Category Archives: Essays

Beyond the reach of the cartographer: Dennis Potter the reviewing writer and writing reviewer

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by DAVID ROLINSON

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Dennis Potter’s non-fiction writing is a tremendous body of work – reviews, radio talks and newspaper features on television, radio, books, society, politics and more.1 I was going to just run through some of his television reviews, but Potter wouldn’t let me get off that lightly. His non-fiction work interweaves with his fiction work in characteristically multi-layered, provocative and entertaining ways. He never lets us forget that words matter. So the word “reviewing” becomes unreliable, which is annoying if you’ve put it in your title. He’s not just a writer who wrote some reviews – his writing reviews, and re-views, his own plays and much more besides. There are lots of traps to fall into, as we can tell from the start of Follow the Yellow Brick Road…

  1. This essay is an earlier – longer – draft version of a talk I gave at the Dennis Potter Day held at Dean Heritage Centre, Soudley, Forest of Dean on 29 June 2013. The full schedule of the day’s events can be found here. Some of this essay has been rewritten for reading rather than speaking, but most of the new or unused material is restricted to these endnotes. Detailed coverage of the event will appear on the Potter Matters blog, which we will link to when the event’s coverage is uploaded. ↩

Funny Farm (1975)

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by DAVID ROLINSON

Play for Today Writer: Roy Minton; Producer: Mark Shivas; Director: Alan Clarke

“This place gets more like a bleeding madhouse every day…”

BTVD_Funny Farm_1 2016Funny Farm depicts a night shift by nurse Alan Welbeck (Tim Preece) on a psychiatric ward. As reviewer James Scott put it, the play comments on “conditions in our mental hospitals – understaffing, overwork, bad pay, old inadequate buildings” and unsatisfactory “patient treatment and cure”, points which are heightened by the play’s “understatement” and rejection of “sensationalism and sentimentality”.1 Dennis Potter praised this “gentle and observant drama” as “Beautifully acted, compassionately written and intelligently directed”.2 The play also dramatises writer Roy Minton’s contention that “Psychiatric therapy is fundamentally an agent for the state”,3 and provides an example of Minton’s productive collaboration with director Alan Clarke. My book Alan Clarke didn’t have a chapter on Funny Farm in its own right – I discussed it only in relation to other collaborations and tendencies across Clarke’s work. This essay aims to correct that omission, and features some new research findings.

  1. James Scott, ‘Writer swipes hard at our crazy values’, The Stage and Television Today, 6 March 1975, p. 19. ↩

  2. Dennis Potter, ‘Switch Back’, New Statesman, 7 March 1975, p. 319. ↩

  3. Minton, quoted in Shiva Naipaul, ‘Madness and their methods’, Radio Times, 20 February 1975, p. 14. ↩

Ingmar Bergman’s The Lie (1970)

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by JOHN WHEATCROFT

Play for Today / The Largest Theatre in the World Writer: Ingmar Bergman; Translated by Paul Britten Austin; Producer: Graeme McDonald; Director: Alan Bridges

‘The truth will tear us apart’

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There has been much talk recently about contemporary television producing drama superior to anything that the cinema currently has to offer. Any vestiges of snobbery about the supposed inferiority of the small screen have been snuffed out with directors such as Martin Scorsese and David Fincher choosing to work in television. Jane Campion, the New Zealander who directed An Angel at my Table and The Piano, said in an interview for The Times that TV is now producing the more pioneering work. Campion, who has directed a six-part crime thriller for television which was launched at Sundance and received its European premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, said after seeing HBO’s Deadwood: ‘Who is commissioning this stuff? This is a revolution, something is really happening in television.’1 It does not follow of course that revolutionary film directors will have a big impact (Scorsese’s Boardwalk Empire had mixed reviews) when they transfer their attentions to TV.

Ingmar Bergman’s first British television play The Lie is a historically interesting but modest piece of work. Historically interesting because of the play’s genesis: it was commissioned by the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation on behalf of European members participating in ‘The Largest Theatre in the World’. This, the Radio Times explained, was ‘a project which enabled a play to be broadcast simultaneously in several languages across Europe.’2 The UK Play For Today version was directed by Alan Bridges; an American version was put out on CBS, directed by Alex Segal.3

  1. Kate Muir, The Times, 12 February 2013, Times2 supplement, p. 9. ↩

  2. ‘Bergman’s British debut on TV’, Uncredited, Radio Times, 25-31 October, 1970. ↩

  3. Paul Duncan and Bengt Wanselius, The Ingmar Bergman Archives (Taschen, 2008), p. 441. ↩

Hitching Your Wagon to a Star: Some random and rambling reflections on Alfred Hitchcock and The Girl (2012)

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by NEIL SINYARD

Writer: Gwyneth Hughes; Based on (book): Donald Spoto, Spellbound by Beauty; Producer: Amanda Jenks; Director:Julian Jarrold

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There is a compelling moment in Strindberg’s The Father when a doctor is recalling a production of Ibsen’s Ghosts and being dismayed by Mrs Alving’s vilification of her late husband. ‘I thought to myself,’ says the Doctor, ‘What a damned shame the fellow’s dead and can’t defend himself!’

I felt a bit like that whilst watching the BBC/HBO production The Girl,1 Julian Jarrold’s film about the deteriorating relationship between Alfred Hitchcock and his new discovery Tippi Hedren during the making of The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964). Dramatic characterisation comes perilously close to character assassination. Jarrold’s previous TV piece, the award-winning Appropriate Adult, was also rooted in reality and had certainly confirmed his aptitude for exploring the dark side of human personality; and The Girl is a powerful and progressively harrowing film about sexual harassment, psychological cruelty, and the abuse of power.2 I think the two leading performances are superb. Toby Jones’s mimicry of Hitchcock is masterly, but he also probes to the melancholy behind the façade; and Sienna Miller likewise conveys a tough and courageous resilience beneath the actress’s surface elegance. At the outset, however, the film claims to be based on extensive research (though there is no mention of Tony Lee Moral’s richly detailed book on the making of Marnie3 ) and thus is purporting to be an accurate account of events. On the level of veracity rather than drama, the film becomes more problematic.

  1. The Girl, tx. BBC2, 26 December 2012. ↩

  2. Appropriate Adult, tx. ITV, 4 and 11 September 2011. ↩

  3. Tony Lee Moral, Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie (Scarecrow Press, 2005). ↩

Making Contact with Contact: From AFN Clarke to Alan Clarke

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by DAVID ROLINSON

Screen Two; Writer: AFN Clarke; Director: Alan Clarke; Producer: Terry Coles

The first production to be shown in the Screen Two strand, Contact was broadcast on BBC2 at 10.10pm on Sunday 6 January 1985.1 An account of British Army patrols around the border in South Armagh, Contact was an appropriate start for Screen Two given its contemporary concerns, politically sensitive subject matter and distinctive style. Filmed between 6 and 29 August 1984, Contact was directed by Alan Clarke.2 It is one of the highlights of Clarke’s astonishing body of work. Jim Naughton’s review of Contact is largely characteristic of the critical acclaim that it received: “a crisp, tight, elegant piece of work, wonderfully shot […] by Philip Bonham Carter and making brilliant use of sound”, the film “found a new angle on Northern Ireland, which is more than can be said for most programmes about that […] province”.3 Typically for a Clarke piece it achieved more acclaim abroad, winning the Golden Leopard’s Eye at the Locarno International Film Festival, where the jury praised the “intelligence and precision with which the camera describes the story of a British patrol in Northern Ireland while leaving the spectator free to judge”.4 Clarke described the win as a “high spot” of his career, “absolutely great”.5 However, there was another Clarke at work on Contact whose own contribution has been underexplored: its writer, AFN Clarke…

  1. This article builds upon one sub-section of Chapter 3 of Dave Rolinson, Alan Clarke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), which was reissued in paperback in 2011. It was a shame that the paperback was just a straight reprint because most of it was written in the restrictive logistical circumstances of my Ph.D. (October 2000-Summer 2004) and I think the Contact chapter in particular would benefit from updating and revising with the facilities and information that I now have. This article marks the start of that process of revision. ↩

  2. Filming dates taken from Contact’s BBC Programme-as-Broadcast file, viewed at the BBC Written Archives Centre. ↩

  3. Jim Naughton, ‘The good spies come back’, The Listener, 10 January 1985, p. 33. ↩

  4. Jury quoted in Paul Johnson, ‘BBC says film on informers was not delayed’, The Guardian, 15 August 1985. Interestingly given some of the reviewer comments quoted later in this essay, the Guardian piece describes Contact as “A BBC documentary on Northern Ireland”. The Contact news is at the bottom of a piece about the BBC denying alleged censorship of a programme about informers in Northern Ireland, On the Word of a Supergrass. ↩

  5. Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire publicity material, viewed at British Film Institute library. ↩