute to here by the equally stubbly Pope and Ferdinando). 

The narrative itself might have been set in many other historical periods and has little in it specific to this particular period –bar the little known ‘fact’ cited by Wheatley that at this time “People were grinding mushrooms into dust and blowing it into people’s faces and then doing magic tricks”; and though efforts are made in the script to emphasize Whitehead’s air of trembling, God-fearing trepidation, such religious angst sits oddly with an alchemist clearly well-practised in the occult arts, which would have been seen as complete heresy at the time, particularly to the Puritans (who made up much of the Parliamentarian side from whose ranks he has clambered mid-skirmish). The vicissitude of the eponymous ‘Field’ being strewn with crops of magic mushrooms, which the protagonists duly ingest some way into the film –though for no readily apparent reason, unless I missed something– is an intriguing one, albeit, again, coloured by what one suspects is the writer’s unhelpful preoccupation with drawing in a more youthful, or ‘recreationally experimental’, audience. Apart from some interesting cinematographic gymnastics, the gorging on hallucinogenic mushrooms (or toadstools) doesn’t seem to add an awful lot to the plot; moreover, the visualised perceptual effects from the offending fungi, nicely composed though they are, are lessened in impact due to the gradual slide into phantasmagorical imagery prior to their consumption. Close-ups of the distinctly phallic-looking funguses recalls the earlier shot of one of the brigand’s diseased-ridden penis –but it almost comes across as if the narrative purpose of the band of deserters suddenly going out to phantasmagorical graze as mushroom-chomping ruminants is more as a prompt for the director to try out some rather peripheral camera experiments. 

One particularly strange and disturbing scene involves Whitehead staggering out of O’Neill’s tent after a minute’s worth of blood-curdling screaming from within, with a rope tied to his neck like a lead –cue next a series of disorienting sequences during which he gallops about the field as if following a scent like a dog, his roped neck tugging O’Neill and the others behind him. This is a quite unsettling, surreal and vertiginously directed sequence which reminds this writer of some of the earlier pictures by Roman Polanski. The edgy, doom-laden musical score by Jim Williams complements the film’s morose atmosphere extremely well, and it’s refreshing to hear an anachronistic contrast of both rustic-sounding acoustic and contemporary synthesiser (which in itself is a sort of retro-approach harking back to some of the historical pictures of the Eighties, such as The Bounty), while the inclusion of period song is a nice authentic touch.

Ultimately, having witnessed the brigands’ rather slow, protracted and gory mutual dispatching (which comes across at times as a kind of Shallow Grave with lace collars), including O’Neill shooting his henchman through the head, the pistol lodged deep into his mouth in a sort of fellatio symbolism, blood and fragments of skulls being seen exploding from his scalp, and Whitehead finally throwing his gentlemanly scruples to the winds (a la Straw Dogs style) and blasting a pistol shot through the back of O’Neill’s head, half his face exploding forth in the process, we witness Whitehead returning to the skirmish from whence he originally fled, presumably on a kind of pilgrimage of repentance for his cowardice, only to stagger through the gunsmoke to be greeted by his three former companions, standing side by side, neatly clothed, staring at their confused witness –and then black out. 

Something about this final shot has much less of the eerie, ghostly quality of the faintly supernatural denouement it is probably intended to project, and much more of the gritty symbolic machismo of the final gunfight in Sam Pekinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Even the poster for this film, with five rugged male silhouettes, four of whom are in wide-brimmed hats and holding weapons, has a slightly Pekinpah or Spaghetti Western look to it –and again is indicative of a contra-aesthetic preoccupation with trying to appeal to populist taste in spite of the actual film’s texturally uncompromising patina of visual and atmospheric authenticity. 

Arguably there has never really been a definitive film or television serial of the English Civil War and its many variegated and profound religious, political and social upheavals –to some extent, one thinks of recommending Gerard Winstanley’s tracts, the transcription of the Putney Debates, or one of Marxist historian Christopher Hill’s many books on the period, or F.D. Dow’s excellent and compendiously thin-spined Radicalism in the English Revolution, for a taste of the true drama and turbulence of the time. In literature, there have mostly only been rather second-rate adventure stories set during or in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, most famously Frederick Maryat’s very Victorian, Cavalier-centric romance Children of the New Forest (1847), a prime example of such pseudo-historical dampness; that story appeared to be part-inspired by William Frederick Yeames’ famous painting And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1878), which depicted a small Royalist boy stood on a stool being interrogated by a lugubrious committee of Puritans –it was made into a Seventies children’s series which this writer vaguely remembers watching on first broadcast but has not seen since. 

In the Fifties and Sixties there was a thin string of Civil War-set films, from vacuous Cavalier-focused swashbucklers such as The Moonraker (1958), Hammer’s The Crimson Blade (1964), the Hammer-esque Witchfinder General (1968), and the partially successful/authentic biopic Cromwell (1970); then in 2003 came the more gritty and visually evocative To Kill A King –the unlikely casting of an incongruously short-haired Tim Roth as Cromwell actually working much better than one might have expected, and perhaps a touch more authentically than Richard Harris’s blond-mopped glowering version of 1970, while Rupert Everett’s Charles I was a worthy if more forgettable portrayal than Alec Guinness’s definitively stuttering performance. But none of these pictures comes close to the very tangible sense of the period, both visually, atmospherically and scripturally, of Brownlow and Mollo’s masterpiece-sans-fanfare Winstanley, which remains, to this writer’s mind, the most important and memorable of all depictions of the period. 

For those who hunger a more lengthy, character-driven and comprehensive saga set before, during and after the English Civil War, which takes in the full dialectical swathe of what is now referred to as ‘The English Revolution’, you could do a lot worse than watching the almost forgotten television serial By The Sword Divided (1983 and 1985), which, among other notable performances (from such classical actors as Julian Glover, Robert Stephens and Gareth Thomas, aka Blake of Blake’s 7, as a particularly sympathetic Roundhead Colonel), features perhaps the two most authentic portrayals of key players Charles I (played brilliantly by aristocratically faced Jeremy Clyde) and Cromwell (a warts-and-all Peter Jeffrey). The first series is a touch too preoccupied with the largely Royalist Lacy family; but by its end we have the emergence of The Levellers, prefiguring a grittier and more Parliamentarian-primed second series, which incorporates the trial and execution of Charles I, the puritanical reign of Oliver Cromwell, the escape of Charles II, and the Royalist retributions of the Reformation. 

Although not particularly ambitious stylistically speaking, By The Sword Divided is, for this writer, a far more satisfactory and didactic dramatisation of the period compared to the enormous disappointment that was The Devil’s Whore (2008): wonderfully shot though it was, with some meticulous attention to period detail –although the authentically reconstructed 17^th century manor house looked slightly out-of-place on the South African veldt location!– this particular serial promised much more than it delivered, and in the end, delivered very little of either dramatic or historical substance. Given, Dominic West’s turn as Cromwell was fairly credible, and the inclusion of Levellers Edward Sexby and Thomas Rainsborough, a refreshingly left-field detail, but the rather misplaced and pointless incorporation of a phalli-centric demon a la magical realism, a thumping metaphorical leitmotiv throughout, plus another gruff and glowering performance from John Simm, all combined to undermine any dashes of historical verisimilitude otherwise evident –such as the beautifully shot scenes of the Diggers tilling their arid land, which served more as an almost Pre-Raphaelite-coloured postcard backdrop to the sublime movement in the complete absence of any actual exposition or exploration of the motivations and ideals of the Diggers themselves. Compared to the damp squib of The Devil’s Whore, A Field In England is certainly of more significance historically, cinematographically and scripturally. But if Jump’s script had attempted to root itself more firmly and resolutely into the period, with a more uncompromising focus on a historically specific theme of that time –as, for example, Chris Newby’s equally chiaroscuro and Bergmanesque Anchoress did in 1993– then the finished result would have had more lasting impact.  

But, in the end, A Field In England is mostly exceptional for its striking and imaginative cinematography and imagery, and less so for its actual writing. That’s not to say Amy Jump’s script doesn’t have its moments of ingenuity, even poetry, and is, in spite of its stylistic patchiness and abundance of anachronistic curses, far more thoughtful and philosophical than the average contemporary period fare. All taken together, this moody experimental work certainly bodes some promise for a more leftfield tilt to future British historical filmmaking, but in and of itself, is likely to be remembered more for its visual than narrative impression, and in that, will no doubt be canonised into Film Studies courses in time, and, on technical grounds, rightly so. But to this writer –a long-standing amateur scholar of this historical period, particularly of the Levellers and Diggers– A Field In England is an opportunity missed: with a script as historically forensic as the visual attention to period detail, perhaps dovetailing between the ‘magic mushroom’ episodes and intertwined hallucinogen-induced epiphanies of a group of Diggers or Millenarians as to a then-envisaged true Christendom to be reined over by Christ himself, a ‘Light Shining’ over the land, would have made for far more profound and period-specific exposition and –together with the first rate cinematography– might have made this film a true masterpiece, rather than just a cinematographic curiosity. 

Alan Morrison © 2013

I, Daniel Blake

Directed by Ken Loach

Written by Paul Laverty

(2016)

It’s Dave Johns’ deeply affecting, understated and defiantly witty portrayal of the eponymous unemployment statistic Daniel Blake that really carries this moving film on an emotional level. Casting a comedian in the main role for such a political film is inspired since it guards against too much earnestness in the central performance. Daniel’s irrepressible humanity and kindness is in stark contrast to the grey-faced, officious and frankly fascistic jobcentre staff who –with the exception of one sympathetic member– conspire to make his experience of unemployment due to incapacity as abjectly miserable and painful as possible. 

One particular jobcentre adviser who plagues Daniel’s existence while he’s forced to claim jobseekers’ allowance –in spite of still recovering from a cardiac arrest– treats him with spiteful contempt, culminating in her sanctioning him seemingly for his not being computer literate. The true scandal of how particularly those on JSA are treated in our so-called civilised society is laid bare for all to witness, and the expectation of jobseekers to spend literally 35 hours a week seeking work, which mostly isn’t there, shows how today the unemployed are expected to jump through continual dehumanising hoops just for the privilege of a state pittance each week. They are treated debatably with less respect than ex-offenders; and, indeed, to be unemployed today in a society obsessed with work, which deems employment as some sort of ‘moral badge’, is tantamount to a taboo. 

Johns’ infectious performance apart, Hayley Squires also puts in a memorable performance as the young single mother forced to move from London to Newcastle in order to rent a decent-sized flat which is, nonetheless, riddled with damp and black mould. The scene where, half-starved, she peels open a tin of beans in a food bank is rightly cited as a hugely symbolic moment in the film: the scandalous state of malnutrition so many people are reduced to in Tory Britain due to remorseless welfare cuts. In the sixth richest country in the world parents are skipping meals so their children can be fed, and all because of a right-wing government’s elective austerity and choice to do the very opposite to what it claimed it would do, actually putting the biggest burdens on the narrowest shoulders. Daniel Blake is the everyman pawn of the system who along with millions of others bears the brunt of budget cuts, and in his particular case, to an ultimately fatal extent. 

That Daniel is a carpenter is also hugely symbolic: it at once brings to mind the occupation of Christ prior to His calling, and is a form of craftsmanship, a skill of the hands but also of the heart and mind, a practical but also artistic trade, and in those senses very much an authentic –and ancient– occupation which in spite of industrial revolutions and automations has managed to –excuse the pun– carve out its own niche in terms of resisting the estranging effects of more mechanised capitalist employment. In these senses carpentry is very much the kind of occupation which employs both hands and mind of which William Morris, for one, approved, typical of his Arts and Crafts adage, ‘have nothing in your house which you do not know to be both beautiful and useful’. 

Daniel’s trade, from which he is temporarily alienated due to being unfit for work, in spite of being found the opposite in a half-baked work capability assessment conducted by a so-called “healthcare professional” (who doesn’t explain what her actual medical background is, of course), is in stark contrast to the unskilled and inauthentic occupation of the Harpy-like employment advisers. There is, indeed, plenty of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital in this important polemical film. 

It’s a functional film: it does what it says on the tin, which in a funny sort of way would be its most appropriate epithet, as opposed to the slightly off-putting hyperbole heaped on it since its release. This and its collecting prompt gongs on the film prize circuit actually distract a bit from the gritty authenticity of the film’s message and its clear purpose as a social-realist polemical statement as opposed to a work of art or poetry. Critical praise is one thing, but there’s something almost cheapening about how promptly the trophies came –at Cannes and then the Baftas– and one can’t help feeling that this was more about alleviating a collective middle-class sense of guilt about the parlous state of existence for hundreds of thousands of unemployed and incapacitated people of this nation than anything else. 

This isn’t a film for which trophies mark triumph, only a change of government policy. It’s also more broadly a film made to challenge skewed public perceptions of benefit claimants who have been so mercilessly dehumanised by our right-wing mainstream media for going on seven years now. Nevertheless, prizes help publicity, even if it’s a slightly depressing fact that all things in capitalist society have to be dressed up for the shop window display.    

But my emphasis on I, Daniel Blake’s polemical thrust isn’t to say there’s not some element of poetry in the film: Daniel’s defiant graffiti-statement outside the jobcentre near the end is surprisingly powerful, as is the simple but eloquently phrased, profoundly important statement he doesn’t get to read out himself at the belated tribunal hearing to reinstate his abruptly stopped employment and support. 

I, Daniel Blake is certainly a film of its times, a true contemporaneous polemic on the state of a nation, or at least, of the Have-Not half of a nation, and for those reasons alone, is a powerful and important cultural intervention, and a kind of Cathy, Come Home for the modern day by the same director. It can only be sincerely hoped that it will come to have as much impact on our society as the aforementioned kitchen-sink breakthrough did back in the Sixties. The scenes showing Daniel pacing around warehouses asking for a job (although in order to fulfil his JSA agreement) was uncomfortably reminiscent of the Yosser Hughes episode of Alan Bleasdale’s Eighties milestone, Boys from the Black Stuff, and it shows just how circuitous our society has become that we’re back in the Black Stuff thirty years later. 

One could argue more could have been made of the ubiquity of ‘brown envelopes’ and the now recognised phobia associated with their menace of millions of claimants –we only briefly glimpse Daniel opening one such tan envelope when he receives the medically illegitimate decision that he is “fit for work”, even after we have witnessed his GP clearly state to him that he is far from it. The tortuousness of the appeals process is expertly depicted, however, with the recently imposed obfuscation of a ‘mandatory reconsideration’ –which is just a way of protracting procedures– before an appeal can actually be lodged. The whole Kafkaesque edifice of today’s benefits bureaucracy is perfectly captured. 

It’s debatably not really true to say that Loach’s film has ‘sparked debate in the country’, as is claimed on its Wikipedia page, since there has been a long ongoing welfare debate for several years now, even if that counter to Tory and red top ‘scrounger’ propaganda has been frustrated and ostracised from the mainstream, it’s still been there. What I, Daniel Blake does is turn that ‘spark’ of polarised experience and opinion into a full on firework display for a mainstream cinema audience. It might have ‘sparked a debate’ among the less affected middle and upper classes perhaps, but the debate was already there among the working class, the underclass, the unemployed, the disabled, the mentally ill, and the zero hour and low-paid ‘precariat’. Loach, also the founder of Left Unity, has amplified all this from the platform of his influential medium, and for that he deserves our gratitude, as well as for directing a deeply affecting and yet strangely uplifting film of humanity and defiance in the face of faceless bureaucracy and unfeeling government. 

Certainly all DWP staff should be forced to sit down and watch I, Daniel Blake. But for Iain Duncan Smith, chief architect of the administrative atrocities criticised in the film, only mentioned once, though appropriately in a curse issued by a half-cut Glaswegian claimant who hails Daniel Blake as he’s sat down under his giant graffiti sprawl (the film’s Spartacus moment –to which, I’m Daniel Blake might have been a more apt title as opposed to the Gravesian one chosen), his boundless yet unmitigated arrogance, hubris and intransigence of self-perceived ‘mission’ render him chronically immune to any sense of humility, shame or regret. (Just as he’d not consider himself one of the unnamed embodiments of ‘hypocritical Catholics’ condemned by socialistic Pope Francis recently). Morally, there’s simply no hope for IDS, and for someone so hungry for posterity at any cost, even notoriety, the fact that a regime he masterminded forms the entire mise-en-scene of a film by a highly acclaimed veteran film director will only massage his egregious ego more. But Loach’s film is a watertight impeachment of this most malicious and contemptible of politicians.

For me personally, I, Daniel Blake doesn’t quite rank with the very cream of Loach, such as Cathy Come Home, In Two Minds, Kes, Days of Hope, Black Jack, Land and Freedom or The Wind That Shakes the Barley; nor is it quite as shocking in impact as that most Loachian of non-Loach TV films, Jim Allen and Roland Joffé’s The Spongers (1978), which is the definitive welfare state polemic and is still, depressingly, every bit as relevant today as it was forty years ago. But it’s certainly on a par with more standard though no less powerful Loach fare, such as The Big Flame, The Rank and File, Raining Stones and Ladybird, Ladybird. 

Artistic aspects aside, I, Daniel Blake is an absolute must-see for everyone but most importantly for those who continue to blindly believe all the red top hyperbole about so-called “benefit cheats” and “scroungers” and a welfare state which is “too generous”, which it emphatically is not. As for “benefit tourists”, if they really do exist in this country then they must be complete masochists. Loach has shown in this immensely human film the full inhumanity of our latter-day welfare state, one which bureaucratically persecutes its own claimants, and which elevates the value of money above the value of human beings. 

Alan Morrison © 2017

 

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The Pitmen Painters

By Lee Hall

Inspired by a book by William Feaver

Lyttleton Theatre

National Theatre

The Painters’ Theory of Value/ The Intrinsic Art of Labour

This is certainly a play worthy of much of the critical accolades surrounding it so far and comes like a breath of very pertinent fresh air in this summer of discontent, where the gratuitous streets of the capital are still reverberating to the beat of further marches against the legion injustices throughout the world. In the year of two vexed anniversaries – the 25^th for the 1984 Miners’ Strike and the thirtieth for the catastrophic ascendance of Margaret Thatcher as premier back in 1979 – the atmosphere is riper than ever for a no-holds-barred tub-thumping socialist play. And, without spelling this out implicitly – because in many ways the spirit of the piece is as much a meditation on our relationship with art – The Pitmen Painters is, essentially, a work of socialist theatre, but, sensitively scripted with deftly nuanced characters, the play is carried by its intrinsic integrity of subject and tone, making its socialism implicit in its narrative as to need no real spelling out or overt-labouring. It is, to my mind, a fair few notches up in terms of narrative, character development and script from Hall’s much-celebrated Billy Elliot, a play whose real point has been arguably dumbed down slightly by the smothering gloss of overly commercial adaptations.  There’s an historical and scriptural authenticity to his latest play’s socialism that lacked from Billy Elliot (the latter, in a way, half-beaten by its own breadth of ambition, in a similar way to Peter Flannery’s epic Our Friends In The North, which in spite of a convincing start, lapsed into a sort of politically-tempered soap-like melodrama in its later stages). The Pitmen Painters doesn’t dumb down, but manages to be fairly accessible through the canniness of its scriptural involvement of the audience through its debating style; this also emphasizes much of the message of the play itself, that true art can be accessible to all, that it is for all, to be shared; that, crucially, as Hall comments in his own forward to the play:

Quite clearly

Anyone can dumb down in order to appeal to the broadest cross-section of society at an immediate, basic level – but this is not about making anything more accessible, its about being too lazy to do so, but instead opting to drag standards down to their most base components. This is what Blair did with the Labour Party, and so secured his three terms – but it would have been quite something far beyond that small achievement had he managed to secure those three terms in power without having abandoned everything his party once stood for, but had gained the same by convincing the people of the fairness and justice of a true socialist mandate. Making something accessible is more about aiding people to access it without changing fundamentally what it is. And art, and socialism, is about raising people up, not pushing them down. Hall understands this, as did William Morris, George Bernard Shaw, and even Oscar Wilde (The Soul Under Socialism).   

The Pitmen Painters’ main strength is in its focus on microcosms, small details, passing moments of insight, which one character observes is what art tries to capture. The play’s dissection of the meaning of art and our relationship with it, its many-levelled metaphorical bent, sets it apart from mere agitprop theatre. But at the same time, and in this sense getting the balance just about right, 

Lee Hall doesn’t shun from voicing sporadic left-wing adages and even impassioned monologues through various characters throughout the script, showing the courage of his convictions in doing so in spite of potential criticisms of occasional lapses into naiveté – but then critics against any leftist sentiments will always cite any higher ideals outside the very limited Social Darwinism of our post-Thatcherite times as ‘naive’.   Based very much in the gritty chiaroscuro of the true grit of the Northumberland coal-pits, being inspired by the true story of the Ashington painters and their implicitly ‘naive’ – in the artistically best sense of the word – take on painting, any accusations of naiveté would have to be put down to the true recording of aspects of historical reality, at least, as it was in the far more culturally optimistic 1930s. That we have lost that naiveté, or rather, that more innocent capacity for flights of wonder above the low-browed horizons of materialism, is something that is continually brought to light by Hall; his sense of opportunities missed in our shared past, opportunities to transform ourselves and society, both through social solidarity and through the language of art and self-expression, daubs the tone of the play with an undercoat of defeat, which contrasts strikingly with the more immediate comedy of the play’s class-based farce aspects. Hall indeed exploits the vast gulfs of class dialects between the gruff Geordie lingo of the miner-painters and the energetic, almost peripatetic middle-class abstractedness of the breathless Robert Lyon (the academic artist who has come from Armstrong College to wax lyrical on Da Vinci and the ‘Rennisince’ as he inflects it), for all it’s worth, creating some infectiously funny moments of miscommunication through pronunciation.  Even the ostensibly sitcom-esque retort from one of the miner’s of ‘Bless you’ after the slide-projecting Lyon exclaims ‘a Titian’, tickled me in this particular context where such miscommunications are more likely. Constantly Hall milks strong comedy out of these clashes in vernacular, but without it being cloying. But it’s also in the gross disparities between working class and middle class ranges of knowledge that some of the wittiest verbal engagements take place, such as the more belligerent of the painters, in riposte to Lyon mentioning his university acquaintance with the sculptor Henry Moore (also, interestingly, of a mining background), beating this detail down as an irrelevant anecdote about the tutor’s student gallivants, having not heard of the famous sculptor’s name before. (One of my few criticisms of Hall’s writings – as I also noticed in a line from Billy Elliot’s miner brother calling his dance tutor a ‘condescending cow’ – is that, debatably, he sometimes dabs the otherwise solidly working-class vocabularies of his characters with randomly refined verbs and adjectives, though that’s not to say of course that this isn’t sometimes the case depending on the individual, and in this case, the word ‘gallivanting’ might or might not be an unlikely contender for a 1930s’ miner’s vocabulary).   Any reservations I initially had that the comedic tone to much of the dialogue of the early scenes of the play may have been detracting slightly from the underlying and highly important social messages of the scenario however, were soon to abate gradually as the play and narrative began take on other shapes and forms of a more dramatic vein later on. Mainly the ethical dilemma of Oliver Kilbourn, one of the more talented of the artists, after he is offered a way out of the drudgery of his mining life by becoming a waged artist under the patronage of bourgeois but empathic art collector Helen Sutherland: here the play reaches its pressure point with Oliver feeling torn between artistic liberation and his sense of solidarity with his own class. Resonantly, from a socialist point of view, he ultimately declines the offer, poignantly explaining that he can’t be transformed from the person he is just by money, that a miner is who and what he is, and most crucially of all, that his he needs to maintain his direct, physical connection with the mining toil and the working-class lifestyle which, after all, provides him with his painting subjects. Indeed, the very earthy, sinewy, almost anthropomorphic  authenticity that makes the miners’ paintings so striking, absorbing and transformative to the viewer, is due to the very fact that these painters are a part of their artistic subject and not simply detached observers. Hence the paradox which also provides Hall with the beautifully unavoidable point to the whole narrative: that the true value of art, as in the value of a product of labour (cue Karl Marx’s ‘intrinsic value of labour’ adage), is in itself, irrespective of any financial price put on it. This differentiation between ‘price’ and ‘value’ is also pointed out, ironically, by the wealthy art collector Helen, to whom money is meaningless in comparison to the value of works of art, partly of course because she has never been in any wont of it. But the brilliant resolution to this play is that even those who have toiled and laboured all their lives in wont of money, in this case the Ashington painters, finally also realise its intrinsic worthlessness and tackiness when awoken to the priceless value of artistic expression. Again, some critics might sniff, naiveté trickles in to the picture – but no, this isn’t naiveté at all, but the small leap of insight above the parapets of material subsistence and physical nourishment, that apart from providing one with the basic necessities for life – food, clothes and shelter – there is very little else of any real value that money can provide; the only other things worth hankering after in life these very types of insights and illuminations that art, as well as compassion, social solidarity, sharing, represent. 

Sharing is a key motif throughout the play: the dramatic tension of The Pitmen Painters revolves around the concept of ‘sharing’, which is punctuated continually by the writer cleverly highlighting those socially imposed barriers which stand in the way of peoples’ ability to share, and to reap from such sharing the brilliant fruits of a collective sense of artistic achievement. Here the play is permeated by the spirit not of only of Marx – whom the spectacled dialecticist of the group frequently quotes – but of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, which sought to bring high culture to the masses through practical workshops; it is also strongly reminiscent of aspects to Robert Tressell’s socialist masterpiece, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, in which an auto-didactic socialist painter and decorator is pitted against his self-defeatingly conservative-minded colleagues as he attempts to convert them to a cause he believes will provide their emancipation from the binds of capitalist labour. Hall’s take on the working-class however differs crucially to Tressell’s – albeit the latter writing early, in the 1900s: while Tressell and his central alter-ego Owen end up lapsing into an ironic misanthropic disillusion with the capacity of the working-class to obtain class consciousness, Hall does just the opposite, and portrays the miner-painters as gradually more and more aware of capitalism’s big con at their expense. This illumination – helped along of course by the fact that one of their most vocal members is a very ‘canny’ Marxist – eventually infiltrates all of the Ashington set, and eventually gives Oliver the moral courage to see through Helen Sutherland’s offer of an ostentatious salvation. It’s almost as if Oliver, by being awoken to the gross social and material disparities between his class and Helen’s, ironically further realises that in recognising the poverty of his own place in society, he also realises its very distinct richness: its utter truth, free of pretention and tainting intellectualisation. It’s this intrinsic spiritually unpolluted quality to the pitmens’ paintings that Lyon is so envious of, as he betrays near the end in his almost self-immolating tirade in reaction to Oliver’s testosterone-charged tantrum against the flat formalism of his mentor’s sketch (a breathtaking piece of on-the-spot draughtsmanship by the artist-actor Ian Kelly while acting his socks off in the process). And it’s some details to this tirade which perhaps also betray a tiny bit of resentment against the class Oliver and the others represent, yet one which Lyon has devotedly martyred himself to in his championing of the work of the Ashington painters: he frustratedly ejects that in order for things to truly change in society it’s up to the working-classes to get off their ‘fat backsides’ and ‘high horses’ and actually have the bravery to stand up and face their oppressors. This is a brave piece of monologue and slightly unexpected from the hitherto self-restrained, mannered Lyon, and thus all the more resonant in its passionate contradictions of emotions. Here Hall makes an important dramatic point that the miners’ learning about themselves and their innate artistic abilities is also paralleled with the unlearning of their very mentor, as he finally despairs at a self-perceived ‘failure’ on his part to develop into a true artist as if his education in technique and draughtsmanship has stifled any natural gift he might have once possessed; this is seemingly another kind of poverty, one arrived at through education and privilege. Lyon is of course unfair on himself, but the point still lingers, metaphorically speaking.  Metaphors are also a common motif throughout, used to both excellent comic – when the deceptively crass Jimmy dumbs down the perceived symbolism in the tiny head of a toiling miner in his linocut as expediency due to his having put in the ceiling of the pit too low beforehand, though joke is milked probably a little too much in less amusing variations later on – and dramatic effect: as the word metaphor comes from the Ancient Greek meaning ‘to transfer’ something into something else, so too are the painters themselves a breathing metaphor for the transformative power of art.

But in the end, The Pitmen Painters bravely – and to many, rightly – asserts that art transcends class barriers, or at least it has the capacity to, if liberated from the exclusive fetters of academic interpretive and linguistic barriers, from the abstractedness of an encoded appreciation of it articulated in a critical patina of language only accessible through a certain education. Hall’s assertion is that art is the untapped lingua franca of civilization, accessible to all in itself, but mystified by elites who don’t wish to share its value with the rest of society. Sharing, however, for Hall, and for many of us sympathetically watching his play, is really the crux of the whole issue, of art, of society, of our collective transformation into the more sensitive, creative species we have always had the potential to become. With capitalism now on trial in the hearts and minds of the masses of today, with new shoots of radicalism emerging in outrage at its growingly transparent moral anarchism, there also seems appropriately a new wave of theatre plays massing that are palpably pitching their standards up front stage-left – as if by way of a backlash against the junk culture that has most risibly pervaded British television over the past decade, that phillistinic diet of reality shows and chocolate-box costume soap. While David Hare has attacked the fallacies of new Labour in his contemporary Gethsemane, Hall comes up on the flank with an historically inspiring play that shows there is still much we can learn from the past of missed opportunities, how it still isn’t too late to reverse the most damaging excesses of capitalism, and also manages a barbed critique of modern day politics and a final swipe at Blair’s betrayal of the Labour movement with a projected caption reminding us that in 1995 he unceremoniously disposed of his party’s crucial Clause 4, their commitment to ultimately realising a society in which the means of production would be held in common ownership. This, coupled with the moving rendition of Robert Saint’s The Gresford Hymn, under the curlicued banner of the Ashington Branch of the true full-blooded Labour movement of old, at the end of the play, stamps that long-maligned but fundamental colour of the political spectrum, rose-red, into our consciousnesses once again.  The Pitmen Painter’s concludes movingly at the dawn of the Clement Attlee Labour Government of 1945, when the new emergent Welfare State, NHS and path of nationalisation brought a surge of optimism to the impoverished classes. How far we came back then, and how far away from the values that truly matter we’ve drifted since. But as Hall and many of us still want to think: history has a way of catching up with us. 

Production Comment

The cast of this play our outstanding in their energy and nuance of portrayals, and earned a well-deserved ovation at the end, returning on stage three times to the deluge of applause from a riveted and inspirited audience (those who have seen the play will no doubt twitter to themselves at the word ‘deluge’ within this context). A nicely unpretentious production – as is Hall’s consummate script driven effortlessly along by the characters’ punchy banter – with an appropriately stripped-down approach, easels dappled in the background against black-bricked walls, and a central projector used to imposing effect as a way for the audience to view each startling painting as one by one the painters’ put up their canvases for their colleagues to comment on. The paintings themselves are truly remarkable, especially given the context of their creation, a certain Lowry-esque naiveté (sorry, that word again) abundant, particularly in the street scenes and pictures of whippet races, but the variety of styles and forms is very much something of its own distinction and, dare I say it, one or two paintings to my mind are arguably a few steps up from Lowry. That these painters, as individuals, are not better known, is mystifying – but then that they are remembered as a collective is more in the spirit of their artistic ethic and that of the play’s: art as a shared experience. The cast, as mentioned, are all exceptional, but for me perhaps the standout performance is Ian Kelly as the nuanced, nervously didactic, almost self-apologetic Robert Lyon, whose energetic verbal delivery and awkwardly punctuating smile throughout are a delight. Overall, a refreshingly unpretentious and heart-lifting play. 

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The Signalman (1976) 

adapted by Andrew Davies from the short story by Charles Dickens

Directed by Lawrence Gordon Clarke 

BFI DVD

This is quite simply a perfect production, driven by subtlety, nuance and atmosphere, lifted to classic status by the supremely unsettled performance of the inimitable Denholm Elliott 

as the title character. The standout line for me is his ruminating comment about his routine-entrenched job: ‘it’s never done…’ This speaks volumes about the existential predicament of the signalman, one that is distilled to nerve-straining degrees in its sheer isolation and automatism. Inevitably for an obviously sensitive, thinking individual, the signalman fills up his seclusion with much speculative thought, which more psychoanalytical viewers might cite as the font for all the apparent phantasms that haunt him in his duties. This is the line taken by his frequent visitor, played by Bernard Lloyd (scripturally, The Traveller), who tries to rationalise objectively the strange happenings about the spookily located signal box – but all to no avail naturally, this being a ghost story at heart. Certain shots, particularly of the bride falling from the train, twisted up on the rails behind, and the ghostly gaping face at the entrance to the tunnel, are still genuinely frightening 31 years on. The final twist is fairly gratifying, but unlike many of Tales of the Unexpected, its revelation does not in any way undermine re-viewings, since it is in the psychological ambiguities of the Signalman and his spectral afflictions that the real enigma of the film plays itself out. This is a TV film to absolutely treasure, mainly for Elliott’s superbly nuanced central performance. Eerily directed by Lawrence Gordon Clarke and exceptionally scripted by Andrew Davies, The Signalman is an absolute must for any lover of vintage television.

Alan Morrison © 2008

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Delius: Song of Summer (1968)

Directed by Ken Russell

BFI DVD

For me this has to be the best thing Ken Russell ever did: a grittily shot, subtly scripted, didactic but inclusive TV film, telling an unusually nuanced story of the creatively heated relationship between the dying blind composer Frederick Delius (Max Adrian) and his diffident, self-effacing amanuensis – and amateur composer – Eric Fenby (Christopher Gable). It is in the dreamy, over-sensitive character of Fenby that Delius: Song of Summer really gripped me – actor/dancer Christopher Gable puts in a truly gripping, realistic performance as the young, sexually repressed Delius-devotee, who finds himself on a pilgrimage to aid his musical idol in scoring his final composition. Gable’s performance is exceptionally believable and endearing; an extremely convincing depiction of an ‘anxious young man’ narrowly dodging a nervous breakdown as he practically martyrs himself to the overwhelmingly domineering ego of a crippled man touched by receding genius. The scene in which Fenby quite candidly criticises one or two notes of Delius’s latest piece as he helps him articulate it on piano is fascinating in its distillation of the collaborative creative process between veteran and pupil, directed with a fly-on-the-wall realism. Almost hilarious – though darkly 

so – is Fenby’s confession near the end of the film as to his suffering a complete nervous breakdown after his sister’s welcome home party on his return to a mundane life in Bradford. This is a fascinating television play and well worth owning and re-watching. It is as witty as it is intense, and is also a compelling and all-too-rare example of (the late) Christopher Gable’s unique acting talent.

Alan Morrison © 2008

Alan Morrison on

Son of Man by Dennis Potter

(1969)

This early outing of Dennis Potter is more than worthy of its controversial reputation, 

in its uncompromising portrayal of Christ as a rough-and-ready, paranoid and angry pariah played exceptionally by Colin Blakely. The play itself does not really say anything new 

about the Passion, but it manages to re-tell this episode of the New Testament with such unadulterated grittiness, that it marks itself out as a hitherto utterly unique and groundbreaking Messianic depiction (the forerunner to Martin Scorcese’s comparatively lightweight The Last Temptation of Christ). Blakely puts in what is for me possibly the most powerful and convincingly tormented performance I have ever seen in a television play. 

The sheer intensity of his portrayal convulses on the screen in a paroxysm of terror and epiphany, which makes for truly startling viewing. This Christ is quite clearly epileptic, 

and the implication throughout is that he is also afflicted by something resembling schizophrenia. What many Christian viewers might also find distressing to take is the sheer angriness of this depiction of Jesus. Blakely’s astounding performance is complimented excellently by the ever-saturnine Robert Hardy as a more sympathetically written Pontius Pilate. Exceptional viewing.

Alan Morrison © 2008

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Stand Up Nigel Barton! (1965)/ Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton (1966)

by Dennis Potter

Directed by Gareth Davies

BBC DVD

Being both a fan of vintage British television and an Old Labour socialist at heart, Nigel Barton is one of my most treasured DVDs, tackling as it does issues of class, ideals, and compromised ideals. While the first play, Stand Up Nigel Barton!, is an extremely witty (note Barton’s neckless father muttering that he doesn’t want ‘no tightrope-walkers’ in his house in allusion to his son’s socially-conflicted metaphor) and involving satire on the Sixties denial of a still palpably entrenched class system, the sequel, Vote for Nigel Barton, is by far the superior of the two, focusing on the compromising road to power, unknowingly pointing towards the shameful sell out of new Labour in the 1990s. In uncanny parallel, here we have a squabbling Labour party campaigning group, torn between its essential principles and the fear of becoming unelectable, ultimately ripping its own heart out along the way. Caught in the middle is Barton (Keith Baron), torn between his coal mining town roots and the seductions of a graspable middle class, intellectually fulfilled future, partly paved by a scholarship to Oxford. Baron portrays this sense of anomie grippingly, helped by lacerating poetic outbursts via the metaphor-rich pen of Potter – his dilemma beautifully encapsulated in many impassioned monologues, most notably his tirade against complacent British society at what should be his speech in bid for election. Lines touching on the wasted artistic talents of his coal-spluttering father are particularly poignant. Potter’s writing in this second play is particularly exceptional. But apart from Baron’s deft turn as Barton, the real stand out, 

most nuanced performance of all is by John Bailey as Barton’s embittered, nicotine-ravaged election agent, Jack Hay. It is in this character particularly that Potter’s true incisive genius as a writer is most exemplified; Hay being a personification of the corrupted, pragmatically-ravaged ideals of the party. Director Gareth Davies goes all out for gritty kitchen-sink atmosphere. Brilliant stuff.

Alan Morrison © 2008

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To Serve Them All My Days

adapted by Andrew Davies from the novel by RF Delderfield 

BBC DVD

I vaguely remembered watching this gently alluring series as a six year old around the time 

of its original transmission in 1980. It was one of my father’s favourite programmes at the time, stirring his nostalgia for his schooldays in a grammar school in Somerset, though this series is set in a public school in Devon. But its depiction of hallowed scholarly halls, 

gowned school masters and CofE equanimity, no doubt reminded him of his boyhood. 

Bamfylde is a backwater snapshot of English Georgian private education, with its own distinctive reputation for quarrying ‘good characters’ in its pupils. It provides an unlikely sanctuary for the shell-shocked, chip-shouldered Welsh miner’s son David Powlett-Jones, 

the idealistic but sometimes hot-headed main protagonist of the series which is in effect his story. The part is played by one of the consummate leads of his period, John Duttine, whose career never quite lifted off as much as it should have. After an incidental role as Hindley Earnshaw in the particularly gritty and thorough TV adaptation of Wuthering Heights of 1978, Duttine landed his first starring role in this effortlessly beguiling adaptation of the novel by 

RF Delderfield. It would act as the springboard to further limelight as the hero of the supremely creepy 1981 serialisation of Day of the Triffids*. Duttine might also have been seen as an obvious contender for the plum role of Sebastian Flyte in ITV’s po-faced adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, but clearly the young Yorkshireman was already 

typecast in angry young working class roles (or hirsute misanthropic parts*). 

Although the actual character of Powlett-Jones does sometimes grate a little during this extensive series (13 50 min episodes in all), this is by no means anything to do with Duttine’s performance, which is exceptionally focused, nuanced and passionate throughout (replete with highly convincing and versatile Welsh accent); this is more down simply to the more irritating aspects to the essentially decent and likeable character of Powlett-Jones, who seems often unrealistically heroic and modest, especially in the midst of the frequent praise heaped on him by all and sundry. The character is indeed seemingly perceived by his teacher peers, and particularly his excruciatingly jolly Headmaster-mentor, Herries, as practically Messianic: the latter clearly sees his young protégé as a rough-edged but malleable saviour 

of an all-too-precariously cosy school. 

‘P-J’ (as he is more affectionately referred to throughout the series by his closer peers) does indeed prove himself to be the near-perfect Headmaster of Bamfylde: utterly committed, morally upstanding, quietly authoritative, unimpeachably trustworthy, open-minded and, well, everything else. His eminent suitability to his ultimate role of Headmaster (finally attained by the end of the penultimate episode) is made particularly ironic in light of his relentless sense of being out of place in the picturesque scenario of a different class to his own. Although the character’s socialism is alluded to throughout, apparently (and I have not read it yet) the actual novel laid more of an emphasis on this than the series; no doubt the toning down of the politics of the story in the television version was tempered by the unfortunate dawning 

of a new conservative Britain at the time. However, political sparring runs through the series, though often fairly patchily; but gains compelling momentum towards the latter part with the character of Christine Forster (a strong performance by Patricia Lawrence), the slightly frosty Labour campaigner who eventually becomes the second Mrs Powlett-Jones frequently challenging PJ’s politically compromised position at Bamfylde. This conflict perversely brings the two together when they realise they are on the same side essentially. Later, Christine’s self-perceived failure at winning a seat in Parliament, combined with a sense of purposelessness as the redundant wife of a successful headmaster, culminates in a breakdown which she only just recovers from at the conclusion of the series. This episode is particularly well acted and nuanced, and is highly convincing and emotive.

There is also a long-running thread of antagonism between the more privileged and educated PJ, and his resentful coal-mining elder brother, Chetwynd, who sees himself as the true rooted socialist and class-warrior of the two. This conflict makes for truly profound television, with PJ palpably torn between his inherited socialist ideas and a new-found sense of belonging and purpose in the seemingly incompatible scenario of an English public school. PJ justifies his decision to stay at Bamfylde, in spite of his politics, by arguing that he is needed more in such a setting to give the other side of the social story to privileged young men, rather than return to rainy Wales to preach to the converted. Although one does see his point, there are times when similarly-minded viewers may perceive PJ as politically compromised and a little self-centred (or rather, Bamfyld-centred). But the series as a whole, through PJ’s story, compellingly depicts the human conflict between ideas and feelings. It is this essential anomie that PJ represents.

The always reliable Duttine aside, TSTAMD also sports a panoply of superb supporting roles, the most notable of whom is Alan MacNaughtan as the supremely sardonic, chain-smoking, Gandalf-esque Howarth. Here is distilled the quintessence of burgeoning Fabian despondency of the period: a thwarted intellectual and card-carrying atheist, who hollers out an unforgettable – albeit resonantly self-restrained – tirade to Herries’ bumbling, optimistic clergyman headmaster as to life being ‘something to be got through’ when rounded on for failing to prevent a suicidal PJ striding off alone onto the moors following the sudden shock 

of his wife’s and children’s deaths in a car crash. This is arguably the most powerful and moving scene in the entire series, and believe me, it is up against many other such moments. Atheist or believer, I challenge any viewer to watch this emotive plea for the dignity of human life in its right to decide its own fate, without feeling a shiver of sentiment run down their spine. Beautifully scripted and acted stuff. What also makes the reassuringly staid, sports-hating, philistine-baiting Howarth such a memorable television character, is his inimitable capacity to talk with a perpetual cigarette balanced in his mouth. I can only recall one scene in the entire series when his mouth is briefly fag-free. Hats off to MacNaughtan for such an exceptional portrayal of what is a deeply complex and deceptively sanguine character, whose last vestige of faith in humanity is entirely invested in the sincere, self-deprecating PJ. The shot of Howarth’s vision dimming as he watches a game of cricket (which he hates) while slouched in a canvas chair as his last cigarette tips out from his clutch, is beautifully shot, 

and poignantly encapsulates the series’ title in its most complex and faithless character. 

While Frank Middlemass’s Herries is undoubtedly a lovably dotty and cheerful character, a 

sort of fluffier version of Michael Horden (voicing Badger in Wind in the Willows, that is), for me the other two stand-out performances are from Neil Stacy (Robert in Duty Free) as the militarily insecure Carter, and Charles Kay (I, Claudius; Edge of Darkness; Sherlock Holmes 

– The Creeping Man) as Alcock, the pent-up, fastidious successor to Herries. While Carter provides continual light relief throughout in his canting patriotism and amusing narrow-mindedness, Alcock adds a dose of genuine menace in what is a startling performance of repressed sexuality and simmering obsession, as the headmaster who spies on his pupils for signs of homosexual behaviour and finds disgust in all habits other than devout teetotalism. 

This is a series I can watch again and again, and one which I could not imagine being made on contemporary television, due to its rectitude, slow pace and reclining nature. It is a profound and sometimes surprising story, and its intrinsic sedateness works in its favour, not against it. I’d recommend purchasing this series to anyone who enjoys the long slow burn of moving and involving storylines and intricate character development. Unforgettably engrossing viewing.

Alan Morrison © 2008

Alan Morrison

Whatever Happened To History?

The Noughtiesisation of Costume Drama

– Being a Right Royal Drubbing of Modern Abominations as The Tudors c. 2008 and a Nostalgic Tribute to the likes of The Six Wives of Henry VIII circa 1970 –

Whatever happened to good old-fashioned television costume drama? In the halcyon days of British television – somewhere from the early Sixties through to the mid Eighties, but peaking 

in the Seventies – the BBC, and even at times ITV, excelled at bringing us a seemingly unending string of high quality, authentically realised costume dramas, pure historically based original scripts or literary adaptations, frequently adapted by actual writers such as Andrew Davies (Dickens’ The Signalman, RF Delderfield’s To Serve Them All My Days), Harry Green (Hardy’s Jude the Obscure), Jack Pulman (Robert Graves’ I, Claudius) Christopher Fry (The Brontës of Haworth), Dennis Potter (Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge; Casanova) and legion regular intra-serial episode writers such as John Prebble, Rosemary Ann Sisson, Hugh Whitemore, Alfred Saughnessy, John Hawkesworth, and even budding novelist Fay Weldon, all of whom contributed scripts to such iconic costume epics as Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-75), The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), Elizabeth R (1972) et al. 

Perhaps it was, in part, the relatively chronic budgetary restraints of these formative decades in British television-making that necessitated such detailed and intricate concentration on scripting and characterisation – long before the eye-candy of film-mimicking digital video (which is an inferior, mistier version of film camera by the way) and CGI invaded our screens – but even in spite of budgetary limitations, many of these vintage serials realised their settings beautifully in often rich detail of set and costume. These were the days when television was basically theatre in an electrical box, and in that sense an artform; when it took its time to build up narrative and tell stories, in the main carried through dialogue and first rate acting. Indeed, some of the most powerful and involving performances I have ever witnessed have been in vintage television costume serials and plays: Colin Blakely’s tortured Christ in Dennis Potter’s Son of Man (1965), Michael Hordern’s acutely observed Asperger’s-ridden academic in Whistle and I’ll Come To You (1968), Denholm Eliot’s tangibly haunted Signalman (1976), Keith Michell’s infectiously fickle King in The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), Glenda Jackson’s titanic turn as Elizabeth R (1972), Alfred Burke’s infinitely subtle portrayal of Patrick Brontë in The Brontës of Haworth (1973), Barry Foster’s loveably fatuous Kaiser Wilhelm in Fall of Eagles

(1974), Frank Finley’s electrifying take on the Fuhrer in The Death of Adolf Hitler (1973), and Derek Jacobi’s stuttering tour-de-force in I, Claudius (1976) – to name only a handful of examples are, to my mind, some of the most immaculately nuanced and intensely realised roles of all time, including all that cinema has to offer. 

And what is about the other chief serendipity of these vintage adaptations (again, dictated to a large extent by budgetary limitations), verbal exposition of a setting’s events through dialogue, that was somehow far more involving and compelling than actually having these events visually depicted? There is something intrinsically more engaging in things being verbally described or alluded to rather than entirely visually represented, in the same way that supernatural and horror narratives are far more disturbing through what is being suggested or partially shown/explained rather than blasted on the screen before us (for instance, in film terms, The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1960) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) are lastingly haunting due to their poetically ambiguous atmospheres and absence of visual closure or rational explanation). The reason being of course that it allows the viewers’ imagination to play around with the possibilities, often in turn describing far worse ideas and possibilities in the dark of ‘suggestion’ than graphic visualisation could muster. So here is the power inherent in verbal exposition and description (exemplified, for example, in a scene in the otherwise fairly graphic I, Claudius, in which a woman vividly, yet only in partial detail, describes the sexual perversions she has been subjected to by the Emperor Tiberius, just prior to stabbing herself after shouting ‘If only I could just cut the memory out…’ – if this were re-made nowadays, we would have had it all spoon-fed, distastefully as possible, in visceral flashbacks) that makes us do much of the imagining ourselves, thus involving us more in the drama, and is in essence of course a key aspect to theatrical drama, which vintage serials were crafted from. And to be frank, any vintage series that attempted to use visual exposition of integral narrative events – the French Revolution being carried out by a peasant rabble of half-a-dozen in 1980’s adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities springs to mind, as does the 1971 attempt to capture the majestic setting of Last of the Mohicans by throwing a handful of face-painted character actors into the Sussex undergrowth – often only served to cheapen the sense of reality to the un-matchable quality of their scripts.

But above all, particularly in the more grittily-lit Seventies’ serials (benefiting more often than not from the intimate immediacy of video camera), but also throughout the Eighties and even into the early Nineties (in particular, Andrew Davies’ superb adaptation of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1994)), the pre-digital video/cod-filmic television age – at its peak between 1968-1978 – had a humility in its historical and costume authenticity. And this is the key differentiation between pre-Nineties television costume drama and its post-Nineties inheritor, the latter more often than not tailored to a misconceived ‘populist’ approach to television-making dictated by the ‘bums-on-seats men-in-suits’ production cartel that’s dumbed down the medium for the past decade and a half.

After the cloying infatuation with chocolate-box Jane Austen adaptations, pioneered by the insipid Pride & Prejudice (1995) – and one would think the famous shot of Colin Firth in a wet frilled-shirt would have been more off-putting than, as it was, brand-making – and, in turn, Persuasion (same year), a string of similarly callow productions ensued, even transferring to – almost indistinguishable – films through yet more tedious dissections of upper-class Georgian matchmaking (the yawn-provoking and woefully miscast Sense and Sensibility, 1995; Emma, 1996; and more recently, yet another adaptation of P&P, 2005), something seemed to shift in the entire perception of costume drama adaptation, a fundamental re-adapting of adaptation itself, to fit the modern-centric populist attitudes of the wider viewing public; or at least, television big-wigs’ own tabloid view of the wider viewing public. This seems in essence to be 

the view: the public needs constant coaxing and persuading to watch anything not set literally in the present day and concerning present day issues – and invariably haircuts – by having historical series either spoon-fed to them through the plague of absurdly edited docu-dramas (more on which later) or ‘contemporised’ through a sort of scriptural, visual and even follicular translation, or transposition, as if these are characters and situations which could be of today, in all except their costumes. Anything deviating from this ‘Noughtiesisation’ of history is passed over to BBC Four, along with the only truly challenging original plays.

I say ‘Noughtiesisation’ since to my mind this modernisation and popularisation of the period drama into a more consumer-palatable mock-form truly came into its – less than impressive – own, this decade. The signs were already there in the Nineties that choices in literary adaptations for television were growingly mirroring the more Daily Mail-sated audiences in increasingly populist author choices, mostly of course Austen, and if not, Dickens (the last truly authentic adaptation being Martin Chuzzlewit, 1994), and more often than not inexorable re-vamps of Oliver Twist. 

There was also a disturbing abrading of time, period, trend and custom in the crass casting of Colin Firth as another Darcy in 2001’s adaptation of the vapid Bridget Jones’ Diary, obviously echoing both the ‘novelist’s’ and the casting director’s mutual crush on said actor’s portrayal of said character, as if to oddly juxtapose these two novels and adaptations on screen. So stony-faced Firth found himself the unwitting pivot in this inter-textual conspiracy. It is also perhaps the fact that the main themes of, say, Austen’s novels, romance and matchmaking (albeit societally-determined in her narratives), being timeless and perennial, that her writing more than any other author’s translates so easily to historically disinterested modern audiences. This also probably partly explains why a string of Hardy adaptations throughout the Nineties and early Noughties (The Woodlanders; Tess of the D’urbevilles; Far From the Madding Crowd) and of George Eliot (Middlemarch; Mill on the Floss), were relative ratings flops – Middlemarch, for instance, having never been repeated since its original broadcast in 1995. Naturally, anything as socially critical (though, ironically, still relevant to our own times to a degree) as Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, would simply not be attempted on the small screen (and in any case, would have an uphill climb to come anywhere close to the definitive and uncompromising adaptation of 1971). 

But now, well into the Noughties, even this populist-tempered choice of adaptations is seemingly not enough: I recently witnessed a trailer for a new series in which a modern day woman changes places with a Jane Austen character. So it has gone well beyond a mere metaphor now, and into the inevitable literalism. Strange and seriously maladjusted entities who have for some time claimed that the interminably dull and unrealistic Coronation Street is comparable to Dickens, might count themselves chief among those to blame for this bastardisation of the medium of costume drama.

In the last decade of British television, and the BBC can count itself particularly guilty, we have been bombarded with a ‘Noughtiesisation’ of the past, a re-telling of history in modern day vernacular, behaviour, attitudes and even hairstyles – a follicular imposition on historical representation which makes the ubiquitous boot-polished quiffs of Sixties’ period adaptations or the flared trousers and proto-afros of Seventies’ sci-fi, look comparatively authentic – and have now, through the auspices of populist programme makers, discovered that, among other revelations, the young Henry VIII wasn’t actually ginger-haired and pallid but actually the spit of an Esquire model replete with ludicrous scalp-quaffed haircut (an evolution from the appropriately Roman-style forward-comb of the Nineties) and designer stubble, and that Robin Hood was in actual fact an arse-kicking lincoln-green-clad Ninja who foreshadowed a future breed of Brighton-based Britpop band frontmen. The latter ‘re-visioning’ of our most popular folk hero is for me the pinnacle of ‘Noughtiesised’ historical adaptation, and has to be the singularly most abysmal ‘bastardisation of the past’ ever made – even the badly-aged electro-fantasia of Eighties’ Robin of Sherwood is inspired by comparison (but for vintage TV afficionados, I’d point you towards 1975’s The Legend of Robin Hood, with Paul Darrow’s proto-‘Avon’ (Blake’s 7) turn as a Plantaganet-nosed Sheriff of Nottingham, for the moodiest, most authentic take on the folk story).

As if this is not seen as enough to spoon-feed the past into the mouths of a perceived race 

of Cro Magnon morons, the writers then re-write the diction and expressions of these historical figures to fit those of the specific time of the viewers to whom it is first broadcast. This will, in time of course, and quite ironically, only serve to age these cod-adaptations even more starkly than the aforementioned Quiff-centric Sixties, as products rooted in the time of broadcast, so will prove pretty pointless all round in the future. It’s costume drama for the culture of immediacy – and any faint notions among the so-called producers and writers of these abominations that somehow their work will serve as didactic Trojan Horses, I would only point them back to their grossly inauthentic scripts as proof that this is evidently not going to be the case. 

For me, the true downturn in costume drama authenticity was heralded by Ray Winston’s cockney version of Henry VIII (2003). This ‘re-interpretation’ of one of our most famous monarchs was, to say the least, brave. But in all other respects, utterly ridiculous and laughable. One almost expected him at some point to turn to one of his Catherines with a gruff, ‘Full English please Caff’. Ok, so one might argue that this curiously unrestrained casting was a revolutionary move in the continued erosion of the fashion for Received Pronunciation in television adaptation. Well, one might argue this, as well as some spurious, politically correct notion of class equality, that it somehow seems fair for once to portray an historical royal as a stubbly working-class bad boy – but then to anyone with a modicum of perception, this is just gimmicky and misleading. One can re-interpret, adapt the past to a degree, but 

one cannot, to suit a particular audience, change a historical fact, at least, not with any artistic credibility: and the fact is, being King of England, it is highly unlikely that Henry VIII would have spoken with a cockney accent. Period (excuse pun). It is equally more unlikely that, as according to the abominable tripe that is The Tudors (2008) – basically a modern day sex-romping soap opera transposed into the 1600s – that same monarch would have had the diction, mannerisms and hairstyle of an average young Londoner of over 400 years into the future. We also know, from historically reliable portraits of Henry VIII, that he looked absolutely nothing like this latest ‘interpretation’, even as a young man, but was blatantly ginger in complexion, pallid and rather plain (at least, by modern perceptions, such as they are). 

It’s also curious to note that alongside the continued Austenite infatuation, the British viewing public are also, apparently, equally besotted with the dynasty of the Tudors – in particular, the endlessly re-visited reign of Elizabeth I, on both small and big screen, none of which have come anywhere near, still, to the definitive portrayal by Glenda Jackson. Is this perhaps because, in a climate of resurging monarchism, and the continuing post-Imperial decline, we like to morbidly revel in the very dynasty which first stamped ‘Britishness’ on the rest of the world? This is made even more ironic by the fact that, to be pedantic,the Tudors represented the first significant break in the original royal line, having tenuously taken the throne from the last legitimate British dynasty, the Plantagenets. But since, of course, our current Queen is descended from her namesake, though indirectly, but far more indirectly descended from any of the Plantagenets, I suspect we will never see a costume drama entitled The Plantagenets on our screens.

To conclude on this topic, I’d like to turn, in brief, to the contemporary televisual mutation we know as ‘docu-drama’. To my mind this strange chimera between half-hearted historical adaptation and intrusive academic commentary, having started in the form we view it in today during the Nineties, was also in part significant in this degeneration of the costume drama. When I first unwittingly watched a docu-drama, not realising that it was one, or what a docu-drama was anyhow, my first thoughts were, why does a University Historian keep interrupting this period drama, and with all the charisma of Simon Schama? Was there interference from Open University? To this day, I have never fully understood the point to docu-drama in such a literal form as this, except to assume it is due to a dearth of proper television writers or a determination not to employ any, but instead, hire a few dull academics to fill in the ‘difficult bits’ during a misty-lensed, CGI-clogged Roman or Mongol computer game. Is this down to scriptural cost-cutting on paying actual writers to tell a didactic, fact-based narrative with some modicum of literary flair (the heady days of the brilliantly written and characterised I, Claudius now a very distant glint in the past), and to instead corner much cheaper University lecturers in their lunch breaks to mumble a string of unembellished facts so that more budget is freed up to attempt Gladiator-scale reconstructions? Partly, I would think, yes. 

But the more sinister aspect to docu-dramas is that they are clearly used now to literally 

spell out any didacticism inherent in the programme, rather than allow an audience to make the effort to pick this up through the dramatisation of historical events, as exemplified in the costume dramas of the Seventies in particular. For me this strips the colour out of the process, the flair and the evocation, the artistry, and reduces the effect to simply a fairly mundane attempt at depicting the past as if it’s happening now, but rarely if ever in a particularly interesting or even authentic way. The highly visceral Rome series, rather like a docu-drama but with the academic commentaries cut out from it, manages to be both distasteful and boring at the same time, which is quite a feat. Though not nearly so graphically sexualised as the 1997 adaptation of Anna Karenina, which left no stone unturned in its title character’s finesse at filleting her illicit lovers; or the corset-bursting male-fantasy bed-romp of Tipping the Velvet (2002) – more like Crushing the Velvet. So now we know what our ancestors, throughout the ages, were busy doing: inexorably copulating. What an intriguing take on the past. 

It’s interesting to note that docu-dramas actually originated as far back as the Sixties, but were, of course, a much less muddled/disorientating breed back then; not cauterised between bored academic and CGI battlefield, but properly scripted by television writers, acted by proper actors, though directed more as fly-on-the-wall documentary-style dramas, specifically made to put across a certain social message or topical issue, or to try and capture the true feel of a certain period or historical figure. These were frequently exceptionally written and acted dramas in their own right, but created as didactic narratives, and so not as colourfully embellished as the average ‘dramatisation’ of the time, being made with more of a sense of ‘reality’. Cathy Come Home (1966) was perhaps the most hard-hitting distillation of 

this genre. But there were many others, some now available on DVD through the BFI, including Ken Russell’s Elgar (1962) and the infectiously intense Delius (1968); and director and film historian Kevin Brownlow’s deeply moving biopic Winstanley (1966), which depicts the doomed Digger commune of its eponymous subject in 1649 as immediately and candidly as if it was happening today – but, without any spoon-feeding, dumbing down, or inauthentic ‘contemporising’ of its lead character, his appearance, manner or diction. In fact, this particular made-for-TV film drew its entire script from the actual writings of Gerrard Winstanley on his experiences in the Digger commune, not excerpted in-between academic commentaries, but used as an inter-textual narrative device, and through occasional dialogue and monologue, through the medium of ‘dramatisation’. Remember ‘dramatisation’? 

Fortunately through the medium of DVD those of us who are driven by the sheer idiocy of modern costume drama to scour the shelves of the obdurately priced BBC Shops, or painstakingly surf the likes of Network DVD and Acorn, are able to uncover those lost gems of authentically crafted vintage TV costume drama, the genuine articles you might say, to give us blissful sanctuary from the mind-numbing ‘Noughtiesisation’ of history. 

Alan Morrison © 2008

Alan Morrison

The Brontës of Howarth (1973)

Written/Adapted by Christopher Fry

(BFS Entertainment, US and Canada Region 1 NTSC, 2003)

and Daphne du Maurier’s The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (Victor Gollancz, 1960; Penguin, 1972)

Being a devoted lover of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and a self-confessed fan of – particularly 1970s – vintage television costume drama, I’d always wanted to see this biographical series of the quirky Irish-Cornish doyens of 19th century gothic romantic fiction. My mother had always remembered this dramatisation vividly from 1973, in particular, Michael Kitchen’s supreme turn as Branwell Brontë and the far too unsung Alfred Burke’s masterly portrayal of the eccentric, aloof and taciturn head of the family, Patrick Brontë. Both actors excel in their performances, but in spite of Kitchen’s tour-de-force of tangible torment (excuse the alliteration] as Branwell, it is Burke’s jackdaw-like Patrick that makes this series especially enjoyable. Indeed, Burke’s husky – replete with convincing Irish accent – catchphrase, ‘Goodnight my children; don’t stay up too late’, which he whispers to his restlessly creative daughters on his way to bed every night in some ways serves as light relief amid the domestic intensity of this series. Burke’s understated take on the near-myopic, bespectacled, beaky-faced Reverend – whose chin, throughout the five episodes, recedes further and further behind an increasingly waxing neckerchief until his mouth is practically embalmed – is one of the most subtly nuanced characterisations I have ever witnessed; masterly. If only Burke had been given more opportunities to shine as one of our greatest character actors, instead of being miscast as Long John Silver in 1977’s adaptation of Treasure Island (apart from the long-running Public Eye 1969-1971, in which he played a down-at-heel detective, and as a Nazi Officer in Enemy at the Door, 1979-80, I can only recall one other outstanding performance from him as the sinister man on the bus in  one of the superior episodes from Tales of the Unexpected, 1980’s The Fly Paper). 

Burke and Kitchen aside, it would be grossly misrepresentative to omit mention of Rosemary McHale and Vickery Turner as Emily and Charlotte respectively. Turner’s Charlotte is an infinitely more intriguing and emotional figure than one might be led to expect; in fact, while Anne (Ann Penfold) is the more passive and composed of the three sisters, and Emily, the aloof and taciturn black sheep, it’s Charlotte here who is depicted as the most frustrated and self-torturing, as exemplified in her beautifully powerful internal monologue at the end of one episode, in which she castigates herself for feeling wanting in the kind of single-minded creative passion that drove others before her to write great things. I can think of no other television series – and as you might be able to tell from the size of my contribution in this section of the site, I’ve seen, and re-seen, an awful lot of them – before or since this forgotten masterpiece, that so uncompromisingly depicts the true nature of artistic agony. It is indeed episode three which stands out as the peak of the series, possibly the most intense 50 minutes of television costume drama I can think of. Apart from Charlotte’s outburst, we also witness another, equally heart-rending one from Anne while working as a stultified governess, groaning to herself on the floor ‘Oh I despair of humankind’. And to top it all, in this episode we reach 

the true nadir of Branwell’s continued breakdown for his sense of complete failure both morally and creatively. There are tormented monologues galore from him throughout, only made comical to the more cynical viewer by Kitchen’s diminutive, puffy-haired demeanour, resembling a cross between Mr Tumnus and Bilbo Baggins (with a smattering of Percy Bysshe Shelley thrown in for good measure). Kitchen’s delivery of Branwell’s defence of the superficially base nature of Byron is deeply moving, especially on considering the profligate, unpublished poet’s sincere empathy with the artistic spirit of his hero: ‘it was from such a 

base nature that the wells of a higher soul sprung’ (sic). 

The entire cast excels in its each portrayal of the Brontë kin, their stormy-browed housemaids, and of their very few but loyal friends and acquaintances. Rosemary McHale proves herself well worthy of her casting for Emily, dour, aloof and almost continually glowering throughout the series, and, stubbornly staggering down the stairs on the day of her death from tuberculosis – the illness that the family was famously and fatally susceptible to – and shrugging off Charlotte’s concern as fussing. The casting of Emily in particular is a tall task, being probably the most obscure and mythical of the three sisters – through the reputation of her one and only novel, the brooding Wuthering Heights – and McHale is a brilliant choice with her bleak beauty and large gloomy eyes. Indeed, all three sisters are cast expertly in terms of character and looks – and this is played on early in the series when they are shown posing behind Branwell’s famous portrait of them, which is facing the viewer by way of facial comparison (though the lack of emphasis on Branwell’s famously brushing himself out from the painting is, strangely, unmentioned; this, along with the preference for focus on Charlotte’s journey through the writing of Jane Eyre, but not of Emily’s seminal gothic-romance, remain the only disappointments in this otherwise comprehensive depiction). Furthermore, one only needs to take a look at the surviving side-profile photograph of Patrick Brontë to see how uncannily similar to him a white-haired, bespectacled Alfred Burke is.

Anyone who has visited the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, will witness how authentically its interior is reproduced in this serial; in particular, the legendary sitting room where the sisters were known to pace round a small table discussing their ideas and reciting their stories to one another (a spell-binding image which rather disturbed me as a small boy when entering that dark creaky room). Location work, of which there is a fair bit for a series of this period, is appropriately filmed in slatey Haworth itself, and around the grounds of the real Parsonage, 

set like a windowed sepulchre among its churchyard of leaning headstones. 

Special mention has to go to writer Christopher Fry for his boldly poetic script, which, rather than – as would be more the case today via irrelevant sex and restless cameras – skirting around long speeches, expositions and, even, silences, actually lingers on such aspects to this series, which are as one might expect abundant throughout; Fry clearly realised that words were the very bone and sinew of this setting, and so drives the narrative through extraordinarily beguiling speeches and monologues, that almost make any attempts throughout at reality-based domesticity and actual recorded events seem comparatively mundane (though still entertaining and interesting in themselves). You simply wouldn’t get a script of this quality being broadcast today, at least, not without it being cauterised into verbal snatches in-between overly visceral visual exposition and pretentious and distracting camerawork). 

But still on the subject of the actual writing, we are to assume the main source behind the script and depictions of the Brontës, most particularly Charlotte and Branwell, originate in Elizabeth Gaskill’s Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857). This is made patently clear to any doubters 

by the actual appearance of Gaskill in the series itself, coming in towards the end to meet, get to know, and begin writing about Charlotte, a writer whom she perceives, no doubt correctly, as superior in ‘genius’ to herself (though one equalled, if not transcended, by her sister Emily, and, at least potentially, by her brother – but of course only the living famous and not the posthumously recognised have the privilege of knowing their biographers). It is also, as we realise by the end, Gaskill’s voice narrating the family story from the beginning and throughout – and Barbara Leigh-Hunt’s dulcet tones serve the purpose well. Inevitably, in a script drawn largely from Gaskill, much of the series’ focus is on Charlotte, and a considerable amount too on her brother, probably because the two were, at least as children, inseparable, feeding off one another as Genius Tallii (Charlotte) and Chief Genius Brannii (Branwell), often formatively co-writing the minute-scripted tales of Angria and Gondol together. Naturally, Branwell’s growing insanity would have been of much significance to his closest sister, and so the series spends almost as much – if not more, at least, for the first three episodes – focus on her brother as on herself. Emily (Genius Emmii) is, in a way appropriately for her reputation, an ever-watching enigma in the scenario, but almost always imposing an unspoken objectivity on the rest of the family by her enviable detachment (helped by McHale’s simmering stare), often only breaking her silences for quipping aphorisms: ‘I suppose endurance is a form of occupation’. 

But having recently read Daphne du Maurier’s utterly riveting work of faction, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (Victor Gollancz, 1960; Penguin, 1972) – possibly the best storyline 

she ‘embellished’ on (her famous Rebecca being almost identical to the plot of Jane Eyre), 

and second only in strength to her ingeniously ambiguous My Cousin, Rachel – I’ve been transported into a slightly different take on Branwell’s nature and life, although Gaskill’s depiction is admittedly every bit as ‘infernal’ as du Maurier’s. But there are certain intriguing aspects to du Maurier’s pseudo-biography of Branwell that are absent from the Gaskill source, and understandably, since the latter was of course a biography on Charlotte and not her brother. While the irrational, temperamental, precocious character of Branwell is portrayed in both du Maurier’s work and Fry’s adaptation from Gaskill, in the former, we are allowed greater insight into the extraordinary workings of the brother’s creative imagination, every bit as distinct and powerful – as evidenced, in glimpses, through the variously quoted fragments of poems and prose throughout the book, occasionally hackneyed and un-drafted though they remain – as each of his sister’s. The difference seems to be that through a misperceived notion of an innate superiority in purpose to his sisters, as tempered by the society of the time, and 

a volatile and unfocused artistic nature palliated ruinously by alcohol, laudanum and opium, Branwell’s potential genius never developed beyond its potential, at least not sufficiently on the page to lift his name to the heights of those poets who populated Blackwood’s. 

Through a tragic combination of transparent precocity, inelegant egoism (re a letterhe wrote to the editor of Blackwood’s on the death of a lauded poet, announcing his own poetic gifts as a consolation), addictive nature, epilepsy (then still religiously misinterpreted and stigmatised) and possible schizophrenia, the fundamentally morbid and obsessive Brontë temperament which he shared with his three sisters, in his case, floundered and turned-in on itself instead of flowering into full bloom through the channel more focused and single-minded creativity. So whereas, in turn, Anne, Emily and Charlotte made the morbid Brontë duende work for them into published authorship, Branwell became victim to it, and it destroyed him. Apart from a 

rag-tag portfolio of literary and poetic scraps – some fleetingly brilliant but many, as du Maurier often observes, ‘amateur’ or ‘doggerel’ – and a few highly promising canvases, Branwell left scarce evidence of his intrinsic ‘genius’ behind him, famously noting this on his death-bed: 

‘I had done nothing neither great nor good’. This is his tragedy, and it is testament to the sheer power – or even genius, if you like – of his turbulent and rebellious personality, that Branwell came posthumously to inspire such a zealous and intricately-drawn biography by one of Britain’s most popular novelists. A flattering tribute indeed, and by way of belated consolation for such an ‘infernal’ life, a means to the posterity he died thinking he’d denied himself. 

Equally interesting as well in du Maurier’s book, is the fact that, among other poet and artist peers of his – all of whom were, conversely, ‘recognised’ in their lifetimes – Branwell counted among one his closest friends the fascinating figure of Hartley Coleridge (son of the famous Samuel Taylor), a poet and critic of some repute in his own right, but whose own gifts were ultimately stunted in the overwhelming shadow of his father’s reputation. du Maurier’s descriptions of Hartley Coleridge are intriguing, this having been a young man whom through extreme sensitivity lived his whole life as a recluse, and, possibly by some neurological quirk, was prematurely white-haired and had the gait and bearing of an old man while only in his twenties (almost a genetic metaphor for his aforementioned creative stunting). But the greatest near-revelation in du Maurier’s account, is the possibility some sparks of Branwell’s own imagination might have filtered into the basic storyline of Emily’s Wuthering Heights. This 

is not substantiated by du Maurier, who, indeed, goes to some length to argue that it was simply Branwell’s fraternal hubris in claiming he had had a hand in his sister’s masterpiece: apparently on brandishing the manuscript of Wuthering Heights to his friends in a pub, he realised on beginning to read it out that he had accidentally picked up a piece of Emily’s writing thinking it his own, but then decided in the moment to pretend it was his own so as not to lose face. Nevertheless, one can’t help thinking that so many aspects to the mood and setting of the story, and in particular, the tormented, demonic nature of Heathcliff, echoed uncannily not only the characteristics and preoccupations of Branwell, but also some of his formative fantastical narratives and characterisations. But one might further assume that inevitably some of his own thoughts and ideas might have unconsciously found their way into the psyche of his similarly-tempered sister (the novel’s character of Hindley Earnshaw, in particular, bears a striking resemblance to her love-abandoned, alcoholic brother; as does, 

in part, the frail doomed youth Linton, though perhaps as well more than an echo of Branwell’s friend, Hartley Coleridge). 

What is clear, in the end, is that even though his own creative development was truncated through mental and physical maladies and a series of unlucky events in a far too constricted home life, Branwell, by his very artistry of personality, indirectly influenced and coloured much of his sisters’ literary achievements. The fact too that, as du Maurier goes into great detail to expose, Branwell was evidently a child prodigy (an ambidexter, he could apparently put down two entirely separate and distinct pieces of writing simultaneously) and thus originally the obvious focal point for all the family’s worldly aspirations, makes his case even more tragic. 

But to return to the dramatisation, which is the main focus of this review. One can only puzzle, greatly, as to why, as yet, this riveting and moving series has yet to be released on DVD in the UK. I managed to get hold of it from Canada, and although it is Region 1, I must have through sheer will power, enabled it to work on my Region 2 player – and this review is proof that it has, and a few times over. One might hope that with the recent box set of adaptations of the Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, that a release of the actual biopic of the writers’ lives, for a viewing public far more enamoured to the medium of ‘docu-drama/fact-based adaptation’ than to ‘fiction-based dramatisation’, will come imminently in the future, for surely there’d be wide demand for this. But who knows? I certainly wouldn’t hold my breath, since for some reason the UK seems to show a rather philistine disregard for its own vintage television gems, preferring more often than not to release contemporary series on DVD, most of which are not only practically embryonic in reputation for having only just been broadcast prior to release, but are also frequently pale and poorly-written shadows of their artistically superior Seventies forebears (why, for instance, buy a sexed-up mediocrity 

like Elizabeth I (2005) when you can get the authentic, superiorly scripted and acted article, Elizabeth R (1972)? and who in all sanity would prefer a grunting cockney Ray Winstone (Henry VIII, 2003) to Keith Michell’s ingratiatingly bumptious portrayal of 1970’s flawless The Six Wives of Henry VIII?). It was some small miracle when the BBC finally released the classic 1978 serialisation of Wuthering Heights, the only adaptation – on small and big screen – that comes near to the brooding gloom of the novel, with a definitive, goblin-like Heathcliff in relative unknown Keith Hutchison – and though it is included in the new Brontës box set, I’d recommend buying it separately, since the superior version of Jane Eyre is the 1973 small budget set-piece with the metallic-voiced Michael Jayston excelling as Rochester, and not the more rose-lensed one with the metallic-faced Timothy Dalton, which is the one included in this set. But the same year’s sister production is still unavailable, in the UK. For those who can’t hold their breath beyond this review, I recommend a quick transaction via Amazon in order to acquire and treasure this brilliantly written and acted masterpiece, tellingly only available as a US/Canadian release – our cousins over the Atlantic showing far more reverence to our own costume drama heritage than we evidently do. But then, as with Branwell, a prophet hath no honour in his own land….

Alan Morrison © 2008

The Devil’s Chore

Being a largely unfavourable comparison of Peter Flannery’s Cromwellian melodrama The Devil’s Whore (2008) with more impressing harbingers such as Winstanley (1975), A King and His Keeper (1970), Children of the New Forest (1977), By the Sword Divided (1983-5), Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and To Kill A King (2003)

Readers may be quickly alerted by the above pun to my less than enthusiastic view of Peter Flannery’s faction-drama based around the key events in the English Civil War, the rather tabloid-titled The Devil’s Whore (though the term being Martin Luther’s idiom for ‘Reason’, something Gerrard Winstanley often cited as the new alternative to feudal traditionalism, is not entirely misplaced). Those on the Left and with a related interest in social and political history of our country would no doubt have been quaking in sceptical anticipation at what promised – via previews of a tub-thumping Lilburne and Diggers tilling the earth before salmon-pink sunsets – to finally be a truly gritty and incisive television depiction of the thwarted radicals of 1640s-50s England. 

  But sadly the fly in the ointment of this – no doubt, heartfelt, and certainly ambitious – dramatisation is the seemingly pointless central narrative of a fictional (though implied with the conceit of an allegedly factual frontispiece) aristocratic woman, namely – the blandly Austen-esque named – Angelica Fanshaw, and her many picaresque encounters and love affairs with some movers and shakers of the times. Most pivotally, the largely unsung (so compliments to Flannery there) landed radical Thomas Rain(s)borough (also known at the time as, among other variations, Rainbow or Rainborow) and the lesser-known but equally historical, rogue Edward Sexby. Though their prominent inclusion is something to be welcomed by knowledgeable viewers, it is a great pity that both portrayals seem to lack in sufficiently compelling exposition by which their narrative motives might have come across more affectingly. The palpably feministic take on narrative by Flannery seems to in part backfire, reducing potentially fascinating characters such as Rainborough and Sexby to near ciphers caught up in the romantic-entanglements of a purposeless, fictional motif in the Rubens-faced Angelica. But the period-suited complexion of the actress chosen for this part is undermined by the usual modern-play-on-the-past style of contemporary historical characterisation, and her apparent ability to influence even the King in his perspectives on the political climate of the time, among other pivotal matters with Parliamentarian leaders later, seems historically unlikely. True, there were female Leveller activists at the time, ‘the bonny besses in the sea-green dresses’ (see Alison Plowden’s excellent book In A Free Republic – Life in Cromwellian England), but it is highly improbable – according to accounts of the period – that, though unreasonably, a woman, no matter her status, could play so galvanic a role in the frontline events of the period as the creation of Angelica does. Lilburne’s wife is perhaps suitably feisty for the woman behind the radicalised pamphleteer.

  Sadly, in spite of some obvious effort on his part, John Simm’s grimacing, scar-cheeked mercenary neither works as a convincing anti-hero nor as a visceral, Heathcliffean fringe-lover to the central protagonist, as no doubt the writer and director both intended; the slightly pantomime look to the character notwithstanding, Simm only manages to engage my attention during his final moments and suicide after a botched assassination attempt on Cromwell. Simm for me is a fairly limited actor, strong at what he does best, which is a sort of scowling edginess, but precisely because of this acting style, tends to get typecast in ‘edgey roles’ (Raskolnikov in Crime in Punishment; a slightly too aggressively-charged van Gogh et al).

  Cromwell himself is fairly authentically portrayed, warts and all (literally), by a scowling trans-Atlantic actor, but one who, in spite of suitable conviction, fails to fully impress on us the true light-and-shade of the deeply complex nature of Oliver Cromwell, one torn between spiritual ideals and earthly pragmatism, and there is more a gruff, bumpkinish West Country crustiness to the actor’s – though admirable given his nationality – take on the rounder curl of the Norfolk accent. But it is germane to acknowledge at this point in the criticism, that apparently Peter Flannery’s original script spanned the equivalent of 12 episodes, reduced to a paltry four by Channel 4 honchos (those who calculate the average attention span of the public as something akin to toddlers’). 

  While the costumes and sets are, at least ostensibly, accurate and impressively detailed, the lighting strikingly chiaroscuro, and the cinematography highly painterly (or Rembrandt-esque as many critics have noted) to say the least – some shots of buff-coated Roundheads galloping over grim hillsides particularly impressive – these visual achievements are blighted by jarring This-Life-style camera jerks, which in trying to convey a sense of urgency to events, instead trips over itself in almost directorial self-parody. Given, in some scenes this works better than others, particularly when depicting the highly charged atmosphere of, say, the trial of ‘Free Born’ John; but mostly it doesn’t fit the grave mood and nature of the settings. 

  As for the inclusion and depiction of Leveller pamphleteer and campaigner for male suffrage, John ‘Free Born’ Lilburne, among those readers of historical accounts of such groups as the Levellers and Diggers of the Commonwealth period (see Christopher Hill’s Puritanism and Revolution or FD Dow’s Radicalism in the English Revolution), this is a potentially vexed issue. For a start, John was known as ‘Free Born’ John, and not, as far as my readings have uncovered, the rather Blackadder-esque ‘Honest’ John. Though Lilburne was a Northerner, from Hull, I would take slight issue with Flannery’s profoundly Geordie-sounding version, whose tub-thumping has been arguably over-egged in terms of its simmering aggression in this depiction. True, according to accounts, Lilburne did indeed class himself as an ‘Agitator’ (and, indeed, distanced himself from what he perceived to be the inaccurate label of ‘Leveller’ attributed to him, since he did not, crucially, believe in the levelling of private property; such was more the conviction of Gerrard Winstanley of the Diggers, or 

‘True Levellers’), but in the period it is likely this term was meant every bit as metaphorically as literally, and more often than not would manifest in scatterings of inflammatory pamphlets rather than necessarily in constant crowd-fomenting confrontations. What also doesn’t help matters is the fact that the actor playing Lilburne looks like a mullet-wigged Alistair Campbell and is only marginally more charming. I find it difficult to believe, from my various readings on Lilburne, that he would have cut quite so smug and sanctimonious a figure as Flannery’s ‘call-a-spade-a-spade’, testosterone-charged version we witness here. For a start, Lilburne was from a ‘middling’ (middle-class) background, a man of letters as much as campaigning, later a captain in the army, so most probably wouldn’t have come across quite as brusque and leathery as he does in this dramatisation. But I would concede, since Lilburne is thought to have been born in Durham, Flannery was perfectly entitled to extrapolate this detail and go for a more gritty, streetwise portrayal rather than what might have been a more Home Counties RP depiction, had the radical figure appeared more substantially than one or two throw-away scenes in Cromwell (1970). So, maybe fair enough. Nevertheless, there’s still something deeply unsatisfactory about Flannery’s Lilburne, not to mention dubious in his initial appearance as close – and apparently more leader-like – chum of Cromwell’s, in an early scene of the series. 

  While I embrace wholeheartedly Flannery’s refreshingly leftfield take on the Civil War and Commonwealth periods by putting the radicals of the times up to the front of the stage (something formerly omitted in favour of focus on the contradictions in Cromwell himself as a sort of metaphor for the different ideas fomenting in the period – as typified in the aforementioned 1970 film), I do, on grounds of historical authenticity, take issue with the writer’s way of doing this. In short, Flannery’s radical sympathies are perhaps a little too transparently voiced through his leading characters – even for viewers such as myself who are particularly sympathetic to this – and there is in a way a sense throughout of a very slight Left-centric re-writing of the true dynamics of the time. For me, The Devil’s Whore would have worked far more affectingly and powerfully had it been written around Lilburne and his like-minded contemporaries solely, without the very modern levering-in of ‘historical celebrity’ as chief protagonists (ie, the King, Cromwell et al). As with the well-intended and occasionally gripping Our Friends in the North, Flannery’s ambitiousness often works against him, and there is a feeling all too often of ‘important events and issues’ being shoe-horned in to the narrative so regularly that it is hard to draw a real feel of their effects for their sheer speed of approach and departure; in short, Flannery tries to encompass too much in too little time for any of it to really settle to the bottom of our consciousnesses. This is a sort of filmic sensibility which television serials shouldn’t hurry to keep up with. But the main problem with Flannery’s plotting and narratives is his compulsion to inter-weave famous historical events with the personal stories of the characters, to an excess. This makes it difficult to really engage with the characters for trying to keep up with rapidly-changing historical and political backdrops. But I certainly commend Flannery’s ambitiousness, albeit, in terms of parachuting in a fictional main character and ‘sexing up’ her factual counterparts (the name Sexby itself being seemingly extrapolated as a Carry On-esque pun), somewhat slapdash and needlessly confusing in my opinion.

  Having noted the authentic flavour to this historical dramatisation (which in spite of its many flaws, is still a good few rungs up from the doggerel of The Tudors or Merlin et al), I have to add that in a sense this convincing evocation of the period is for me, perhaps counter-productively, best represented by background details, costumes and apparel, even in the more befitting haircuts of sundry extras, than in the portrayals of the main players. Rainborough, for instance, resembles more Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings than his historical inspirer, with his long straggly hair tied in a braid; and the Gothic-esque visitations of a phallic-tongued CGI demon tonguing at Angelica from gnarled trees every so often (not to mention the Ring-Wraith style procession of spirits from a battlefield), also smacks more of Middle-Earth than Middle-England. Frankly, such phantasmal intrusions on an essential historical dramatisation fall flat on their face and are simply laughable. The pre-publicity relating to the series being filmed in South Africa didn’t help for me, since all I could see was disproportionately sized replicas of 17th century manor houses positioned incongruously amid the russet grasses of the veldt. In general, a shabby historicism unfortunately undermines the very deeply felt and still reverberating ideas of English radical groups of the period that Flannery was evidently setting out to exhume for reappraisal. And I can’t help feeling that the same could be said of his much-lauded Our Friends in the North. Where arguably Flannery is more successful in this most recent venture is in emphasizing the distinct parallel between the compromised (if not corrupted) policies of Cromwell’s Commonwealth and those of Blair’s New Labour. But this polemic is undermined by the more superficial and pretentious excesses of The Devil’s Whore. 

  I have probably watched most, if not all, of this historical period’s depictions on both television and film. How The Devil’s Whore compares to its very varied predecessors in depicting the most momentous time in our political history? It’s difficult to say. Swashbuckling nonsense such as The Moonraker (1958) aside, the 1970 epic Cromwell was an uneven affair, notable really only for some period details and Alec Guinness’s very convincing take on Charles I, but overall the film felt a whitewash of the real issues of the Civil War, a technicolour simplification for cinema audiences, with a wildly miscast Richard Harris in the title role (Trevor Howard would have been more suited), not because of his acting, which was suitably scowling throughout, but simply because he didn’t look remotely like Cromwell – as we think of him from his apparently accurate, wart-pocked portraits – with his mop of blond hair and faintly tanned face, fresh out of A Man Called Horse. To Kill A King (2003) provided us with a Napoleonic version of Cromwell in the diminutive Tim Roth, and overall this wasn’t too bad a dramatisation, focused more on the muddiness of the politics than the very black-and-white take of Cromwell. 

  In television terms, John Hawkesworth’s By The Sword Divided (1983, 1985), especially in its second series, was for me – in spite of its slight bias towards the Royalist side, perhaps reflective of the Thatcherite times – far more substantial and satisfactory a dramatisation of the period than Flannery’s more ambitious but film-centric take. The immediacy of video-shot studio scenes (as in the old TV style of production), a more laboured exposition through considerably more episodes, and one or two stand-out performances – notably Jeremy Clyde’s achingly aristocratic King (a more nuanced harbinger of Peter Capaldi’s slightly flatter take), Peter Jeffreys’ truly ‘warts and all’ portrayal of Cromwell, Rob Edwards’ steely John Fletcher and Gareth Thomas’s idealistic Roundhead General, Horton – By the Sword Divided is as good a dramatisation of the whole scope of the period as has been managed so far. It’s a sort of Upstairs, Downstairs of the Stewart age (or rather, Cavaliers, Roundheads). Though far from perfect, the series greatly matures into its second series, with more in-depth focus on the radical clashes of the Commonwealth, and affords a sense of completion due to its relatively epic length. 

A King and His Keeper, from the Biography anthology series (1970), is an interesting curio about King Charles’s imprisonment on the Isle of Wight starring Alan Badel as the incarcerated Charles I, and Robin Ellis as his chief Parliamentarian captor. But perhaps one of the most historically authentic productions was a BBC adaptation of Captain Maryatt’s Children of the New Forest (1977), a beautifully shot five part serial with some exceptional performances from John Carson as the sympathetic Parliamentarian Colonel Heatherstone, Donald Sumpter as the menacing fanatical Puritan Ned Corbould, Artro Morris as Oliver Cromwell, and, in a brief scene at the beginning of the series, Jeremy Clyde as Charles I, foreshadowing his lengthier portrayal six years later in By the Sword Divided. The story was reshot by the BBC in 1998, but in spite of some commendable aspects, particularly in period detail, this six part version lacked the same attention to scripting and characterisation that set its 1977 precurser apart. 

  But for me the greatest production on this period – bar Caryl Churchill’s rightly lauded stage play on the same subject, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire – is Kevin Brownlow’s 1975 Winstanley. This is a true gem of a production, and the only one to focus on arguably the most important and influential radical thinker of the time (played with gentle conviction by relative unknown Miles Halliwell), who led his followers – the Diggers – in sustaining themselves on an untended scrap of arable land by way of re-enacting early Christian proto-communist communities. (The Diggers, the most significant radical group of the times, are only half-heartedly featured in The Devil’s Whore, and puzzlingly, their charismatic leader Winstanley is wholly absent; though side-references to the Ranters is worthy of some note). Winstanley was indeed the ‘True Leveller’, the Digger who, unlike Lilburne, did believe in the levelling of property, and in this sense was a proto-Marxist, an early socialist who was completely ahead of his age (for the most in-depth study of his ideas I am aware of see David W. Petegorsky’s Left-Wing Democracy in the Age of Civil War – Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger Movement). Brownlow’s documentary-style film is as gritty as it is beguiling, in its black-and-white photography and naturalistic acting, and has a purity to its approach which compliments the lived ideals of its protagonists beautifully; a little masterpiece, and by far, in my opinion, the most compelling depiction of the sky-gazing radicalism of the time. 

  In Flannery’s effort, strikingly choreographed though it is, the production, and its mix-and-match narrative and characters, never really lingers long enough at any point to affect us more than fleetingly. It suffers, in part, from the filmic pretensions of all contemporary historical drama, but stands out as the most frustrating example, since its scope and choice 

of subjects had so much potential. But unnecessary bums-on-seats buzz-motifs of wax-skinned femme fatales and bodice-ripping rogues have served to denigrate the true ideological pith of its substance. In spite of some breathtaking cinematography, authentically lit set-pieces, spot-lit radicals and snippets of political grit, The Devil’s Whore is a wasted opportunity at getting to the true nuts and bolts of the ideas of the period, weighed down in irrelevant melodramatic romancing and shoddily-sketched historicisms. 

Recommended Reading

In A Free Republic – Life in Cromwellian England by Alison Plowden (Sutton)

Left-Wing Democracy in the Age of Civil War – Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger Movement by David W. Petergorsky (Sandpiper Books)

Puritanism and Revolution by Christopher Hill (Peregrine Books)

Radicalism in the English Revolution by FD Dow (Wileyblackwell)

Recommended Viewing

Cromwell (1970)

A King and His Keeper (1970) 

Winstanley (1975) (recommended)

Children of the New Forest (1977)

By The Sword Divided (1983, 1985) (recommended)

Children of the New Forest (1998)

To Kill A King (2003)

Alan Morrison © 2008

Alan Morrison

Alan Morrison on

The Death of Adolf Hitler (1973)

Written by Vincent Tilsley

Directed by Rex Firkin

Starring Frank Finlay as Hitler

Network DVD, 2009

For those of you have seen the morbidly engrossing German film Downfall but might wish for a more theatrical, studio-based companion piece to the same doom-laden scenario, The Death of Adolf Hitler is an absolute must-see. I actually fished it out from Amazon a year ago, prior to its belated British release, as a Region 1 import, but was tempted into investing in a more strikingly packaged UK version since it is such an astonishing piece of drama. This is mainly due to a truly towering performance from the extraordinary looking actor Frank Finlay, who was, particularly in the early to mid Seventies, a ubiquitous character face on British television, playing in a relatively short period such diverse roles as the lead in Dennis Potter’s adaptation of Casanova, the sugar-daddy publisher Peter Manson in the achingly middle-class but brilliant Bouquet of Barbed Wire/Another Bouquet,  Van Helsing in the masterly TV adaptation of Dracula, and, of course, as Adolf Hitler in this slightly lesser known LWT production. That said, Finlay was regarded at the time as the most terrifying portrayal of the Fuhrer to date – and in spite of Bruno Ganz’s mesmerizingly choreographed, somewhat battle-weary interpretation in Downfall, for me Finlay’s even more raving, almost rabid realisation of the most notorious dictator in history is still the most terrifying of all. One is only relieved throughout Finlay’s hysterical performance by the urge to laugh out loud at the almost proto-Fawlty turns in his various rages: at the first news of dissent among his once-loyal henchmen Goering and Himmler,  Finlay will start with a forbidding mumble, even a slight dignity of restraint as matched by his clenched side-parting, then suddenly smash a tray of crockery and storm out into the main room of the bunker hysterically announcing that ‘Herman Goering is your new leader’, pacing up and down screaming with incandescent fury, flailing his fists in the air and gritting his teeth like a lunatic, with a cartoon-like speed of expression which is frightening as it is perversely hilarious to watch. The script plays these blackly comical aspects to excellent effect, the sheer fatuity of such lines from the Fuhrer as wanting one of his absent officers to come to him ‘personally… in person’, while visibly oblivious to the verbal tautology of what he’s just said. This sending-up of practically the darkest figure in history is as expertly done as the best-written comedies of the time – but does nothing to diminish the essential drama of the piece. Finlay’s intense effort to will himself into one of the most darkly challenging parts is palpable and exceptional and must rank as one of the most convincing performances of anyone by anyone in the whole television and film canon. Startling. That Finlay’s brief fling with leading roles on television petered out later on into supporting roles in second-rate adventure films (The Three Musketeers, The Wild Geese) is one of the great mysteries of the acting profession for me.  

The Death of Adolf Hitler is also perhaps the politically bravest Hitlerian adaptation to have reached the screen: in one haunting scene the half-asleep Fuhrer returns in his mind to his days sleeping in the Austrian gutters, apparently, as depicted here, preyed on by usurious food-touts and belittling prostitutes (‘You’re not a man, but you have a way with you’), all portrayed as explicitly Jewish. Here is a controversial attempt to try and get to grips with the irrational roots of his obsessive anti-Semitism, and while it makes for uncomfortable viewing, one can only admire Vincent Tilsley’s determined courage in throwing a torch-light on a precariously empathetic approach to Hitler’s psychological makeup. Equally curious is a grisly scene in which a concentration camp Doctor (a side-shaven Ray McNally) eulogises on the fineness of a lampshade made from flayed Jewish skin, which visibly repels the Fuhrer, hinting at his own sensitive stomach regarding the gruesome realities of experiments in his own regime’s death camps, and he promptly storms out and vomits into a sink. A hint of guilt to Hitler? Of shame? Of self-disgust? The implication seems to be that Tilsley’s Hitler seethes with a hatred of Jews carved completely out of the abstract, and has no interest in or taste for the sadistic anti-Semitic appetites of his thuggish disciples; like a Satan disgusted by demons, this is a compelling and multi-layered characterisation. The abstractedness of Hitler’s disposition is also illuminated brilliantly in scenes when he is poring his architectural fantasies over a miniature model of his planned Nazi capital, all paper Doric columns in the classical style; or when he prays to his own shadow alluding to it as their ‘master’. This aspect is left tantalisingly ambiguous also in that he does not specify that it is the Christian God. Finlay’s intensely delivered final soliloquy on the frequently cited ‘Rats’ of his highly fevered anti-Semitic neurosis, fittingly contradictory in its ultimate tribute to said motifs as the natural successors to the ensuing devastation of Berlin and Germany – ‘let them bore into my skull’ or such like – is the lasting icing on the cake to this brilliantly conceived drama.  

I’ve watched this superb television play several times now and can say that it never dulls on reviewing, unlike much of modern historical adaptations and interminable docudramas. This really is a gem of classic British TV drama and is addictive viewing. As I say, it is also, strangely, one of the most darkly hilarious viewing experiences of maniacal hysteria you’re ever likely see, outside of Fawlty Towers that is. But this is by no means a criticism: it just shows how intensely riveting the acting and scripting is that one can randomly laugh throughout its course without for one moment being allowed to forget the unnatural extremes of human motivation and behaviour that underpin its superficially mannered surface. A furious little masterpiece.

Alan Morrison © 2009

Alan Morrison on

Owen Sheers

To Provide All People: A Poem in the Voice of the NHS

BBC Wales

Treacly at the point of delivery

There’s a nice line near the opening of Owen Sheers’ film-poem paean to the NHS in its 70th year, the Samaritan-like ‘to lay a hand on the wound of a stranger’, which has the resonance of a biblical aphorism –and is quite possibly paraphrased from the New Testament– or even possibly a new motto for the National Health Service. And this trope does indeed set the tone for what’s to follow: sometimes thoughtful and touching, sometimes oversimplified and syrupy poetic perspectives on an institution which many in the liberal-centrist commentariat term the nation’s ‘secular religion’. The deeply reverent, hallowed tones and montages of Sheers’ rather awkwardly and dully titled To Provide All People treats the institution under the spotlight implicitly as a kind of cultural creed, a national faith or religion.

Indeed, the word ‘heal’ is intoned almost holily throughout, until one might begin to think that NHS actually stands for National Healing Service. And this gushing religiousness is the film-poem’s undoing: too many misty-eyed close ups of numerous and seemingly haphazard enunciators, replete with broken-toned, whispery deliveries, cloys after a while, especially since there doesn’t seem to be any real tonal change at any point of the epic 58 minutes (though admittedly much of the fault here lies with whoever directed it). 

Much as it is gratifying and heartening to witness such an unadulterated encomium on the NHS and its founding by the late great Nye Bevan (represented as a suited blur in the background of some smudgy shots) in time for its 70th birthday and against its worst crisis since its crucial inception under the interminable Jeremy Hunt (Sheers takes a fair few swipes at contemporary Tory vandalism of the NHS through backdoor privatisation), this film-poem seems to tip from sentiment into treacle. 

The NHS is spoken of rightly as an exceptional and nation-changing socialist intervention at the most fundamental level of society, but Sheers’ tribute ends up coming across as too religious in tone and utopian in depiction to be taken completely seriously, while the very name Bevan is spoken by various in such hushed tones that one might think he was the Second Coming (though his political achievements, like Keir Hardie’s before him, come perhaps closest to parliamentary Messianism).

But the trouble is a lot of this comes across as a rather simplistic ‘political’ depiction. For starters, the NHS isn’t entirely “free at the point of delivery” if one takes into account prescription charges, which keep rising –in England at any rate– and are bluntly extortionate; Bevan famously resigned from Attlee’s Cabinet only two years after founding the NHS because the Labour Government found it impossible to move the institution forward financially without charging for prescriptions (and this was necessitated because of a stubborn, middle-class-baiting insistence on universalism i.e. providing something free for everyone, including the wealthiest, rather than focusing the resources on those without the means to access private health care). 

And as for the parlous state of privately-infiltrated NHS dentistry, well, where to start…? Suffice it to say that whilst rudimentary treatments are provided ‘on the NHS’, anything over and above standard fillings and extractions comes with charges for every patient, the unemployed included, and, most puzzlingly of all, these treatments, such as hygienist appointments, are preventative treatments, which neither makes practical nor ethical sense. 

So there is a small element of myth in how our nation, or rather, the liberal-centrist middle classes, depict the NHS, even if in the main it is still a vital and fundamentally humanitarian institution (although since creeping privatisation, it is becoming less humane by the year). The point of how the market corrupts the spirit of the institution is the most powerful part of Sheers’ film-poem: cue an NHS brain surgeon talking of the impossibility of treating a ‘broken soul’ –as opposed to treating a physical brain or, in the case of a psychologist, a ‘mind’– in this case, that of the NHS. This is an important point made well by Sheers. And he also does Bevan much service by emphasizing how he had to conquer the reactionary resistance to state-funded healthcare of most of the British medical profession of the time (by famously “stuffing their mouths with gold”). 

But much else feels rose-tinted. Bluntly, Sheers’ film-poem is drenched in a certain kind of middle-class NHS-sentimentalism frequently expressed by those who are not so dependent on its’ increasingly stretched and atomised services. Services which today incorporate such passive-aggressive obstacles as GP surgeries only giving appointments out between 8 and 8.30am; mental health teams often so incompetent they end up exacerbating patients’ conditions rather than alleviating them; and prescription charges that go up so often and by so much that they must already price many lower income households out of treatment altogether, unless they are able to qualify for very specific exemptions. Universalism, though a nice idea in theory, when applied to such a grotesquely unequal society as the UK, borders on the absurd, as well as the downright unfair when it comes to prescription charges. 

The problem here is pretty fundamental: is this the right poet for the subject? Whilst Sheers had ordinary enough origins, and attended a comprehensive school in Wales, he later progressed onto New College, Oxford, and then onto an MA in Creative Writing at the prestigious UEA, scooping an Eric Gregory Award, and then cleaning up through a domino of prizes and high profile TV and radio commissions ever since. He is also a TV presenter and documentary host. In short, Sheers is part of the cultural establishment, in a privileged place in terms of career and profile, none of which would necessarily matter if it wasn’t for the sense from this almost soporific film-poem of a commission ‘going through the motions’ by pressing generic emotional buttons in order to elicit certain responses from its audience, rather than something authentically passionate. That it relies mainly on first-hand accounts from actual NHS staff would seem to be more a necessity than a choice. 

And To Provide All People very much leaves the impression of being a commission, an ode with a deadline, a work-in-progress, as opposed to a fully-fledged poem; it is an event due to its celebration of the 70th anniversary of the NHS, less so due to its content. It wears its Welshness on its sleeve, all the hospital characters intoning their mini-monologues with earthy Welsh accents, and this links to the nationality of NHS founder, Nye Bevan, who is ubiquitous as a saintly meme, as well as to the author’s own Welsh roots. But is there something else being communicated here, perhaps unconsciously? 

The talented Martin Sheen might have intoned his lines early on as if privately relishing a perceived opportunity to be his generation’s Richard Burton reading from some modern equivalent to Under Milk Wood, but whilst Sheen is an actor great in range (while Burton’s greatness lay in his preternatural presence, inimitable voice and pitch-perfect poetry-reading), Sheers is, if anything, the opposite to Dylan Thomas. Whilst Thomas unashamedly languished in language of which he seemed to have an almost magical grasp, Sheers rations it, coming from the opposite end of the poetic spectrum: the pared-down prose-inflected contemporary poetics propagated by university creative writing departments such as, well, the one he graduated from –what one might term ‘constipated poetics’. 

Not that Sheers is I think nursing any real desire to be anything other than himself –and, indeed, would probably covet much more comparisons with another Welsh poet, the hugely gifted Alun Lewis, on whom he has written much, than with Thomas; but one suspects the director of this film-poem at least half-consciously worked on these assumptions, if the meditative opening is anything to go by –and this is, after all, a play for voices set in Wales. 

Much of the actual writing in this film-poem feels workmanlike and prosaic –common symptoms of much contemporary mainstream poetry (there is also something journalistic about this type of poetry whose more senior exponents include the likes of Hugo Williams, Blake Morrison and James Fenton). Added to this are parts of the text that speak too simplistically about such deeply complex issues as mental health as to beg the question: is the only way to write an important poetic work on such a fundamental theme as the NHS to write it in the plainest way possible, bar, as said, the occasional aphorismic flourish which punctuates the longer prosaic passages…? I would say emphatically not: it is possible to compose an important poetic work for the masses without resorting to mawkishness and simplicity. 

Perhaps Sheers is just over-worked and swamped with too many commissions and could do with some of his peers taking up some of the slack? If one is not careful, prolific commissioned works start to come across as hackery. Perhaps this particular commission could have been complemented by a poet more comfortable with political themes? If we apply Cyril Connolly’s taxonomy of the different species of writers from his Enemies of Promise (1938), Sheers would probably fit more the “thin harvest” category than the “militant thistle” (the political poet/writer). There are so many more capable poets in the UK, hundreds of them, so why does the BBC and other commissioning bodies unimaginatively utilise such a small and limited rota of Armitages, Sheerses, Tempests and Duffys? It’s becoming tiresome. 

I was also rather puzzled by the continual emphasis by Sheers on the ‘individualism’ inherent in the NHS as a ‘system’ –as if the writer is constantly concerned that using the term ‘system’ implies some sort of Big State/Soviet Bloc mentality and thus needs to be constantly counterbalanced with the term ‘individual’. This for me is another symptom of post-Thatcherism-accommodating pink centrism typical of the overrepresented Oxbridge commentariat. 

(The other problem is, much as it pains one to admit, the NHS isn’t this nation’s ‘secular religion’, as it is often fancifully termed –that pedestal is rather depressingly occupied by employment. Work is our nation’s masochistic ‘secular cult’, to the point that anyone who is out of work is automatically suspected of idleness and dishonesty and stigmatised, scapegoated and outcast thus. More pointedly, there are ‘work coaches’ infiltrating NHS mental health services, GP surgeries, and soon even hospitals –such is our national pathological obsession with a mythical ‘work cure’ for all ills. While there is nothing wrong with occupation, and, indeed, it is absolutely fundamental to any sense of human accomplishment, work, or employment, is something else: it is as much about behavioural control as it is about productivity, especially in capitalist society).

While it’s heartening to have such an emotional encomium to the NHS at a time when it is being heinously undermined by a Tory government, a bit more grit, guts and anger wouldn’t have gone amiss –key characteristics, after all, of the vitriolic Bevan himself– so that the whole thing didn’t tip into mawkishness, which sadly this film-poem does frequently, and to such a point as to make it potentially easy satirical fodder for the pro-market Right which might pick it apart for its sometimes embarrassing evangelism. 

It all felt a bit too much like a formulaic political broadcast, albeit one at least infused with some ingredients of ideology –not least rhetorical rudiments of the revived democratic socialism of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour with a mention somewhere in the film of its’ 2017 manifesto title, ‘for the many, not the few’. Even such an excellent cast of largely Welsh veteran character actors –Martin Sheen, Jonathan Price, Sîan Phillips et al– couldn’t quite lift the words from the commonplace and predictable. It felt like second-hand sentiment, perhaps, again, a casualty of Sheers’ commission to form a ‘poem’ around the anecdotes of real life NHS staff. 

And that title: rather prosaic… The more obvious title would have been the oft-repeated Free at the Point of Delivery… Or, better still, From Cradle to Grave…? Or would that have been a bit too obvious for postmodernist tastes…? Sometimes obvious is better if it makes for a more striking title… Nevertheless, this film-poem does what it says on the tin…

Alan Morrison © 2018

To Provide All People: A Poem in the Voice of the NHS

Owen Sheers

BBC Wales

Treacly at the point of delivery

There’s a nice line near the opening of Owen Sheers’ film-poem paean to the NHS in its 70^th year, the Samaritan-like ‘to lay a hand on the wound of a stranger’, which has the resonance of a biblical aphorism –and is quite possibly paraphrased from the New Testament– or even possibly a new motto for the National Health Service. And this trope does indeed set the tone for what’s to follow: sometimes thoughtful and touching, sometimes oversimplified and syrupy poetic perspectives on an institution which many in the liberal-centrist commentariat term the nation’s ‘secular religion’. The deeply reverent, hallowed tones and montages of Sheers’ rather awkwardly and dully titled To Provide All People treats the institution under the spotlight implicitly as a kind of cultural creed, a national faith or religion.

Indeed, the word ‘heal’ is intoned almost holily throughout, until one might begin to think that NHS actually stands for National Healing Service. And this gushing religiousness is the film-poem’s undoing: too many misty-eyed close ups of the poem’s numerous and seemingly haphazard enunciators, replete with broken-toned, whispery deliveries, cloys after a while, especially since there doesn’t seem to be any real tonal change at any point of the epic 58 minutes (though admittedly much of the fault here lies with whoever directed it). 

Much as it is gratifying and heartening to witness such an unadulterated encomium on the NHS and its founding by the late great Nye Bevan (represented as a suited blur in the background of some smudgy shots) in time for its 70^th birthday and against its worst crisis since its crucial inception under the interminable Jeremy Hunt (Sheers takes a fair few swipes at contemporary Tory vandalism of the NHS through backdoor privatisation), this film-poem seems to tip from sentiment into treacle. 

The NHS is spoken of rightly as an exceptional and nation-changing socialist intervention at the most fundamental level of society, but Sheers’ tribute ends up coming across as too religious in tone and utopian in depiction to be taken completely seriously, while the very name Bevan is spoken by various in such hushed tones that one might think he was the Second Coming (though his political achievements, like Keir Hardie’s before him, come perhaps closest to parliamentary Messianism).

But the trouble is a lot of this comes across as a rather simplistic ‘political’ depiction. For starters, the NHS isn’t entirely “free at the point of delivery” if one takes into account prescription charges, which keep rising –in England at any rate– and are bluntly extortionate; Bevan famously resigned from Attlee’s Cabinet only two years after founding the NHS because the Labour Government found it impossible to move the institution forward financially without charging for prescriptions (and this was necessitated because of a stubborn, middle-class-baiting insistence on universalism i.e. providing something free for everyone, including the wealthiest, rather than focusing the resources on those without the means to access private health care). 

And as for the parlous state of privately-infiltrated NHS dentistry, well, where to start…? Suffice it to say that whilst rudimentary treatments are provided ‘on the NHS’, anything over and above standard fillings and extractions comes with charges for every patient, the unemployed included, and, most puzzlingly of all, these treatments, such as hygienist appointments, are preventative treatments, which neither makes practical nor ethical sense. 

So there is a small element of myth in how our nation, or rather, the liberal centre-left middle classes, depict the NHS, even if in the main it is still a vital and fundamentally humanitarian institution (although since creeping privatisation, it is becoming less humane by the year). The point of how the market corrupts the spirit of the institution is the most powerful part of Sheers’ film-poem: cue an NHS brain surgeon talking of the impossibility of treating a ‘broken soul’ –as opposed to treating a physical brain or, in the case of a psychologist, a ‘mind’– in this case, that of the NHS. This is an important point made well by Sheers. And he also does Bevan much service by emphasizing how he had to conquer the reactionary resistance to state-funded healthcare of most of the British medical profession of the time (by famously “stuffing their mouths with gold”). 

But much else feels rose-tinted. Bluntly, Sheers’ film-poem is drenched in a certain kind of middle-class NHS-sentimentalism frequently expressed by those who are not entirely dependent on its’ increasingly stretched and atomised services. Services which today incorporate such passive-aggressive obstacles as GP surgeries only giving appointments out between 8 and 8.30am; mental health teams often so incompetent they end up exacerbating patients’ conditions rather than alleviating them; and prescription charges that go up so often and by so much that they must already price many lower income households out of treatment altogether, unless they are able to qualify for very specific exemptions. Universalism, though a nice idea in theory, when applied to such a grotesquely unequal society as the UK, borders on the absurd, as well as the downright unfair when it comes to prescription charges. 

The problem here is pretty fundamental: is this the right poet for the subject? Whilst Sheers had ordinary enough origins, and attended a comprehensive school in Wales, he later progressed onto New College, Oxford, and then onto an MA in Creative Writing at the prestigious UEA, scooping an Eric Gregory Award, and then cleaning up through a domino of prizes and high profile TV and radio commissions ever since. He is also a TV presenter and documentary host. In short, Sheers is part of the cultural establishment, in a privileged place in terms of career and profile, none of which would necessarily matter if it wasn’t for the sense from this almost soporific film-poem of a commission ‘going through the motions’ by pressing generic emotional buttons in order to elicit certain responses from its audience, rather than something authentically passionate. That it relies mainly on first-hand accounts from actual NHS staff would seem to be more a necessity than a choice. 

And To Provide All People very much leaves the impression of being a commission, an ode with a deadline, a work-in-progress, as opposed to a fully-fledged poem; it is an event due to its celebration of the 70^th anniversary of the NHS, less so because of its content. It wears its Welshness on its sleeve, all the hospital characters intoning their mini-monologues with earthy Welsh accents, and this links to the nationality of NHS founder, Nye Bevan, who is ubiquitous as a saintly meme, as well as to the author’s own Welsh roots. But is there something else being communicated here, perhaps unconsciously? 

The talented Martin Sheen might have intoned his lines early on as if privately relishing a perceived opportunity to be his generation’s Richard Burton reading from some modern equivalent to Under Milk Wood, but whilst Sheen is an actor great in range (while Burton’s greatness lay in his preternatural presence, inimitable voice and pitch-perfect poetry-reading), Sheers is, if anything, the opposite type of poet to Dylan Thomas. Whilst Thomas unashamedly languished in language of which he seemed to have an almost magical grasp, Sheers rations it, coming from the opposite end of the poetic spectrum: the pared-down prose-inflected contemporary poetics propagated by university creative writing departments such as, well, the one he graduated from –what one might term ‘constipated poetics’. 

Not that Sheers is I think nursing any real desire to be anything other than himself –and, indeed, would probably covet much more comparisons with another Welsh poet, the hugely gifted Alun Lewis, on whom he has written much, than with Thomas; but one suspects the director of this film-poem at least half-consciously worked on these assumptions, if the meditative opening is anything to go by –and this is, after all, a play for voices set in Wales. 

Much of the actual writing in this film-poem feels workmanlike and prosaic –common symptoms of much contemporary mainstream poetry. Added to this are parts of the text that speak too simplistically about such deeply complex issues as mental health as to beg the question: is the only way to write an important poetic work on such a fundamental theme as the NHS to write it in the most plainest way possible, bar, as said, the occasional aphorismic flourish which punctuates the longer prosaic passages…? I would say emphatically not: it is possible to compose an important poetic work for the masses without resorting to mawkishness and simplicity. 

Perhaps Sheers is just over-worked and swamped with too many commissions and could do with some of his peers taking up some of the slack? If one is not careful, prolific commissioned works start to come across as hackery. There are so many capable poets in the UK, literally hundreds and hundreds of them, so why does the BBC and other commissioning bodies so unimaginatively utilise such a small and limited rota of Armitages, Sheerses, Tempests and Duffys? It’s becoming tiresome. 

I was also rather puzzled by the continual emphasis by Sheers on the ‘individualism’ inherent in the NHS as a ‘system’ –as if the writer is constantly concerned that using the term ‘system’ implies some sort of Big State/Soviet Bloc mentality and thus needs to be constantly counterbalanced with the term ‘individual’. This for me is another symptom of post-Thatcherism-accommodating pink centrism typical of the overrepresented Oxbridge commentariat. 

(The other problem is, much as it pains one to admit, the NHS isn’t this nation’s ‘secular religion’, as it is often fancifully termed –that pedestal is rather depressingly occupied by employment. Work is our nation’s masochistic ‘secular cult’, to the point that anyone who is out of work is automatically suspected of idleness and dishonesty and stigmatised, scapegoated and outcast thus. More pointedly, there are ‘work coaches’ infiltrating NHS mental health services, GP surgeries, and soon even hospitals –such is our national pathological obsession with a mythical ‘work cure’ for all ills. While there is nothing wrong with occupation, and, indeed, it is absolutely fundamental to any sense of human accomplishment, work, or employment, is something else: it is as much about behavioural control as it is about productivity, especially in capitalist society).

While it’s heartening to have such an emotional encomium to the NHS at a time when it is being heinously undermined by a Tory government, a bit more grit, guts and anger wouldn’t have gone amiss –key characteristics, after all, of the vitriolic Bevan himself– so that the whole thing didn’t tip into mawkishness, which sadly this film-poem does frequently, and to such a point as to make it potentially easy satirical fodder for the pro-market Right which might pick it apart for its sometimes embarrassing evangelism. 

It all feels a bit too much like a formulaic political broadcast, albeit one at least infused with some ingredients of ideology –not least rhetorical rudiments of the revived democratic socialism of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour with a mention somewhere in the film of their 2017 manifesto title, ‘for the many, not the few’. Even such an excellent cast of largely Welsh veteran character actors –Martin Sheen, Jonathan Price, Sîan Phillips et al– couldn’t quite lift the words from the commonplace and predictable. It felt like second-hand sentiment, perhaps, again, a casualty of Sheers’ commission to form a ‘poem’ around the anecdotes of real life NHS staff. 

And that title: rather prosaic… The more obvious title would have been the oft-repeated Free at the Point of Delivery…? Or, better still, From Cradle to Grave…? Or would that have been a bit too obvious for postmodernist tastes…? Sometimes obvious is better if it makes for a more striking title… Nevertheless, this film-poem does what it says on the tin…

Alan Morrison © 2018

 

Alan Morrison on

Two Seventies’ doses of apocalyptic political

drama belatedly released on DVD

Noah’s Castle 

(Southern TV, 1979/1980) 

By John Rowe Townsend

Simply Entertainment DVD, 2009

The Guardians 

(LWT, 1971)

From the novel by John Christopher

Created by Rex Firkin and Vincent Tilsley

Network DVD, 2010

England Soon?

– ‘People are so…hard’

 – ‘It seems to be the style these days’

                                            The Guardians

For any aficionados of vintage or cult television, particularly of the Seventies, the repository of nostalgia DVD websites such as Network and Simply Entertainment are absolute God-sends for those desperately seeking out some classic titles to give them the kind of intelligent and imaginative escapism and drama that modern television seems almost pathologically incapable of providing us. A provisional caveat here is that both these sites, Network most particularly, cater mainly for vintage ITV series, and as many nostalgia-viewers are probably in vague agreement on, on the whole, the BBC traditionally had the edge on drama – but note the emphatic past tense here (nowadays their Licence Fee seems grossly exorbitant in proportion to the quality of their output). But Network has made available a breathtaking array of some of ITV’s more obscure output from, especially, the Seventies – that definitive golden era of British TV drama, sci-fi and comedy, still un-bettered to this day. And far from these being understandably neglected series in their patchier canon, most I’ve viewed from this resource have surprised me in their sheer political grittiness of approach, concept and writing. These two series under discussion here, in particular, also showcase a gallery of underappreciated classically-trained supporting actors of their time, in possibly the only leading roles of their television careers.

To take first the highly political and genuinely ‘adult ‘-oriented ‘children’s series’ from 1979/80, Noah’s Castle – here’s the plot synopsis and other details from the back cover of the DVD:

“It is the near-future and Britain faces social and economic collapse. Hyper-inflation leads to rioting and chronic food shortages but Norman Mortimer is determined to protect his loved ones from the encroaching chaos. Mortimer moves his family to a large house in the country and strengthens the cellar in preparation to hoard the food they will need to survive. The Mortimer children are shocked by their father’s behaviour and argue that food should be fairly distributed to all those who need it. As the crises deepens the Mortimers arouse the suspicions of starving neighbours, blackmailers and the ruthless criminal Vince Holloway. As Norman struggles to keep his feuding family together news of the secret food store spreads and his ‘castle’ comes under siege… Produced by Southern Television in late 1979, this remarkable seven-part series was intended for younger viewers but praised by the London Evening News as “strong meat indeed… it is perhaps 

a pity that drama bosses haven’t the nerve to serve up anything quite so spicy for the rest of us”.

And this was intended at the time as a children’s serial, probably on at 5 ‘o’ clock in the evening, viewed by an audience of Seventies’ kids whose evident political and intellectual sophistication is reflected in the sheer ambition and grittiness of a plot summary for what was then a fairly standard tea-time drama. The series does not disappoint in the least and creates for the viewer an all-too believable social reality in which mass unemployment, sky-high inflation and strikes have led to a national food shortage, rationing, and near-starvation for the poorest. Naturally, in such strained circumstances, social unrest is rife and individuals and families are faced with the moral challenge of either fending for themselves and hoarding as much food as possible, or trying to share what there is out among as many people as possible, to do their bit in the face of mass adversity and stave off the encroaching moral entropy of a society at starving point. Here the themes of mass unemployment, strikes, social unrest, urban violence, echo the political turbulence of the late Seventies, but in their very style of contemporary dramatisation, one which exhaustively analyses and dissects the various moral dilemmas of such a situation, serves as a sort of televisual salvation for the viewers of the time, reflecting again that in more transparently troubled periods in our recent history – at least, pre-Thatcherism – most people were also continually questioning things; as much the dubious policies of governments compromised by the economic trappings of capitalism (whether Tory or Labour) as the political alternatives, most particularly, extremisms of either Left or Right. The Seventies was a more radicalised time in the UK, and the type of television drama serials throughout the decade tended to reflect this, as they did the radical fluctuations of the period itself. A reciprocal, triangular relationship seemed to exist back hen between political society, dramatisation and audience. 

It’s not banal to claim that much of the TV dramas of the Seventies served a strong sociological function, as well as an escapist one: one only has to consider just how much the social and political issues of the time found their way, often through satire, into even sci-fi serials such as the uniquely political Blake’s 7, in which the heroes were, in their own context, political criminals operating as terrorists, albeit idealistic ones who opposed a corrupt and authoritarian Federation; numerous stories within the canon of Doctor Who, at its most openly political in the early to mid Seventies, with political and ecological evils of the period anthropomorphised into metaphorical monsters; and escapist ‘children’s’ serials such as the psychically subversive Tarot-themed Ace of Wands (1970-72), its successor, the less well-articulated but no less imaginatively subversive The Tomorrow People (1973-9); and perhaps most strikingly of all, the superbly disturbing and disorienting The Changes (filmed 1973; broadcast 1975), which plunged a young girl into a society entering a new Dark Age following an irrational and inexplicable mass pogrom on all forms of technology triggered by a mysterious noise vibration emitted from pylons (still, equally mysteriously, unreleased by the BBC, and, like The Guardians, never even repeated). 

Noah’s Castle is another series of the era that provides further evidence of such popular sophistication. It presents an uncompromising state of societal breakdown to a juvenile audience, and then throughout its run challenges them to mentally role play their way through it, en route to finding political and philosophical solutions to the privations at hand. 

This is serious and intelligent television, and compared to most of the so-called ‘adult’ viewing of the trivial Noughties, comes across as infinitely more questioning, disturbing, compelling, and more sophisticated in its lacing of suggestive moral innuendo. True, this series was transmitted in 1979/80, so on the last cusp of the Seventies, but as we all know, the interminable Thatcherite ‘transformation’ had yet to fully set in until the Eighties proper; and arguably between 1979 and around 1982, there was still a strong mood of very healthy and – as it turned out, justifiable – opposition to the almost Malthusian economic doctrines of the new Tory government. Social turbulence would continue in various forms throughout the Eighties, but ever more dissipatedly as the Iron Lady took hold of the public consciousness with all her various avaricious carrots, duping many later into a callous denial that gratuitous material gain for some obscured a burgeoning epidemic of increased impoverishment and polarisation for many others. Thatcherism, and the unthinking culture it promulgated into the Eighties, one which eventually resulted in the philistine celebritism we’ve known in more recent times, had yet to set in comprehensively into the minds of the many in 1980; at this time, the tail-end of the post-War communitarian orthodoxy was gasping its last questioning of the validity of the very society it was a part of, and politics, most importantly of all, socialism, was not yet the sneered-at term it was to become. 

And it is a spirit of socialist thought that runs through the themes – and articulations of those themes – in many of these half-forgotten Seventies dramas. Basic quandaries of the Left as to the conflict between the individual and the community, ends and means, just how far a state should go to try and impose policies intended to ‘do good’, or how much the individual should be left to choose his own methods and motives. The muddy clash between, on the one hand, the almost primal fear of the Orwellian nightmare of Thought Police, and the more leftist horror at the prospect of equally arbitrary private capitalists and unaccountable corporations covertly running society without anyone actually realising. Ultimately of course, both extreme forms of social control are one and the same, whether termed Fascist or Stalinist, and the real battleground is in the greyer area of the moderate political wings: the establishment Right and the democratic Left. It’s more in these murkier ideological areas that these two series operate.

Noah’s Castle is a brilliantly written, directed and acted drama (replete with eerie electronic signature tune and haunting slow-footage riot-scene title sequence); its story is that of a young boy torn between his sense of loyalty to an increasingly paranoid and reactionary father (played in an unusually central role by character actor David Neal) who hoards as much food as possible and then buries it and his family away in the safety of a barbed-wired country retreat, and his compassion for others less fortunate in the wider community. This is an excellent and highly ambitious position to put a central juvenile character in, and the always convincing child actor Simon Gipps-Kent (notable also in other challenging serials of the time such as Midnight Is A Place and To Serve Them All My Days; who tragically died at only 29 in 1987), gives compelling expression to the idealistic son Barry Mortimer. 

But perhaps the most compelling dialectic in this little gem of a serial, is between the nuanced difference of methods taken by two characters who both wish to find solutions to the current crisis and its aftermath, both fundamentally motivated by humanitarian instincts, but both taking very different routes; the perennial ends and means debate. One is an altruist who musters his resources to take vans of food out to the people and keep as many of them fed as possible, the standard moderate socialist shall we say; the other is a more radicalised, and seeks to use his energies to subvert the status quo which is using ever more oppressive measures to contain the nascent anarchy, and seeks ultimately to overthrow it, through violence if necessary – the revolutionary. The altruist criticises the revolutionary for his morally compromised means, while the revolutionary mocks the altruist for his impractical naivety and political timidity. By the end, there is a form of combined resolution by these two sides of the same coin, and the two characters work together to both fend off a predatory mob leader (played with reliable pugilistic charm by Mike Reid), and to face off the apparent callousness of the hoarding Mortimer Snr. Nuanced as this series is, there are no lazy black and white brushstrokes, and Mr Mortimer is left with the final word, self-doubtingly trying to justify the extremes he has gone to in order to fulfil his duty to the welfare of his own family; and it is his slightly misanthropic, family-centred obsession with kith and kin over all others, that lingers with you at the end, as a rather disturbing philosophical problem, far too rooted in human instincts of familial protectionism to warrant the gauche abuse of ‘Fascist’. 

A more recent release, this time from the ITV nostalgist outlet Network DVD, is the no less beguiling ‘adult’ serial, The Guardians, predating Noah’s Castle by about eight years, but already tackling similar themes, with, again, a society broken down to its base constituent parts following a period of mass unemployment and hyper-inflation, resulting in a sinister parliamentary reformation from democracy to neo-Fascist dictatorship, politely presided over by the avuncular puppet Prime Minister Hobson (played by the peerless Cyril Luckham) who spends most of the series trying to convince himself that such strict and authoritarian methods are required during a period of unprecedented economic instability. Hobson, again, rather like Mr Mortimer in Noah’s Castle, is a misguided lone crusader who thinks it his personal moral duty to impose a paternalist social and economic protectionist regime on others, in this case, on an entire society (his family on a macrocosmic level). Hobson is growingly uneasy with the increasing powers arbitrarily handed to the Guardians (or the G’s), a militaristic form of state police (rather similar in style and uniform to the Federation guards in Blake’s 7 ; and more obviously prefiguring the subjects of the title to the 1987 children’s dystopian series Knights of God), who seem to be run autonomously to his puppet Cabinet, though, as becomes apparent later, are effectively co-ordinated by the PM’s distinctly Fascistic Chief Secretary (played with supreme unctuousness by Derek Smith), whose Sir Humphrey-esque obfuscations frequently provoke the hilarious haranguing from the PM, ‘I ask you again, where have you put our nuclear weapons?’ 

The PM is a paternalistic Liberal at heart, trying to balance the power during a turbulent period which, in his absence, could so easily be exploited by an unscrupulous out-and-out despot. He is however a morally compromised character, in spite of his avuncular reasonableness of private persona, and has sanctioned a block on immigration, as well as, most sinisterly (and only mentioned by one character very briefly in passing) an exportation of ‘the blacks’ from the country, during his dubious premiership so far (though this is contradicted slightly by the appearance of one black woman in a later episode (played by Elizabeth Adare shortly before her debut in The Tomorrow People), albeit a brief appearance since she shockingly douses herself in petrol and sets herself alight in a public park). But the PM’s trust in the use of necessary force and imposition for the common good inevitably plays into the hands of his Machiavellian subordinate, resulting in his own covered-up assassination, and the ultimate recruiting of the PM’s previously sceptical son into what appears to be a brewing dynasty, the only hint of future salvation in the inheritor’s allusion to the disastrously brief reign of ‘Tumbledown Dick’, Oliver Cromwell’s haplessly ill-suited son Richard. 

The characters throughout this genuinely disturbing and grittily executed series – ironically, adapted for adults from a children’s novel by John Christopher – are sufficiently nuanced in motives and traits to keep one interested through its twelve episode run, even if the rota of different episode writers robs the serial as a whole of the more cohesive dramatic drive it could have potentially had under just one writer (a similar effect to the mid-Seventies post-apocalypse drama Survivors, some later episodes of which uncannily echo this series’ scenario, with some communities reverting to forms of Social Darwinism and even Fascism as an irrational response to the threat of anarchy). Later episodes tend to the patchy in places, one or two overly ‘talky’ even for my tastes – and I frequently lambast modern television for lacking the kind of fully involved dialogues which were par for the course for most series back in the Seventies – and a few plot red herrings throw the storyline a little of course here and there. The core plotline of Weston, seen in the first superb episode, ‘The State of England’, as an outright thug of a Guardian officer, but later turning out to be a Communist infiltrator, who gets found out, captured, tortured, brainwashed, then finally escapes, only to die while drugged in bed, seems in the end a little pointless in its laboured exposition, even if his character is being flagged up as an example of just how complex the internecine intrigues of espionage are in such a society; how one can’t tell anything about others on the surface, and any one might be a dissident in disguise as a Guardian, or vice versa. 

Probably the most fascinating character is the psychiatrist, played expertly by the narrow-eyed David Burke (the first Dr Watson to Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes), whose rather affected and bourgeois establishment facade slowly reveals an idealist in disguise, a secret democrat with an existentialist will to give freedom of choice back to the people, but whose methods prove highly ethically dubious and morally compromised further in; again, the means and ends argument, which his character very much personifies. The motif this character serves in the series is excellently dissected when he comes into contact with an even less scrupulous, more cold-hearted, Communist, who ends up through some brilliantly scripted dialectic (appropriately argued out on a theatre stage) being the Doctor’s salvation, in that he suddenly sees a side to his own character reflected back from a harder individual than him, and from then on begins to be ever more plagued by doubts on his previous methods. The psychiatrist character is a secret member of Quarmby, a liberal democratic movement which opposes the Guardians, and – rather like the Fabians who (after their namesake, the Roman general Fabius) hoped patiently that capitalism would eventually destroy itself and then give way to socialism – are using sporadic terrorism to provoke the neo-Fascist system into becoming more and more openly oppressive, in the rather convoluted hope that then the masses will rise up against their government. The great strength of Quarmby is in its complete anonymity and invisibility: it has no organisational centre, and is simply a disconnected network of autonomously operating individuals who contribute spontaneously to the slow erosion of the Guardian state by enacting various subversive deeds. In one late episode, the deeply unsettling ‘I Want You to Understand Me’, this manifests even more obscurely through a bizarre, scatological neo-religious sect, which subtly encourages random acts of public suicide. This episode, to my mind, represents one of the most brilliantly subversive and unsettling pieces of television I’ve seen (matched only later on in the decade by the notorious Survivors episode ‘Law and Order’).

All in all, The Guardians, though uneven at times and perhaps foiled in part by its sheer ambition, is still an exceptional piece of television drama, containing as it does in only twelve episodes the all-too-convincing realisation of a near-future neo-Fascist dystopian England (set, with some aspects of precognition, in the 1980s), mottled with all manner of fully nuanced characters, in-depth and genuinely compelling moral and political debates and dialectics (perhaps the best written scene is one between the PM and his sceptically probing old Cambridge colleauge, played by Richard Hurndall), and some very classily directed action scenes that must have had some pedestrians at the time more than a little taken aback. An uncompromisingly political and cerebral script is served well, too, by strong visuals, imaginative designs and costumes – quirky interpretations of what a near-future 1980s might look like – and last but not least, a superbly subversive title sequence which, after announcing the title for each episode, posits the caption ‘England soon?’, with ever more zoomed-in urgency, a satirical blatancy that reinforces one’s sense of nostalgia for the more politically aware and questioning Seventies culture. Finally, in true vintage TV style, The Guardians has its own utterly distinctive signature tune, a strident composition by composer Wilfred Josephs, which instantly gets the heart beating with its marching, ambulant brass. 

There is perhaps something unconsciously prescient in the marketing strategies of Network DVD and Simply Entertainment, by serving up these two lost Seventies classics of political apocalypse and social and democratic breakdown following capitalist crises that have incurred mass unemployment and hyperinflation, where Far Right factions start to wield worryingly disproportionate influence and powers:  in our current economic climate, with our democratic parliamentary system near-discredited, unemployment, poverty, crime and racial tensions on the increase, and at the fringes, the likes of the BNP starting to penetrate a jittering democracy on the backs of misguided votes from a minority of disaffected working-class ex-Labour voters and a growing sense of public alarm at the rate of immigration, these timeless slices of drama seem ever-relevant and perhaps should be required viewing for most of us at this time. The worst projections are played out in both compelling serials, and we can only hope that the dystopias they depict will only ever be a televisual extrapolation, and never a reality. But don’t let such questions spoil your enjoyment of a standard of television drama that will serve as a much-needed nostalgic repast in the long starvation-diet of today’s hyper-inflated TV triviality. 

Alan Morrison © 2010

The Hollow Crown

Part One: Richard II

BBC 2

Directed by Rupert Goold

Produced by Rupert Ryle-Hodges

Although the evocative title of this four part dramatisation of William Shakespeare’s first four plays chronicling the Wars of the Roses (1455-1485), Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V (the latter four plays being Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3, and Richard III), has actually been used before – first, in 1961, as the title for John Barton’s monarchical anthology of dramatised speeches, documents and gossip of English royalty from William the Conqueror to Queen Victoria, and, second, for Helen Hollick’s 2004 novel of Anglo-Saxon England, A Hollow Crown, chronicling Kings Æthelred and Cnute – the metaphorical title The Hollow Crown seemed a promising indicator that the first instalment of this serial would be dishing up that rare contemporary phenomenon: a genuinely authentic and literarily focused historical adaptation. And Rupert Goold’s sensitively and unpretentiously directed Richard II did not disappoint, nor outstay its welcome of almost two and half hours, which seemed to pass far more quickly. This feat is all the more remarkable coming as it does in the twilight of the televisual hinterland of ‘contemporised costume drama’ that has plagued our screens for the best part of a decade or more; and whose worst textual and textural atrocities have included the unfathomably popular and implausibly teenagerish The Tudors, the fortunately short-lived Brit-popish banality of Robin Hood, the libidinous ‘mockume’ on the Pre-Raphaelites, Desperate Romantics (think the Carry On Up The Easel that never was), the poorly cast, super-pretentious mess that was The Devil’s Whore (retrospectively bowled out at almost every level by the mid-Eighties’ serial By The Sword Divided), the sorcery and saccharine of Merlin (which makes the musical, shining armour romanticism of 1967’s Camelot look grittily authentic by comparison), and the more recent wasted medieval dramatic opportunity The Pillars of the Earth. In short, historical drama has not been the BBC’s strong point for quite some time now, when once it was the envy of the world; and in the golden age of the Seventies, without peer before or since.

This is perhaps where The Hollow Crown: Richard II has managed to buck the contemporary trend of visually arresting but scripturally crass BBC historical adaptations of recent years: it has clearly taken as its blueprint the more theatrically intimate, slower paced, character-focused, verbally driven dramas of particularly the Seventies BBC canon – think, in particular, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), Elizabeth R (1971), and the still unparalleled masterpiece of I, Claudius (1976), in particular; not to say, the studio-bound BBC Shakespeare adaptations of the Seventies and Eighties. But what The Hollow Crown can additionally offer the viewer is some modicum of visual spectacle, a grittier authenticity, a panoramic Mise-en-scène, outside the studio, and in this adaptation’s case, filmed entirely on location in suitably well-preserved mediaeval interiors and exteriors (albeit slightly crumbling castle ruins in the latter case – presumably filmed in Wales). And this is where, at least in its first instalment, Richard II, The Hollow Crown has managed for the first time to combined today’s bigger budgets with yesterday’s scriptural richness, in this case, of course, courtesy of The Bard himself. At over two hours, Richard II would appear to have followed Shakespeare’s only play composed entirely in verse, verbatim, and at sufficiently meditative pace as to allow the audience – both verse-familiar and novice – to be able to absorb the lion’s share of the poetry and rhythm of the language, as sensitively and comprehensively as one can imagine it ever being possible via the televisual or filmic medium. Above all, the viewer is enabled to at least comprehend the ‘sense’ and ‘texture’ of Shakespeare’s verse, if not enough aspects of the narrative as conveyed through dialogue and soliloquy, to keep their bearings throughout, without feeling they must cling to every line in order to understand what’s happening. This is all choreographed brilliantly by director Goold, who allows the camera to remain relatively still for unusually leisurely longuers almost extinct in today’s peripatetic televisual camerawork, which again reminds one in the best way of the slower-paced, more nuanced and dramatically accumulative costume dramas of the Seventies. This patient and unobtrusive approach to the direction is perhaps best exemplified in the opening scene, which lasts along as that first scene of the play lasts, all in Richard’s courtroom, thus capturing the atmosphere and mood of perfectly, so it draws one in with a focus on script and character, in a relatively still frame which undoubtedly evokes the original stage setting of the play. Another particularly striking choreographed sequence is the ‘For god’s sake, let us sit upon the ground/ And tell sad stories of the death of kings’ scene, breathtakingly shot on a beach with tide far out; the returning King, realising in his absence abroad (as indicated imaginatively with his becrowned turban-like head robe, seemingly part of his same-coloured primrose yellow gown) the cousin he exiled, Henry Bolingbroke (played with understated grievance and resentment by Rory Kinnear), has effectively seized the kingdom from him with overwhelming support, begins to – literally and metaphorically – sink into the sands of his own making. The chosen location for this pivotal scene reminds this reviewer of the similarly important moment in the 1964 film Becket where the two sparring protagonists, Henry II (Curtmantle) and Thomas Á Becket (played by the theatrical greats Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton, respectively, both deliberately cast against type) meet for their last face-to-face conversation prior to the terrible climax, on horseback on a windswept sandy beach. 

It is at this point in the drama, roughly halfway through, that Ben Whishaw’s hitherto slightly affected, if effeminate portrayal of the callow King really comes into its own in a sensitively and intelligently acted series of stormy and conflictive emotional fluctuations; from hereon in, Whishaw dominates all the scenes up to his bloodily depicted murder in the Tower of London, a gory but tremendously painterly sequence, as Richard’s gangly, pallid torso is punctured with crossbow bolts against an almost black backdrop, visually echoing the chiaroscuro of a Caravaggio or Rembrandt painting. As a meta-textual play on Richard’s monomaniacal addiction to the concept of the ‘Divine Right of Kings’, Shakespeare wrote the part as an almost theatrically messianic pretender, and here Goold faithfully frames the wirily bearded, sallow Whishaw in Christological regalia and tones, depicting his death-scene almost like a martyrdom. But it is a martyrdom to kingly delusions of grandeur, a perennial monarchical sickness but one which afflicted the Plantagenet dynasty more than any other. Richard the Second’s feverish self-deifying was, at least politically, adumbrated by the notorious King John; while a similar tendency towards more pathological delusions haunted the later reign of Henry VI, last of the Lancaster (Red Rose) line, who spent most of his time on the throne in a state of severe neurasthenia verging on psychosis (Charles VI of France, father-in-law to Richard II, also suffered from psychosis, believing himself to be made of glass and thus prone to shatter into pieces if he fell or was struck – a fascinating psychiatric meta-symbolism). Although Whishaw looks considerably swarthier than the more angelic contemporary portraits of the real Richard II, his waif-like physique and features fit the part. The casting is consummate in the main, though not overly ambitious; Rory Kinnear, a fine yet underwhelming actor on the whole, makes for a sympathetically drawn Bollingbroke, but an implausible – if not almost polar physiological and physiognomic opposite – to his older self regal self, Henry IV, played by the chiselled Jeremy Irons in the forthcoming Henry IV Part 1. Patrick Stewart – whose crowning performance was, to this reviewer’s mind, his turn as a physiognomically uncanny, chillingly unscrupulous Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in the masterpiece episode of 1974’s Fall of Eagles, ‘Absolute Beginners’ (not to mention his menacing turn as a curly haired Sejanus in I, Claudius (1976) – puts in a quite captivating performance as Bollingbroke’s world-weary father, John of Gaunt, delivering one of the most famous soliloquies in the Shakespearean canon, with a tremulous, understated but perfectly pitched recitation. It is this speech, so frequently taken out of context and bowdlerised for its grossly misinterpreted expression of ‘patriotism’, which is more a bitterly nostalgic threnody for a past and latterly corrupted national narrative, that the timing of a dramatisation of Richard II seems so appropriate on a polemical level, almost as if, perhaps unconsciously on the part of its producers (ostensibly appearing as part of BBC 2’s Shakespeare Unlocked season), it is commenting the current parlous state of the country in 2012: a corroded democracy, increasingly unrepresentative, plundered by the Robber Barons of the Banks, reigned over by a pseudo-aristocratic upper-class prime minister (fifth cousin to our Queen) who displays an almost regal ‘sense of entitlement’ to his position. Given our contemporary societal context, this ‘precious stone’ of a speech is ‘set in a choppy sea’ of austerity, cuts, corrupted capitalist ‘values’, where an ever out-of-touch financial elite sails far above the common struggle, and fawns and flatters to its constitutional monarch via jarringly ostentatious Jubilee celebrations. What more appropriate a moment in our social history to watch a bearded Patrick Stewart to sourly, lachrymosely and passionately croak the following:

Methinks I am a prophet new inspired

And thus expiring do foretell of him:

His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last,

For violent fires soon burn out themselves;

Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short;

He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;

With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder:

Light vanity, insatiate cormorant,

Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,

Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth,

Renowned for their deeds as far from home,

For Christian service and true chivalry,

As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,

Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son,

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,

Dear for her reputation through the world,

Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,

Like to a tenement or pelting farm:

England, bound in with the triumphant sea

Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege

Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,

With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:

That England, that was wont to conquer others,

Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,

How happy then were my ensuing death!

But no doubt such impassioned mourning for a nation’s purer soul of yore would go over the heads of most politicians and plutocrats of today (Mr Cameron will no doubt be knee-trembling ahead of the forthcoming Henry V, to this reviewer’s mind, possibly one of the most facile and forgettable of Shakespeare’s plays, replete as it is with its non-polemical patriotic battle-speech, ‘Once more unto the breach…’).  

This reviewer was particularly intrigued to watch this first episode of The Hollow Crown, since Richard II is his favourite Shakespeare play, chiefly due to its intensely nuanced, delicately painted and deconstructed portrayal of a King crowned too young, and, indeed, also by accident: his father, Edward, the celebrated ‘Black Prince’, was seen to be predestined to succeed his father Edward III, but died before he could succeed him, and thus the crown passed to the ten-year-old Richard, the youngest and only surviving son of the Black Prince, thus bypassing his uncle, John of Gaunt, the youngest surviving son of Edward III). The precocity of Richard’s accession to the throne sows the seeds from his childhood onwards for his eventual doom and deposition; though his eventual monarchical monomania tends to obscure his other qualities, none particularly likeable, but still notable: such as his precariously unscrupulous political guile, and ostensible bravery when personally confronting Watt Tyler and his outnumbering men at the toxic climax of The Peasant’s Revolt of 1381. But what, to this reviewer’s mind, makes Richard II such a powerful play, is in its closing scenes, in which a boy not born to be King, but crowned through a succession of chance and accident, but, perhaps symbiotically to this inner-insecurity, the most possessed with the delusional ‘divine virus’ that sporadically dogged his dynasty, has to come to terms with his sudden dethroning, which to him above all monarchs who preceded him, inextricably entails the decrowning of his very core identity, his only identity, his only sense of self: his ‘God-consecrated’ royalty. Without his crown – now, temporarily, a ‘hollow’ one, until Bollingbroke dons it in his almost politely delayed coronation – he appears unable to recognise himself in the mirror. Richard’s powerful and strangely heart-wrenching soliloquy is a triumph of Shakespeare’s empathic insight into the nature of fragmenting identity, and is superbly delivered by Whishaw:

Give me the glass, and therein will I read.

No deeper wrinkles yet? hath sorrow struck

So many blows upon this face of mine,

And made no deeper wounds? O flattering glass,

Like to my followers in prosperity,

Thou dost beguile me! Was this face the face

That every day under his household roof

Did keep ten thousand men? was this the face

That, like the sun, did make beholders wink?

Was this the face that faced so many follies,

And was at last out-faced by Bolingbroke?

A brittle glory shineth in this face:

As brittle as the glory is the face;

Dashes the glass against the ground

For there it is, crack’d in a hundred shivers.

Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport,

How soon my sorrow hath destroy’d my face.

[Note here Shakespeare’s beautifully crafted blank verse, mostly in iambic pentameter, interspersed as it is with sporadic end-rhyme and half-rhyme, and sprung rhyme and rhythm]. That Whishaw carves out such a distinctive and nuanced Richard all his own is no small accomplishment, not only given the actorly challenge in the sheer dramatic range of the role, but also given the part’s adumbrations by former televisual portrayals by Ian McKellen, and, most memorably, a blond-wigged Derek Jacobi (who also hosted an articulate documentary on the play Richard II from the thespian’s perspective, which followed this pilot episode of The Hollow Crown). 

Although this reviewer is somewhat less enthusiastic with regards to the comparatively less intense and verse-based dramatisations of Henry IV and the slightly jingoistic Henry V, he reserves judgement and, based on this first sensitively directed and acted instalment, anticipates a further three well-crafted and choreographed episodes of The Hollow Crown. Though a keen admirer of the early Seventies television adaptations, The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elizabeth R – both sporting the definitive portrayals of both monarchs by Keith Michell and Glenda Jackson respectively – this reviewer is not historically interested particularly in the Tudor dynasty (is, if anything, almost allergic to it given its incomprehensible dominance in both dramatic and documental television – cultivated most vociferously and selectively by ubiquitous TV historian David Starkey – historical literature of the past decade), and it was purely the sheer dramatic excellence of said halcyon adaptations which sustained his fascination. This reviewer has long wished for a serialised Plantagenet adaptation of the dramatic calibre of the aforementioned series, or that of I, Claudius, to finally grace our screens. It’s taken a very long time, literally decades, for anything resembling an authentic, character-based depiction of the Plantagenet period (albeit, in this case, only its latter half, the Wars of the Roses), to be produced for television. The BBC Shakespeare plays of the Seventies/Eighties apart, the only time to this reviewer’s mind that there was a serialisation set in this period was in the 1965 black and white and highly theatrical television trilogy The War of the Roses, comprising Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3 and Richard III (presumably those plays which will follow in a second series of The Hollow Crown). Having viewed this forgotten series, this reviewer can relay that, in spite of some fine casting (particularly David Warner as the neurotic Henry VI – though also some less convincing casting, such as Ian Holm’s Richard Crookback) and acting, it is a foggy, almost turgid production, which would have greatly benefited from having been made a decade later during the peak of BBC costume drama. Prior to this 1965 trilogy, there had also been 1960’s serial Age of Kings, which included an implausibly cast Sean Connery as Sir Henry Percy, aka Harry Hotspur, a character whom we are soon to see in The Hollow Crown: Henry IV Parts 1 and 2: the pretender and challenger to the now crowned Bollingbroke’s throne. So The Hollow Crown has not come too soon by any means, and hopefully it will be the trend-changer after over a decade of serials, films, documentaries and books about the Tedious Tudors. Whether or not the next three instalments of this ambitious new series live up to the immaculate precedent of Richard II or not – which this reviewer doubts – at least this first instalment will warrant future re-viewing and appreciation of its many nuances and merits. 

Rating: 9/10 

The Hollow Crown

Part Two: Henry IV Part 1

Part Three: Henry IV Part 2

Directed by Richard Eyre

BBC2

As predicted at the end of my enthusiastic review of The Hollow Crown: Richard II, a refreshingly poetic and theatrical historical Shakespearean adaptation, Richard Goold’s imaginative and painterly direction proved a high precedent for Richard Eyre to match in his follow up instalment, Henry IV Part 1, which was in the main a far less satisfying return to the more peripatetic and fast-cutting camera style of most contemporary costume drama. Allied to this short-attention-span-tailored jerky camerawork, wholly inappropriate to the language-focused drama of Shakespeare, were those other two contemporary TV/Film stylistic irritants: mumbled speech delivery – again, hardly the best method to convey the deeply poetic, metaphorically complex language of Shakespeare – and a jarringly melodramatic and mood-imposing musical score, often drowning out much of the dialogue. All these modern pretensions which so frequently dog otherwise visually striking historical dramas on television and film were expertly avoided in Richard Goold’s exceptionally well-paced, atmospheric and literarily centred adaptation of Richard II – and on the basis of Henry IV Part 1, one might have been led to suddenly ask, bar its first gripping instalment, is The Hollow Crown to be another type of ‘hollow’ to that which it’s figurative title is supposed to suggest? 

The performances in Henry IV Part 1 generally paled in comparison to the intensity of Whishaw’s Richard Plantagenet, or Kinnear’s quietly simmering Bollingbroke: suddenly we were plunged into the sharp tonal shift of revelling, roistering and larks in a rakish tavern scenario, full of bull and bluster and yet frequently inaudible soliloquies by Prince Hal’s sparring partner, the obese Falstaff, apparently being hysterically amusing throughout as signposted by the largely affected laughter of his coterie, Julie Walters’ Mistress Quickly among them – all seemingly desperate to ‘act’ their hysteria as Simon Russell Beale’s rubicund wastrel strutted his stuff. Beale is apparently regarded by some as the greatest stage thesp of his generation; and no doubt there are good reasons for such; on television he is still probably most memorable for his portrayal of the oddly enigmatic social misfit Widmerpool from 1997’s stylistically heavy-handed TV adaptation of Anthony Powell’s Dance To The Music of Time. Buried in beard and prosthetic red nose, Beale has had to do most of his Falstaff routine with his roving eyes alone, which has had the unfortunate effect of reminding one of John Rhys-Davies’ wholly ocular comical portrayal the dwarf Gimli in Peter Jackson’s visually stunning but directorially over-sentimentalised Lord of the Rings film trilogy, than anything resembling Orson Wells’ more mercurial Falstaff of  Chimes At Midnight (1965). Nevertheless, Beale is reasonably convincing throughout, even if the theatrical ‘cult’ of his comical character as crafted by Shakespeare seems to be put across in this adaptation as if most viewers are well-initiated into it already – the atmosphere and mannerly – or rather, unmannerly – high jinks and capers of the whole crew coming across as achingly actorly in comparison to the previous weeks’ more understated and authentic-feeling instalment. John Hiddleston is an interestingly unobvious type of Prince Hal, rather fey and acts his part satisfactorily, but seems restricted in dramatic scope by what feels to this writer more of a ‘light entertainment’ intermission between the intriguing grimness of Richard II and the sourer mood of Henry IV Part 2. In short, this writer is simply not much of a fan of Henry IV Part 1 (nor particularly of Part 2 either, nor of Henry V – the deeper polemic on the nature of monarchy as exemplified in Richard II, Henry VI 1,2 and 3 and Richard II, to his mind, make for far more arresting dramas). 

As if almost echoing the bizarre casting decisions of the aforementioned 1997 serial A Dance To The Music of Time, in which the main character was inexplicably re-cast in the later episodes by a much older actor who bore no obvious resemblance to the younger version, even though the rest of the cast were artificially ‘aged’ with make up and silver hair dyes: from Rory Kinnear’s slightly portly Bollingbroke we jump to his aged self as Henry IV who has suddenly grown a couple of inches into a thinner and more sculpted Jeremy Irons, replete with completely different colouring and voice. Presumably owing to the different directors of each instalment, the casting directors also changed – but nevertheless, this is a big jump in suspension of disbelief for the viewer since there is simply absolutely no physical or vocal resemblance between the two actors. Anyhow, it is Irons subdued and moody performance and the growingly haunted – by his usurpation of the ‘hollow’ crown – Henry IV which singularly made Henry IV Part 1 worth sticking with. In this writer’s case, however, it was in-between intermittent catnaps, a soporific effect which Richard II did not have on him at all. He was occasionally woken by Jo Armstrong’s very shouty Hotspur ranting and raving all over the place, but felt otherwise unmoved by his portrayal, energetic though it was. Most unimportantly for a Shakespeare adaptation, it was the stunningly realised winter battle scenes at the end of the play which captured my attention more than anything, beautifully choreographed, ending in a genuinely authentic-seeming duel between Hal and Hotspur. But that was not enough to lift Henry IV Part 1 above the average, paling in comparison to its brilliant precursor.

Happily, Henry IV Part 2 was a definite improvement, perhaps because it is a far moodier piece than Part 1, a sense of winter truly set into the tone of proceedings, with Irons bringing even more intensity to his portrayal of a rueful usurper, sinking rapidly into some sort of paranoid melancholia or manic depression, accompanied by seizures. Even Falstaff seems more lugubrious throughout, as if already sensing a wind-change ahead in Hal’s imminent taking up of the crown. There is one scene particularly well choreographed, when Falstaff talks with lachrymose nostalgia of the ‘chimes at midnight’ with his henchmen around a campfire. But the most strikingly shot scenes are of the Lancastrian knights of the King on horseback hunting down Yorkist renegades through a wintry forest; here Eyre finally comes into his own with some breathtaking camerawork, filming the chain-mailed riders at full gallop through the thin sharply-lit trees, some of the most beautiful direction this reviewer’s seen in any historical television adaptation before. In terms of cinematography – which is a germane term to use for today’s filmic approach to television – Eyre’s eye for tone and light, particularly for chiaroscuro (the frosted countryside looks almost two-tone throughout), draws some small comparison to the iconic photography of ‘the Swede’,  Sven Nykvist, the supremely gifted cinematographer of Ingmar Bergman’s films, whose genius for tone and light made for a peerless chiaroscuro in Bergman’s 40s-60s black and white portfolio, and for phantasmagorical palettes of alternately invigorated or diluted shades in his colour films (as also in his collaborations outside of Bergman, such as with Roman Polanski on The Tenant (1974)). All in all, Henry IV Part 2 was a much more atmospheric and satisfying instalment of The Hollow Crown than the rather too self-conscious and pretentiously shot Part 1. But this reviewer is not likely to reprise his running commentary on this intelligent and visually striking series, since he finds it hard to enthuse about Henry V as a play, therefore is unlikely to be sufficiently interested in its latest adaptation to the extent of writing a review of it. More to the point, he suspects it is likely to much more resemble the muddiness of Kenneth Brannagh’s 1989 version than the theatrical ingenuity and visual panache – based on the disproportionately sized contemporaneous mediaeval pictures of knights in tiny castles – of Laurence Olivier’s 1944 Henry V. 

Alan Morrison © 2012

Alan Morrison on

The Death of Adolf Hitler (1973)

Written by Vincent Tilsley

Directed by Rex Firkin

Starring Frank Finlay as Hitler

Network DVD, 2009

For those of you have seen the morbidly engrossing German film Downfall but might wish for a more theatrical, studio-based companion piece to the same doom-laden scenario, The Death of Adolf Hitler is an absolute must-see. I actually fished it out from Amazon a year ago, prior to its belated British release, as a Region 1 import, but was tempted into investing in a more strikingly packaged UK version since it is such an astonishing piece of drama. This is mainly due to a truly towering performance from the extraordinary looking actor Frank Finlay, who was, particularly in the early to mid Seventies, a ubiquitous character face on British television, playing in a relatively short period such diverse roles as the lead in Dennis Potter’s adaptation of Casanova, the sugar-daddy publisher Peter Manson in the achingly middle-class but brilliant Bouquet of Barbed Wire/Another Bouquet,  Van Helsing in the masterly TV adaptation of Dracula, and, of course, as Adolf Hitler in this slightly lesser known LWT production. That said, Finlay was regarded at the time as the most terrifying portrayal of the Fuhrer to date – and in spite of Bruno Ganz’s mesmerizingly choreographed, somewhat battle-weary interpretation in Downfall, for me Finlay’s even more raving, almost rabid realisation of the most notorious dictator in history is still the most terrifying of all. One is only relieved throughout Finlay’s hysterical performance by the urge to laugh out loud at the almost proto-Fawlty turns in his various rages: at the first news of dissent among his once-loyal henchmen Goering and Himmler,  Finlay will start with a forbidding mumble, even a slight dignity of restraint as matched by his clenched side-parting, then suddenly smash a tray of crockery and storm out into the main room of the bunker hysterically announcing that ‘Herman Goering is your new leader’, pacing up and down screaming with incandescent fury, flailing his fists in the air and gritting his teeth like a lunatic, with a cartoon-like speed of expression which is frightening as it is perversely hilarious to watch. The script plays these blackly comical aspects to excellent effect, the sheer fatuity of such lines from the Fuhrer as wanting one of his absent officers to come to him ‘personally… in person’, while visibly oblivious to the verbal tautology of what he’s just said. This sending-up of practically the darkest figure in history is as expertly done as the best-written comedies of the time – but does nothing to diminish the essential drama of the piece. Finlay’s intense effort to will himself into one of the most darkly challenging parts is palpable and exceptional and must rank as one of the most convincing performances of anyone by anyone in the whole television and film canon. Startling. That Finlay’s brief fling with leading roles on television petered out later on into supporting roles in second-rate adventure films (The Three Musketeers, The Wild Geese) is one of the great mysteries of the acting profession for me.  

The Death of Adolf Hitler is also perhaps the politically bravest Hitlerian adaptation to have reached the screen: in one haunting scene the half-asleep Fuhrer returns in his mind to his days sleeping in the Austrian gutters, apparently, as depicted here, preyed on by usurious food-touts and belittling prostitutes (‘You’re not a man, but you have a way with you’), all portrayed as explicitly Jewish. Here is a controversial attempt to try and get to grips with the irrational roots of his obsessive anti-Semitism, and while it makes for uncomfortable viewing, one can only admire Vincent Tilsley’s determined courage in throwing a torch-light on a precariously empathetic approach to Hitler’s psychological makeup. Equally curious is a grisly scene in which a concentration camp Doctor (a side-shaven Ray McNally) eulogises on the fineness of a lampshade made from flayed Jewish skin, which visibly repels the Fuhrer, hinting at his own sensitive stomach regarding the gruesome realities of experiments in his own regime’s death camps, and he promptly storms out and vomits into a sink. A hint of guilt to Hitler? Of shame? Of self-disgust? The implication seems to be that Tilsley’s Hitler seethes with a hatred of Jews carved completely out of the abstract, and has no interest in or taste for the sadistic anti-Semitic appetites of his thuggish disciples; like a Satan disgusted by demons, this is a compelling and multi-layered characterisation. The abstractedness of Hitler’s disposition is also illuminated brilliantly in scenes when he is poring his architectural fantasies over a miniature model of his planned Nazi capital, all paper Doric columns in the classical style; or when he prays to his own shadow alluding to it as their ‘master’. This aspect is left tantalisingly ambiguous also in that he does not specify that it is the Christian God. Finlay’s intensely delivered final soliloquy on the frequently cited ‘Rats’ of his highly fevered anti-Semitic neurosis, fittingly contradictory in its ultimate tribute to said motifs as the natural successors to the ensuing devastation of Berlin and Germany – ‘let them bore into my skull’ or such like – is the lasting icing on the cake to this brilliantly conceived drama.  

I’ve watched this superb television play several times now and can say that it never dulls on reviewing, unlike much of modern historical adaptations and interminable docudramas. This really is a gem of classic British TV drama and is addictive viewing. As I say, it is also, strangely, one of the most darkly hilarious viewing experiences of maniacal hysteria you’re ever likely see, outside of Fawlty Towers that is. But this is by no means a criticism: it just shows how intensely riveting the acting and scripting is that one can randomly laugh throughout its course without for one moment being allowed to forget the unnatural extremes of human motivation and behaviour that underpin its superficially mannered surface. A furious little masterpiece.

Alan Morrison © 2009

Alan Morrison

The Brontës of Howarth (1973)

Written/Adapted by Christopher Fry

(BFS Entertainment, US and Canada Region 1 NTSC, 2003)

and Daphne du Maurier’s The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (Victor Gollancz, 1960; Penguin, 1972)

Being a devoted lover of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and a self-confessed fan of – particularly 1970s – vintage television costume drama, I’d always wanted to see this biographical series of the quirky Irish-Cornish doyens of 19th century gothic romantic fiction. My mother had always remembered this dramatisation vividly from 1973, in particular, Michael Kitchen’s supreme turn as Branwell Brontë and the far too unsung Alfred Burke’s masterly portrayal of the eccentric, aloof and taciturn head of the family, Patrick Brontë. Both actors excel in their performances, but in spite of Kitchen’s tour-de-force of tangible torment (excuse the alliteration] as Branwell, it is Burke’s jackdaw-like Patrick that makes this series especially enjoyable. Indeed, Burke’s husky – replete with convincing Irish accent – catchphrase, ‘Goodnight my children; don’t stay up too late’, which he whispers to his restlessly creative daughters on his way to bed every night in some ways serves as light relief amid the domestic intensity of this series. Burke’s understated take on the near-myopic, bespectacled, beaky-faced Reverend – whose chin, throughout the five episodes, recedes further and further behind an increasingly waxing neckerchief until his mouth is practically embalmed – is one of the most subtly nuanced characterisations I have ever witnessed; masterly. If only Burke had been given more opportunities to shine as one of our greatest character actors, instead of being miscast as Long John Silver in 1977’s adaptation of Treasure Island (apart from the long-running Public Eye 1969-1971, in which he played a down-at-heel detective, and as a Nazi Officer in Enemy at the Door, 1979-80, I can only recall one other outstanding performance from him as the sinister man on the bus in  one of the superior episodes from Tales of the Unexpected, 1980’s The Fly Paper). 

Burke and Kitchen aside, it would be grossly misrepresentative to omit mention of Rosemary McHale and Vickery Turner as Emily and Charlotte respectively. Turner’s Charlotte is an infinitely more intriguing and emotional figure than one might be led to expect; in fact, while Anne (Ann Penfold) is the more passive and composed of the three sisters, and Emily, the aloof and taciturn black sheep, it’s Charlotte here who is depicted as the most frustrated and self-torturing, as exemplified in her beautifully powerful internal monologue at the end of one episode, in which she castigates herself for feeling wanting in the kind of single-minded creative passion that drove others before her to write great things. I can think of no other television series – and as you might be able to tell from the size of my contribution in this section of the site, I’ve seen, and re-seen, an awful lot of them – before or since this forgotten masterpiece, that so uncompromisingly depicts the true nature of artistic agony. It is indeed episode three which stands out as the peak of the series, possibly the most intense 50 minutes of television costume drama I can think of. Apart from Charlotte’s outburst, we also witness another, equally heart-rending one from Anne while working as a stultified governess, groaning to herself on the floor ‘Oh I despair of humankind’. And to top it all, in this episode we reach 

the true nadir of Branwell’s continued breakdown for his sense of complete failure both morally and creatively. There are tormented monologues galore from him throughout, only made comical to the more cynical viewer by Kitchen’s diminutive, puffy-haired demeanour, resembling a cross between Mr Tumnus and Bilbo Baggins (with a smattering of Percy Bysshe Shelley thrown in for good measure). Kitchen’s delivery of Branwell’s defence of the superficially base nature of Byron is deeply moving, especially on considering the profligate, unpublished poet’s sincere empathy with the artistic spirit of his hero: ‘it was from such a 

base nature that the wells of a higher soul sprung’ (sic). 

The entire cast excels in its each portrayal of the Brontë kin, their stormy-browed housemaids, and of their very few but loyal friends and acquaintances. Rosemary McHale proves herself well worthy of her casting for Emily, dour, aloof and almost continually glowering throughout the series, and, stubbornly staggering down the stairs on the day of her death from tuberculosis – the illness that the family was famously and fatally susceptible to – and shrugging off Charlotte’s concern as fussing. The casting of Emily in particular is a tall task, being probably the most obscure and mythical of the three sisters – through the reputation of her one and only novel, the brooding Wuthering Heights – and McHale is a brilliant choice with her bleak beauty and large gloomy eyes. Indeed, all three sisters are cast expertly in terms of character and looks – and this is played on early in the series when they are shown posing behind Branwell’s famous portrait of them, which is facing the viewer by way of facial comparison (though the lack of emphasis on Branwell’s famously brushing himself out from the painting is, strangely, unmentioned; this, along with the preference for focus on Charlotte’s journey through the writing of Jane Eyre, but not of Emily’s seminal gothic-romance, remain the only disappointments in this otherwise comprehensive depiction). Furthermore, one only needs to take a look at the surviving side-profile photograph of Patrick Brontë to see how uncannily similar to him a white-haired, bespectacled Alfred Burke is.

Anyone who has visited the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, will witness how authentically its interior is reproduced in this serial; in particular, the legendary sitting room where the sisters were known to pace round a small table discussing their ideas and reciting their stories to one another (a spell-binding image which rather disturbed me as a small boy when entering that dark creaky room). Location work, of which there is a fair bit for a series of this period, is appropriately filmed in slatey Haworth itself, and around the grounds of the real Parsonage, 

set like a windowed sepulchre among its churchyard of leaning headstones. 

Special mention has to go to writer Christopher Fry for his boldly poetic script, which, rather than – as would be more the case today via irrelevant sex and restless cameras – skirting around long speeches, expositions and, even, silences, actually lingers on such aspects to this series, which are as one might expect abundant throughout; Fry clearly realised that words were the very bone and sinew of this setting, and so drives the narrative through extraordinarily beguiling speeches and monologues, that almost make any attempts throughout at reality-based domesticity and actual recorded events seem comparatively mundane (though still entertaining and interesting in themselves). You simply wouldn’t get a script of this quality being broadcast today, at least, not without it being cauterised into verbal snatches in-between overly visceral visual exposition and pretentious and distracting camerawork). 

But still on the subject of the actual writing, we are to assume the main source behind the script and depictions of the Brontës, most particularly Charlotte and Branwell, originate in Elizabeth Gaskill’s Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857). This is made patently clear to any doubters 

by the actual appearance of Gaskill in the series itself, coming in towards the end to meet, get to know, and begin writing about Charlotte, a writer whom she perceives, no doubt correctly, as superior in ‘genius’ to herself (though one equalled, if not transcended, by her sister Emily, and, at least potentially, by her brother – but of course only the living famous and not the posthumously recognised have the privilege of knowing their biographers). It is also, as we realise by the end, Gaskill’s voice narrating the family story from the beginning and throughout – and Barbara Leigh-Hunt’s dulcet tones serve the purpose well. Inevitably, in a script drawn largely from Gaskill, much of the series’ focus is on Charlotte, and a considerable amount too on her brother, probably because the two were, at least as children, inseparable, feeding off one another as Genius Tallii (Charlotte) and Chief Genius Brannii (Branwell), often formatively co-writing the minute-scripted tales of Angria and Gondol together. Naturally, Branwell’s growing insanity would have been of much significance to his closest sister, and so the series spends almost as much – if not more, at least, for the first three episodes – focus on her brother as on herself. Emily (Genius Emmii) is, in a way appropriately for her reputation, an ever-watching enigma in the scenario, but almost always imposing an unspoken objectivity on the rest of the family by her enviable detachment (helped by McHale’s simmering stare), often only breaking her silences for quipping aphorisms: ‘I suppose endurance is a form of occupation’. 

But having recently read Daphne du Maurier’s utterly riveting work of faction, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (Victor Gollancz, 1960; Penguin, 1972) – possibly the best storyline 

she ‘embellished’ on (her famous Rebecca being almost identical to the plot of Jane Eyre), 

and second only in strength to her ingeniously ambiguous My Cousin, Rachel – I’ve been transported into a slightly different take on Branwell’s nature and life, although Gaskill’s depiction is admittedly every bit as ‘infernal’ as du Maurier’s. But there are certain intriguing aspects to du Maurier’s pseudo-biography of Branwell that are absent from the Gaskill source, and understandably, since the latter was of course a biography on Charlotte and not her brother. While the irrational, temperamental, precocious character of Branwell is portrayed in both du Maurier’s work and Fry’s adaptation from Gaskill, in the former, we are allowed greater insight into the extraordinary workings of the brother’s creative imagination, every bit as distinct and powerful – as evidenced, in glimpses, through the variously quoted fragments of poems and prose throughout the book, occasionally hackneyed and un-drafted though they remain – as each of his sister’s. The difference seems to be that through a misperceived notion of an innate superiority in purpose to his sisters, as tempered by the society of the time, and 

a volatile and unfocused artistic nature palliated ruinously by alcohol, laudanum and opium, Branwell’s potential genius never developed beyond its potential, at least not sufficiently on the page to lift his name to the heights of those poets who populated Blackwood’s. 

Through a tragic combination of transparent precocity, inelegant egoism (re a letterhe wrote to the editor of Blackwood’s on the death of a lauded poet, announcing his own poetic gifts as a consolation), addictive nature, epilepsy (then still religiously misinterpreted and stigmatised) and possible schizophrenia, the fundamentally morbid and obsessive Brontë temperament which he shared with his three sisters, in his case, floundered and turned-in on itself instead of flowering into full bloom through the channel more focused and single-minded creativity. So whereas, in turn, Anne, Emily and Charlotte made the morbid Brontë duende work for them into published authorship, Branwell became victim to it, and it destroyed him. Apart from a 

rag-tag portfolio of literary and poetic scraps – some fleetingly brilliant but many, as du Maurier often observes, ‘amateur’ or ‘doggerel’ – and a few highly promising canvases, Branwell left scarce evidence of his intrinsic ‘genius’ behind him, famously noting this on his death-bed: 

‘I had done nothing neither great nor good’. This is his tragedy, and it is testament to the sheer power – or even genius, if you like – of his turbulent and rebellious personality, that Branwell came posthumously to inspire such a zealous and intricately-drawn biography by one of Britain’s most popular novelists. A flattering tribute indeed, and by way of belated consolation for such an ‘infernal’ life, a means to the posterity he died thinking he’d denied himself. 

Equally interesting as well in du Maurier’s book, is the fact that, among other poet and artist peers of his – all of whom were, conversely, ‘recognised’ in their lifetimes – Branwell counted among one his closest friends the fascinating figure of Hartley Coleridge (son of the famous Samuel Taylor), a poet and critic of some repute in his own right, but whose own gifts were ultimately stunted in the overwhelming shadow of his father’s reputation. du Maurier’s descriptions of Hartley Coleridge are intriguing, this having been a young man whom through extreme sensitivity lived his whole life as a recluse, and, possibly by some neurological quirk, was prematurely white-haired and had the gait and bearing of an old man while only in his twenties (almost a genetic metaphor for his aforementioned creative stunting). But the greatest near-revelation in du Maurier’s account, is the possibility some sparks of Branwell’s own imagination might have filtered into the basic storyline of Emily’s Wuthering Heights. This 

is not substantiated by du Maurier, who, indeed, goes to some length to argue that it was simply Branwell’s fraternal hubris in claiming he had had a hand in his sister’s masterpiece: apparently on brandishing the manuscript of Wuthering Heights to his friends in a pub, he realised on beginning to read it out that he had accidentally picked up a piece of Emily’s writing thinking it his own, but then decided in the moment to pretend it was his own so as not to lose face. Nevertheless, one can’t help thinking that so many aspects to the mood and setting of the story, and in particular, the tormented, demonic nature of Heathcliff, echoed uncannily not only the characteristics and preoccupations of Branwell, but also some of his formative fantastical narratives and characterisations. But one might further assume that inevitably some of his own thoughts and ideas might have unconsciously found their way into the psyche of his similarly-tempered sister (the novel’s character of Hindley Earnshaw, in particular, bears a striking resemblance to her love-abandoned, alcoholic brother; as does, 

in part, the frail doomed youth Linton, though perhaps as well more than an echo of Branwell’s friend, Hartley Coleridge). 

What is clear, in the end, is that even though his own creative development was truncated through mental and physical maladies and a series of unlucky events in a far too constricted home life, Branwell, by his very artistry of personality, indirectly influenced and coloured much of his sisters’ literary achievements. The fact too that, as du Maurier goes into great detail to expose, Branwell was evidently a child prodigy (an ambidexter, he could apparently put down two entirely separate and distinct pieces of writing simultaneously) and thus originally the obvious focal point for all the family’s worldly aspirations, makes his case even more tragic. 

But to return to the dramatisation, which is the main focus of this review. One can only puzzle, greatly, as to why, as yet, this riveting and moving series has yet to be released on DVD in the UK. I managed to get hold of it from Canada, and although it is Region 1, I must have through sheer will power, enabled it to work on my Region 2 player – and this review is proof that it has, and a few times over. One might hope that with the recent box set of adaptations of the Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, that a release of the actual biopic of the writers’ lives, for a viewing public far more enamoured to the medium of ‘docu-drama/fact-based adaptation’ than to ‘fiction-based dramatisation’, will come imminently in the future, for surely there’d be wide demand for this. But who knows? I certainly wouldn’t hold my breath, since for some reason the UK seems to show a rather philistine disregard for its own vintage television gems, preferring more often than not to release contemporary series on DVD, most of which are not only practically embryonic in reputation for having only just been broadcast prior to release, but are also frequently pale and poorly-written shadows of their artistically superior Seventies forebears (why, for instance, buy a sexed-up mediocrity 

like Elizabeth I (2005) when you can get the authentic, superiorly scripted and acted article, Elizabeth R (1972)? and who in all sanity would prefer a grunting cockney Ray Winstone (Henry VIII, 2003) to Keith Michell’s ingratiatingly bumptious portrayal of 1970’s flawless The Six Wives of Henry VIII?). It was some small miracle when the BBC finally released the classic 1978 serialisation of Wuthering Heights, the only adaptation – on small and big screen – that comes near to the brooding gloom of the novel, with a definitive, goblin-like Heathcliff in relative unknown Keith Hutchison – and though it is included in the new Brontës box set, I’d recommend buying it separately, since the superior version of Jane Eyre is the 1973 small budget set-piece with the metallic-voiced Michael Jayston excelling as Rochester, and not the more rose-lensed one with the metallic-faced Timothy Dalton, which is the one included in this set. But the same year’s sister production is still unavailable, in the UK. For those who can’t hold their breath beyond this review, I recommend a quick transaction via Amazon in order to acquire and treasure this brilliantly written and acted masterpiece, tellingly only available as a US/Canadian release – our cousins over the Atlantic showing far more reverence to our own costume drama heritage than we evidently do. But then, as with Branwell, a prophet hath no honour in his own land….

Alan Morrison © 2008

Alan Morrison on

The Signalman (1976) 

adapted by Andrew Davies from the short story by Charles Dickens

Directed by Lawrence Gordon Clarke 

BFI DVD

This is quite simply a perfect production, driven by subtlety, nuance and atmosphere, lifted to classic status by the supremely unsettled performance of the inimitable Denholm Elliott 

as the title character. The standout line for me is his ruminating comment about his routine-entrenched job: ‘it’s never done…’ This speaks volumes about the existential predicament of the signalman, one that is distilled to nerve-straining degrees in its sheer isolation and automatism. Inevitably for an obviously sensitive, thinking individual, the signalman fills up his seclusion with much speculative thought, which more psychoanalytical viewers might cite as the font for all the apparent phantasms that haunt him in his duties. This is the line taken by his frequent visitor, played by Bernard Lloyd (scripturally, The Traveller), who tries to rationalise objectively the strange happenings about the spookily located signal box – but all to no avail naturally, this being a ghost story at heart. Certain shots, particularly of the bride falling from the train, twisted up on the rails behind, and the ghostly gaping face at the entrance to the tunnel, are still genuinely frightening 31 years on. The final twist is fairly gratifying, but unlike many of Tales of the Unexpected, its revelation does not in any way undermine re-viewings, since it is in the psychological ambiguities of the Signalman and his spectral afflictions that the real enigma of the film plays itself out. This is a TV film to absolutely treasure, mainly for Elliott’s superbly nuanced central performance. Eerily directed by Lawrence Gordon Clarke and exceptionally scripted by Andrew Davies, The Signalman is an absolute must for any lover of vintage television.

Alan Morrison © 2008

Alan Morrison on

Delius: Song of Summer (1968)

Directed by Ken Russell

BFI DVD

For me this has to be the best thing Ken Russell ever did: a grittily shot, subtly scripted, didactic but inclusive TV film, telling an unusually nuanced story of the creatively heated relationship between the dying blind composer Frederick Delius (Max Adrian) and his diffident, self-effacing amanuensis – and amateur composer – Eric Fenby (Christopher Gable). It is in the dreamy, over-sensitive character of Fenby that Delius: Song of Summer really gripped me – actor/dancer Christopher Gable puts in a truly gripping, realistic performance as the young, sexually repressed Delius-devotee, who finds himself on a pilgrimage to aid his musical idol in scoring his final composition. Gable’s performance is exceptionally believable and endearing; an extremely convincing depiction of an ‘anxious young man’ narrowly dodging a nervous breakdown as he practically martyrs himself to the overwhelmingly domineering ego of a crippled man touched by receding genius. The scene in which Fenby quite candidly criticises one or two notes of Delius’s latest piece as he helps him articulate it on piano is fascinating in its distillation of the collaborative creative process between veteran and pupil, directed with a fly-on-the-wall realism. Almost hilarious – though darkly 

so – is Fenby’s confession near the end of the film as to his suffering a complete nervous breakdown after his sister’s welcome home party on his return to a mundane life in Bradford. This is a fascinating television play and well worth owning and re-watching. It is as witty as it is intense, and is also a compelling and all-too-rare example of (the late) Christopher Gable’s unique acting talent.

Alan Morrison © 2008

Alan Morrison on

Son of Man by Dennis Potter

(1969)

This early outing of Dennis Potter is more than worthy of its controversial reputation, 

in its uncompromising portrayal of Christ as a rough-and-ready, paranoid and angry pariah played exceptionally by Colin Blakely. The play itself does not really say anything new 

about the Passion, but it manages to re-tell this episode of the New Testament with such unadulterated grittiness, that it marks itself out as a hitherto utterly unique and groundbreaking Messianic depiction (the forerunner to Martin Scorcese’s comparatively lightweight The Last Temptation of Christ). Blakely puts in what is for me possibly the most powerful and convincingly tormented performance I have ever seen in a television play. 

The sheer intensity of his portrayal convulses on the screen in a paroxysm of terror and epiphany, which makes for truly startling viewing. This Christ is quite clearly epileptic, 

and the implication throughout is that he is also afflicted by something resembling schizophrenia. What many Christian viewers might also find distressing to take is the sheer angriness of this depiction of Jesus. Blakely’s astounding performance is complimented excellently by the ever-saturnine Robert Hardy as a more sympathetically written Pontius Pilate. Exceptional viewing.

Alan Morrison © 2008

Alan Morrison on

Stand Up Nigel Barton! (1965)/ Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton (1966)

by Dennis Potter

Directed by Gareth Davies

BBC DVD

Being both a fan of vintage British television and an Old Labour socialist at heart, Nigel Barton is one of my most treasured DVDs, tackling as it does issues of class, ideals, and compromised ideals. While the first play, Stand Up Nigel Barton!, is an extremely witty (note Barton’s neckless father muttering that he doesn’t want ‘no tightrope-walkers’ in his house in allusion to his son’s socially-conflicted metaphor) and involving satire on the Sixties denial of a still palpably entrenched class system, the sequel, Vote for Nigel Barton, is by far the superior of the two, focusing on the compromising road to power, unknowingly pointing towards the shameful sell out of new Labour in the 1990s. In uncanny parallel, here we have a squabbling Labour party campaigning group, torn between its essential principles and the fear of becoming unelectable, ultimately ripping its own heart out along the way. Caught in the middle is Barton (Keith Baron), torn between his coal mining town roots and the seductions of a graspable middle class, intellectually fulfilled future, partly paved by a scholarship to Oxford. Baron portrays this sense of anomie grippingly, helped by lacerating poetic outbursts via the metaphor-rich pen of Potter – his dilemma beautifully encapsulated in many impassioned monologues, most notably his tirade against complacent British society at what should be his speech in bid for election. Lines touching on the wasted artistic talents of his coal-spluttering father are particularly poignant. Potter’s writing in this second play is particularly exceptional. But apart from Baron’s deft turn as Barton, the real stand out, 

most nuanced performance of all is by John Bailey as Barton’s embittered, nicotine-ravaged election agent, Jack Hay. It is in this character particularly that Potter’s true incisive genius as a writer is most exemplified; Hay being a personification of the corrupted, pragmatically-ravaged ideals of the party. Director Gareth Davies goes all out for gritty kitchen-sink atmosphere. Brilliant stuff.

Alan Morrison © 2008

Alan Morrison on

To Serve Them All My Days

adapted by Andrew Davies from the novel by RF Delderfield 

BBC DVD

I vaguely remembered watching this gently alluring series as a six year old around the time 

of its original transmission in 1980. It was one of my father’s favourite programmes at the time, stirring his nostalgia for his schooldays in a grammar school in Somerset, though this series is set in a public school in Devon. But its depiction of hallowed scholarly halls, 

gowned school masters and CofE equanimity, no doubt reminded him of his boyhood. 

Bamfylde is a backwater snapshot of English Georgian private education, with its own distinctive reputation for quarrying ‘good characters’ in its pupils. It provides an unlikely sanctuary for the shell-shocked, chip-shouldered Welsh miner’s son David Powlett-Jones, 

the idealistic but sometimes hot-headed main protagonist of the series which is in effect his story. The part is played by one of the consummate leads of his period, John Duttine, whose career never quite lifted off as much as it should have. After an incidental role as Hindley Earnshaw in the particularly gritty and thorough TV adaptation of Wuthering Heights of 1978, Duttine landed his first starring role in this effortlessly beguiling adaptation of the novel by 

RF Delderfield. It would act as the springboard to further limelight as the hero of the supremely creepy 1981 serialisation of Day of the Triffids*. Duttine might also have been seen as an obvious contender for the plum role of Sebastian Flyte in ITV’s po-faced adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, but clearly the young Yorkshireman was already 

typecast in angry young working class roles (or hirsute misanthropic parts*). 

Although the actual character of Powlett-Jones does sometimes grate a little during this extensive series (13 50 min episodes in all), this is by no means anything to do with Duttine’s performance, which is exceptionally focused, nuanced and passionate throughout (replete with highly convincing and versatile Welsh accent); this is more down simply to the more irritating aspects to the essentially decent and likeable character of Powlett-Jones, who seems often unrealistically heroic and modest, especially in the midst of the frequent praise heaped on him by all and sundry. The character is indeed seemingly perceived by his teacher peers, and particularly his excruciatingly jolly Headmaster-mentor, Herries, as practically Messianic: the latter clearly sees his young protégé as a rough-edged but malleable saviour 

of an all-too-precariously cosy school. 

‘P-J’ (as he is more affectionately referred to throughout the series by his closer peers) does indeed prove himself to be the near-perfect Headmaster of Bamfylde: utterly committed, morally upstanding, quietly authoritative, unimpeachably trustworthy, open-minded and, well, everything else. His eminent suitability to his ultimate role of Headmaster (finally attained by the end of the penultimate episode) is made particularly ironic in light of his relentless sense of being out of place in the picturesque scenario of a different class to his own. Although the character’s socialism is alluded to throughout, apparently (and I have not read it yet) the actual novel laid more of an emphasis on this than the series; no doubt the toning down of the politics of the story in the television version was tempered by the unfortunate dawning 

of a new conservative Britain at the time. However, political sparring runs through the series, though often fairly patchily; but gains compelling momentum towards the latter part with the character of Christine Forster (a strong performance by Patricia Lawrence), the slightly frosty Labour campaigner who eventually becomes the second Mrs Powlett-Jones frequently challenging PJ’s politically compromised position at Bamfylde. This conflict perversely brings the two together when they realise they are on the same side essentially. Later, Christine’s self-perceived failure at winning a seat in Parliament, combined with a sense of purposelessness as the redundant wife of a successful headmaster, culminates in a breakdown which she only just recovers from at the conclusion of the series. This episode is particularly well acted and nuanced, and is highly convincing and emotive.

There is also a long-running thread of antagonism between the more privileged and educated PJ, and his resentful coal-mining elder brother, Chetwynd, who sees himself as the true rooted socialist and class-warrior of the two. This conflict makes for truly profound television, with PJ palpably torn between his inherited socialist ideas and a new-found sense of belonging and purpose in the seemingly incompatible scenario of an English public school. PJ justifies his decision to stay at Bamfylde, in spite of his politics, by arguing that he is needed more in such a setting to give the other side of the social story to privileged young men, rather than return to rainy Wales to preach to the converted. Although one does see his point, there are times when similarly-minded viewers may perceive PJ as politically compromised and a little self-centred (or rather, Bamfyld-centred). But the series as a whole, through PJ’s story, compellingly depicts the human conflict between ideas and feelings. It is this essential anomie that PJ represents.

The always reliable Duttine aside, TSTAMD also sports a panoply of superb supporting roles, the most notable of whom is Alan MacNaughtan as the supremely sardonic, chain-smoking, Gandalf-esque Howarth. Here is distilled the quintessence of burgeoning Fabian despondency of the period: a thwarted intellectual and card-carrying atheist, who hollers out an unforgettable – albeit resonantly self-restrained – tirade to Herries’ bumbling, optimistic clergyman headmaster as to life being ‘something to be got through’ when rounded on for failing to prevent a suicidal PJ striding off alone onto the moors following the sudden shock 

of his wife’s and children’s deaths in a car crash. This is arguably the most powerful and moving scene in the entire series, and believe me, it is up against many other such moments. Atheist or believer, I challenge any viewer to watch this emotive plea for the dignity of human life in its right to decide its own fate, without feeling a shiver of sentiment run down their spine. Beautifully scripted and acted stuff. What also makes the reassuringly staid, sports-hating, philistine-baiting Howarth such a memorable television character, is his inimitable capacity to talk with a perpetual cigarette balanced in his mouth. I can only recall one scene in the entire series when his mouth is briefly fag-free. Hats off to MacNaughtan for such an exceptional portrayal of what is a deeply complex and deceptively sanguine character, whose last vestige of faith in humanity is entirely invested in the sincere, self-deprecating PJ. The shot of Howarth’s vision dimming as he watches a game of cricket (which he hates) while slouched in a canvas chair as his last cigarette tips out from his clutch, is beautifully shot, 

and poignantly encapsulates the series’ title in its most complex and faithless character. 

While Frank Middlemass’s Herries is undoubtedly a lovably dotty and cheerful character, a 

sort of fluffier version of Michael Horden (voicing Badger in Wind in the Willows, that is), for me the other two stand-out performances are from Neil Stacy (Robert in Duty Free) as the militarily insecure Carter, and Charles Kay (I, Claudius; Edge of Darkness; Sherlock Holmes 

– The Creeping Man) as Alcock, the pent-up, fastidious successor to Herries. While Carter provides continual light relief throughout in his canting patriotism and amusing narrow-mindedness, Alcock adds a dose of genuine menace in what is a startling performance of repressed sexuality and simmering obsession, as the headmaster who spies on his pupils for signs of homosexual behaviour and finds disgust in all habits other than devout teetotalism. 

This is a series I can watch again and again, and one which I could not imagine being made on contemporary television, due to its rectitude, slow pace and reclining nature. It is a profound and sometimes surprising story, and its intrinsic sedateness works in its favour, not against it. I’d recommend purchasing this series to anyone who enjoys the long slow burn of moving and involving storylines and intricate character development. Unforgettably engrossing viewing.

Alan Morrison © 2008

Alan Morrison

Whatever Happened To History?

The Noughtiesisation of Costume Drama

– Being a Right Royal Drubbing of Modern Abominations as The Tudors c. 2008 and a Nostalgic Tribute to the likes of The Six Wives of Henry VIII circa 1970 –

Whatever happened to good old-fashioned television costume drama? In the halcyon days of British television – somewhere from the early Sixties through to the mid Eighties, but peaking 

in the Seventies – the BBC, and even at times ITV, excelled at bringing us a seemingly unending string of high quality, authentically realised costume dramas, pure historically based original scripts or literary adaptations, frequently adapted by actual writers such as Andrew Davies (Dickens’ The Signalman, RF Delderfield’s To Serve Them All My Days), Harry Green (Hardy’s Jude the Obscure), Jack Pulman (Robert Graves’ I, Claudius) Christopher Fry (The Brontës of Haworth), Dennis Potter (Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge; Casanova) and legion regular intra-serial episode writers such as John Prebble, Rosemary Ann Sisson, Hugh Whitemore, Alfred Saughnessy, John Hawkesworth, and even budding novelist Fay Weldon, all of whom contributed scripts to such iconic costume epics as Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-75), The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), Elizabeth R (1972) et al. 

Perhaps it was, in part, the relatively chronic budgetary restraints of these formative decades in British television-making that necessitated such detailed and intricate concentration on scripting and characterisation – long before the eye-candy of film-mimicking digital video (which is an inferior, mistier version of film camera by the way) and CGI invaded our screens – but even in spite of budgetary limitations, many of these vintage serials realised their settings beautifully in often rich detail of set and costume. These were the days when television was basically theatre in an electrical box, and in that sense an artform; when it took its time to build up narrative and tell stories, in the main carried through dialogue and first rate acting. Indeed, some of the most powerful and involving performances I have ever witnessed have been in vintage television costume serials and plays: Colin Blakely’s tortured Christ in Dennis Potter’s Son of Man (1965), Michael Hordern’s acutely observed Asperger’s-ridden academic in Whistle and I’ll Come To You (1968), Denholm Eliot’s tangibly haunted Signalman (1976), Keith Michell’s infectiously fickle King in The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), Glenda Jackson’s titanic turn as Elizabeth R (1972), Alfred Burke’s infinitely subtle portrayal of Patrick Brontë in The Brontës of Haworth (1973), Barry Foster’s loveably fatuous Kaiser Wilhelm in Fall of Eagles

(1974), Frank Finley’s electrifying take on the Fuhrer in The Death of Adolf Hitler (1973), and Derek Jacobi’s stuttering tour-de-force in I, Claudius (1976) – to name only a handful of examples are, to my mind, some of the most immaculately nuanced and intensely realised roles of all time, including all that cinema has to offer. 

And what is about the other chief serendipity of these vintage adaptations (again, dictated to a large extent by budgetary limitations), verbal exposition of a setting’s events through dialogue, that was somehow far more involving and compelling than actually having these events visually depicted? There is something intrinsically more engaging in things being verbally described or alluded to rather than entirely visually represented, in the same way that supernatural and horror narratives are far more disturbing through what is being suggested or partially shown/explained rather than blasted on the screen before us (for instance, in film terms, The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1960) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) are lastingly haunting due to their poetically ambiguous atmospheres and absence of visual closure or rational explanation). The reason being of course that it allows the viewers’ imagination to play around with the possibilities, often in turn describing far worse ideas and possibilities in the dark of ‘suggestion’ than graphic visualisation could muster. So here is the power inherent in verbal exposition and description (exemplified, for example, in a scene in the otherwise fairly graphic I, Claudius, in which a woman vividly, yet only in partial detail, describes the sexual perversions she has been subjected to by the Emperor Tiberius, just prior to stabbing herself after shouting ‘If only I could just cut the memory out…’ – if this were re-made nowadays, we would have had it all spoon-fed, distastefully as possible, in visceral flashbacks) that makes us do much of the imagining ourselves, thus involving us more in the drama, and is in essence of course a key aspect to theatrical drama, which vintage serials were crafted from. And to be frank, any vintage series that attempted to use visual exposition of integral narrative events – the French Revolution being carried out by a peasant rabble of half-a-dozen in 1980’s adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities springs to mind, as does the 1971 attempt to capture the majestic setting of Last of the Mohicans by throwing a handful of face-painted character actors into the Sussex undergrowth – often only served to cheapen the sense of reality to the un-matchable quality of their scripts.

But above all, particularly in the more grittily-lit Seventies’ serials (benefiting more often than not from the intimate immediacy of video camera), but also throughout the Eighties and even into the early Nineties (in particular, Andrew Davies’ superb adaptation of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1994)), the pre-digital video/cod-filmic television age – at its peak between 1968-1978 – had a humility in its historical and costume authenticity. And this is the key differentiation between pre-Nineties television costume drama and its post-Nineties inheritor, the latter more often than not tailored to a misconceived ‘populist’ approach to television-making dictated by the ‘bums-on-seats men-in-suits’ production cartel that’s dumbed down the medium for the past decade and a half.

After the cloying infatuation with chocolate-box Jane Austen adaptations, pioneered by the insipid Pride & Prejudice (1995) – and one would think the famous shot of Colin Firth in a wet frilled-shirt would have been more off-putting than, as it was, brand-making – and, in turn, Persuasion (same year), a string of similarly callow productions ensued, even transferring to – almost indistinguishable – films through yet more tedious dissections of upper-class Georgian matchmaking (the yawn-provoking and woefully miscast Sense and Sensibility, 1995; Emma, 1996; and more recently, yet another adaptation of P&P, 2005), something seemed to shift in the entire perception of costume drama adaptation, a fundamental re-adapting of adaptation itself, to fit the modern-centric populist attitudes of the wider viewing public; or at least, television big-wigs’ own tabloid view of the wider viewing public. This seems in essence to be 

the view: the public needs constant coaxing and persuading to watch anything not set literally in the present day and concerning present day issues – and invariably haircuts – by having historical series either spoon-fed to them through the plague of absurdly edited docu-dramas (more on which later) or ‘contemporised’ through a sort of scriptural, visual and even follicular translation, or transposition, as if these are characters and situations which could be of today, in all except their costumes. Anything deviating from this ‘Noughtiesisation’ of history is passed over to BBC Four, along with the only truly challenging original plays.

I say ‘Noughtiesisation’ since to my mind this modernisation and popularisation of the period drama into a more consumer-palatable mock-form truly came into its – less than impressive – own, this decade. The signs were already there in the Nineties that choices in literary adaptations for television were growingly mirroring the more Daily Mail-sated audiences in increasingly populist author choices, mostly of course Austen, and if not, Dickens (the last truly authentic adaptation being Martin Chuzzlewit, 1994), and more often than not inexorable re-vamps of Oliver Twist. 

There was also a disturbing abrading of time, period, trend and custom in the crass casting of Colin Firth as another Darcy in 2001’s adaptation of the vapid Bridget Jones’ Diary, obviously echoing both the ‘novelist’s’ and the casting director’s mutual crush on said actor’s portrayal of said character, as if to oddly juxtapose these two novels and adaptations on screen. So stony-faced Firth found himself the unwitting pivot in this inter-textual conspiracy. It is also perhaps the fact that the main themes of, say, Austen’s novels, romance and matchmaking (albeit societally-determined in her narratives), being timeless and perennial, that her writing more than any other author’s translates so easily to historically disinterested modern audiences. This also probably partly explains why a string of Hardy adaptations throughout the Nineties and early Noughties (The Woodlanders; Tess of the D’urbevilles; Far From the Madding Crowd) and of George Eliot (Middlemarch; Mill on the Floss), were relative ratings flops – Middlemarch, for instance, having never been repeated since its original broadcast in 1995. Naturally, anything as socially critical (though, ironically, still relevant to our own times to a degree) as Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, would simply not be attempted on the small screen (and in any case, would have an uphill climb to come anywhere close to the definitive and uncompromising adaptation of 1971). 

But now, well into the Noughties, even this populist-tempered choice of adaptations is seemingly not enough: I recently witnessed a trailer for a new series in which a modern day woman changes places with a Jane Austen character. So it has gone well beyond a mere metaphor now, and into the inevitable literalism. Strange and seriously maladjusted entities who have for some time claimed that the interminably dull and unrealistic Coronation Street is comparable to Dickens, might count themselves chief among those to blame for this bastardisation of the medium of costume drama.

In the last decade of British television, and the BBC can count itself particularly guilty, we have been bombarded with a ‘Noughtiesisation’ of the past, a re-telling of history in modern day vernacular, behaviour, attitudes and even hairstyles – a follicular imposition on historical representation which makes the ubiquitous boot-polished quiffs of Sixties’ period adaptations or the flared trousers and proto-afros of Seventies’ sci-fi, look comparatively authentic – and have now, through the auspices of populist programme makers, discovered that, among other revelations, the young Henry VIII wasn’t actually ginger-haired and pallid but actually the spit of an Esquire model replete with ludicrous scalp-quaffed haircut (an evolution from the appropriately Roman-style forward-comb of the Nineties) and designer stubble, and that Robin Hood was in actual fact an arse-kicking lincoln-green-clad Ninja who foreshadowed a future breed of Brighton-based Britpop band frontmen. The latter ‘re-visioning’ of our most popular folk hero is for me the pinnacle of ‘Noughtiesised’ historical adaptation, and has to be the singularly most abysmal ‘bastardisation of the past’ ever made – even the badly-aged electro-fantasia of Eighties’ Robin of Sherwood is inspired by comparison (but for vintage TV afficionados, I’d point you towards 1975’s The Legend of Robin Hood, with Paul Darrow’s proto-‘Avon’ (Blake’s 7) turn as a Plantaganet-nosed Sheriff of Nottingham, for the moodiest, most authentic take on the folk story).

As if this is not seen as enough to spoon-feed the past into the mouths of a perceived race 

of Cro Magnon morons, the writers then re-write the diction and expressions of these historical figures to fit those of the specific time of the viewers to whom it is first broadcast. This will, in time of course, and quite ironically, only serve to age these cod-adaptations even more starkly than the aforementioned Quiff-centric Sixties, as products rooted in the time of broadcast, so will prove pretty pointless all round in the future. It’s costume drama for the culture of immediacy – and any faint notions among the so-called producers and writers of these abominations that somehow their work will serve as didactic Trojan Horses, I would only point them back to their grossly inauthentic scripts as proof that this is evidently not going to be the case. 

For me, the true downturn in costume drama authenticity was heralded by Ray Winston’s cockney version of Henry VIII (2003). This ‘re-interpretation’ of one of our most famous monarchs was, to say the least, brave. But in all other respects, utterly ridiculous and laughable. One almost expected him at some point to turn to one of his Catherines with a gruff, ‘Full English please Caff’. Ok, so one might argue that this curiously unrestrained casting was a revolutionary move in the continued erosion of the fashion for Received Pronunciation in television adaptation. Well, one might argue this, as well as some spurious, politically correct notion of class equality, that it somehow seems fair for once to portray an historical royal as a stubbly working-class bad boy – but then to anyone with a modicum of perception, this is just gimmicky and misleading. One can re-interpret, adapt the past to a degree, but 

one cannot, to suit a particular audience, change a historical fact, at least, not with any artistic credibility: and the fact is, being King of England, it is highly unlikely that Henry VIII would have spoken with a cockney accent. Period (excuse pun). It is equally more unlikely that, as according to the abominable tripe that is The Tudors (2008) – basically a modern day sex-romping soap opera transposed into the 1600s – that same monarch would have had the diction, mannerisms and hairstyle of an average young Londoner of over 400 years into the future. We also know, from historically reliable portraits of Henry VIII, that he looked absolutely nothing like this latest ‘interpretation’, even as a young man, but was blatantly ginger in complexion, pallid and rather plain (at least, by modern perceptions, such as they are). 

It’s also curious to note that alongside the continued Austenite infatuation, the British viewing public are also, apparently, equally besotted with the dynasty of the Tudors – in particular, the endlessly re-visited reign of Elizabeth I, on both small and big screen, none of which have come anywhere near, still, to the definitive portrayal by Glenda Jackson. Is this perhaps because, in a climate of resurging monarchism, and the continuing post-Imperial decline, we like to morbidly revel in the very dynasty which first stamped ‘Britishness’ on the rest of the world? This is made even more ironic by the fact that, to be pedantic,the Tudors represented the first significant break in the original royal line, having tenuously taken the throne from the last legitimate British dynasty, the Plantagenets. But since, of course, our current Queen is descended from her namesake, though indirectly, but far more indirectly descended from any of the Plantagenets, I suspect we will never see a costume drama entitled The Plantagenets on our screens.

To conclude on this topic, I’d like to turn, in brief, to the contemporary televisual mutation we know as ‘docu-drama’. To my mind this strange chimera between half-hearted historical adaptation and intrusive academic commentary, having started in the form we view it in today during the Nineties, was also in part significant in this degeneration of the costume drama. When I first unwittingly watched a docu-drama, not realising that it was one, or what a docu-drama was anyhow, my first thoughts were, why does a University Historian keep interrupting this period drama, and with all the charisma of Simon Schama? Was there interference from Open University? To this day, I have never fully understood the point to docu-drama in such a literal form as this, except to assume it is due to a dearth of proper television writers or a determination not to employ any, but instead, hire a few dull academics to fill in the ‘difficult bits’ during a misty-lensed, CGI-clogged Roman or Mongol computer game. Is this down to scriptural cost-cutting on paying actual writers to tell a didactic, fact-based narrative with some modicum of literary flair (the heady days of the brilliantly written and characterised I, Claudius now a very distant glint in the past), and to instead corner much cheaper University lecturers in their lunch breaks to mumble a string of unembellished facts so that more budget is freed up to attempt Gladiator-scale reconstructions? Partly, I would think, yes. 

But the more sinister aspect to docu-dramas is that they are clearly used now to literally 

spell out any didacticism inherent in the programme, rather than allow an audience to make the effort to pick this up through the dramatisation of historical events, as exemplified in the costume dramas of the Seventies in particular. For me this strips the colour out of the process, the flair and the evocation, the artistry, and reduces the effect to simply a fairly mundane attempt at depicting the past as if it’s happening now, but rarely if ever in a particularly interesting or even authentic way. The highly visceral Rome series, rather like a docu-drama but with the academic commentaries cut out from it, manages to be both distasteful and boring at the same time, which is quite a feat. Though not nearly so graphically sexualised as the 1997 adaptation of Anna Karenina, which left no stone unturned in its title character’s finesse at filleting her illicit lovers; or the corset-bursting male-fantasy bed-romp of Tipping the Velvet (2002) – more like Crushing the Velvet. So now we know what our ancestors, throughout the ages, were busy doing: inexorably copulating. What an intriguing take on the past. 

It’s interesting to note that docu-dramas actually originated as far back as the Sixties, but were, of course, a much less muddled/disorientating breed back then; not cauterised between bored academic and CGI battlefield, but properly scripted by television writers, acted by proper actors, though directed more as fly-on-the-wall documentary-style dramas, specifically made to put across a certain social message or topical issue, or to try and capture the true feel of a certain period or historical figure. These were frequently exceptionally written and acted dramas in their own right, but created as didactic narratives, and so not as colourfully embellished as the average ‘dramatisation’ of the time, being made with more of a sense of ‘reality’. Cathy Come Home (1966) was perhaps the most hard-hitting distillation of 

this genre. But there were many others, some now available on DVD through the BFI, including Ken Russell’s Elgar (1962) and the infectiously intense Delius (1968); and director and film historian Kevin Brownlow’s deeply moving biopic Winstanley (1966), which depicts the doomed Digger commune of its eponymous subject in 1649 as immediately and candidly as if it was happening today – but, without any spoon-feeding, dumbing down, or inauthentic ‘contemporising’ of its lead character, his appearance, manner or diction. In fact, this particular made-for-TV film drew its entire script from the actual writings of Gerrard Winstanley on his experiences in the Digger commune, not excerpted in-between academic commentaries, but used as an inter-textual narrative device, and through occasional dialogue and monologue, through the medium of ‘dramatisation’. Remember ‘dramatisation’? 

Fortunately through the medium of DVD those of us who are driven by the sheer idiocy of modern costume drama to scour the shelves of the obdurately priced BBC Shops, or painstakingly surf the likes of Network DVD and Acorn, are able to uncover those lost gems of authentically crafted vintage TV costume drama, the genuine articles you might say, to give us blissful sanctuary from the mind-numbing ‘Noughtiesisation’ of history. 

Alan Morrison © 2008