It’s 1986 – the year Maradona ends England’s world cup dreams in Mexico; the year Top Gun is the highest grossing film; the year over 3.4 million Brits are unemployed and the year Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) is leaving school.

On his own again after the gang was broken up by Combo’s (Stephen Graham) terrifying acts of violence, hapless Shaun is a magnet for trouble. Then a chance encounter reunites him with Woody (Joe Gilgun), Lol (Vicky McClure), Smell (Rosamund Hanson) and the others and soon the past is forgotten. The gang are back together and they’re all looking for love, a laugh, a job and something that resembles a future.

Shane Meadows said: “When I finished This Is England I had a wealth of material and unused ideas that I felt very keen to take further – audiences seemed to really respond to the characters we created and out of my long standing relationship with Film4 and Channel 4 the idea for a television serial developed. Not only did I want to take the story of the gang broader and deeper, I also saw in the experiences of the young in 1986 many resonances to now – recession, lack of jobs, sense of the world at a turning point. Whereas the film told part of the story, the TV serial will tell the rest.”

Back this September: the gang from This is England

Channel 4 Head of Drama, Camilla Campbell, said: “Film4 has a longstanding relationship with Shane, and so I’m thrilled that a filmmaker of his calibre has decided to make his TV debut for Channel 4. I can’t wait to see the characters reunited in 1986 and watch their stories unfold over four hours of television. With all it has to say about the way we live now as well as the way we lived then, this is a darkly funny and utterly compelling British drama.”

This is England ’86 is acclaimed British filmmaker Shane Meadows’ (Somers Town, Dead Man’s Shoes) television debut and the much anticipated follow up to his BAFTA award-winning film. Reuniting the original cast, the four-part drama is co-written by Shane Meadows and Jack Thorne (The Scouting Book For Boys), directed by Shane Meadows and Tom Harper (Misfits) and produced by Warp Films.

This Is England ‘86. Tuesday 7 September, 10.00 pm, Channel 4 – see www.channel4.com/thisisengland86

The most impressive thing about A Study in Pink, the brilliant first episode of new series Sherlock, is that, for all the modern-day rebooting and visual invention, its spirit and detail are so faithful to the source work by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As in his Doctor Who work, writer Steven Moffat brings a fan’s eye to the strengths and weaknesses of his beloved source material, developing the series format with fellow executive producers Sue Vertue and fellow Holmes and Who expert (and writer of episode 3) Mark Gatiss. A Study in Pink captures the essence of Holmes’s 19th century debut – reworking A Study in Scarlet (1887) and elements of Holmes’s second story, The Sign of Four (1890) – in a package that, with the impressive pace and technique of director Paul McGuigan, makes for one of the 21st century’s sharpest 90 minutes of popular drama to date.

‘Not in the canon’: modernity and the limits of iconography

Critics worrying about modern versions of Holmes are nothing new. Although Moffat and Gatiss are fans of the original sources, they were struck by how the 1940s Holmes films, featuring Basil Rathbone, were ‘a damn sight more fun than most Sherlock Holmes movies’. Moffat was aware that these were ‘cheap as chips’ B-movies that fans could see as ‘a heretical defilement of a sacred text’.¹ From The Voice of Terror (1942), the third Rathbone film, onwards, Holmes and Watson are relocated to the Second World War period, but only after a caption almost apologises for time-shifting them, reminding us that they are ‘ageless, invincible and unchanging’. This could almost be an epigram for A Study in Pink. The apology was necessary because critics were already disappointed by adaptations that moved away from period detail and fidelity to Doyle’s originals. However, even a brief study of Holmes on screen can reveal that period detail and fidelity have rarely been central issues.

Picturegoer Weekly complained that The Speckled Band (1931) was ‘asking for trouble’ by trying to ‘modernise’ Holmes, because ‘you cannot divorce Holmes from the period of hansoms and a Baker Street that is long past’.² David Stuart Davies notes that many reviews of The Missing Rembrandt (1932) ‘made mention of the modernisation of the setting’ as if it ‘seemed to catch the reviewers unawares’.³ However, as Davies replies, ‘all previous Holmes talkies and most of the silent movies had eschewed the Victorian period for budgetary reasons’.⁴ Indeed, Rathbone’s debut, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), was the first ‘period’ Holmes. Therefore, updating Holmes is as strong a tradition as attempting fidelity to Holmes’s ‘proper’ place. But what is his ‘proper’ place? It may not be a specific time period – after all, Doyle published new Holmes stories between 1887 and 1927, during which time the world and Doyle’s interests changed – but an idea of period, which took stronger hold after Doyle’s death in 1930.⁵

Jeremy Brett's Holmes disappearing into smoke, 'The Greek Interpreter'

Therefore, post-war years see screen versions focus on period iconography which then passes into the popular consciousness. Russell Miller notes how Doyle, early in A Study in Scarlet, has ‘set the blueprint’, with ‘Victorian London’s murky gaslit cobbled streets swirled in fog, its rattling hansom cabs, its urchins and ragamuffins, and its endless mysteries’.⁶ Moffat observed that ‘hundreds of TV and film adaptations’ showed Holmes as ‘the icon of a bygone age. A lovingly preserved relic; a suitable object for awe; a monolith from ancient times, looming out of the fog.’⁷ Although Moffat and Gatiss both ‘loved Victoriana and fogs and melodrama and a nice bit of posh shouting’, they thought ‘this was not what Sherlock Holmes was meant to be’.⁸ For Moffat, adaptations rendered Holmes ‘a period piece’ but Doyle ‘wasn’t writing a period piece’: The Sign of Four doesn’t contain vast ‘period detail’ because ‘Doyle was writing fast-paced, contemporary detective thrillers – he wasn’t wasting time on what you could see from your own window’.⁹ Some dramas, therefore, depend too heavily on period iconography. For instance, Matt Frewer’s Sherlock Holmes is quickly established in a Holmesian milieu in The Sign of Four (2000) but David Stuart Davies was not alone in despairing at the opening scenes with Holmes walking the street in a Tam O’ Shanter while scraping his violin; for Davies, Frewer’s The Sign of Four improves our sense of Holmes’s abilities when it incorporates ‘new elements’¹⁰ Sherlock is keen to stress Holmes’s modernity – but then, so was Doyle. As Andrew Lycett notes, Doyle builds the ‘contemporary feel’ of his introduction to Holmes and Watson by flagging them up as Bohemians; furthermore, Doyle often demonstrated ‘skill at absorbing and reflecting trends, whether literary (Gothicism and sensationalism), cultural (science and its discontents) or social (how two men disport themselves)’¹¹. Why shouldn’t future adaptations do what Doyle himself did so often, displaying ‘the chameleon side of his nature’?¹².

This is not to deny that there are vital elements of Doyle’s Holmes stories that are specific to their time. For Lycett, the ‘fragile and intriguing creature’ that lay beneath Holmes’s ‘cerebral exterior’ reflected, amongst other things, the age in which he lived, ‘in which the certainties of reason were under threat’.¹³ Locating him in his time period provides a context for his modernity. The Metropolitan Police were only founded in 1828, and major landmarks in the detective thriller genre were still fresh, including Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) which is often seen as the first British detective novel.¹⁴ Moffat is right about iconography obscuring Doyle’s achievement, and Sherlock superbly returns to Doyle’s spirit – but several period-based adaptations hold onto period for the same reason of returning to Doyle. Two previous BBC Holmes series of the 1960s saw first Douglas Wilmer and then Peter Cushing battling production circumstances to insist on accuracy and fidelity (Wilmer to the point of rewriting scripts himself).¹⁵ There are further issues of cultural value at stake: after all, Doyle’s first decade of Holmes writing is ‘Victorian literature’ but deviations in adaptation are rarely judged as harshly as they are when other Victorian literature is reinterpreted. Indeed, the emphasis on Doyle’s texts in the Granada series (1984-94) was in itself new, as producer Michael Cox convinced executives (who ‘moaned, “Not corny old Sherlock Holmes again”’) that this was ‘the exciting genuine article’.¹⁶ Indeed, its early runs including The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984-85) and much of The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1986-88) are spellbinding, and feature Jeremy Brett as the definitive Holmes (and, with both David Burke and his successor Edward Hardwicke as Watson, the definitive Holmes/Watson partnership). Avoiding period cliché did not have to mean modernising, but could facilitate a return to the text: Brett accepted the role of Holmes when he saw this was ‘a dark and mysterious character’, and ‘it wasn’t all pipes and deerstalkers’.¹⁷ Cushing insisted that ‘I never had a Meerschaum’ pipe because it’s ‘not in the canon’ but was used by William Gillette on stage.¹⁸ Other parts of his popular image derived more from Sidney Paget’s illustrations than Doyle’s prose. The Granada series had a production bible on minor details taken from Doyle’s text, but it’s ironic that one reason this was useful was to keep on top of Doyle’s mistakes! Doyle’s own prose was ‘riddled with glaring errors and inconsistencies’ because his stories were often ‘churned out carelessly’.¹⁹ From snakes with improbable hearing and milk-drinking capacities to seemingly getting Watson’s first name wrong²⁰, Doyle seemed not to ‘keep track of what he had written’ because, according to Miller, ‘although he earned large sums of money, he cared little for the work that did little, he believed, to enhance his literary stature’.²¹ Doyle at one point argued that ‘In short stories it has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little.’²²

A younger Doyle/Holmes - the brilliant Murder Rooms

Longevity has necessarily led many to seek ‘new’ ways of doing Holmes, from the darker approach – see Murder By Decree (1979) written by John Hopkins – to the comedic, including N. F. Simpson’s Elementary, My Dear Watson (1973) to Billy Wilder’s lovely The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1969), on which Wilder aimed to treat Holmes and Watson ‘with respect but not reverence’.²³ Whether because the early Bretts are intimidatingly definitive or because of institutional drifts from adaptation, modern British programme makers struggle to sell period versions. An interesting precursor to Sherlock came with David Pirie’s approach to the BBC in 1999 to tackle A Study in Scarlet ‘because I felt that a younger, more “Oscar Wilde” Holmes had never been done’ and an ‘older’ or ‘stodgier’ Holmes had unfairly dominated.²⁴ David M. Thompson of BBC Films rejected the idea of doing Holmes but in search of a new angle proposed something on Doyle’s inspiration Dr. Joseph Bell, resulting in Murder Rooms: the Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes (2000-2001) which paired Bell with Doyle. The brilliant, successful and mysteriously-cancelled Murder Rooms showed that new angles could still emphasise Doyle’s achievements.

Future visions: Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century

Faithful Holmes: Sherlock Hound

For those who decide that the best way to update Holmes is to literally move him into the modern world, there are many potential pitfalls. Time travel or thawing out a cryogenically-frozen Holmes results in the Adam Adamant Lives! (1966-67)-type spectacle of an adventurer from the past attempting to use their methods in the modern world, as in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1987) or 1994 Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes Returns (1993), or the future, as in the animated Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century which shares with Sherlock a desire to revision his stories (1999-2001). Revisioning can also take in different species, as in the surprisingly canon-respecting canine capers of Sherlock Hound (1984).²⁵ Even less apparently outlandish versions see Holmes grasping modern technology: Holmes uses a pocket radio in The Isolated House (1914), has an intercom and records conversations in his office in The Speckled Band (1931) and even gets involved with a car-immobilising ray in Sherlock Holmes (1924). The wartime propaganda service of Rathbone’s Holmes involves a world of Nazis, fast cars and varying technology in several films. David Stuart Davies’s book Starring Sherlock Holmes provides an excellent overview of these and many other productions.

‘There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.’ – Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet²⁶

Sherlock is packed with modern technology and updated iconography, but their effect is not anachronistic but is in keeping with Doyle: not simply by playful in-jokes (although there are some) but by sharing Doyle’s ability to put detail at service of character. So telegrams, letters and newspaper small ads give way to smartphones and texts, phone apps replace some text books and Holmes’s smoking his way through a ‘three-pipe problem’ is thwarted by modern London and becomes a three-nicotine-patch problem. Watson’s romantic write-ups for the Strand become an online blog which, embracing the meta-potential of new delivery platforms is available for all at John Watson Blog. Holmes’s monographs become websites, such as another available at The Science of Deduction, which appropriately attracts some odd followers – quite appropriately for Holmes, given that policeman Athelney Jones greets him as ‘Mr. Theorist’ in The Sign of Four.²⁷ Holmes uses a mobile phone, but he insists on texting rather than calling people, which is in keeping with his nature as defined by Doyle (and Watson) and the rendering of his texts on-screen underlines how oddly appropriate modern communication like texts and Twitter are, given the pre-eminence of the written word. Tie-in websites aren’t always particularly essential, but in this case it’s excellent to see such interactivity applied to concepts from Doyle.

It seems to be missing the point, therefore, to see Sherlock’s updating as a weak spot, as the Guardian’s reviewer did, arguing that ‘in blowing away the fog, brightening it up for the 21st century, they’ve done away with the fear as well. It’s slick, and quick, and yes, compelling. But there’s also a sanity about it, a pantomime squeaky-cleanness.’²⁸ Although the reviewer is positive in other ways, it’s a little unfair to compare the episode with Doyle’s ‘The [Adventure of the] Speckled Band’, given that Doyle himself cited that as his favourite story.²⁹ The review risks taking one type of Holmes story and essentialising it as his fixed approach (when Doyle actually differentiated them, hence ‘Adventure of’, ‘Mystery of’), underestimating Doyle’s own sense of pace and fun and the way that Moffat builds a sense of darkness that is more complex than the usual over-reliance on fog machines or grisly deaths. Indeed, Watson defines his practice in ‘The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist’: his selections ‘give preference to those cases which derive their interest not so much from the brutality of the crime as from the ingenuity and dramatic quality of the solution’³⁰. A better comparison would be with A Study in Scarlet – and it’s a comparison that makes A Study in Pink even more impressive.

‘Nothing happens to me’: studies in pink and scarlet

A Study in Scarlet was the first Holmes story written and published, and through Watson’s prose we experience Holmes and his methods through their first meeting – however, despite being the subject of the first full-length Holmes adaptation in 1914, it is rarely adapted, and hardly ever with their meeting scene intact. It was written quickly during March and April 1886³¹, but Doyle found the story difficult to sell, and it eventually appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in December 1887.³² Although it and its follow-up The Sign of Four were successful, it was the episodic short stories in the Strand, illustrated by Sidney Paget, that cemented Holmes as a household name and form the basis of many adaptations. This essay is long enough without trying to give an overview of Holmes’s long career on film and television³³ but it’s worth considering why visual media have so rarely tackled A Study in Scarlet. Partly it’s difficult to replicate the newness of a debut: as Michael Atkinson put it, ‘How utterly peculiar Sherlock Holmes must have seemed to those unprepared readers’, for whom ‘the traits that are now familiar, even endearing’ would have seemed ‘alternately intriguing and appalling – and eminently mysterious.’³⁴ Moreover, there are weaknesses in the plot: Sherlock gets around these in various ways, but even its widespread changes are achieved in a way that singles out some of the original’s most impressive ideas and moments and makes them more central than Doyle did.

A Study in Pink opens with Watson having nightmares about his war service in Afghanistan, illustrated by images of modern warfare: although the Radio Times thought this a new development, Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet opens with Watson’s account of how his service in Afghanistan brought him ‘misfortune and disaster’.³⁵ Whereas Watson’s first-person narration allows Doyle to describe having ‘my health irretrievably ruined’, which ‘forebade me from venturing out’ and left him ‘a lonely man’ in the ‘great wilderness’ of ‘cesspool’ London, director Paul McGuigan makes similar points about Watson’s low spirits through dissolves compressing mundane time in his sparse accommodation.³⁶ That repetition captures Watson’s description in the novel of the ‘monotony of my daily existence’.³⁷ Composed against walls, he is adrift in empty frames, particularly in his meeting with his therapist, in which he says of his life: ‘Nothing happens to me.’ It may seem surprising to end the pre-titles with this moment (echoes of Crazy Like A Fox’s title sequence – ‘What could possibly happen?’ – we can leave to my overactive nerdometer) rather than, say, the melodramatic but mysterious addition to the 1968 Cushing A Study in Scarlet (an unseen figure taking the wedding ring, a subsequent clue, from the body of an as-yet-unidentified woman) or the mysterious deaths which follow A Study in Pink’s opening titles.³⁸ However, the Watson sequence is vital: as in Doyle, Watson’s state of mind drives much of what follows. McGuigan’s compositions make a point familiar from Doyle’s prose: Watson, worrying that the reader might think him a ‘hopeless busybody’ for his interest in Holmes, says:

Before pronouncing judgement, however, be it remembered how objectless was my life, and how little there was to engage my attention. […] I eagerly hailed the little mystery which hung around my companion.³⁹

With Watson ‘leading a comfortless, meaningless existence’, he has everything to gain. Martin Freeman combines an understated mournfulness with an eye for the moments when Watson sparkles. He shares that with David Burke and Edward Hardwicke from the Granada series (and, slightly out of our jurisdiction, Michael Williams’s excellent characterisation in the BBC radio series), which stand as excellent examples of getting Watson right. Getting Watson wrong is often associated with the famous performance of Nigel Bruce, which is unfair on Bruce in that the Bruce ‘silly ass’ Watson is tied to the actor’s screen persona and the cinematic tone of its times, which shape other versions in different ways. There are worse Watsons than Bruce, but the general idea that it’s hard to imagine a genius like Holmes sharing adventures with such a crass blunderer has become a yardstick for judging Watsons. After all, in Doyle’s writing, Watson’s everyman observation and Doyle/Watson’s prose grounds Holmes’s activities, as was marked by Doyle arriving at the name (after considering Ormond Sacker)⁴⁰ because, as Lycett puts it, ‘like his monicker, he was anonymous – a foil’ to Holmes⁴¹. Turning Watson into a character rather than narrator loses much: just as trying to ‘read as Watson reads is to appreciate Conan Doyle’s craft’, and to become ‘aware that there is something about the genius of the creator that always eludes us’⁴² , so we can look between the lines of Watson’s first-person prose for a sense of his motivations. A few adaptations have reflected his damaged past, and how Holmes and Watson gain from each other, but A Study in Pink foregrounds it.

After witnessing a series of mysterious deaths involving pills, and realising that they are random (but with the mystery being present not in potential suspects – as in the Cushing version’s largely faithful dramatisation of Doyle⁴³ – but in a sense of something happening just outside the frame of each incident, which is confirmed by explanatory flashbacks later). Stangerson, Drebber, Charpentier, Utah: inter-related aspects from Doyle that are replaced by this seemingly random killer – I’ll come back to their absence, and Moffat’s alternatives, later.

Foregrounding Holmes and Watson involves a sequence of events that have hardly ever been dramatised: realising Watson needs someone to share accommodation with, Stamford takes him to meet Sherlock Holmes, who is experimenting at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. For a long time, ‘the only filmed version of the meeting’ at Bart’s came in the 1953/54 Guild Films series starring Ronald Howard, and even then in a different pilot, ‘The Case of the Cunningham Heritage’.⁴⁴ Holmes has already chronically misread a woman’s desire for coffee, condescendingly assuming she was offering to get him one: quite consistent with The Sign of Four, when Watson as ever notices that a woman was attractive and Holmes replies, ‘Is she? I did not observe’, leading Watson to consider him ‘positively inhuman […] an automaton – a calculating machine’⁴⁵ Holmes observes – her changing lipstick in his presence – but does not deduce. He is instead battering a corpse with a stick, as in Doyle’s original, whose influences include Joseph Bell’s 1839 paper on medical jurisprudence which ‘described beating corpses with a heavy stick in order to study the effects of bruises produced after death’⁴⁶ or Christison’s intervention into the Burke and Hare case. That latter investigation into ‘suffocating [...] victims without damaging them physically’ used ‘experiments into the bruising of corpses’ which ‘helped secure Burke’s conviction’.⁴⁷ When Watson meets Holmes, he is enthralled by the same thing as us: Holmes’s instant deductions.

The ‘best superpower ever’: deductions

‘Sometimes you can’t read fast enough – but I’ll tell you what, it wasn’t the gaslight; it wasn’t the hansom cabs or the fogs or any of the things I’d be told, years later, were SO important to Sherlock Holmes. It was the deductions. No, that’s too dull a word. Let’s call it what it was when I was ten. It was the best superpower ever! Sherlock Holmes glanced at Dr Watson and deduced he’d been to Afghanistan – and, talk about superpowers, Arthur Conan Doyle made me wait pages to find out how he’d done it.’ – Moffat.⁴⁸

Depictions of Holmes stand and fall by the quality of Holmes’s deductions: the reading of clues (or semiotics – ‘the study of signs in a social context’).⁴⁹ The modern-day setting seems to present greater challenges to the dramatist – even Doyle was stretching credulity by taking Joseph Bell’s real-life ability to note where patients had been owing to types of clay on their shoes in a small part of Edinburgh and extending that to the whole of London, a credulity which Nigel Williams relates to the reassurance implicit in containing this sprawling city⁵⁰. The gentlemen and ladies of Doyle’s London could often be traced by markers of individuality marginalised or lost in an age of mass production: specially-made hats, distinctive cigar ash, the re-soling of boots. There are signs here and in episode 2 that some can simply be updated: identifying an airline pilot by his left thumb or an IT designer by their tie (or, during A Study in Pink, ‘something in the media’ from garish nail varnish). However, comparing A Study in Scarlet with A Study in Pink, Moffat’s Holmes is at least as compelling at deduction, and in places sharper. Holmes’s observation that Watson was in Afghanistan, a vital deduction since it intrigues Watson, is problematic in Doyle’s original. Miller argues that ‘it hardly stands up to much scrutiny’ with Watson deduced as an army doctor because he is ‘a gentleman of the military type, but with the air of a military man’, but those deductions aren’t explained further.⁵¹ Jumping from Watson holding his arm ‘in a stiff and unnatural manner’, via his tan, Holmes identifies Afghanistan rather than (as Miller suggests) South Africa. In A Study in Pink, we can at least join the deduction, informed by Watson’s haircut, his comment to Stratford and his leaning against a stick – indeed, the way he leans against that stick attracts a diagnosis of psychosomatic illness which is not only plausible but vital: it’s all the more intriguing for Watson if Holmes has glimpsed some secret, especially if Watson himself isn’t yet aware of it. More overtly critical in the book – thinking Holmes impractically develops ‘the theory of some arm-chair lounger who evolves all these neat little paradoxes in the seclusion of his own study’⁵² – he must be won round.

‘I’m not a psychopath, Anderson, I’m a high-functioning sociopath – do your research.’ – Sherlock, A Study in Pink

Our first crime scene shows the story’s mixture of respect and playfulness. The female victim here is in a similar position to male victim Drebber in A Study in Scarlet: the bare room, the scrawled ‘rache’, the significant wedding ring. However, the cigar ash and mysterious blood are removed, and moments that Doyle did not develop – analysis of the body itself, or the ‘rache’ detail that is ultimately a red herring – are now developed. ‘Rache’ is not helpfully scratched by the killer on the wall at his own height but is scratched on the ground by the victim. Holmes’s disagreement with the police over ‘rache’ is inverted – this time he dismisses the German translation for revenge in favour of Rachel – and the wedding ring, rather than fortuitously falling from the body (an indictment of a clumsy killer and incompetent police), is the victim’s ring. The ring leads clues about her character – these are dazzlingly compiled in quick bursts of text on the screen, culminating in the brutal labelling (Holmes’s mind) of the corpse: ‘serial adulterer’ (a later character will similarly be labelled ‘DYING’). In truth, Doyle had not yet developed Holmes’s deductive powers to their later extent: much is explained via a simple telegram researching names found on the body, the killer helpfully not changing their name, and details filled in by the killer’s lengthy backstory. In place of luck and the killer’s mistakes, Moffat’s crime scene provides clues, some deduced by Holmes (her lifestyle and clothing provoking awareness of absent items), and some provided by the victim. When dog cart splashes are replaced by pink suitcase tracks, and that item is found to be missing, we are into playfulness: Holmes and Watson are immediately onto a case. Whilst Doyle named his story after a turn of phrase, the ‘scarlet thread of murder’,⁵³ A Study in Pink shows Holmes studying pink.

Options suggest themselves...

We are told in Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet: ‘So swiftly was the examination made, that one would hardly have guessed the minuteness with which it was conducted’.⁵⁴ To show the minuteness of the crime scene examination, A Study in Pink moves into a different time register, akin to the ‘bullet time’ in which movies slow action scenes to concentrate on detail. In print, Holmes’s deductions are seen through Watson’s eyes: Watson notes Holmes’s behaviour, notes deviations from standard behaviour (albeit sometimes with helpful observations of Holmes deviating from his own standard behaviour), but presents us with conclusions with the step inbetween left hazy until later. It’s difficult to portray on screen without Watson seeming stupid (merely by asking the questions we’re asking or making credible suggestions), with the occasional solution of Watson helping to apply Holmes’s methods. Through graphics, the relative cleanliness of the inside and outside of the wedding ring first produce observations (clean, dirty) then deductions about their wearer’s marital state. In Tom Sutcliffe’s phrase, Sherlock ‘visualised his thought processes […] so that his inspirations tag the crime scene like an internet word cloud’.⁵⁵

From observation to deduction...

Far from being gimmicky, the graphics interact not only with characterisation – Holmes’s head-shaking dismissing the rache/revenge angle by shaking it off the screen – but also with shots and compositions. Visual pleasure in Holmes can be a thorny subject: for instance, the Granada series declined when the production team was instructed to ‘cut out the talk and concentrate on the visuals’.⁵⁶ Detail, pace and character make the deduction scenes as enthralling as action scenes. In this way, Sherlock tackles something that Doyle himself worried about in the early 1890s: how to dramatise Holmes’s deductive process:

‘I am well convinced that Holmes is not fitted for dramatic representation. His reasonings and deductions (which are the whole point of the character) would become an intolerable bore upon the stage.’ – Doyle.⁵⁷

That seems unthinkable now – and partly motivated by Doyle’s feeling that the detective story was an ‘elementary’ form,⁵⁸ and a performed version would represent his ‘weaker work’, a public emphasis which ‘unduly obscured my better’⁵⁹ Doyle praised stage Holmes William Gillette for making ‘the poor hero of the anaemic printed page a very limp object compared with the glamour of your own personality which you infuse into his stage presentment’.⁶⁰

The same could be said of Benedict Cumberbatch – Doyle’s stories often brought out Holmes’s contrary nature as cold-blooded calculating machine and a perpetrator of theatricality with a love for the centre-stage – after deductions Holmes ‘bowed as if to some applauding crowd conjured up by his imagination’⁶¹ – and (often tactically-applied) charisma. Brett achieved that, sensing that ‘Men find him fascinating because he is so self-contained and totally in control, while women see him as a challenge: they want to break that icy demeanour and reveal the real emotion beneath.’⁶² Cumberbatch achieves this too, and is a magnetic, brilliant Holmes. Female reviewers have stressed his sexiness too – before that causes any great distress, Doyle knew the value of that quality too, when confronted by Paget’s illustrations: he had not imagined Holmes as being so handsome but ‘from the point of view of my lady readers it was as well’.⁶³

A further deductive joy comes with Holmes’s deductions from Watson’s mobile phone. Reworking a sequence from The Sign of Four neglects its darker undertones: the playful punchline here – Holmes deduces a brother when Watson has a sister – misses prose Watson’s anger about the alcoholism judgement, which critics have related to Doyle’s concerns about his declining father.⁶⁴ However, it is a superb updating of the deduction, with Cumberbatch’s high-speed, intense delivery sharing Moffat’s love for Doyle’s explanations. Moffat recommends reading the first chapters of The Sign of Four, in which Holmes ‘takes Watson’s pocket watch and only deduces his brother’s entire life and death!!! […] How clear, how brilliant. A genius writer making exposition (the curse of plot) into a living hero on the page.’⁶⁵ For the young Moffat, ‘the best thing ever’ about Holmes’s superpower was that he ‘explained’.⁶⁶

Sherlock steps out from behind his more brilliant brother Mycroft, Granada's 'The Greek Interpreter'

To arrest my galloping word-count I’ll pick out a couple more moments but skip over other joys such as Watson’s encounter with a mysterious figure (although his deductive brilliance and loaded phrases surely made his identity obvious to Doyle fans), Mrs Hudson, and Holmes and Watson setting up home (unlike Doyle, Moffat has Holmes moving in first and rushing the deal, which continues the sense that he has made a deduction about Watson). As the plot develops, the improvements to Doyle are clear: Doyle rarely wrote ‘whodunit’ plots of the Agatha Christie type, and A Study in Scarlet is particularly guilty of withholding information that we need to gauge the brilliance of Holmes’s deductions (while marvelling at his observations). A Study in Pink, however, presents clues and builds to moments whose impact depends upon our own rate of deduction.⁶⁷

A chase around modern-day London shows that Holmes still knows his streets and transport details and can use these to his advantage. Again, leaps of logic are depicted through graphics over shots: street maps as mental satnav, and traffic signals from several streets away lending urgency to Holmes and Watson’s journey. They stop a suspect taxi in a moment that, as in so many other Moffat scripts, seems light but in retrospect is heavily loaded. It is a comic scene – stopping the wrong suspect, performing the kind of cheeky (overzealous cops) volte-face that Spike and Lynda used in Moffat’s Press Gang, then fleeing the police themselves. It is also fun that the suspect is dismissed for being American, if you know the causes of the killings in A Study in Scarlet. But the scene has serious beats: the misdirection by which we neither see nor consider the taxi driver (significant given his later words) and the fact that the seemingly injured Watson has sprinted around without his crutch, with no harm. I’m reminded of prose Watson’s description of how he ‘eagerly hailed the little mystery’ of Holmes, which in itself sounds like hailing a taxi.⁶⁸ This partly shows the synthesising of elements from The Sign of Four: there, Holmes asks Watson to take part in a six-mile ‘trudge’ and asks ‘Your leg will stand it?’ (Watson replies, ‘Oh, yes’).⁶⁹ Here, Holmes considers Watson’s experience of suffering in Afghanistan then asks, ‘Want to see some more?’, to which Watson replies, ‘Hell, yes’. After all, in Doyle’s original, Watson says he is ‘not strong enough yet to stand much noise or excitement. I had enough of both in Aghanistan’ but then dives into the story.⁷⁰ Holmes’s diagnosis of psychosomatic injury is a lovely in-joke about Doyle’s textual inconsistencies. His injury changes from his shoulder in A Study in Scarlet to his ‘wounded leg’ which ‘ached wearily at every change of the weather’ in The Sign of Four.⁷¹ Later in A Study in Pink, Watson admits his injury was in his shoulder. There are other in-jokes in Moffat’s script, but then Doyle loved an in-joke himself. In The Sign of Four, Holmes chides Watson’s (therefore Doyle’s) write-up of A Study in Scarlet for stressing romance over cold deduction: Lycett observes this as Doyle’s ‘in-joke about his own craft’.⁷² Further examples include ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’ (1892), which opens with Holmes querying Watson’s writing style: ‘Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.’⁷³ Sherlock is not the first to play along: Brett episode The Copper Beeches ends with Watson then reading the ending of his/Doyle’s version and receiving Holmes’s apparent approval along with an unseen raised eyebrow.

‘I’m in shock – look, I’ve got a blanket’: catching a cab

As in Doyle’s original, the culprit (albeit with a different identity here) is a cab driver who presents people with a choice of two pills – one fatal, one safe – and takes the other himself. However, his discovery and capture are superbly developed by Moffat. Doyle has Holmes advertise the dropped wedding ring and hand it to someone who fools Holmes disguised as an old woman – the killer later calls him a ‘friend’ and refuses to incriminate him (if unknown to Holmes, why would he need a disguise?), thereby sparing Doyle from providing convincing detail. The 1968 Cushing episode at least gives Holmes the skills to trace the impersonator: a hired actor unaware of the ring’s importance.⁷⁴ Sutcliffe notes the ‘slyly oblique’ touch by Moffat: here, the ‘lost ring’ is converted ‘into a lost “ring”, a mobile phone that can be used to contact the killer directly’.⁷⁵ In both versions, there are police at 221B Baker Street as the cabbie arrives. In Doyle’s version, to everyone’s surprise Holmes grabs the cabbie and unveils the murderer. In Moffat’s version, Holmes is the one surprised. As the GPS tracks the suspect phone to Baker Street, and characters work through the plot so far, Moffat’s mastery of plot pacing helps us to realise the implications before the cab driver’s appearance is almost casually noted, and spookily disembodied in the dark frame. (Is it just me or was Watson’s reminder to the police that the suspected Holmes can’t have the mobile phone because they earlier got a text reply from the killer a piece of post-sync dubbing? Was this added because it was missed as the plot became too involved, or had an explanatory scene been cut?) The resolution comes at the same point as Doyle, but is restricted to rapid explanatory flashbacks as Holmes works it out. In Doyle’s original, the arrival of the killer marks a tailing-off of narrative and dissipation of tension. In Sherlock’s version, it marks an escalation of plot and a test of its lead characters.

In A Study in Scarlet, the murders are explained via a long flashback (the story’s second half) to the events which motivated them, in a Mormon community in Utah. This is often seen as the story’s weakness: ‘crudely divided into two halves’⁷⁶ to produce a ‘melodramatic’ section in which ‘Holmes is entirely absent and sorely missed’.⁷⁷ We shouldn’t dismiss the split between sections out of hand – Michael Atkinson for instance contrasts the changes in narrative position, prose style and sympathy to argue that ‘the American saga relates to the London frame narrative as the unconscious relates to the conscious mind’.⁷⁸ Also, it’s interesting that Doyle’s description of the American section echoes how we first find Watson: barrenness, inhospitality, a ‘land of despair’, a wilderness with a seemingly dying man, ‘complete and heart-subduing silence’.⁷⁹ However, it explains filmmakers’ reluctance to tackle the story. The 1914 film A Study in Scarlet – with John Ford’s brother Francis as Holmes – opts to restructure it chronologically, but ‘Holmes becomes almost a supporting character, appearing fairly late in the proceedings’.⁸⁰ The 1933 A Study in Scarlet – complete with erroneous 221A Baker Street – uses only the title and none of the plot.⁸¹ The Cushing episode is very faithful but lacks the Bart’s meeting (unsurprisingly, since the episode was late in the series) and lets brief dialogue replace the Utah section.⁸² Similar scaling-back occurred with Sherlock Holmes & A Study in Scarlet (1984), even though it was an animated feature and so didn’t have to consider overseas locations.⁸³

Whilst Jefferson Hope in Doyle’s original provided a choice of pills to mete God’s justice in revenge over two specific people, the killer in Sherlock has provided a choice to four random people for a reason that does not directly concern them (it would seem a bit Saw or Dark Knight if it wasn’t in Doyle’s original). If the explanation is less psychologically grounded, it is also more compelling as a threat. The random nature of the killings builds up an undeveloped but compelling Doyle idea: for Hope, a desire for revenge pre-dated becoming a cabbie – ‘what better means could he adapt than to turn cab driver’.⁸⁴ In Doyle’s version, we know there can’t be any more killings, but here we have a sense of continuing threat. It cranks up the plot, of course – hence Holmes’s excitement early on when he realises there is a serial killer at work: ‘Love those – there’s always something to look forward to’. In Doyle’s own terms, it adds to the mystery and our sense of Holmes’s skill: as Holmes says in ‘The Adventure of the Naval Treaty’, ‘The most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless’.⁸⁵ Faced with the choice between handing over the killer – who admits he would meekly accept arrest – or understanding what had happened, Holmes leaves the safety of 221B, then containing Watson and many police officers, to place himself in danger. What preoccupies him is another brilliant idea of Doyle’s that he didn’t build up but A Study in Pink foregrounds: ‘How could one man compel another to take poison?’⁸⁶

Still Holmes's London: Sherlock opening titles

Holmes can still work out where a journey has taken him within London – as he does in a cab in The Sign of Four.⁸⁷ The climax quite rightly takes place at a college of further education as Holmes has much to learn and his would-be killer addresses him on subjects close to his own worldview: ‘Why can’t people think? […] I know how people think’. Holmes’s flirtation with taking the pill just to see if he has called correctly, or to engage with the killer’s fascinating conundrum, renders in dramatic form something which Doyle raises in dialogue but does not substantiate. In the novel, Stamford muses that he can imagine Holmes administering the latest vegetable alkaloid to someone, ‘not out of malevolence, but […] just to determine the effect’.⁸⁸ The resolution, and Watson’s role in it, demonstrates Moffat’s compelling ability to take moments from Doyle and foreground them, integrate them into the plot and shape our understanding of the characters. There is also room to incorporate the unseen crime figure Moriarty, giving the series what, since I’m writing on a website, I should probably call a ‘Big Bad’ or ‘story arc’. Again, the Guardian’s reviewer was unimpressed by this (I’m probably returning to this review a lot because most were so uniformly positive), and it could recall a weakness of the Rathbone films – Moriarty’s many returns, untroubled by trivial details such as his own death in previous films – but there is a strong precedent for it in the Granada series, when Moriarty popped up in The Red-Headed League to build up the importance of the showdown to come in The Final Problem.

The work of the opening episode is underlined as the leads stride off together towards the camera in slow-motion, and Mycroft portentously proclaims them ‘Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson’. They are united at this point as the climax underlines what they need from each other and their similarities. Mycroft was right about Watson: ‘You’re not haunted by the war, Doctor Watson. You miss it. Welcome back.’ Freeman and Cumberbatch have proved themselves an impressive Holmes and Watson, with light and shade. There is playfulness at the implications of two bachelors sharing a flat: ‘of course we’ll be needing two’ bedrooms; Mrs Hudson consoles Watson with ‘My husband was just the same’; the restaurant misunderstanding as Holmes says, although ‘flattered’, that ‘I’m married to my work’, at which point Freeman allows himself a rare sitcom reaction. Jokes about their marital status are hardly a postmodern phenomenon: Doyle was himself so concerned that he married Watson off at the end of the second story, The Sign of Four (the subsequent shift to episodic short stories revealed this to be a format-troubling development, and TV versions such as the Brett and Cushing avoid it). Sherlock’s second episode, The Blind Banker, similarly sees Watson finding some romantic interest. The darker aspects of the partnership are also well developed. Freeman adeptly brings out qualities that are again consistent: in Granada’s version of The Crooked Man, David Burke brought out just how much Watson enjoys being back amongst soldiers. Holmes avoids questions by gripping a form of crutch – ‘I’m in shock – look, I’ve got a blanket’ – which is funny because he has already noted its uselessness, but also reminds me of Watson’s walking stick, the need for which is soon addressed again (by contrast, The Sign of Four has Watson calling himself ‘an army surgeon with a weak leg and a weaker bank account’).⁸⁹ Watson was alone in the frame at the start, apart from his crutch, but now has Holmes – and Holmes has him: as Holmes says in Doyle’s ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, ‘I am lost without my Boswell’.⁹⁰ How reliably Watson fulfilled that function is open to question – he (not Doyle) has been cited as an ‘unreliable narrator’⁹¹ – so his own contradictions as a character are revealing. I wonder if those contradictions and evasions will colour Watson’s blog?

As in Doyle’s original, we are presented with two very different men – ‘an arrogant, unashamedly narcissistic misogynist, a cold, calculating, analytical ascetic who admitted to few emotions’ and ‘a warm, loyal, salt-of-the-earth chap with a weakness for […] pretty women, utterly in thrall to his friend’s brilliance’ – but who form ‘a symbiotic and timeless friendship’.⁹² This equally applies to this version. Without any Young Sherlock Holmes revisionism, this is a partnership of equals starting their journey and with great potential. In a sense they have indeed returned to source. Wanting to do this is hardly a new desire for television – the makers of the 1953-54 series Sherlock Holmes were aware that:

‘In A Study in Scarlet, when Holmes and Watson first meet, the two men are in their twenties, and yet Holmes is almost always portrayed on screen as being middle-aged, with Watson racing toward senility.’⁹³

It is almost as though Sherlock has been less about ‘updating’ the original text and more about addressing the habits that film and television versions of Sherlock Holmes have fallen into, scraping away the accumulated errors of people who found Doyle’s approach so difficult to adapt. If the Holmes stories were an ideal combination of the short detective form and Doyle’s style, necessitating ‘rhythm and control’, ‘sufficient pace to entertain’ and ‘labyrinthine plots’, the series is ideal.⁹⁴ In line with adaptation theory, Sherlock succeeds by focusing not on fidelity to every last detail but in a synthesis of source prose and television techniques to produce a ‘third text’ – the fact that the result is more faithful to the spirit of Doyle’s Holmes is a worthy paradox. Adaptations can be too faithful – the 1921 Hound of the Baskervilles was said to lack ‘pace’ by having ‘too much “dialogue”’, and radio adapter Bert Coules observed that ‘Dramatisations have to be dramatic, and what is dramatic in a book is not necessarily dramatic on screen or radio’.⁹⁵ Doyle himself replied to William Gillette’s query about whether he could marry Holmes off by saying he could marry, murder or do anything he wanted with him.⁹⁶ We often have to apply this caveat to revisions and adaptations of Holmes. However, A Study in Pink doesn’t need that apology. Like Moffat’s revisioning of another classic – Jekyll (2007) – it invites reconsideration of the sources as well as standing on its own. Whether the rest of the series lives up to its brilliance is another matter, but on its own merits this is one of television’s greatest responses to Arthur Conan Doyle.⁹⁷
THE END

The Doctor goes Sherlockian in 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang'

Watson playfully dons a fez in Granada's 'The Empty House'. Shades of Doctor Who: The Big Bang?

P.S. Another aspect of modernisation is inevitable – changing methods and tastes in film and TV – and whilst those are beyond this essay, reviewers have been so interested in connections with one particular contemporary programme, Doctor Who, that I’ll comment on that briefly. As a child, Moffat felt that ‘if Doctor Who had been a detective, clearly he’d have been Sherlock Holmes’⁹⁸ and the happy dovetailing of Sherlock with Moffat’s show-runner role on Doctor Who can’t escape attention. The stylish camerawork taking Holmes’s point-of-view on significant information recalls the stop-frame sequence in which the Doctor tries to work out which significant detail he’s barely glimpsed in Moffat’s The Eleventh Hour (2010). Some dialogue has jumped across: Holmes’s ‘It’s Christmas!’ appears in similar circumstances in The Vampires of Venice (2010), while ‘What is it like in your funny little brains, it must be so boring’ echoes ‘Funny little human brains, how do you get around in those things?’ from Moffat’s The Doctor Dances (2005). Given Moffat’s playful referencing of lines from his other work in various pieces – Coupling, Press Gang and others have cropped up in Who – we can look forward to a version of The Sign of Four given that it features a bloke with a missing leg (one for Moffat fans). Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Holmes’s enthusiasm and turns of phrase (‘Love those!’) inevitably echo similarly-scripted Who moments for Matt Smith. Neil Gaiman, the author of A Study in Emerald (2004), another audacious reworking of A Study in Scarlet, is writing for the 2011 season of Doctor Who. As for Holmes’s influence on Who, we’d be here all day. The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977) is steeped in Victorian literary and cultural references, paraphrases Holmes dialogue, features a deerstalker and an uncontrollable diminutive assassin (The Sign of Four) and presents a variation on the ‘untold’ Holmes story ‘The Giant Rat of Sumatra’. Tom Baker, the Doctor at the time, later appeared as Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982). Was TV movie 1994: Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes Returns (1993), with the young hero reborn to try out deductions in San Francisco, an inspiration for the Doctor Who TV movie (1996)? Holmes and Watson meet the Doctor in Andy Lane’s New Adventure novel All-Consuming Fire (1994), with detailed Holmes fan ideas including the presence of brother Sherrinford, about whom Sherlock refuses to talk (other texts incorporate Doyle himself and Mycroft). Watson’s diary is interspersed with passages from the diary of the Doctor’s companion Bernice Summerfield. A sample of Watson’s account in All-Consuming Fire: ‘I embarked upon another account of my adventures with Holmes: The Sign of the Four. To my surprise (and, if truth be told, to Holmes’s chagrin) the public rather took to these little amusements, and so I began to write more of them. I composed A Scandal in Bohemia in shorter form as an experiment, and found that its popularity far outstripped either of the two longer works […] My medical colleague and co-author, Arthur Conan Doyle, became well known to the public.’ Holmes’s response: ‘Write the book, let the doctor friend of yours pretty it up for you, and then lock it away somewhere.’⁹⁹

1. Steven Moffat, ‘The fabulous Baker Street boys’, Radio Times, 24-30 July 2010, p. 24. We could compare this concern for ‘heresy’ and fidelity with Moffat and Gatiss’s work on Doctor Who and Gatiss’s on a less successful revamp, of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). Much of Gatiss’s work, most famously as part of The League of Gentlemen, demonstrates his feel for the period.
2. Quoted in David Stuart Davies, Starring Sherlock Holmes (London: Titan Books, 2001), p. 23.
3. Davies, p. 26.
4. Ibid.
5. Of course, long-running fictional detectives cause problems of unlikely old age for their creators – Doyle himself restricts Holmes and Watson’s period of activity – and for their adapters. Television series have creative and practical reasons to format long-running sources into fixed periods: note how Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1989-present) condenses Christie’s sources – which were published between the 1920s and 1970s – to a Poirot pre-war golden age.
6. Russell Miller, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle (London: Harvill Secker, 2008), p. 111
7. Moffat, p. 23.
8. Ibid, p. 24.
9. Ibid.
10. Davies, p. 179.
11. Lycett, p. 121
12. ibid
13. Andrew Lycett, Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes (London: Phoenix, 2008 [Paperback. Original 2007.]), p. 121.
14. See Miller, pp. 107-109.
15. See Davies, pp. 86-87, 90-91.
16. Davies, p. 122. See Michael Cox memoir, A Study in Celluloid.
17. Davies, p. 122.
18. Davies, p. 91
19. Miller, p. 146.
20. ‘The Man With the Twisted Lip’ and ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ respectively. Many publications and fan websites try to smooth over problematic details such as John Watson being suddenly addressed as ‘James’.
21. Ibid, p. 147.
22. Ibid, p. 147.
23. Davies, p. 93. See Davies on the vogue for very different interpretations of Holmes throughout the 1970s.
24. Davies, p. 176.
25. Again, see Davies.
26. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘A Study in Scarlet’, The Complete Illustrated ‘Strand’, p. 21.
27. Doyle, pp. 81-82.
28. The review is very positive about the characterisation. Sam Wollaston, ‘TV review: Sherlock and Orchestra United’, The Guardian, 26 July 2010.
29. Lycett, p. 268.
30. Doyle, p. 599
31. It is often said to have been written over six weeks, although Lycett thinks it may have been finished as early as 11 April. Lycett, p. 123
32. See Miller, pp. 110-114
33. For a brief list of Holmes’s television career before Sherlock, see sites such as .
34. Michael Atkinson, The Secret Marriage of Sherlock Holmes and Other Eccentric Readings (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998 [Paperback. Original 1996.]), p. 65.
35. Doyle, p. 11.
36. Doyle, p. 11, except ‘forebade me from venturing out’, p. 15.
37. Doyle, p. 15.
38. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: ‘A Study in Scarlet’, tx. 23 September 1968. The story was dramatised by Hugh Leonard.
39. Doyle, p. 15.
40. See Doyle’s letters for his draft document, p. 245
41. Lycett, p. 119
42. Atkinson, p. 12.
43. ‘A Study in Scarlet’, 1968.
44. Davies, p. 77
45. Doyle, p. 69.
46. Miller, p. 52
47. Lycett, pp. 50-51
48. Moffat, p. 22.
49. Lycett, p. 123.
50. ‘Sherlock Holmes and the Visionary Doctor’, The Great Detectives, tx. BBC2, 16 May 1999.
51. Miller, p. 112
52. Doyle, p. 17.
53. Doyle, p. 26.
54. Doyle, p. 21
55. Tom Sutcliffe, ‘The Weekend’s TV: Sherlock, Sun, BBC1 Amish: World’s Squarest Teenagers, Sun, Channel 4′, The Independent, 26 July 2010.
56. Davies, p. 172.
57. Arthur Conan Doyle, A Life in Letters, edited by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley (London: Harper Perennial, 2008) [Original 2007], p. 389. Subsequently referred to as ‘Letters‘.
58. Miller, p. 157.
59. Letters, p. 398.
60. Ibid, p. 481
61. Doyle, p. 13.
62. Davies, 127.
63. Miller, p. 140
64. The Great Detectives.
65. Moffat, p. 23.
66. Moffat, p. 22.
67. See Lycett, p. 122 for an argument about whether Holmes is really practising ‘deduction’ or ‘abduction’.
68. Doyle, p. 15.
69. Doyle, p. 85.
70. Doyle, p. 12.
71. Doyle, p. 65.
72. Lycett, p. 158.
73. Doyle, p. 272.
74. ‘A Study in Scarlet’, 1968.
75. Sutcliffe, The Independent.
76. Lycett, p. 124.
77. Miller, p. 113.
78. Atkinson, p. 69.
79. Doyle, p. 38.
80. Davies, p. 14.
81. Davies, p. 31.
82. ‘A Study in Scarlet’, 1968.
83. Davies, p. 119.
84. Doyle, p. 62.
85. Doyle, p. 420.
86. Doyle, p. 24.
87. Doyle, p. 71.
88. Doyle, p. 13.
89. Doyle, p. 69.
90. Doyle, p. 120.
91. Lycett, p. 120.
92. Miller, pp. 111-112.
93. Sheldon Reynolds, paraphrased by Davies, p. 76.
94. Miller, pp. 142-143.
95. Davies, pp. 16, 113.
96. Lycett, p. 258.
97. The second episode, The Blind Banker, utilises the same format – updating the crime scene elements of The Sign of Four (episode 1 just takes from it Holmes/Watson character beats) and the coded messages of ‘The Adventure of the Dancing Men’, among other touches – but the result is less playful, less complex and feels more like the accumulation of old ideas. It’s also a more obvious example than the first episode of the influence of Moffat and Gatiss’s love for the Rathbone and Bruce movies. However, it builds up the unseen influence of Moriarty and promises to build to a difficult conclusion.
98. Moffat, Radio Times.
99. Andy Lane, All-Consuming Fire (London: Virgin, 1994, p. 300.

After the brilliant ending of Ashes to Ashes/Life on Mars (2006-2010) really worked through the idea of police series as “deluded daydream”, and featured a clip of P.C. George Dixon, here’s a link to an article I wrote in 2004 on The Black and Blue Lamp (1988).

The Black and Blue Lamp: Illustrated Gazette article by Dave Rolinson

This was another drama which featured characters mysteriously transported from one time of policing to another, in this case from the Ealing world of The Blue Lamp (and, therefore, its TV spin-off Dixon of Dock Green (1955-1974)) and into the corrupt, violent world of the Gene Hunt-style cop series, here fictionalised as a show-within-a-show, The Filth. The Black and Blue Lamp was much more controversial – with the police in particular – because of the scathing conclusions it drew about the police, and although Life on Mars was less political, it did use time devices to question the “indulgent tradition” of police dramas. This site will have more on The Black and Blue Lamp, Dixon of Dock Green and Life on Mars in the future. Meanwhile, the best blogs on Ashes to Ashes, which have picked up the Dante and other key themes throughout, were on Cathode Ray Tube, with the final piece here

Biographical essay by Oliver Wake

The BBC’s appointment of Sydney Newman as their head of drama in 1962 was the opening act of what some perceive as a ‘golden age’ of British television drama. However, this is not how it appeared to everybody at the time, and the alienating effect of Newman’s ‘new broom’ should be remembered. Perhaps the most outspoken casualty of Newman’s arrival was Don Taylor, a highly successful producer/director who found himself stifled and, he alleged, blacklisted by Newman.

From humble working-class origins in East London, Taylor (30 June 1936-11 November 2003) won a scholarship to grammar school, and then to Oxford in 1955. There he studied literature and became involved with student theatre, both acting and directing. He secured the notable coup of directing the first production of John Osborne’s Epitaph for George Dillon in 1957. Graduating in 1958, he joined the Oxford Playhouse as assistant to the theatre’s director, Frank Hauser. Although he was effectively an errand boy, Taylor found the experience of the theatrical life invaluable. After six months, Hauser pushed Taylor out, telling him: ‘Sell your body if necessary, but find some way of your own to write and direct.’¹ A spell as a supply teacher followed while Taylor failed to break into the theatre.

Taylor and his family had been avid cinema-goers until 1951, when they bought their first television set, after which he and his father became passionate devotees of the medium. As an Oxbridge graduate with a background in drama and an enthusiasm for television, it was inevitable that Taylor would find himself at the BBC. In 1960, at the age of 23, he was offered a position as a trainee director on a six-month contract. The initial six-week directors’ course was a pragmatic guide to getting a show on air, and keeping it there come what may, at a time when live drama was still common and pre-recording crude. The course culminated in a modestly resourced twenty-minute studio production for each trainee, with Taylor choosing to produce Tennessee Williams’ short play The Last of My Solid Gold Watches. He later recalled Michael Barry, the BBC’s head of drama, calling the piece ‘the best of its kind he had ever seen’.²

Taylor was assigned to the team of producer David Rose and allocated two episodes of his new police series Scotland Yard to direct. The series made great use of film to stage action sequences and bridge live studio scenes, something Taylor was initially unenthusiastic about. He recalled later: ‘I didn’t have the slightest interest in film making as a profession, or as an art, and never had done. I had a passion for dramatic poetry, for writers who used language imaginatively, rather than grainy realists who imitated the incoherence of speech.’³ Whilst he would never be won over to realism, Taylor’s aversion to filming soon evaporated after a week shooting night scenes and car chases.

His first Scotland Yard episode went well, with Taylor enjoying the buzz of live transmission.⁴ Michael Barry informed him that the BBC was taking up the option in his contract to keep him on for a further two years as a fully fledged director. With the confidence of success, Taylor made his second episode of Scotland Yard a far more ambitious production than the first. Including sequences of expanded time, Taylor’s camera script so severely pushed the limits of what was achievable in live transmission that some doubted he would pull it off. But, thanks largely to the expertise of his studio crew, the episode went as planned, earning Taylor a round of applause at its conclusion.⁵

The documentary play about bankruptcy The Road to Carey Street followed.⁶ Although he thought the script ‘turgid’, Taylor’s production was much admired within the BBC and its success marked the end of his period as an apprentice director.⁷ Taylor was now in a much stronger position to pick and choose his scripts, and was able to escape producing two that he particularly objected to. Having always held socialist beliefs, inherited from his trade-unionist father and inspired by his class roots, Taylor found some of the scripts he was offered objectionable on political grounds. One Sunny Afternoon, a play about a wealthy industrialist and his privately educated daughter, dramatised the privilege he so despised. He wrote: ‘I couldn’t do plays about what, to me, was the enemy, putting forward views of life which I rejected to the bottom of my being.’⁸

Soon Taylor found scripts that were more to his taste and with great enthusiasm set about two productions in as many months. Norman Crisp’s The Dark Man was a tale of racial prejudice in a taxi firm.⁹ It was one of the earliest television dramas to tackle the subject. Meanwhile, David Turner’s The Train Set appealed due to its setting amongst the working class of Birmingham and being written in their dialect. The story was about a factory worker who wants to buy his railway enthusiast son a model train set for his birthday but cannot afford to. The live performance of The Train Set in January 1961 attracted highly positive reviews, but sadly was not recorded for posterity.¹⁰ Taylor directed another three Turner plays before the end of 1961, including On the Boundary, about people in Birmingham on the border between the slums and the better life brought by building modernisation, and Choirboys Unite!, a light-hearted piece for Christmas about a Birmingham choir going on strike.¹¹

During the production of The Dark Man, Taylor was introduced to the work of the working class Yorkshire playwright David Mercer and was instantly impressed, as he stated: ‘This writer clearly had a developed mind, a passionate interest in politics, and was prepared to write powerfully and thoughtfully about the lives and dilemmas of ordinary people.’¹² Taylor quickly got hold of a Mercer script about the political tension between a father and his two sons. Taylor noted that ‘its subject matter, being educated out of one’s class, and the future of socialism, could hardly have been more congenial to me.’¹³ Not only the subject, but the passionate and lyrical style of Mercer’s script inspired Taylor.

The script became Where the Difference Begins.¹⁴ In production, Mercer took Taylor to visit the deprived areas of Yorkshire that had inspired his play. Taylor shot establishing film sequences there, inserting one, depicting an old engine yard, because it encapsulated the detail of Northern working class life that was so alien to him and the majority of the play’s audience. ‘It had the rare vital three-dimensional quality that draws you in’, wrote The Observer’s Maurice Richardson, who thought it ‘the best new play of the year’.¹⁵ ‘A masterpiece of tv drama’ was The Stage and Television Today’s verdict.¹⁶ Although stagey by modern standards, Where the Difference Begins boasts some fine performances, notably from Barry Foster as the idealistic Richard, a character Mercer clearly based on himself, and Leslie Sands as the father of the divided family.

In September 1961, about three months before the transmission of Where the Difference Begins, an event occurred which was to have a massive effect on Taylor’s career: Michael Barry suddenly resigned. With no replacement lined-up, Norman Rutherford, previously Assistant Head, became caretaker Head of Drama, and Elwyn Jones, from Documentary Drama, became Assistant Head. In practice, it was Jones who dealt with the day-to-day running of the Department.

Taylor began 1962 with The Alderman by Norman Crisp, a play about a retiring old socialist town councillor.¹⁷ Although ultimately a success, the live transmission did not go to plan. Shortly before it was due to begin, a new camera mounting which allowed shots from a height of nine feet, which Taylor had planned to make great use of, irreparably broke down. Taylor’s only option was to go on air, five minutes late, managing the high shots as best as possible with his tallest cameraman using a substituted standard mounting. Viewers, unaware of the situation, apparently noticed nothing amiss, while The Times felt that ‘Don Taylor’s production kept an easy simplicity’.¹⁸

In a break from new drama, Taylor sought permission to produce his favourite Shakespeare play, The Winter’s Tale. His suggestion was not well received by Elwyn Jones, but Jones offered a deal that was acceptable to them both. Taylor agreed to direct an episode of Jones’s pet series Z Cars in exchange for being allowed the Shakespeare play. However, an impasse resulted when Jones refused the play the lengthy transmission slot it required, and Taylor refused to cut the script to reduce the running time. Eventually, Taylor had his way and The Winter’s Tale, played fast, went out at a length of two hours and twenty minutes.¹⁹ Several months later, Taylor directed John Hopkins’ Unconditional Surrender, the concluding episode of Z Cars’ first series.²⁰ He dismissed it in his memoir as ‘left-hand work, merely an exercise of my skill and directorial flair.’²¹

Meanwhile, Mercer had delivered a follow-up to his first play. A Climate of Fear depicted a woman becoming estranged from her husband as she commits herself, as her student children had, to the CND cause.²² Although initially wary of such politically provocative material, Elwyn Jones was convinced by Taylor’s assertions that the play was not propaganda, but a drama of rounded characters and argument. To add verisimilitude to the concluding montage, Taylor degraded film of the play’s main character to match footage of the recent Trafalgar Square CND demonstration.

While A Climate of Fear was still in production, Mercer had come up with a startlingly original new play. A Suitable Case for Treatment was the comic story of the angry, disillusioned and increasingly disturbed young Socialist Morgan Delt.²³ Fired up with enthusiasm for the script, Taylor was dismayed that Elwyn Jones was unimpressed by it. The two argued at length over several days with Jones eventually relenting, telling Taylor: ‘OK boy. You do it then. And it damn well better be good, or you’re for it!’²⁴ In his memoir, Taylor honoured Jones for being ‘big enough to change his mind, to say “I might be wrong, you might be right, go ahead and see.”’²⁵

With the play over-running its allocated sixty minutes, it was Taylor’s turn to acquiesce and he removed ten minutes from the script. A Suitable Case for Treatment was pre-recorded to videotape with numerous inventive film sequences, visual jokes, dream sequences, and a soundtrack of disparate music providing a form of audio commentary. The finished play was highly praised, and Mercer won the Screenwriter’s Guild award for the best play of the year. Alan Lovell wrote in Contrast the following year that ‘From the first shot of the gorilla’s face, one was aware of something new and exciting happening on the television screen … Naturalism went by the board.’²⁶ Taylor himself concurred: ‘a new age of television drama began that evening, and the original play on television from that night forward was permanently changed.’²⁷

The Taylor/Mercer collaboration continued with The Birth of a Private Man, the final part of the loose trilogy that had begun with Where the Difference Begins.²⁸ Mercer’s theme was expanded from the parochial ideological conflicts of the first two plays to encompass the whole of European Socialism. Taylor suggested to Elwyn Jones that he and Mercer make a BBC funded research trip to the real locations of the play in Eastern Europe and was astonished when he agreed. The process of arranging visas saw them interviewed at the Polish Embassy about their political convictions by a sinister character who they believed to be a secret policeman.

In Warsaw the pair met with local artists and intellectuals and experienced the drink-fuelled nightlife. In East Berlin they wandered dangerously close to the new Berlin Wall, a grim symbol which featured at the play’s conclusion. The research trip had proved fruitful, but plans to return to shoot sequences of the play in Poland came to nothing when the crew’s visas were suddenly and inexplicably withdrawn. The play went ahead with the Warsaw scenes relocated to a railway carriage at Ealing studios. Filming was also done around the unmarked paupers’ graves in a snowy Wakefield cemetery and a mock-up of the Berlin wall in a Watford brewery, on which the lead character symbolically dies at the end of the play. ‘Mr Taylor’s production was full of excellent shots, visual contrasts, emphases on faces or movement, and moments of telling stillness’, wrote Mary Crozier in The Guardian after its transmission.²⁹

In December 1962, the BBC finally appointed a new head for the drama department. The Canadian Sydney Newman, previously occupying a similar post at ABC, was installed part way through the following year. Newman revamped the BBC’s drama output, increasing the emphasis on serials and steering plays along more populist lines. His values were the polar opposite of Taylor’s and the two were soon in conflict. Taylor particularly resented Newman’s implementation of a ‘producer system’, whereby directors were assigned scripts and had to work with separate script editors, rather than pursuing the work and writers they favoured, as Taylor was used to. Newman had divided out the roles of producer and director, which for plays had been combined under the producer title previously, leaving Taylor as director only for most of his productions.

Taylor’s first production to have a separate producer and script editor attached was For Tea on Sunday, another Mercer script, though they did not interfere with Taylor.³⁰ The play was an allegorical tale dramatising the violent eruption of the tensions beneath the surface of 1960s Britain. It concluded with the disturbed character Nicholas destroying the contents of a bourgeois flat with an axe. Taylor had three sets made of all the props to be destroyed to allow for a full run-through and two possible takes. As a precaution, the run-through of the scene had been recorded and Taylor ultimately used sections of it for transmission.

Aside from its unusual production, For Tea on Sunday showcased a new form of writing. Mercer had always written eloquently and literately, but for this script he gave his characters long speeches of metaphors and similes. Although opaque to many, the allegory behind the action seems to be a joyous prediction that decadent capitalist society would be smashed in sudden and shocking violence. Taylor called it ‘the first television poetic drama’ and thought it ‘one of the brightest artistic highlights of my life’. The Daily Mirror reported that the BBC had received 134 calls of complaint on the evening of its transmission, though their critic noted that Taylor had produced ‘with considerable talent’.³¹ Fifteen years later the BBC gave Taylor the opportunity to re-produce the play, for which he was able to reinstate some minor script cuts into what was otherwise a conscious attempt to replicate the original.³²

Newman made his presence felt on Taylor’s next production, a play by George Target about an industrial dispute. Newman decided that the original title, Workshop Limits, a wittily metaphorical title drawn from the language of the workshop itself, had to be changed. He insisted that it became You Can’t Throw Your Mates and when Taylor refused Newman issued his own orders to the production team to supersede Taylor’s. Although a minor issue, Taylor felt this interference proved that ‘a new order had come to power’.³³ In interview in 1977, Taylor reported that his moment of disillusionment under this new order ultimately came when a new script he wanted to produce was accepted, then give to someone else to direct.³⁴

Hugh Whitemore’s The Full Chatter followed.³⁵ Taylor remembered it as ‘the funniest new play I had ever read… it was full of all kinds of original and imaginative techniques for making people laugh, voices over, dream sequences, moments of surrealism, all handled with the lightest of touches.’³⁶ The play is a comic story about Frederick Instance, a television-hating teacher aspiring to the life of a writer. It proved a successful use of the techniques pioneered in A Suitable Case for Treatment, with The Times writing that Whitemore and Taylor had ‘achieved something which belongs purely to television. Nothing happens except through the hero’s eyes, and, for all his hatred of television, Instance’s imagination works in televisual terms, converting thought into “commercials”, announcements and commentaries.’³⁷

With another year left in his contract, Taylor found himself in 1963 with no productions on the horizon. Newman took this opportunity to take him away from the production of single plays, which had been his lifeblood and sole artistic interest, allocating him instead, to his horror, to series. Taylor refused producership of Newman’s brainchild children’s series Doctor Who, instead concocting with Elwyn Jones an ambitious series more to his taste. It was to be set around a new University and allow a different play each week. Taylor was enthusiastic for the project: ‘I would have a regular cast of both students and academic characters, and within that format I could deal with just about every serious issue likely to arise in the political, social, artistic, or any other kind of world. It could be a true microcosm, with characters of every class and every range of intelligence and sophistication, and it could tell every kind of story.’³⁸

He commissioned scripts from the likes of Alan Plater, Malcolm Bradbury and Hugh Whitemore, and wrote two himself. Ultimately, after almost a year’s work, it did not get the final go-ahead from Newman. Taylor wrote:

There was, at bottom, an unbridgeable gulf of taste between us. He was not prepared to do what I wanted to do, and I couldn’t give him what he wanted, not with any kind of integrity… I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, fit in with his new world, and he was not prepared to tolerate mine. We had reached an impasse.³⁹

Taylor felt he had been allowed to nurture the project merely as a diversion.

There was however to be one more production for Taylor before his contract expired, thanks to Whitemore and producer James MacTaggart. Whitemore’s Dan, Dan the Charity Man was a comedy about advertising which was told with unusual dramatic devices, such as speeded up film sequences, silent film style captions and characters pausing the action to address the viewer.⁴⁰ The drama was well received (The Guardian calling it ‘a true television event’ for example), ending Taylor’s four years as a BBC staff director on a positive note.⁴¹

Taylor didn’t entirely escape the BBC, however. After a brief stint in regional theatre, he returned in 1965 as a freelancer at the invitation of James MacTaggart, to direct Mercer’s And Did Those Feet?, a non-naturalistic script in which the writer’s lyrical, satirical style tipped close to fantasy.⁴² It was an elaborate production, including two weeks of night filming in a candle-lit swimming pool. With finances under Newman’s system now in the hands of the producer, Taylor found himself having to request greater resources from MacTaggart than he had initially been allocated. Taylor later recalled that he ‘raised a quiet inner eyebrow, but didn’t argue’ when MacTaggart proved amenable.⁴³

Taylor didn’t consider the finished play to be an unqualified success. He felt he had misjudged the pacing, partly due to the mix of filming and studio recording, and failed to realise the climax ‘with the right degree of baroque style.’⁴⁴ The Daily Herald called it ‘a masterpiece’⁴⁵, though The Times was less impressed: ‘Taylor’s direction created some delightful pictures … but could not impose pace and a sense of direction upon the scenes which Mr. Mercer allowed to stagnate.’⁴⁶ There is some truth in all these comments, with the play beginning in rapid visual jokes but becoming bogged down in obscure symbolism by its conclusion. Even so, it has moments of real beauty, most notably the pool sequences and poetic monologues.

According to Taylor’s account, when he visited MacTaggart shortly afterwards to talk of future productions, he was told ‘you’ll never work for this organization again, not while I’m here.’⁴⁷ Taylor reports that the later, official explanation was that the drama department could not afford his chronic overspending. Taylor felt that whilst it may be fanciful to suggest he had been ‘set up’ by MacTaggart over And Did Those Feet?, ‘the overspend on that huge production became a useful stick to beat me with after the event.’⁴⁸ Taylor became only too aware that he had become persona non grata within the drama department.

It was seven years before Taylor would work again in the BBC drama department and he suggested, first in The Times in 1982⁴⁹ and later, in more detail, in his memoir, that this was due to him being ‘blacklisted’ by Sydney Newman.⁵⁰ Newman replied that the allegation was ‘arrant nonsense. The notion the article put forward that a blacklist existed at the BBC when I was its Head of Television Drama Group, and that Don Taylor suffered because of it, is contemptible and not true.’⁵¹

Taylor was able to continue working for the BBC, but in a different department. Stuart Hearst of the Corporation’s Arts Features department recognised Taylor’s potential and took him in. For Arts Features, Taylor directed instalments of the arts magazine Look of the Week⁵² and film essays about the likes of George Bernard Shaw and Sean O’Casey, including dramatised sections.⁵³ Between his television work during this period, Taylor spend time in the theatre, both directing and writing. He had struggled with his own writing since leaving Oxford, and had finally had his first play, Grounds for Marriage, performed in 1967. Many more followed, including The Roses of Eyam, which has remained popular since its first production in 1970.

Taylor’s work for Arts Features also gave him the opportunity to write and he scripted many of his own productions, often for the illustrious Omnibus strand. Paradise Restored, his 1972 biographical film about John Milton, was considered a great success.⁵⁴ The Times wrote that ‘Mr Taylor gave us a searing study of the giant in chains… The thing was splendidly written and movingly performed.’⁵⁵ The Guardian called it ‘a triumph for imagination’.⁵⁶ Similar pieces about Wordsworth, Eliot and the like followed. One of Taylor’s most interesting television scripts was Prisoners, which he directed as an Arts Feature in 1971.⁵⁷ It was an intelligent duologue about repression and the place of the artist in society, subjects close to Taylor’s heart.

In 1972 Taylor made his return to the BBC drama department (from which Newman had long since departed) with a studio version of his own play The Exorcism, which can only be described as a socialist ghost story.⁵⁸ Although never as prolific within the system as previously, Taylor continued to direct occasional productions for the drama department, as well as Arts Features, throughout the rest of his career. His seven-year sojourn in Arts Features had not only allowed him to remain a creative force in television but had proved a valuable learning ground. He later wrote: ‘I can never fully express the debt of gratitude I owe to Stephen Hearst. He saved my career, and also gave me the opportunity to develop as a television writer and film maker which I would probably never have had in Drama Department.’⁵⁹

Despite a deep personal aversion to commercial television, Taylor directed several plays for ATV in the mid-1970s. He began in 1974 with Visitors and The Person Responsible, both by his playwright wife Ellen Dryden.⁶⁰ Two years later he directed two instalments of the Nigel Kneale anthology Beasts.⁶¹ A few years later he was set to direct Kneale’s slave drama Crow, also for ATV, but it was cancelled due to its expense. At the BBC he produced another film, Mercer’s Find Me, about a Polish ex-partisan literary figure⁶², and a studio drama about DH Lawrence by Fay Weldon, which could not ultimately be transmitted due to a copyright problem.⁶³ In 1976 Taylor wrote and directed Dad for BBC2.⁶⁴ The Stage and Television Today’s critic was highly impressed, praising Taylor’s ‘imaginative realisation in words of an idea, and his faultless direction.’⁶⁵ Writing and directing again, he created the abstract studio play Flayed a few years later.⁶⁶ The Stage and Television Today didn’t consider Flayed entirely successful, but observed how it ‘seared across its audience with merciless intensity.’⁶⁷

In 1980 Taylor directed In Hiding⁶⁸, which he described as the ‘first single camera video film’⁶⁹, before returning to the more familiar multi-camera studio method for versions of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible⁷⁰, Sheridan’s The Critic⁷¹ and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard.⁷² He wrote and directed another unusual studio drama in 1981, called A Last Visitor for Mr Hugh Peter.⁷³ This concerned the life and death of the eponymous historical figure and included a scripted studio discussion. In 1986 he directed Sophocles’s trilogy of Theban plays, in his own new translations⁷⁴, with Iphigenia at Aulis following in 1990⁷⁵, along with a version of Edward Bond’s Bingo.⁷⁶

In 1990 Taylor took his final leave of television when his project to produce new versions of three Euripides plays was cancelled. He continued to work in theatre and radio, for which he had written numerous plays since the early-1970s, and published a memoir of his time in television called Days of Vision. Don Taylor died of cancer in 2003, aged 67.⁷⁷ He had been working up until the end, writing and translating, having forsaken morphine pain-relief until his last two weeks in case it restricted his talents.⁷⁸

Taylor was an outspoken advocate of the power of television drama. In Days of Vision he wrote passionately and eloquently of the unique qualities of studio drama – as opposed to the film-style production which was then taking over – as a medium for creative expression, free from the conventions of naturalism imposed by other methods of production. Taylor subscribed to the most socialistic view of Public Service Broadcasting, believing in television as a great force for the advancement of culture, and steadfastly refused to alter his views to fit changing media trends. He detested the effect of commercial principles on television and was dismayed to see television being wasted on quiz shows and American imports, despising the process of cultural erosion which is now commonly referred to as ‘dumbing down’. Taylor concluded Days of Vision with a plea that was sadly rhetorical:

Television does not have to be cheap, depressing and second-rate. It is a beautiful, beautiful medium, capable of anything and everything the human imagination can conceive. It can be whatever we want it to be.

Why are we throwing it away?⁷⁹

When looking back at the history of television drama, Taylor is a figure easily overlooked; overshadowed by the reputation of Mercer, sidelined through much of the perceived ‘golden age’, and dismissed by some academics for his cultural ‘snobbery’.⁸⁰ He developed a literate, poetic drama while realism was becoming fashionable, and it was the latter school which ultimately proved to have the greater influence. Yet to forget Taylor is to lose from television history an accomplished director and a loud voice of dissent from within the ranks of television drama’s creators. With alienation and rebellion the themes of many of Taylor’s greatest productions, it is perhaps appropriate that his legacy may be to represent the cry of protest against the shifting values of a rapidly evolving broadcasting age.

This is a revised and updated version of an article published in Live from Mars issue two in 2008.

1. Quoted in Don Taylor, Days of Vision: Working with David Mercer: Television Drama Then and Now (London: Methuen, 1990), p. 59. This book is the main source for much of this essay.
2. Quoted in Taylor, Days of Vision, p. 16.
3. Ibid, p. 17.
4. Scotland Yard: ‘Interpol’, tx. 31 May 1960.
5. Scotland Yard: ‘Used in Evidence’, tx. 21 June 1960.
6. The Road to Carey Street, tx. 10 November 1960.
7. Taylor, Days of Vision, p. 28.
8. Ibid, p. 38.
9. The Dark Man, tx. 8 December 1960.
10. The Train Set, tx. 5 January 1961.
11. Choirboys Unite!, tx. 21 December 1961.
12. Taylor, Days of Vision, p. 64.
13. Ibid, p. 65.
14. Where the Difference Begins, tx. 15 December 1961.
15. Quoted in Taylor, Days of Vision, p. 123.
16. Anon, ‘ABC’s seasonal offering is telling and powerful production’, The Stage and Television Today, 21 December 1961, p. 11.
17. The Sunday Night Play: ‘The Alderman’, tx. 28 January 1962.
18. Anon, ‘Aged Firebrand Leaps to Life’, The Times, 29 January 1962, p. 5.
19. The Winter’s Tale, tx. 20 April 1962.
20. Z Cars: ‘Unconditional Surrender’, tx. 31 July 1962.
21. Taylor, Days of Vision, p. 141.
22. A Climate of Fear, tx. 22 June 1962.
23. The Sunday-Night Play: ‘A Suitable Case for Treatment’, tx. 21 October 1962.
24. Taylor, Days of Vision, p. 141.
25. Ibid.
26. Quoted in Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (London: British Film Institute, 2003, p. 78.
27. Taylor, Days of Vision, p. 160.
28. The Birth of a Private Man, tx. 8 March 1963.
29. Mary Crozier, ‘Television’, The Guardian, 11 March 1963, p. 7.
30. The Sunday-Night Play: ‘For Tea on Sunday’, tx. 17 March 1963.
31. Richard Sear, ‘Storm at a Tea Party’, Daily Mirror, 18 March 1963, p. 14.
32. Play of the Week: ‘For Tea on Sunday’, tx. 29 March 1978.
33. Taylor, Days of Vision, p. 190.
34. Anon, ‘When directors and writers lost their freedom’, The Stage and Television Today, 10 March 1977, p. 16.
35. The Sunday-Night Play: ‘The Full Chatter’, tx. 16 June 1963.
36. Taylor, Days of Vision, p. 188.
37. Anon, ‘Insiders Versus An Outsider’, The Times, 17 June 1963, p. 8.
38. Taylor, Days of Vision, p. 202.
39. Ibid, pp. 203-204.
40. The Wednesday Play: ‘Dan, Dan the Charity Man’, tx. 3 February 1965.
41. Gerald Larner, ‘Dan, Dan, the Charity Man on BBC-1’, The Guardian, 4 February 1965, p. 9.
42. The Wednesday Play: ‘And Did Those Feet?’, tx. 2 June 1965.
43. Taylor, Days of Vision, p. 213.
44. Ibid, p. 214.
45. Quote from Ibid, p. 218.
46. Anon, ‘Funniness Taken to Exhaustion’, The Times, 4 June 1965, p. 15.
47. Taylor, Days of Vision, p. 220.
48. Ibid, p. 221.
49. Anon, ‘Investing in culture’, The Times, 21 August 1982, p. 5.
50. Taylor, Days of Vision, pp. 223-224.
51. Sydney Newman, ‘The producer system’ (letter), The Times, 22 October 1982, p. 13.
52. Look of the Week: six episodes in 1966.
53. Sunday Night: ‘Shaw and Women’, tx. 22 May 1966. Omnibus: ‘The Exile’, tx. 6 February 1968.
54. Omnibus: ‘Paradise Restored’, tx. 2 January 1972.
55. Leonard Buckley, ‘Omnibus’, The Times, 3 January 1972, p. 8.
56. Peter Fiddick, ‘Everybody’s Revolution on Television’, The Guardian, 3 January 1972, p. 8.
57. Prisoners, tx. 7 April 1971.
58. Dead of Night: ‘The Exorcism’, tx. 5 November 1972.
59. Taylor, Days of Vision, p. 222.
60. The Person Responsible, tx. 17 September 1974.
61. Beasts: ‘During Barty’s Party’, tx. 22 October 1976 and ‘Buddyboy’, tx. 29 October 1976.
62. Omnibus: ‘Find Me’, tx. 8 December 1974.
63. The Lawrence drama was The Agreement of the People, recorded 1975.
64. Playhouse: ‘Dad’, tx. 23 April 1976.
65. Jackie Dyason, ‘Finely tailored play’, The Stage and Television Today, 29 April 1976, p. 13.
66. Play of the Week: ‘Flayed’, tx. 22 February 1978.
67. For a full review see Jennifer Lovelace, ‘Not easy, not great, but unforgettable’, The Stage and Television Today, 2 March 1978, p. 14. However the quote used is from Jennifer Lovelace, ‘Honourable failures illuminate the drama of 1978’, The Stage and Television Today, 21 December 1978, p. 14.
68. Playhouse: ‘In Hiding’, tx. 15 March 1980.
69. Taylor, Days of Vision, p. 273.
70. The Crucible, tx. 12 April 1981.
71. Play of the Month: ‘The Critic’, tx. 23 August 1982.
72. Play of the Month: ‘The White Guard’, tx. 20 September 1982.
73. Playhouse: ‘A Last Visitor for Mr Hugh Peter’, tx. 30 January 1981.
74. Theban Plays by Sophocles: ‘Oedipus the King’, tx. 16 September 1976; ‘Oedipus at Colonus’, tx. 17 September 1986; ‘Antigone’, tx. 19 September 1986.
75. Theatre Night: ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’, tx. 21 July 1990.
76. Theatre Night: ‘Bingo’, tx. 30 June 1990.
77. The Guardian’s obituary is available here.
78. Philip Purser, ‘Don Taylor’, The Guardian, 20 November 2003. Available online at: www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/nov/20/broadcasting.artsobituaries [accessed 29 December 2009].
79. Taylor, Days of Vision, p. 267.
80. John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 76.

For me, Doctor Who literally is a fairy tale. It’s not really science fiction. It’s not set in space, it’s set under your bed. – Steven Moffat¹

If you look at the stories I’ve written so far I suppose I might be slightly more at the fairy-tale and Tim Burton end of Doctor Who, whereas Russell is probably more at the blockbuster and Superman end of the show. – Steven Moffat²

Here are a few thoughts on the ideas at work in The Eleventh Hour, the first episode of the 2010 season of Doctor Who. It’s not a straight ‘review’, because there are enough of those on the internet already. But it’s also not the type of researched essay you expect from this site, because I’m interested in the episode’s ambiguities and the thoughts circulating in my head after seeing it, and don’t want to re-watch the episode to death or wait until the end of the season when some of those ideas will have been resolved. This piece will discuss the ideas relating to the ‘storybook quality’ that new lead writer Steven Moffat has talked about³, think about how style and imagery support characterisation and theme, and work out why my mind has made associations with the classic Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death (1946). This piece contains spoilers, and, unlike other essays on this site, you will need to have seen the episode to know what I’m talking about.

Moffat’s previous Who scripts have been seen as ‘darker’ stories than usual, rife with depth and metaphor.⁴ However, The Eleventh Hour is his first attempt at an Episode 1, which is traditionally a ‘more of the same’ romp – whilst also underlining the new era’s differences. Bags of fun, The Eleventh Hour also displays a consistency of theme and imagery, achieving that tricky ‘post-regeneration-trauma’ story (there have been some stinkers) by anchoring it through a concern with identity.

The best monsters, in myths and literature⁵ or Doctor Who, make manifest the themes of their narratives or wider social concerns from class to gender. Moffat’s previous Who stories are no exception: take the gas mask zombification in The Empty Child which makes literal the rootlessness of post-war children amid the rubble and British identity’s stultification in regressive wartime iconography, or the Clockwork Men of The Girl in the Fireplace who simultaneously echo the Doctor (hollow men of time with clock faces) and underline the relationship imagery at work: masks which hide faces (which are the masks we wear). Equally, while admiring The Eleventh Hour’s creepy personification of Prisoner Zero in one man and his dog – ‘bizarre scenes where you can have a dog and bark yourself’⁶ – and the mother and daughters, there are concerns that reflect the Doctor’s position: an attempt to assert identity, to find a voice, to separate (as the Doctor later does from that montage of old Doctors faces, ultimately stepping through the face of the previous Doctor to assert that he is the Doctor now).

But the threat is also a melding of realities, the nightmarish and uncanny, as Amy’s fairy-tale unfolds in dream logic. As Matthew Kilburn has noted, dreams were important in Moffat’s previous Who scripts:

either characters forced to live nightmare existences, unwaking, such as Jamie and his fellow gas-mask people in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances; or dreams irrupting into real life, whether the Doctor’s appearance to Reinette in The Girl in the Fireplace or the presence of the Weeping Angels in Blink. Closing your eyes is dangerous; the nightmares can possess you, but there is a possibility that a good dream will deliver you.⁷

The manner of the interplay between dream and reality is one of the parallels I felt with A Matter of Life and Death, which as per convention I’ll call AMOLAD. I’m not claiming it as an influence, just noting devices and images in common: they both open with the male lead character crashing, both have a male/female relationship (with the woman in uniform) rooted in tensions between reality and fantasy, eyeball imagery related to ideas of ‘vision’ (both connected to Doctors making long-distance diagnoses over a village), the idea of playing with time (again connected to vision) and creative agency battling determinism.

In AMOLAD, we first see Peter (David Niven) in a plane that’s about to crash. He has no parachute and cannot escape, introducing determinism (events being decided by forces beyond our control). Peter’s response is to think of loved ones and quote poetry – he says he would rather have written like Raleigh than to have flown through Hitler’s legs. (Rather than flying through Hitler’s legs, the Eleventh Doctor narrowly avoids avoiding damaging what’s between his legs on the top of Big Ben⁸.) Peter accepts his imminent death and jumps without a parachute, as if asserting his agency (people can assert their free will). The Doctor tried the no-parachute jump in The End of Time Part 2 to confront the Master and Rassilon (his rage towards the end of the era was in response to the idea of events being beyond his control, not least the suicide in The Waters of Mars), and The Eleventh Hour confirms the ‘Fall’ (not from innocence but from the godlike status which Davies conferred upon the Tenth Doctor in several stories). As in the Fifth Doctor’s first story, Castrovalva, the Doctor’s regeneration depends on shedding a previous season’s determinism to assert free will.

AMOLAD does this too, but by going in a very different direction: lost in the fog before his conductor can take him to Heaven, Peter wanders around alive and falls in love (unforgettably, AMOLAD renders Heaven in monochrome and Earth in colour as it’s as certain as the Doctor that everyday life is more miraculous). His physical body undergoes an operation, but on a metaphysical level he faces a trial to remain on Earth. Are we seeing dreams or reality? If they’re dreams, whose dreams are they?⁹

This raises a question toyed with in the episode: how far is what happens down to Amy’s perception? (Like Peter, the Doctor after his crash first discovers a child.) The smooth transition from title sequence to drama in a graphic match between time tunnel and a swirling fan gives a smooth storybook quality, and the opening tracking shot echoes Tim Burton in visually announcing ‘once upon a time’ (while suggesting a more stylised form of storytelling), but also integrates the Doctor with Amy in a way that’s even more striking as we see the child Amy all-but wish the Doctor into existence. (What brings the Doctor to Amy, and his ulterior motives in travelling with her, are troubling questions set up in looks and edits, to be resolved later in the season.) As Neil Perryman observes, the red of the fan gives way to the ‘darker, colder blue’ colour ‘palette’, just as we shift from ‘grandstanding spectacle’ to ‘a solitary child’s voice and a spooky undercurrent’¹⁰ We plunge straight into the iconography of fairy tale. By contrast, the first episode of this relaunched series, Russell T. Davies’s Rose, vitally established an everyday world (which some fans lazily and inaccurately called ‘soap’), and Rose as an everywoman and empathy figure, to be shaken up by the Doctor’s arrival. Rose staked Doctor Who’s claim to join the existing televisual landscape, for people who did not know what it did: although The Eleventh Hour does the same in character terms (new viewers learn about the Doctor through Amy), the genre markers show how far Davies groomed the Saturday night audience. Introductions to Rose, Martha and Donna were ‘encouraging rather than defying the audience to gain some perspective on them, and then presenting us with mystery’,¹¹ while Amy has an odd backstory full of gaps, which make her part of those genre markers or, perhaps, the genre markers part of her identity. We’re learning about the Doctor and Amy simultaneously. But first, like Russell T. Davies, who superbly raised questions about the impact of regeneration (‘New teeth… that’s weird’), Moffat produces a fast, funny sequence of the Doctor working out what he likes to eat, an early grappling with identity.

However, we are more concerned with the spooky crack in Amy’s bedroom wall. It’s an appropriate image to accompany the Doctor’s arrival, given Matthew Kilburn’s argument that ‘that crack in the wall is Doctor Who, coming into our cosy teatime lives with disturbing themes, and waiting for us in our imaginations at night’¹² John Williams argues that the Doctor’s deduction – that it’s actually a crack in the universe – ‘is both a brilliantly Doctor-ish and childlike diagnosis. It’s the opposite of Occam’s razor, and exactly gets the characteristically solipsistic way that a child views the world… the Doctor is partly to be a child’¹³. Wall imagery is vital to new Doctor Who. In the emotional climax to Davies’s Doomsday, a white wall symbolises the seemingly final separation of the Doctor and Rose; in Davies’s The End of Time a small cabinet (as fans put it, ‘the Wrath of Khan death box’) fatally imprisons the Doctor, an oddly disturbing end for the Davies era, given Davies’s statement that the sonic screwdriver and psychic paper were devices to get past the locked doors and times in cells that slowed down old Who. In Moffat’s work, walls are more mutable.¹⁴ Unlike the later Doomsday, the Doctor and Rose can breach walls in The Doctor Dances, while The Girl in the Fireplace is full of doors and walls between times and places, culminating in the Doctor’s horse-jump through a mirror.

The Doctor smashes through the mirror in The Girl in the Fireplace. Not, repeat NOT, to be confused with...

...Chuck Norris arriving to have words with a terrorist in The Delta Force.

The Eleventh Hour even signposts connections, as the Doctor steals a line from The Girl in the Fireplace as he looks at Amy’s wall: ‘You’ve had some cowboys in here’. He turns it into a joke (‘Not actual cowboys, though that can happen’), but if we remember that episode, it’s slightly disturbing: when he said it to Reinette, he was looking into Reinette’s mind. Is he somehow inside Amy’s mind/world now?

The romantic tragedy of The Girl in the Fireplace – mutable walls only delivered the Doctor at certain points during Reinette’s life, so that she died waiting for him – is echoed in Amy’s years waiting for the Doctor’s return, but also in the wall imagery and time as place. In a fanzine piece on The Girl in the Fireplace I quoted Richard Gilman, who was writing about the problem faced by Anton Chekhov in writing Three Sisters:

how to write a drama about time, not simply taking place in time – all plays do that – but about how we exist in and with it as though it were a place and a being. [Samuel] Beckett’s “doubleheaded monster of damnation and salvation”, the cradle and ground of all we do, home of our myths, imaginings and actualities. Time as place, place as time, Proustian, Einsteinian, a pact among the tenses, the scene of an appointment for which we’re always too early or too late.¹⁵

The melded spaceship/France setting of Fireplace constitutes ‘time as place’ and ‘place as time’. The Eleventh Hour has echoes of this in the combination of wall-breach and the Doctor’s timekeeping, and the Doctor making Amy see the door (of perception) that she has lived in ignorance of for years – but which for him, and us, follows on a linear narrative path.

Young Amy’s wall also introduces the eyeball motif which runs through the episode. The eye peering through the wall brings to mind the fourth-wall-shattering impact of Carnival of Monsters, the realisation that the Doctor and Jo are in a reality-TV-like peepshow exhibit, the collision of realities as a hand reaches into the fiction. But there are wider ideas which again merit comparison with AMOLAD.


There are several pieces of eye imagery in AMOLAD: a gaze down from Heaven through a circle, a point-of-view shot inside Peter’s eye in the operating room, and a scene in which Dr Reeves uses a camera obscura to diagnose patients around the village. The first and last are associated with authority figures, with knowledge and judgement (in the episode, judgement awaits Prisoner Zero). Taken together, you have vision in both its senses: vision as in sight and vision as in personal vision, creation: Dr Reeves says that June, via the camera obscura, sees everything clearly and all at once like a poet. Peter quoted poetry earlier, so his ‘vision’ relates also to creative ‘agency’, his ability to create, invent, dream, as an individual.¹⁶ We’re left to consider the relationship between Amy’s vision, and dreams, with the story as it unfolds, ideally stopping short of not destroying the experience in over-analysis (she’s called Amy Pond, there’s a duck pond without ducks in it – hmm, is she too an ‘empty Pond’?). The Atraxi ship, with its eyeball design, is one of the issues the series will return to.

But the idea of creative vision is vital to this episode, which typically for Moffat explores, according to Frank Collins, ‘the inner fantasy lives of children’, and Amy in particular, a woman who ‘grows up and sadly disconnects from her own inner child’.¹⁷ As in AMOLAD, there is a thin line between seeing and imagining: Amy has spent her youth being psychoanalysed precisely because she is unsure whether she saw the Doctor and TARDIS or imagined them, created them just as she effectively asked Santa to conjure them up at the start and played games with them through stories, fantasies and home-made toys later. As in Rumpelstiltskin, a fairytale creature defeated by naming, the cure for her ills seems to lie in identity.

Staring into eyes convinces her of danger (Prisoner Zero and its pursuers) and the Doctor’s ability to respond, as in the scene in which she traps the Doctor in a car door by his tie, which collides so many ideas from the story: the Doctor trapped by the costume of his predecessor, the use of a door, and Amy needing to stop the Doctor moving, but doing so by trapping him to a usually moving object.¹⁸ We too delve into the Doctor’s eye at the start of the stop-motion sequence in which we see the Doctor’s photographic memory, and roam across the village looking for the detail he is sure he’s observed.

This recalls Dr Reeves’s camera obscura, but the switch in style also reminds me of the moment in AMOLAD when time stops during a table tennis game: film itself is playing with time – as in this episode, we wonder, as Philip Horne said of AMOLAD, ‘At times like this, as spectators, are we creators (putting the images together in our minds) or watchers?’¹⁹ That’s certainly a question to ask of Amy.

Amy’s police uniform, kiss-a-gram job and other outfits have led to concerns, for instance on a Daily Mail front cover, that Doctor Who was being ‘too sexy’, or that older Amy ‘was now filling the potentially titillating shoes of 22-year-old Karen Gillan, who was introduced with a lingering shot up her thighs’²⁰. But the dressing up is a central part of the episode’s use of imagery to serve characterisation. Amy is dressed like a police woman just as the ‘police box’ is dressed as a police box, and she is no more a nun or maid than the Doctor is a Doctor. It’s a lovely shorthand for what Frank Collins calls the child’s ‘fantasy role playing of adventures with the raggedy Doctor’, along with her ‘stories, drawings and dolls’ based on a desire to have adventures, which have ‘become sublimated into an adult life where the yearning for such adventure still exists but hasn’t been acted upon’.²¹ Dressing up is a key theme of the episode: boyfriend Rory who has joined Amy’s fantasy world by dressing as the Doctor and who tried to become a doctor but became a nurse, and finally the Doctor, who only discovers his new outfit when he is certain of his identity. Undressing in front of Amy serves as a manic version of the Doctor’s divestment of his previous identity in Castrovalva, and confirmation to Amy that you can reflect or even create your identity in ‘dressing up’.²² The Doctor, like Amy, is stealing other people’s clothes.²³ The connections between them mount up, in ways that are ‘ripe for psychoanalysis’ as ‘Amy helped shape the Doctor’s new personality’²⁴ just as he did for her, potentially problematically for a patriarchal reading.²⁵

It’s fitting that Amy boards the TARDIS in her nightclothes: not only does it connect the adult Amy with the young Amy, it connects to her dreams (if we accept that the moment when we see young Amy waiting for the Doctor, and she smiles as she hears the TARDIS, is part of the older Amy’s dream, which is implied by the cut to the older Amy waking). It also relates to the way that the previous Doctor confronted his first story (The Christmas Invasion) in his pyjamas. It underlines the fairytale, dream quality of the episode, and confirms the lovely exchange between the Doctor and cynical Amy: ‘I grew up.’ ‘Don’t worry, I’ll soon fix that.’ As Moffat has argued, ‘Although it is watched by far more adults than children, there’s something fundamental in its DNA that makes it a children’s programme and it makes children of everyone who watches it. If you’re still a grown up by the end of that opening music, you’ve not been paying attention.’²⁶ Or, more succinctly: ‘when Doctor Who is really working, when it really delivers, the entire audience is eight years old – whatever age they started out!’²⁷ Therefore, The Eleventh Hour faced a different kind of challenge from Rose: Amy’s behaviour ‘represents the children who watched Rose in 2005, and are affecting or learning more cynicism as they move into their teens’²⁸

And yet, aren’t the nightclothes also a sign of innocence, given the sinister undertone to the end of the episode? As Matthew Kilburn notes, ‘it appears that she is part of or contaminated by the crack in the fabric of space-time which ran through her bedroom, as the crack appeared on the screen above the console in the closing TARDIS scene, and the Doctor seemed keen that Amy should not see it’. This sinister undertone shows story arcs being put in place for the rest of the season: as the season runs on, I’m sure some of my ideas here will be cancelled out. Some elements seem to be deliberately ambiguous. What if the shot of young Amy smiling as she hears the TARDIS arriving isn’t part of older Amy’s dream, and he did go back? Or forward? Certainly we will have to revisit it, judging by Moffat’s warnings:

There’s a big twist to come – don’t assume you know everything, and don’t assume you’ve understood everything you’ve seen.²⁹

certain things along the way will take on a significance retrospectively that they didn’t have at the time. You have to watch everything, that’s what I’m saying. Twice.³⁰

All in all, this was a triumphant start to the season, mixing old (various fan sites have listed the repetition of story tropes from previous Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat stories, or earlier Doctor Who stories, to which I could happily add Moffat’s characteristic references to his earlier Press Gang and Coupling) and new. There are few dramas in which a change of lead writer gets press attention, not only in listings magazines and newspaper media supplements but also the main news section of a newspaper like The Observer which observed that the episode was ‘the first for the show’s new creative boss, Steven Moffat, who has brought audiences some of the scariest episodes so far, including Blink and The Girl in the Fireplace.³¹ Newspapers have drawn the kind of improbable generalisations usually made by fans: ‘It’s a welcome relief after the absurd self-indulgence of the Russell T. Davies era, when the plots were unfathomable and David Tennant descended into slapstick’³². Will Moffat’s ‘era’ give more weight to plot? Mobile phones, laptops (is it significant that the laptop brand is ‘Myth’?) and conference-calls are present from the Davies era, although unlike Last of the Time Lords, what is broadcast is not belief in the Doctor leading to his messianic resurrection, but a succession of zeroes. The zeroes are probably not a sardonic comment like Alfred Hitchcock’s point that the ‘O’ in Roger O. Thornhill (in North by Northwest) stood for ‘nothing’. For those of us writing in fanzines two decades ago, such coverage was unimaginable, and yet we live in a world where the anti-Thatcher rhetoric of late 1980s Who is deemed worthy of a Newsnight feature, surely the only time Newsnight has been twenty years behind our photocopied fanzines.

Last but not least, there is the sparkling interplay between Karen Gillan and Matt Smith, and almost unanimous praise for the new Doctor, a ‘young-old’ Doctor. If BBC executives were worried, ‘they can relax’ because ‘Smith is a revelation: a proper Doctor, with elements of both absent-minded Professor and schoolboy’³³ Fans may have been worried, but they hardly count given the shocking revelation on forums in 2003-5 that some of them didn’t even know who Christopher Eccleston was, and seem blind to the idea that even a 40-year-old isn’t necessarily more convincing at being a 900-year-old than a 27-year-old is. One columnist said, ‘Thank God I can stop defending Matt Smith’ now everyone has seen him: ‘For the first time ever we understand what it must be like for the Doctor to inhabit an entirely new body’.³⁴ In the previous Doctor’s first story (The Christmas Invasion) the Doctor too defeated an alien and stressed that Earth was defended, but did so through a sword fight and eventual killing with a Satsuma after giving ‘one chance’, which he attributed to the sort of guy he now is (revealing an arrogance that played out in the bleak finale to The Waters of Mars). By that token, and with the unresolved elements of The Eleventh Hour, it is clear that Smith and Gillan will be stretched more as performers once story arcs start to play out.

You are merely the nightmare of my childhood. – Reinette, ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’

1. Steven Moffat, quoted in Gareth McLean, ‘The man with a monster of a job’, The Guardian, Media Guardian, 22 March 2010, p. 5.
2. Steven Moffat, quoted in BBC press release, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2010/03_march/19/doctor_who2.shtml.
3. McLean, ‘The man with a monster of a job’, p. 5.
4. I wrote about his first stories, The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances (two-parter 2005) and The Girl in the Fireplace (2006), for the fanzine This Way Up. I wrote repeatedly about Moffat’s previous work, in particular Press Gang (1989-93), for fanzines like Circus in the 1990s, including calls for Moffat to run Doctor Who should it ever return.
5. See Marina Warner, Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time (London: Vintage, 1994).
6. Frank Collins, Doctor Who: Series 5 – The Eleventh Hour / Review’, at Cathode Ray Tube
7. Matthew Kilburn, ‘Doctor Who XXXI.1: The Eleventh Hour‘, at Parrot-Knight
8. Just this once, a snotty fanboy aside: insert own Slitheen joke here about bollocks hitting Big Ben
9. Philip Horne has argued that we might just see the whole film as ‘a dying man’s fantasy of survival’ – Philip Horne, ‘Life and Death in A Matter of Life and Death, in Ian Christie and Andrew Moor (editors), The Cinema of Michael Powell, p. 128. Surprising, really, that I haven’t applied this to Life on Mars yet. There are lots more AMOLAD parallels, but I’ll restrict myself to a facetious one: Peter repeats that his age is 27 and that ‘that’s important’, something film critics like Charles Barr have pondered upon, but which has another resonance for critical reactions to Matt Smith’s casting.
10. Neil Perryman, ‘Up to Eleven’, at Behind the Sofa.
11. Kilburn, Parrot-Knight.
12. Kilburn.
13. John Williams, ‘The Moffat Manoeuvre’, at Behind the Sofa.
14. However, I wouldn’t want to judge contrasts between the writing styles of Moffat and Davies while Davies was show-runner, because that’s problematic at best. Although Davies did not rewrite Moffat the way he did other writers, Moffat wrote to Davies’s overall requirements, and the wall-breaches in Moffat’s scripts could just as easily be deliberate foreshadowing of Davies’s finale.
15. Richard Gilman, introduction to Anton Chekhov, Plays. Quoted in my piece on The Girl in the Fireplace for This Way Up in 2006.
16. It would be an unconvincing stretch to apply another reading of eyes to The Eleventh Hour, namely its reflexive quality: Andrew Moor, John Ellis and others have related these poetic eyes to cinema itself. ‘Just as A Matter of Life and Death’s Dr Reeves sees the whole of the village through his camera obscura, Powell and Pressburger mounted their affectionate-ironic explorations of Britain from the optic of cinema’ – John Ellis, ‘At the Edge of Our World’, in Christie and Moor, p. 17.
17. Frank Collins.
18. Amy’s harassment of an innocent bystander during a row also brings to mind Spike-Lynda scenes from Press Gang, and if the Doctor remains a cross between that series’ Spike and Colin, you’ll hear no complaints from this quarter.
19. Again, I wouldn’t read The Eleventh Hour reflexively, but AMOLAD partly is: the stopped table tennis game includes images that are still but also moving, like film in a projector. Like Dr Reeves’s diagnosis of Peter’s hallucinations, film images are ‘a series of highly organized illusions’ (in The Eleventh Hour, the Doctor’s sequence is, more literally than usual, a series of photographs). Horne, p. 124.
20. Rob Sharp, ‘He travels in style’, The Independent, Life section, 5 April 2010, p. 19.
21. Collins.
22. Otherwise, it’s just boringly part of a ‘sexy agenda’ (the Doctor starts the episode saving the required body parts) or a sign of the Doctor’s alien-ness, just as Leela’s unselfconscious need to change clothes shocked an unprepared resident of early twentieth century Earth in Horror of Fang Rock
23. An echo of the Doctor’s post-regenerative wardrobe-procurement in hospitals in Spearhead from Space and the 1996 TV movie.
24. Perryman.
25. Kilburn. To relate Kilburn’s statement about patriarchy in relation to a feminist interpretation of the role of the Doctor Who companion, see Dave Rolinson, ‘Is Who Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’, 2009 revision of 2002 fanzine piece, in Time Unincorporated – The Doctor Who Fanzine Archives Volume 2: Writings on the Classic Series (Mad Norwegian Press, June 2010).
26. Moffat, in McLean.
27. Moffat, quoted in BBC press release, http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2010/03_march/19/doctor_who2.shtml
28. Kilburn.
29. Moffat, quoted in ‘He who rules’, p. 5.
30. Moffat, in Tom Spilsbury, ‘Takin’ Over the Asylum’, Doctor Who Magazine, 417, February 2010, p. 21.
31. Vanessa Thorpe, ‘New Doctor crash-lands to screams from kids and aliens’, The Observer, 4 April 2010, p. 5.
32. Neil Midgley, ‘What to watch’, Daily Telegraph, Review, p. R33.
33. Neil Midgley, ‘What to watch’, Daily Telegraph, Review, p. R33.
34. Liz Hoggard, ‘What will Matt Smith do next?’, The Independent, 5 April 2010, p. 33.

BFI Southbank debates the current state of British Television drama in a two-month season during May and June. Despite critical negativity about the present and future of British small-screen drama, we contend that the current generation of British TV dramatists is as accomplished as any before. The season showcases some of the best shorter-form dramas from the last decade or so, from Dominic Savage’s Out of Control (2002) to Russell T Davies’ Second Coming (2003). We also welcome a number of the programmes’ directors, actors and producers in for Q&As, including William Ivory, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Dominic Savage and Tony Marchant. (Image and most of text supplied by BFI. More information from BFI site.)

When people talk about the pioneers of television writing in Britain, they inevitably mention those who made their reputations in the 1960s, like Dennis Potter and John Hopkins. However, in the 1950s, Iain MacCormick was recognised as the first writer to make a name specifically from original television writing in Britain. This essay is an attempt to explain who he was, why his work was notable and why he is now so obscure.

MacCormick was a Scot who had been living in Australia when the Second World War began. He served with the Australian army, reaching the rank of Captain before being captured in 1941. He spent the next four years as a prisoner of war, during which time he took up writing, completing a number of plays. Two of these, Stairway to the Stars and Call Back the Night, were produced in London simultaneously in 1945. MacCormick settled in England, becoming the director of an advertising agency (although he gave this up in 1951 to concentrate on writing).¹ MacCormick’s 1949 stage play The Beautiful World was a tragedy set in post-war Berlin, based on a true story. It concerned the political and personal conflicts which arise when the daughter of a Communist takes a Social Democrat as her boyfriend. This form of ideological melodrama, informed by the turbulent politics of the mid-twentieth century, is characteristic of much of MacCormick’s television work.

Although it’s not known if he had worked in the medium previously (it seems unlikely), MacCormick made a big impact in television drama in 1954 when he wrote The Promised Years for the BBC. This wasn’t a single play but an ambitious ‘cycle’ of four plays. As MacCormick explained in the Radio Times: ‘A ‘series’ of plays is merely a group of dramatic episodes, not necessarily related. On the other hand, a ‘cycle’ is a group of related plays and, as the word implies, the final play should return to the scene and characters of the first.’²

The cycle opens with The Liberators, set in Italy in 1945.³ The British officer Major Kent must order the destruction of the town of Canavento to impede the German retreat and the drama is built around his dilemma as to whether he can afford to allow the evacuation of civilians first. Two of The Liberators’ characters are carried through to the next play, The Good Partners, which was set around the Berlin airlift of 1948 and the plight of a fugitive eastern European scientist.⁴

Another pair of The Liberators’ characters appeared in the third play in the cycle, The Small Victory.⁵ Another three years has passed and the setting is the Korean war. The story is set around a Catholic mission overtaken by the Chinese and tyrannised by the sadistic Captain Feng, who attempts to force false confessions by torture. The quartet concluded with Return to the River, in which Kent revisits the rebuilt Canavento in the present of 1954 and finds that these promised years of peace are anything but; the sides have changed but the violence continues.⁶

The Liberators was called ‘outstanding television drama’ by The Stage.⁷ Writing in The Observer, Ken Tynan reported that The Good Partners was a ‘triumph’, praised the ‘masterly incisiveness’ of MacCormick‘s writing and explained that the play was one of ‘the proofs that television has its fingers at the throat of the cinema, and that the fingers are rapidly sprouting claws.’ ⁸ Critics were less impressed by Return to the River than by its precursors, with The Guardian finding it a ‘sad anticlimax.’⁹ Even so, The Promised Years had been a great success and MacCormick won the Guild of TV Producers and Directors’ television script award for the cycle.¹⁰ Another prize followed at the Daily Mail National Radio and Television awards.¹¹ The script of The Small Victory was later published in an anthology of television plays and it, along with The Liberators, was produced again by the BBC in 1960, independent of the whole cycle, indicating that they worked as stand-alone plays in their own right.¹²

MacCormick was one of the first to write original drama for the new ITV network when it arrived in 1955. His play The Rescue was seen in October that year and in 1956 he provided The Mother, about a Polish refugee family trying to reach Canada and the sacrifice the mother must make to enable the others to leave, for the network’s premier drama anthology Armchair Theatre (1956-74).¹³ It was later reported that The Mother was to be filmed to mark International Refugee Year (1960), though it’s unclear if this project reached fruition. ¹⁴

Recognising a business opportunity in the threat ITV posed to the BBC, MacCormick formed International Playwrights Group Ltd. He proposed to the BBC that he and a group of other writers represented by this company could be contracted by the Corporation to provide a large number of short dramas per year, with their guarantee that they would not work for ITV. The BBC declined the proposal.¹⁵ It seems MacCormick was involved in other aspects of television dramatists’ contracts around this time, with the BBC’s script unit head Donald Wilson writing in 1960 that MacCormick was ‘determined that the author should not be at a disadvantage in television, either financially or artistically. He was early in the ring fighting for both causes with vigour and obstinacy.’¹⁶

In 1956, MacCormick provided the storyline for a film drama about nurses’ lives called The Feminine Touch. As well as his ITV and film work in the mid-1950s, MacCormick wrote a number of new plays for the BBC. The Safe Haven (1955) was a melodrama about the daughter of a wealthy Scottish industrialist, her Canadian husband and the visitation of his wastrel father.¹⁷ In The Weeping Madonna (1956), two roguish Italians plot to create a fake ‘weeping’ Madonna statue to boost tourism to their small town and make their fortunes, only for the statue to start weeping for real.¹⁸

Act of Violence (1956) was set in an unnamed central European state where a legendary revolutionary reappears to seize power.¹⁹ Although his coup is unexpectedly bloodless, violence follows in the aftermath. MacCormick called it ‘a frank and unashamed melodrama of the modern manner’, a description which fits much of his work.²⁰ Another project planned for the same year was a serial about a Nazi’s resurgence, but it’s unclear if this was produced.²¹

Violence was again on the horizon in One Morning Near Troodos (1956), which took place in contemporary Cyprus where occupying British troops were hunting a local resistance leader.²² Less topical but also about resistance to an occupier was Marjolaine (1957), named after the Brittany village in which it is set in 1943. The villagers face the dilemma of whether to hide or hand over to the Germans a wounded British airman shot down nearby.

The Quiet Ones (1957) was a more contemporary piece about Communist infiltration and political agitation at the level of the factory floor.²³ It is somewhat ironic therefore that the play’s broadcast was postponed due to what The Stage called ‘industrial strife’.²⁴ Its lead character is a devout Catholic seen to be seduced into Communism by trade unionists, only to be disillusioned when it is revealed that his brother is one of the eponymous ‘quiet ones’ who control the agitation from behind the scenes.

Later in 1957 came MacCormick’s next big project, The English Family Robinson. It was another cycle of four plays, this time on the theme of ‘a century of British rule in India’.²⁵ The cycle told the story of four generations of the Robinson family, each representing a different facet of the British experience in India. The first play, Night of the Tigers, was set around the outbreak of the Indian mutiny of 1857 while the second, The Little World, concerned a potential famine due to a crop change.²⁶ The cycle continued in 1904 for The Third Miracle, about a threatened typhoid epidemic, and concluded with Free Passage Home, which concerned the spectre of seemingly inevitable violence between Muslims and Hindus on the eve of the partitioning of India in 1947.²⁷

The Times praised the ‘satisfyingly compact drama’ of Night of the Tigers, though The Guardian was less keen, finding it ‘a dull, if worthy, play.’²⁸ The Stage hoped for more plays of the quality of Free Passage Home, noting that MacCormick had ‘shown his near-mastery of the TV medium.’²⁹ ‘A sound essay in writing for television’ was The Guardian’s final summary of the whole quartet.³⁰ The English Family Robinson doesn’t seem entirely deserving of the ‘cycle’ description because, according to MacCormick’s own definition, the passage of time prevents any of the characters of the first play returning for the fourth; nevertheless, it was another notable achievement in terms of original drama conceived and commissioned specifically for television.

Upon completion of The English Family Robinson, MacCormick was asked to turn his hand to serial-writing. It proved to be harder than he’d anticipated and he reported to the Radio Times that he’d had to learn a completely new writing technique as well as jettisoning his original story idea as it would not fit into the serial format.³¹ The result was The Money Man (1958), a six-part ‘whodunit’ which the author described as ‘the first exposé of the way in which the European currency racket sets about its business’.³² Although he would later script stand-alone episodes for popular series, MacCormick didn’t attempt his own serial again.

Back in the realm of plays, The Uninvited (1958) was about a Russian woman who turns up in a London newspaper office looking for her American serviceman husband, having recently been released from one of Stalin’s labour camps. Her plight is taken up by the newspaper but the husband, once located, refuses to be reunited with his war bride, having remarried in the intervening years. The Daily Mirror found it ‘an entertaining short story’.³³

In 1959 MacCormick moved into series television, writing five episodes for The Third Man (1959-65), a BBC/MGM co-production spin-off from the more famous film of the same name. Also in 1959, he was part of a group who founded the company Channel Communications (Television) Ltd, to compete for the ITV licence for the Channel Islands. The bid proved successful and in 1962, as Channel Television, the company went on-air, where it has remained ever since. It’s possible that MacCormick’s involvement with this company explains his dearth of known writing credits between 1961 and 1965, although this is pure speculation and his level of hands-on involvement with the station is unknown.

MacCormick did continue to write original plays, including Nightfall at Kriekville (1961), in which a prejudiced mayor of a small South African town uses a minor prank (perpetrated, it transpires, by his own son) as a convenient pretext to demolish the homes of the native Bantus people in an attempt to drive them away.³⁴ The Guardian wrote that it was ‘a credible and exciting play of the clash between black and white, without moralising or propaganda either way.’³⁵ The Times went further, finding it ‘a vigorous, harsh and exciting piece of work’ and pondering whether

it is the immediacy of its theme that gives it its unusual strength or whether Mr. MacCormick has this time cut deeper than in the past… If the play actually does go deeper than its predecessors it is because the author finds something in the perverted fanaticism of the mayor independent of the situation … It seems as if Mr. MacCormick has gone beyond his temporary pretext for his play to a permanent sore on human character.³⁶

Less than a month later, The Hunted (1961) was broadcast.³⁷ Concerning a half-French, half-Algerian girl on the run and the American novelists she meets late at night, it was a ‘tough, efficient thriller,’ according to the Radio Times, set in ‘the underworld of modern Paris, where political differences are settled at pistol-point.’³⁸ The Times was impressed, noting that ‘during the play’s tightly packed 50 minutes we were never left in any doubt … that we were in the presence of rounded, believable human beings, however extraordinary the situation in which they found themselves.’³⁹

MacCormick’s last known television credits are for a number of episodes of ITV’s Gideon’s Way (1965-66), a police series based on the characters and themes of John Creasey’s Gideon novels. Several, if not all, of MacCormick’s episodes were broadcast posthumously, as he died in 1965, aged around 45.⁴⁰

As early as the mid-1950s, within a year of his big splash with The Promised Years, MacCormick’s unique position in television was being recognised. The Times noted in 1955 that he was ‘a writer who has made television his speciality.’⁴¹ The following year the Radio Times wrote that ‘MacCormick is a rare creature – a serious playwright whose name has been made by television and who is writing on commission especially for the medium.’ In 1959 he was noted in an Armchair Theatre book to be ‘the first major playwright to make his reputation from British television’.⁴²

MacCormick was already celebrity enough to appear on the BBC storytelling panel game Once Upon a Time between the third and fourth of The Promised Years plays.⁴³ The BBC commission for The English Family Robinson reportedly came with a fee ‘greater than any yet paid by the Corporation’.⁴⁴ These comments indicate not only MacCormick’s level of recognition for his original television work but the rarity of dramatists at the time choosing television as their primary outlet, which makes him all the more notable.

It’s also interesting to note the style of MacCormick’s work. The Stage reported that The Liberators seemed to ‘belong’ to television, which sets it apart from the more theatrical presentation of drama which dominated television then.⁴⁵ However, other sources suggest this may have not been typical for MacCormick. For The English Family Robinson, he restricted himself to only one set each for three of the plays, with one being allowed a second. He decreed that there would be no film inserts used, with the whole drama occurring live in the studio, without a glimpse of Indian exteriors.⁴⁶ Presumably, therefore, these plays were aesthetically more conventional and theatre-like.⁴⁷ Tellingly, the Daily Mirror noted that The Uninvited ‘could have been broadcast on sound to advantage’, suggesting a lack of visual interest.⁴⁸ These comments indicate that while a talented writer of drama, MacCormick wasn’t interested in innovating a particularly ‘televisual’ style or pushing the technical limitations of the medium, as some of his successors were.

However, interestingly, Donald Wilson reported in 1960 that ‘MacCormick set his heart against the subordination of the writer to a junior rank among the production group, and trained as a television producer in order to equip himself to talk on equal terms with the producers and designers of his plays.’⁴⁹ Given that he has no obvious production credits and there’s no indication he aspired to produce, one assumes MacCormick’s training was informal, via sitting-in on production meetings, etc. Even so, it does seem unusual that he kept his plays so stylistically simple when he must have known how much more was possible.

Perhaps the most notable characteristic of MacCormick’s work was its topicality, with many of his plays being based around contemporary events or political movements. In their review of The Hunted, The Times reported that MacCormick was ‘almost alone among our television dramatists in finding his inspiration consistently in the political and social problems of the day… it is his particular talent to demonstrate abstract issues in properly human terms’.⁵⁰ However, this was not always to his work’s advantage, with The Times later writing in relation to Nightfall at Kriekville that MacCormick ‘creates his plays neatly and with admirable precision from an impassioned involvement in the world’s troubles, which change rapidly enough to rob the plays they inspire of a certain immediacy.’⁵¹

Prior to his death, MacCormick had written another play cycle, called The Last Adventure. It was in a similar vein to The English Family Robinson, but dealing with English settlers in Kenya, from the earliest days of the Mau Mau uprising to a prophecy of a fascistic all-African nation emerging. Producer Irene Shubik later recalled that it was never made ‘because of its very specific political allusions’.⁵² She suggested that in some respects the political topicality of MacCormick’s work acted against it, quickly making it dated. She recalls that when his widow suggested in both 1966 and ‘69 that the BBC produce The Last Adventure and repeat some of his earlier plays, ‘all were found to have values and attitudes belonging to another era.’⁵³

Although his choice of contemporary subjects was a new approach for television drama, MacCormick’s ‘values and attitudes’ were conventional and conservative. For example, he depicts the political left-wing as shady and sinister. Unsurprisingly given the Cold War era in which he was writing, Communism is shown as a malign presence or influence, but even British trades unionism is tarred with the same brush in The Quiet Ones. Conversely, British imperialism is celebrated as a paternalistic force in The English Family Robinson.

Faith is a subject drawn upon in a number of MacCormick’s plays, and the author seems to have a particular affinity for Roman Catholic characters and themes, from the erring but devout protagonist of The Quiet Ones to the miraculous events of The Weeping Madonna. The Small Victory gives us perhaps the most extreme example. A small group of prisoners of the Chinese in Korea undergo torture and eventually execution, largely willingly, instead of allow the Catholic priest amongst them to sign a false confession. This is presented as a moral victory, as the title makes clear, despite the great and unnecessary human tragedy it entails for no tangible benefit.

Tradition, faith, British resolve and imperial beneficence are undoubtedly the values of MacCormick’s drama which Shubik noted to be outdated by the mid/late-1960s. Indeed, it’s almost a surprise to learn that The Small Victory had a second production as late as 1960 and it’s hard to image many of his earlier dramas being made again beyond that point. In light of this, it is perhaps unsurprising then that by the beginning of the 1960s, as more progressive writers like David Mercer and Alun Owen were becoming prominent in the sphere of single television plays, MacCormick’s output of plays dwindled in favour of the more formulaic world of genre series.⁵⁴

Despite his deservedness for recognition as one of the earliest writers of serious original television drama, it easy to understand MacCormick’s present obscurity. He chose to work in television when it was considered to be an entirely ephemeral medium and as such his work was not preserved for posterity.⁵⁵ In addition, the topicality and ideologically conservative standpoint of much of his work prevented it having a longevity. Finally, his premature death in 1965, just as what is now perceived by many as a ‘golden age’ for television was getting under way, meant that his contribution to television pre-dated the period which excites most retrospective interest.

1. Biographical details from Anonymous, The Armchair Theatre: How to Write, Design, Direct, Act and Enjoy Television Plays (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1959), p. 65 and Anon, ‘Chit Chat’, The Stage, 19 July 1945, p. 4. Some accounts refer to MacCormick as an Australian. It may be that he was naturalised as an Australian but the profile of him in the Armchair Theatre book calls him a Scot and given that MacCormick contributed to this book one would assume it got its biographical details from the subject himself.
2. Iain MacCormick, ‘An Experiment in Television Drama’, Radio Times, 21 May 1954, p. 14.
3. The Promised Years: ‘The Liberators’, tx. 23 May 1954.
4. The Promised Years: ‘The Good Partners’, tx. 13 June 1954.
5. The Promised Years: ‘The Small Victory’, tx. 11 July 1954.
6. The Promised Years: ‘Return to the River’, tx. 15 August 1954.
7. Anonymous, ‘TV Becomes Intelligent’, The Stage, 27 May 1954, p. 9.
8. Kenneth Tynan, ‘Comics and Others’, The Observer, 20 June 1954, p. 10.
9. Anonymous, ‘Play Cycle Ends in Anticlimax’, Guardian, 17 August 1954, p. 4.
10. Anonymous, ‘Television Awards’, Times, 26 October 1954, p. 5.
11. Siriol Hugh Jones, ‘The Weeping Madonna’, Radio Times, 6 January 1956, p.15.
12. Michael Barry (editor), The Television Playwright (London: Michael Joseph Ltd, 1960).
13. TV Playhouse: ‘The Rescue’, tx. 15 October 1955. Armchair Theatre: ‘The Mother’, tx. 28 October 1956.
14. Anon, The Armchair Theatre, p. 65.
15. Irene Shubik, Play for Today: The Evolution of Television Drama Second Edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 19-20.
16. Donald Wilson in Barry, The Television Playwright, p.45.
17. The Safe Haven, tx. 24 April 1955.
18. The Weeping Madonna, tx. 8 January 1956.
19. Act of Violence, tx. 9 February 1956.
20. Iain MacCormick, ‘Act of Violence’, Radio Times, 3 February 1956, p. 5.
21. Hugh Jones, ‘The Weeping Madonna’.
22. Anonymous, ‘Jimmy Edwards, Norman Wisdom, MacCormick contribute to BBC-TV’s Autumn Plans’, The Stage, 20 September 1956, p. 12. One Morning Near Troodos, tx. 30 September 1956.
23. The Quiet Ones, tx. 16 June 1957.
24. Anonymous, ‘Iain MacCormick’s Postponed Play’, The Stage, 6 June 1957, p. 6.
25. Anthony Gray, ‘Telebriefs…’, The Stage, 21 February 1957, p. 12.
26. English Family Robinson: ‘Night of the Tigers’, tx. 27 October 1957. English Family Robinson: ‘The Little World’, tx. 3 November 1957.
27. English Family Robinson: ‘The Third Miracle’, tx. 10 October 1957. English Family Robinson: ‘Free Passage Home’, tx. 17 November 1957.
28. Anonymous, ‘The English Family Robinson’, Times, 28 October 1957, p. 5 and Anon, ‘21 Years of BBC Television’, Guardian, 28 October 1957, p. 5.
29. Vera Dixon in ‘Left in Space’, The Stage, 21 November 1957, p. 19.
30. Anonymous, ‘A Year of Landmarks and Technical Progress’, Guardian, 31 December 1957, p. 3.
31. Iain MacCormick, ‘The Money Man’, Radio Times, 28 March 1958, p. 7.
32. Ibid. The Money Man, six episodes, 5 April to 10 May 1958.
33. Richard Sear, ‘It was OK for sound’, Daily Mirror, 24 November 1958, p. 16.
34. Nightfall at Kriekville, tx. 25 September 1961.
35. Mary Crozier, ‘Television’, Guardian, 26 September 1961, p. 7.
36. Anonymous, ‘Study in Perverted Fanaticism’, Times, 26 September 1961, p. 14.
37. The Hunted, tx. 16 October 1961.
38. Anonymous, ‘The Hunted’, Radio Times, 12 October 1961, p. 23.
39. Anonymous, ‘A Not So Simple Mystery Story’, Times, 17 October 1961, p. 16.
40. MacCormick’s year of death is reported in Shubik, Play for Today, p. 19, though the exact date is unknown. His age is given as 39 in Anon, The Armchair Theatre, which was published in 1959 (p. 65).
41. Anon, ‘Creative Material for Television’, The Times, 26 April 1955, p. 16.
42. Anonymous, The Armchair Theatre, p.65.
43. Tx. 28 July 1954.
44. Gray, ‘Telebriefs…’.
45. Anon, ‘TV Becomes Intelligent’.
46. Iain MacCormick, ‘The English Family Robinson’, Radio Times, 25 October 1957, p. 11.
47. It is impossible to know with any certainty what these plays looked like as no recordings exist.
48. Sear, ‘It was OK for sound’.
49. Donald Wilson in Barry, The Television Playwright, p. 45.
50. Anon, ‘A Not So Simple Mystery Story’.
51. Anon, ‘Study in Perverted Fanaticism’.
52. Shubik, Play for Today, p. 19.
53. Ibid, p. 20.
54. The reader should however note that these observations are based on the minimal evidence available about MacCormick’s work (mainly television listings and reviews) and cannot be considered in any way a definitive statement on the character of MacCormick or his drama.
55. To expand on an earlier comment regarding a dearth of archive, a recording for only one of MacCormick’s single plays (Nightfall at Kriekville) is known to exist. The Money Man also does not exist. However, as episodes in filmed series, MacCormick’s instalments of The Third Man and Gideon’s Way do survive.

As a producer, director and writer of British television drama, James MacTaggart (1928-1974) was responsible for numerous stylistic experiments and technical innovations in the medium from the early 1960s until the mid-1970s. In a 15 year television career, he was responsible for over 120 television plays or episodes, a number that would have been much greater had it not been for his premature death.

MacTaggart was born in Glasgow, where he remained for a university education. After his National Service he made a career as an actor, ‘of high skill’ according to The Times, in theatre, radio and television.¹ Having acted for them regularly, MacTaggart joined BBC Scotland as a General Programme Producer in radio in the 1950s, working on magazine programmes and several major dramas. He subsequently moved into television as a Drama Production Assistant at the BBC’s Glasgow studios, despite some sinister rumblings about his suitability within the Corporation’s Appointments department.² By 1958 he had become a television director, with early work including instalments of the topical magazine Compass.³ He soon moved into drama, where he was credited as producer, as the roles of producer and director on television plays were combined under the one title.

In 1961 MacTaggart produced Jack Gerson’s Three Ring Circus, the winning entry into a Scottish television play competition.⁴ It was about a man who, having lost his memory, and therefore his identity, finds himself in an absurd European police state where is claimed by a number of parties in place of their own missing persons. Veering from hallucinatory fantasy to blunt satire, the play was ‘a parable of the individual lost in the nightmare of the modern world’, as The Times put it.⁵ Gerson’s script demanded a highly stylised production, which MacTaggart gave it, using a variety of non-naturalistic tricks and often minimalistic sets to achieve the strange situations and locations required. The Listener noted that ‘in an always interesting and often grippingly exciting way, [it] explored the darkening maze of the world and man’s ever-increasing sense of alienation.’⁶ The play was a great success and propelled MacTaggart to great things.

When BBC staff writer Troy Kennedy Martin proposed a series of non-naturalist plays, Elwyn Jones, one of the drama department bosses, ‘jumped at it’ and on the back of the success of Three Ring Circus invited MacTaggart to relocate to London to produce it.⁷ ‘We were going to destroy naturalism,’ Kennedy Martin later recalled, ‘if possible, before Christmas’.⁸ The series was Storyboard (1961), a drama anthology which aimed to ‘tell a story in visual terms’, something which television, with its modest resources, was still learning to do.⁹ These plays used non-naturalistic techniques including narration and the mixing of shots to music rather than to dialogue, all produced live under MacTaggart’s direction.¹⁰ One instalment had 21 characters and 130 scenes across its half-hour duration, and required six cameras, more than was usually used for a 90-minute piece. One montage sequence used 20 shots, five sets, various extreme close-ups and no dialogue.¹¹ It was the opposite of the still relatively static, dialogue-led conventional form of most television drama.

MacTaggart followed up Storyboard with Studio 4 (1964), which carried the same remit and, for its first series, was produced between him and Alan Bridges. It was named after the studio it used in the BBC’s Television Centre, then one of the most modern in the world.¹² MacTaggart’s production of The Second Curtain found favour in The Times, which noted that ‘the whole production was a small masterpiece of compression and precision’.¹³ This compression was a characteristic of the non-naturalistic drama MacTaggart worked on, which tried to eliminate the longueurs of much television storytelling, often with a jumping, non-linear timeline.

In 1963, the BBC’s new head of drama, Sydney Newman, divided the roles of producer and director on plays and henceforth MacTaggart only performed one of these roles on each of his productions. In 1963-64, he produced the anthology series Teletale, an experimental testing ground for new directors. The series was relegated to the smaller studios of the BBC’s provincial bases, but this didn’t blunt the production team’s ambition. In an internal BBC memo, series writers Roger Smith and Christopher Williams explained that:

The stories will be told with the maximum economy and condensation. The juxtaposition of scenes and the cutting between them will be crucial to the narrative. The style of narration will be fluid, using and exploring the resources of framing, camera mobility and studio space … We hope that this method will allow us to liberate the action from the accepted necessities of naturalism, while not detracting from the interest of the story.¹⁴

An example of the unconventional style of Teletale was Ken Loach’s ‘Catherine’, which used rapid shot changes, montage, narration and had no sets, signalling a change of scene with changes of lighting.¹⁵ Speaking of the impetus behind Teletale, MacTaggart bemoaned the acceptance by writers of television’s limitations:

If only it could be regarded for a while as being a director’s medium, so that stories could be allowed to drift madly off somewhere…What we need are people who are excited by the possibilities and say ‘the hell with the limitations, we’ll break the rules’. I think we’ve got far too many damn rules. My attitude to the whole thing is that the studio is as big as your imagination and somewhere to tell a story, and you must be frank about the fact that there is a studio and you are telling a story… The time has come to write in terms of the pictures … I believe passionately that a picture can say so much emotionally. If only people would conceive stories in terms of the emotions … even if it means writing down the pictures. I’m not one of those directors who resents seeing Cut to Close Up written in a script.¹⁶

He thought Teletale had ‘pushed the studio walls back’ and saw his role on the series as creating ‘the kind of atmosphere in which these people [the directors] could respond and get excited and enthusiastic. Instead of saying to them ‘No, you can’t do that’ I’ve said ‘Yes, have a bash, that sounds exciting’’.¹⁷

Between these experimental anthologies, MacTaggart directed instalments of Z Cars (1962-78) and Second World War series Moonstrike (1963), and produced the Joseph Conrad dramatisation Freya of the Seven Isles (1963).¹⁸ He had directed Alun Owen’s You Can’t Win ‘Em All (1962) and subsequently handled Corrigan Blake (1963), its comedy-adventure serial sequel.¹⁹ Immediately following the end of Teletale, MacTaggart was made producer of First Night (1963-64), an anthology of ‘popular’ contemporary television plays which had been drawing criticism for its sex and ‘sleaziness’.²⁰ Newman had hoped MacTaggart would reverse the series’ flagging fortunes but it was cancelled after MacTaggart had produced only a handful of plays.²¹

In March 1964, Kennedy Martin published ‘Nats Go Home’, an impassioned attack on television drama’s prevailing naturalistic style. He proposed ‘a working philosophy’ for a new television drama, involving ‘a new idea of form, with new language, new punctuation and new style’.²² His manifesto’s originality is often overstated and it should be noted that others at the BBC had been experimenting on these lines, albeit with less impact, and Newman himself had championed less naturalistic drama at roughly the same time.²³ This was, of course, also what MacTaggart had been doing on his three experimental anthologies.

Putting all his theories into practice, Kennedy Martin wrote, in conjunction with John McGrath, the six-part serial Diary of a Young Man (1964).²⁴ MacTaggart produced, with Loach and Peter Duguid, both graduates of Teletale, directing. MacTaggart explained to Newman that it was ‘taut, condensed and utterly devoid of flabby realistic fill in stuff’.²⁵ For viewers, he introduced it as ‘a new kind of writing for television, exploring the possibilities of the medium in a rather more extreme way than we’ve tried before.’²⁶

The serial used voice-over, sequences of still images, tricks with chronology, surreal and absurd sequences and, at times, archetypes in place of characters. Newman was impressed, calling the serial ‘a major breakthrough in television story telling … this is television of the first order’.²⁷ Diary of a Young Man was, however, generally unpopular with its viewers and its sexual content concerned some, with a vicar complaining loudly in the press about its ‘filth and depravity’.²⁸ One critic noted that it seemed ‘to have been written and directed as an illustration of a thesis rather than as an independent work’, which isn’t far from the truth.²⁹

The axing of First Night led, in part, to the creation of the BBC’s new flagship drama anthology, The Wednesday Play (1964-70), which had much the same remit.³⁰ After a run of plays ‘orphaned’ from another cancelled series, Newman made MacTaggart producer for The Wednesday Play’s first proper series, in 1965, to get the series back on track. MacTaggart rapidly reinvigorated it into a showcase for new and often controversial contemporary drama, employing innovative young writers and directors. Dennis Potter had his first television production on MacTaggart’s series of The Wednesday Play, as did James O’Connor, who was a particularly brave choice given that he held a murder conviction.

As an anthology, the series had room for all styles of production but it’s noticeable that non-naturalistic devices, such as narration and montage sequences, were common during MacTaggart’s year as producer. Ken Loach directed some of the most famous instalments of The Wednesday Play, though his work rapidly moved towards realism rather than the less naturalistic work he had previously done with MacTaggart. Another director employed was Don Taylor, who shared MacTaggart’s interest in non-naturalism and used a variety of established and new techniques in directing Dan, Dan, the Charity Man (1965), including mock-silent film sequences, captions, speeded-up chase scenes, slow motion and characters addressing the audience while the rest of the action is paused.³¹ He also directed David Mercer’s And Did Those Feet? (1965), which was satirical, cartoonish and beautifully lyrical.³²

Given a remit for what Newman would later, famously, call ‘agitational contemporaneity’, MacTaggart was unafraid of producing plays about some of the taboos of the 1960s.³³ Amongst many other subjects, MacTaggart’s Wednesday Plays tackled class, race relations, capital punishment, homosexuality and abortion (the latter two still illegal at that time). The controversy that invariably followed each transmission was such that the production of the plays themselves constituted a wilful intervention into public (and parliamentary) debate on the subjects.³⁴ It is for these plays which The Wednesday Play became famous, though MacTaggart’s year in charge also included traditional comedy, mystery and suspense plays, plus biography, science fiction and a musical.

Tony Garnett, who had been a story editor on The Wednesday Play (and, later, would produce it), recalled that such provocative programming was possible only because MacTaggart was ‘a BBC Establishment-stamped, trusted person. The hierarchy could feel comfortable with these wild lads [directors and story editors] around provided Jim was there to handle them. At the same time, he was extremely innovative, open-minded and, again, allowing. He was also a very fine human being and an underestimated man’.³⁵

Although a number of Wednesday Plays used non-naturalistic techniques to greater or lesser degrees, the series as a whole ultimately became known for its productions which strove for realism. Although this shift can be attributed largely to those who came later, its origins lie in MacTaggart’s year in charge, with an increased use of location filming, most notably with Ken Loach’s Up the Junction (1965).³⁶ This play made extensive use of 16mm filming and included montage sequences to create a documentary effect. Even so, Garnett reports that the play’s inception came about while MacTaggart was away on holiday.³⁷

Under MacTaggart’s tenure, The Wednesday Play became a popular and critical success. MacTaggart concluded his producership at the end of 1965, with 34 new plays behind him. He returned periodically over the next couple of years to direct several instalments, including The Boneyard (1966), the first of his successor’s plays, a legal-themed trilogy by barrister Nemone Lethbridge and Charles Wood’s colourful satire of racial integration, Drums Along the Avon (1967).³⁸

In 1968 MacTaggart was recruited, along with David Mercer, by his Wednesday Play colleagues Tony Garnett and Kenith Trodd to be a partner in Kestrel Productions, Britain’s first independent television drama production company.³⁹ This necessitated all involved taking their leave of the BBC, though this was not problematic for MacTaggart, who for the past six years had worked for the Corporation on a series of short-term contracts and on a freelance basis.⁴⁰ MacTaggart took on an executive producer role, shared with Garnett, and also directed plays, including Dennis Potter’s compelling psychological portrait Moonlight on the Highway (1969).⁴¹

As well as a producer and director, MacTaggart was also a talented writer. He often wrote adaptations of novels or short stories for his own productions and contributed scripts to series such as Adam Adamant Lives! (1966-76) and Detective (1964-68). Following his stint with Kestrel, he returned to the BBC as a freelance writer and director in late 1969. The following year he gained his one feature film credit, directing All the Way Up, a comedy of social advancement based on David Turner’s stage play Semi-detached.

In the early-1970s MacTaggart directed a number of instalments of The Wednesday Play’s successor, Play for Today (1970-1984). Perhaps most notable of these were the eerie and unsettling Robin Redbreast (1970), and Orkney (1971), a trio of short plays set and filmed on the eponymous Scottish islands, where the hauntingly bleak scenery matched the lives depicted in the drama.⁴² MacTaggart’s continuing interest in Scotland was evident throughout his career. In 1968 he addressed a television seminar run by Scottish TV and in 1970 filmed sequences for an episode of Menace (1970-73) on the streets of his native Glasgow.⁴³

Scotch on the Rocks (1973) was a BBC Scotland serial adapted by MacTaggart from the novel by Andrew Osmond and future Home Secretary Douglas Hurd.⁴⁴ Set in the near future, the serial depicted Scottish nationalism, fuelled by North Sea oil wealth, lead to political unrest and insurrection. It was an incendiary subject and the Scottish National Party complained that they were portrayed as being involved in extreme left-wing agitation and political violence, which amounted to damaging propaganda against them. The BBC Programme Complaints Commission upheld the complaint, specifically criticising a scene of MacTaggart’s own invention.⁴⁵

The advancement of electronic effects in the early 1970s, notably the development of the Colour Separation Overlay (CSO) superimposition effect, allowed MacTaggart to expand his range of non-naturalistic techniques. This was apparent on his impressive Candide (1973), which he had adapted from Voltaire’s satirical novella.⁴⁶ His production was entirely studio-bound, with his protagonist’s globe-trotting adventures being largely realised by superimposing his characters against a variety of cartoon backdrops, and having Frank Finlay as Voltaire wander in front of them to narrate, and through the use of models and voiceover.

He made further good use of CSO for Alice Through the Looking Glass (1973), basing his artificial backdrops on the book’s original illustrations and using three cameras to achieve some of the composite shots.⁴⁷ The Stage and Television Today’s critic praised MacTaggart’s ‘imagination, understanding, technical skill’ and noted that ‘esoteric settings and productions techniques were employed not for their own sake, but to create an atmosphere of dreamlike fantasy’, enabling Alice to interact with a variety of imaginary characters.⁴⁸ The production was nominated for the Society of Film and Television Arts’ single play award and was entered for the Prix Italia.⁴⁹

MacTaggart died suddenly in May 1974, having just returned from Tobago where he was filming Robinson Crusoe for the BBC.⁵⁰ Aged 46, he was at the peak of his career, switching happily between writing, producing and directing. In a tribute broadcast by the BBC, his colleagues praised the easy affinity he had with his audience, his calm, unhurried temperament, and his technical brilliance.⁵¹ Just two months before his death he had been awarded the Society of Film and Television Arts’ Desmond Davis Award for outstanding creative contribution to television, and in February 1975 was posthumously a co-recipient of the Press Guild’s equivalent in recognition of his ‘technical adventure’.⁵² Shaun Sutton, then the BBC’s head of drama, wrote that MacTaggart:

was astonishingly good at everything. As a producer he had authority and taste; as a director he was a joy for he combined a marvellous technical knowledge with the ability to understand actors … As a writer he was pure professional, sure and uncomplicated … I and hundreds of others will miss his cheerfulness, his shrewd humour, his honesty. Perhaps the saddest thing of all is to think of the host of major projects he left undone … We are the poorer and drama is the poorer. We have lost one of our best friends.⁵³

In 1976, a retrospective of MacTaggart’s work was organised by the BBC in association with Granada Television and the Edinburgh International Film Festival. As part of this, John McGrath delivered a ‘James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture’ entitled ‘TV Drama: Case Against Naturalism’.⁵⁴ The following year, the Edinburgh International Television Festival began and the MacTaggart Lecture became an annual fixture, being given by leading figures in the industry, including Dennis Potter, Michael Grade, Verity Lambert and Greg Dyke. Although the lecture now has no connection with MacTaggart’s work, covering instead a broad canvas of television-related subjects, it has become the regular highlight of the festival and attracts much attention with media industries.

MacTaggart’s experimental work in the first half of the 1960s broke new ground in the presentation of television drama. His year of The Wednesday Play made drama into headline news and the spark of public debate. His further non-naturalistic work tested the bounds of television staging. Beyond his experimental work, MacTaggart was also the producer or director of numerous more conventional but polished and popular dramas. Though television drama now occupies near-exclusively naturalistic ground, suggesting that his legacy may be less than we might have hoped, MacTaggart’s career proved the scope of what television drama could achieve and originated some outstanding examples of the medium.

Oliver Wake has also written a different biographical piece on James MacTaggart for Screenonline.

1. Bob Franklin, Television Policy: The MacTaggart Lectures (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 7-8 and AW, ‘Mr James MacTaggart’, The Times, 30 May 1974, p. 18.
2. Franklin, Television Policy: The MacTaggart Lectures, p.8.
3. Further details of this programme unknown. The Stage and Television Today makes references to MacTaggart directing instalments on 2 and 30 April 1958.
4. Three Ring Circus, tx. 2 February 1961.
5. Anonymous, ‘Imagination Unleashed’, The Times, 3 February 1961, p.13.
6. Anthony Cookman, Jr, ‘The Critic on the Hearth’, The Listener, 9 February 1961, pp.280-281.
7. Kennedy Martin quoted in Lez Cooke, Troy Kennedy Martin, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 61.
8. Troy Kennedy Martin in his 1986 James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, entitled ‘‘Opening up the Fourth Front’: Micro Drama and the Rejection of Naturalism’, as reproduced in Franklin, Television Policy: The MacTaggart Lectures, pp. 105-112. The quote is from p.106.
9. Elwyn Jones, ‘Storyboard’, Radio Times, 20 July 1961, p.51.
10. Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (London: BFI, 2003), p.54.
11. Ibid. Storyboard: ‘The Middle Men’, tx. 11 August 1961.
12. Anonymous, ‘The Cross and the Arrow’, Radio Times, 20 January 1962, p.19.
13. Anonymous, ‘Graham Greene Hero in Kafka World’, The Times, 30 January 1962, p.13. Studio 4: ‘The Second Curtain’, tx. 29 January 1962.
14. Memo quoted in John Hill, ‘A “new drama for television”?: Diary of a Young Man’, in Laura Mulvey and Jamie Sexton (eds), Experimental British Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p.50.
15. Hill, pp. 50-51. Teletale: ‘Catherine’, tx. 24 January 1964.
16. MacTaggart interviewed by Marjorie Bilbow for ‘Writers are afraid of medium’s limitations’, The Stage and Television Today, 9 January 1964, p. 10. Italics as per the original.
17. Ibid.
18. The Sunday Night Play: ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, tx. 20 January 1963.
19. You Can’t Win Em All, BBC, tx. 2 February 1962. Corrigan Blake, six episodes, 1 May to 5 June 1963.
20. ‘Popular’ was Sydney Newman, writing in 1963, quoted in MK MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, ‘The BBC and the Birth of ‘The Wednesday Play’, 1962-66: institutional containment versus ‘agitational contemporaneity’’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 17, No. 3, 1997, pp. 367-381. ‘Sleaziness’ from Milton Shulman, ‘Behind the Scenes, Two Men Battle to Boss BBC Drama’, Evening Standard, 29 July 1964, p.4. For more contemporary comments on First Night, see Hill, p. 51.
21. Hill, p. 51.
22. Kennedy Martin, quoted in Hill, p. 48.
23. Hill, p. 51.
24. Diary of a Young Man, six episodes, 8 August to 12 September 1964.
25. MacTaggart quoted in Hill, p. 58.
26. MacTaggart in the Radio Times, quoted in Cooke, Troy Kennedy Martin, p. 96, note 40.
27. Memo from Newman to MacTaggart, quoted in Hill, pp. 60-61.
28. Hill, p. 61.
29. John Russell Taylor in The Listener, quoted in Hill, p. 55.
30. For a good account of the genesis of The Wednesday Play, see MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, ‘The BBC and the Birth of The Wednesday Play.
31. The Wednesday Play: ‘Dan, Dan the Charity Man’, tx. 3 February 1965.
32. The Wednesday Play: ‘And Did Those Feet?’, tx. 2 June 1965.
33. Newman in 1966, quoted in, amongst many others, MK MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, ‘The BBC and the Birth of The Wednesday Play, p. 374.
34. For more on The Wednesday Play as an intervention in public debate, see MK MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, ‘’Drama into ‘news’: strategies of intervention in The Wednesday Play‘, Screen, 38:3 Autumn 1997, pp. 247-259.
35. Garnett interviewed by MK MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, February 1997: www.world-productions.com/wp/content/reference/tony/tlectures_04.htm [accessed 3 February 2009].
36. The Wednesday Play: ‘Up the Junction’, tx. 3 November 1965.
37. Garnett interviewed by MK MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, February 1997.
38. The Wednesday Play: ‘The Boneyard’, tx. 5 January 1966; ‘The Portsmouth Defence’, tx. 30 March 1966; ‘Little Master Mind’, tx. 14 December 1966; ‘An Officer of the Court’, tx. 20 December 1967; ‘Drums Along the Avon’, tx. 24 May 1967.
39. For an account of Kestrel Productions’ short history, see John R Cook, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen Second edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 62-64.
40. JDS Haworth, ‘Young independents jealous of their own standards’, The Stage and Television Today, 1 February 1968, p. 10.
41. Exec prod from Anonymous, ‘LWT signs up drama group’, The Stage and Television Today, 18 January 1968, p. 9. Saturday Night Theatre: ‘Moonlight On The Highway’, tx. 12 April 1969.
42. Play for Today: ‘Robin Redbreast’, tx. 10 December 1970; ‘Orkney’, tx. 13 May 1971.
43. Anonymous, ‘STV seminar a big success’, The Stage and Television Today, 18 January 1968, p.10. Anon, ‘Filming for thriller in new series’, The Stage and Television Today, 2 July 1970, p.14. Menace: ‘Good Morning, Yesterday’, tx. 6 October 1970.
44. Scotch on the Rocks, five episodes, 11 May to 8 June 1973.
45. John Kerr, ‘TV serial ruled unfair to SNP’, The Guardian, 4 October 1973, p. 9.
46. Play of the Month: ‘Candide’, tx. 16 February 1972.
47. Alice Through the Looking Glass, tx. 25 December 1973.
48. Patrick Campbell, ‘The monster Christmas lucky dip’, The Stage and Television Today, 3 January 1974, p.10.
49. Anonymous, ‘BBC names two for Florence’, The Stage and Television Today, 22 August 1975, p. 13.
50. Play of the Month: ‘Robinson Crusoe’, tx. 29 December 1974.
51. In Vision: ‘A Tribute to James MacTaggart’, tx. 7 June 1974. Details on content of the tribute drawn from the summary of the programme on the BBC’s Infax database [accessed 27 October 2007, at which time a trial version was available for public access online].
52. Anonymous, ‘Princess presents film awards’, The Times, 7 March 1974, p.4 and Peter Fiddick, ‘Does Humphrey Burton [...]‘, The Guardian, 3 March 1975, p. 8.
    
53. Shaun Sutton in Anon, ‘James MacTaggart’, The Stage and Television Today, 6 June 1974, p.13.
54. This lecture is reproduced in Franklin, Television Policy: The MacTaggart Lectures, pp.35-44.

Plato and Hazel Blears do not often make it into the same sentence but they do share a common concern: from ancient Greece to the Salford Chipmunk, the arts have troubled the polis.

Admittedly Hazel Blears is not as extreme in her views as Plato, who sought to banish poets from his Republic for fear of their deleterious effect on the citizenry. Nonetheless Blears, speaking last year when still a Minister, expressed her worries about the corrosive effect of fictional accounts of politics and politicians on this country. Wondering why people might be deterred from participation in politics, she ruminated that one factor might be its portrayal on our TV screens. While Americans enjoy a tradition of uplifting political narratives from Mr Smith Goes to Washington to The West Wing, by contrast the British, she argued, are served with a diet of either the incompetent (Yes, Minister) or Machiavellian (House of Cards); two tendencies synthesized today in The Thick of It where clueless ministers are the playthings of conniving spin doctor Malcolm Tucker.

This Atlantic divide between American reverence and British cynicism is a commonly recognised one, although in truth both nations’ traditions of political fiction are more nuanced than this division suggests. However, the questions Blears raises are interesting and have been seized upon by a number other commentators. There clearly is a difference between the ethos emanating from the Bartlett White House and the sweary, headless chickens that inhabit DoSAC in The Thick of It. So does scabrous British political fiction pose a danger to democracy, as Blears and others have suggested?

In part the answer may be yes – and that’s the way we Brits like it. Our politicians are just that and nothing more: representatives to whom we lend our vote but not our total credulity (perhaps our relationship is made more simple because the Head of Government and the Head of state are not one and the same, as in the U.S.) If our depictions of them seem unduly negative, this comes from a positive place; the desire to deflate our rulers. Although ironically we can make a hero of House of Cards’s diabolical Chief Whip Frances Urquhart which might perhaps be read in terms of the British voter (think of the reaction of both Right and Left to Thatcher) yearning for a politician who ‘knows what s/he wants’.

If U.S. fiction consistently portrays the politician (more often the President actually) as hero, it is understandable why the British politician should look on in envy. But does the aura of liberal self-satisfaction that surrounds The West Wing really offer a preferable alternative?

Rather than dull our sensibilities, Britain’s more skeptical take on its corridors of power might prompt us to question the practice and purpose of politics in this country. Take The Thick of It’s Malcolm Tucker: fast becoming a national hero for his ingenious cussing (when will the BBC wise up and start selling those tea towels with Tucker’s Law embroidered on it?) but also held up as the sign of all that is rotten with our current system of government where politicians are in thrall to the spin doctor and, in any case, spin is all there is to politics.

But is it that clear cut? Look beyond the façade of pyrotechnic profanity and alarmingly bulging temples, and just how effective and in control is Tucker? If there is any power behind the throne in The Thick of It, ultimately it belongs to the media and its agenda. Whether this should be the case or whether the energy expended upon spin by Tucker and his colleagues is a worthwhile justification of their time or existence lies at the core of the drama. Witness what seems Tucker’s increasing steps towards a breakdown in the current series.

And what about the politicians themselves? Our real-life elected representatives have struggled in recent months to give a good account of themselves in light of recent events but I would venture that fictional accounts such as The Thick of It might be able to elicit a little understanding – even some sympathy, for the politician’s lot. In one memorable exchange during the first series, beleagured minister Hugh Abbott muses on how a trip to the toilet offers his only chance for ‘a bit of quality time’.

Glen: You’re late; and you look shit
Hugh: I know both of those things already. Margaret Thatcher used to survive on less that 4 hours sleep a night. How is that possible?
Glen: Monkey glands. She was mad, mad people have different…
Hugh: …and she lived above the shop of course, so she didn’t have to commute. I mean, God, London is so big – can’t we devolve some of it? So I could get just one decent night’s shut eye…
Glen: Well Hugh do yourself a favour, stay at the flat.
Hugh: I can’t. I promised to Kate…
Glen: I mean do you actually get to see the children?
Hugh: Glen, I don’t have time for that. All I do…I eat, I work, I shower – that’s it…occasionally I take a dump…just as a sort of treat. Really, it really is my treat; that’s what it has come to. Yeah, I sit there and I think, no I am not going to read the New Statesman, this time is just for me. This is quality time…just for me. Is that normal?
Glen: It’s sad.
Hugh: At least I’ve made something.

Holding public office is not an all-expenses-paid picnic in The Thick of It but a matter of endless drudgery, unbearable pressure and relentless scrutiny. It’s hard not to feel sorry for someone whose loo break is the highlight of their day.

So whilst we Brits might not emulate the optimism of The West Wing in our fictional accounts of politics this may be because we would rather examine than be immobilised by self satisfaction. Perversely, then for all its cynicism The Thick of It may have been able to do some work in directing our sympathies (or at least understanding) towards our politicians. If that work has been made harder it might be that politicians like Blears need to look closer to (their second) home rather than picking on Malcolm Tucker.

Although rarely discussed now, Michael Barry (1910-1988) had an important role in the development of British television drama. As a producer before and immediately after the Second World War and subsequently as the BBC’s first Head of Television Drama, he helped shape the new medium in its formative years.

After spells as a student of agriculture and an actor, Barry turned to theatre production, enjoying three successful years as the Croydon Repertory Theatre’s artistic producer. He was taken on as a producer by the BBC’s television service in 1938, just its third year of regular broadcasting, and reported to the modest facilities of its Alexandra Palace studios in North London.¹ As in radio, the BBC at that time did not recognise the independent role of director, so Barry’s work as producer also involved artistic aspects now more associated with directors.

In his first play, The Marvellous History of St Bernard (1938)², Barry experimented by varying camera lenses and playing with focus as part of a career-long quest to achieve a sense of ‘vitality’ on screen, which saw him pioneer new techniques and push standards³. An early success was his ‘charming’ reduced adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (1938).⁴ With pre-recording technology still decades away, these productions were transmitted live, with ‘repeats’ that involved performing the piece again. The rapid production rate of early television saw Barry produce a score of plays over the next fifteen months, a hectic schedule which encouraged Barry to favour plays already familiar from his own stage productions, despite his own concerns about their suitability for television.

After war service – six years leading a company of Royal Marines whilst receiving a retainer salary from the BBC – Barry returned to Britain in 1946, as the BBC’s television service was preparing to reopen. His initial lack of enthusiasm was dispelled upon reading The Silence of the Sea, a French novel published by the underground press in 1942. After dramatising the work, ‘I never again found myself bored by the process of story-telling on television,’ he later recalled.’⁵ The Silence of the Sea was chosen as a practice exercise prior to television’s resumption and then as the main evening programme on the night the service reopened.⁶ Its sympathetic portrait of a young German soldier billeted on a resentful French family was a brave choice given that hostilities with Germany had ended barely a year earlier. Recognising the limitation imposed on the visualisation of the drama by the archaic equipment, Barry made good use of sound, with the interior monologue of Kenneth More as the German soldier and various sound effects played into the live performance.

Barry produced two more war plays in 1946, both drawn from radio scripts: They Flew Through Sand, a fast-paced action story set in North Africa, and Adventure Story, which portrayed a young couple returning from the war and struggling to adapt to the banalities of peacetime life.⁷ Written by Charles Terrot, with whom Barry went on to have a productive creative partnership, Adventure Story was a complex production which stretched Barry’s talents. As he had done before the war, Barry improvised the numerous settings required within the tiny studio. With the use of shadows and small items of scenery (and, in one instance, stage hands throwing water), he employed the power of suggestion to provide the numerous locations that could not have been built in the studio. Sound effects, models and back projection were used to give what Barry called ‘a depth and vitality to a tiny setting’.⁸ The play was a success and was reproduced several times.

Barry broke new ground with I Want to be an Actor (1946), a script by journalist and radio producer Robert Barr which became television’s first dramatised documentary.⁹ It inspired Barry to write his own drama documentary about the history of medical practice, I Want to be a Doctor (1947), which was well regarded at the BBC: Cecil McGivern, the newly installed Television Programme Director, recognised it as ‘a sign-post to the way ahead for scripts of its kind’.¹⁰

Barry had an unhappy experience in directing for the cinema when he was invited to Pinewood to film Stop Press Girl (1949), a light fantasy about a girl whose presence interferes with machinery. Shooting with the new ‘Independent Frame’ method, which put the onus on pre-production planning, production-line mechanisation and speed, Barry felt he had allowed the mechanised technique to stifle the comedy. The Times complained that it moved ‘in a series of uneasy fits and starts’ and Barry called it ‘one of the industry’s least distinguished works’.¹¹

Back at the BBC, Barry found better fortune with The Passionate Pilgrim (1949), his own adaptation of Charles Terrot’s novel Miss Nightingale’s Ladies.¹² A form of historical documentary based on the true story of one of Florence Nightingale’s nurses in the Crimea, the play was lauded by the Daily Telegraph as ‘A triumphant production’, and by C. A. Lejeune, as ‘beautifully acted throughout, and produced by Michael Barry with courage, tenderness and a real sense of the medium as a nascent art’.¹³ Barry’s restaging of the play in 1953 was broadcast two days before the Queen’s coronation, for which sales of television sets rocketed, and so was many viewers’ first experience of television drama.

Written and produced by Barry, Promise of Tomorrow (1950) was a play about a trio aspiring to succeed in the theatre world.¹⁴ Barry was allowed the rare privilege of shooting brief film sequences to insert into the otherwise live transmission, depicting his characters travelling by train and road, including sequences at night, providing ‘the sort of locations where the reality of sodden coats and rain lashed windscreens provided verisimilitude’.¹⁵ C A Lejeune summarised the mixed reaction: ‘Some people were touched and charmed by it. Others gave it up in bewilderment and exasperation. But everybody talked about it.’¹⁶ Other Barry productions from this period included Karel and Josef Capek’s The Insect Play (1950), in which human society is parodied in the world of insects.¹⁷

His ambition growing, Barry adapted and produced Terence Rattigan’s Adventure Story (1950, not to be confused with the war play of the same name discussed above), a large-scale biography of Alexander the Great.¹⁸ He was allowed a two-hour timeslot and both of Alexandra Palace’s studios to stage the epic story. He noted later that the subject was probably ‘too large and remote to be encompassed dramatically’, but ‘the fascination lay within the attempt’.¹⁹ Barry chose to highlight ‘thought and action against amorphous backgrounds… and great care was taken to make every frame as perfect a composition as possible’.²⁰ After his popular earlier productions, Barry felt that The Insect Play and Adventure Story’s ‘visual and oral images … had gone further, in diverse ways, to stretch the illusion of space within the small screen’.²¹

In the summer of 1950 Barry received the offer of a job in American television with CBS, but despite the prospect of a substantially higher salary, he declined the offer, happy with the level of support and creative freedom at the BBC.²² He was excited by projects such as Shout Aloud Salvation (1951), which proved to be amongst his most successful productions.²³ Adapting the manuscript of Charles Terrot’s sprawling historical novel about the early days of the Salvation Army, Barry reduced the story to focus on two young women despatched to introduce the Salvation Army into a bleak northern town. It was another large-scale production, with 50 characters, a riot staged in the studio, a real Salvation Army band and brief film sequences shot. An opening sequence used narration over a montage of background sounds and both still and moving images, indicating the magpie approach employed by Barry, as he applied whichever techniques from radio and film best established his setting with the modest resources at his disposal.

Reaction to Shout Aloud Salvation was rapturous: the Evening Standard called it the ‘Most successful of original television plays’ and the Derby Evening Times voiced a consensus that it was ‘extraordinarily moving’.²⁴ The play’s conclusion was criticised, and Barry realised it had been over-ambitious and inadequately realised: it was amended for a new production five years later by George More O’Ferrall.

As Barry drafted Shout Aloud Salvation, the BBC advertised the new posts of Head of Documentary and Assistant Head of Drama, Television. Perhaps surprisingly, Barry applied for the former, as the latter was an unknown quantity at that time. However, he was called for an interview for the Drama post, and although Barry insisted the position was unsuitable, Director of Television George Barnes said Barry’s acceptance was important to television, and assured him that he would have a free hand, with Val Gielgud, Head of Drama over both radio and television, soon to return to his preferred province in radio. Indeed, radio and television separated in 1952 and Barry duly received the Head of Television Drama title. Talked around, Barry suggested ‘we try it for six months’.²⁵ He was to stay ten years.

In his new role, Barry prioritised attracting new writers to television and improving productions, impulses that had driven him since his early days as a producer.²⁶ He established the Drama Script Section, with a Script Supervisor under his direct control whose brief was to find new writing. Within a year the Script Supervisor reported ‘very encouraging’ statistics, including that 12 out of 107 dramas transmitted over the past twelve months had been new works written specially for television (against hardly any in the previous five years).²⁷ Under Barry’s leadership, this increased to 256 new works for television in the twelve months ending March 1960.²⁸ The post of staff writer was also created, the first filled by Nigel Kneale, whose three original Quatermass serials (1953, 1955, 1958-59) thrilled television audiences during the 1950s. Other writers included freelancer Iain MacCormick who provided a number of highly topical new plays throughout the decade. Other initiatives included the Television Writers’ Course, which had 700 applicants by February 1952, and numerous writing competitions.

Barry aimed to replace ‘dead wood’ with new producers from film and theatre.²⁹ New talents included Rudolph Cartier and Don Taylor, who went on to produce the type of vital work that Barry wanted to see. Cartier did much to expand television’s scope, with large-scale stories, but was only able to do so with the staunch support of Barry, who shared and encouraged his aims. Innovative producers, rapidly advancing technology and increased resources greatly improved production standards over Barry’s decade in charge.

Pushing his department’s technical progression, Barry was instrumental in establishing BBC television’s Experimental Group in 1956, the aim of which was to devise new means of televising conventional subjects. This led to the creation of the more specialised Langham Group in 1959, which pioneered experimental drama techniques. Prior to the Langham Group’s creation, Barry co-produced the experimental play The Sleeping Clergyman (1959) with one of the group’s founding members.³⁰ Although some suggested the Langham Group’s legacy was minimal, Barry felt quite the reverse, seeing it in 1961 as ‘a sort of underground movement, that’s affected just about every department of drama, in some way or another’. For Barry, ‘even those people who were most vociferous in their denials of its use, have now consciously or unconsciously been influenced by the Langham.’³¹ Barry remained a staunch supporter of experimentation in television, and thought that the BBC should lead it.³²

Barry was also a supporter of strong and provocative work, such as Nigel Kneale and Rudolph Cartier’s adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954). When the national outcry against it became clear, Barry defended it in a Panorama debate and refused to cancel the scheduled repeat performance. He also introduced the repeat performance, encouraging viewers to exercise their own judgement in choosing whether to watch.³³

Being head of department did not prevent Barry – who later said he ‘hated desk work’³⁴ – from maintaining an active presence in the studio. He produced occasional plays, such as The Man with a Load of Mischief, which he was pleased to produce for a second time in 1952, taking advantage of the greater resources of the BBC’s new Lime Grove studios, and the first ever production of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House in 1958.³⁵ The same year he commissioned and produced the new play Till Time Shall End to mark the 400th anniversary of the accession of Elizabeth I.³⁶ His production of Robert Ardrey’s documentary play The Shadow of Heroes (1959), about 1956’s Hungarian revolution, was particularly successful, with Barry praised for ‘his use of cameras, his presentation and the use he made of the crowd scenes’, which made for a ‘moving historical document’.³⁷

Plays were the primary form of drama for Barry, although he presided over the introduction of numerous popular series and serials (such as Dixon of Dock Green (1955-76), The Grove Family (1954-57) and Quatermass). As Don Taylor recalled, ‘under Michael Barry, the emphasis had been very clearly upon the production of television plays. The rest was a sideline, popular audience stuff, but not what the department was for. Michael Barry was a man of the theatre, and his values were the values of that milieu and that age’.³⁸ His drama policy was occasionally criticised, as The Stage and Television Today reported, as ‘living in the theatrical past’, as ‘being out of touch with the present-day idiom of TV thought’ and as ‘presenting plays with no appeal to modern minds’.³⁹ The criticism reflected his perceived lack of a popular touch and, despite his championing of new television writing, his department’s continued scheduling of theatrical or classically ‘worthy’ play series such as the unpopular Television World Theatre. The arrival of ITV in 1955, with its more populist programming, highlighted the gulf between BBC programming and the public’s taste, and the Corporation was slow to respond to its success.

Matters came to a head in September 1961, when Barry suddenly resigned his post. He maintained a gentlemanly discretion over his reasons, but according to Don Taylor:

Rumour and bar conversation had it that Michael had resigned – it had been a real resignation, not a polite sacking – because the sixth floor, the programme controllers and directors, had demanded of him a change of policy with regard to BBC Drama output that he could not accept. More series and serials were required, and Michael, who regarded himself as a plays man, was not prepared to preside over such a change.⁴⁰

Just two months later the Guild of Television Producers and Directors (the forerunner of BAFTA) recognised Barry’s achievements, giving him the Desmond David Award for services to television.⁴¹ Under Barry’s leadership, the Television Drama Department had expanded to the point that it produced over 220 hours of drama in 1961.⁴² As the Times argued, it was a period of ‘drive, organization and artistic skill’.⁴³ Innovative drama programming such as the play ‘cycles’ of Iain MacCormick, the serialisation of Shakespeare’s history plays as An Age of Kings (1960)⁴⁴, and the immensely popular detective series Maigret (1960-63) all originated under Barry.

Barry was admired both professionally and personally: Don Taylor thought he represented the ‘liberal humanist attitude to the production of drama’⁴⁵, and another producer, Peter Cotes, described him as ‘warm, generous and self-effacing’.⁴⁶ While department head, he was recognised in the industry press as ‘a highly sensitive and intelligent man with a strong sense of dedication, whose liberal-minded handling of his department is, among other things, an object-lesson in human relationships.’⁴⁷

After a year seconded as programme controller to the new Irish Television (Telefis Eireann) network – leaving earlier than the planned three years reportedly after ‘policy disagreements’⁴⁸- there was speculation that he would return to the BBC in London where a special appointment could be created for him. However, this proved unfounded and Barry left the staff of the Corporation.⁴⁹ He did however return to the BBC on a freelance basis, producing and directing a handful of dramas in the mid-1960s. He also wrote, for example dramatising Clemence Dane’s Broome Stages (1966), which he also produced and directed.⁵⁰

He also produced the epic The Wars of the Roses (1965), a trilogy of plays derived from Shakespeare’s histories which were performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company.⁵¹ With directors from the RSC and BBC, plays were recorded on the specially adapted stage of Stratford-upon-Avon’s Shakespeare Theatre using the BBC’s Outside Broadcast units. With eight cameras in use and a control gallery installed in the theatre’s circle bar for the five-week recording, the project was technically demanding. The BBC described it as the ‘biggest technical operation ever carried out by the BBC in the field of drama’.⁵² The production illustrates both Barry’s level of technical accomplishment and his continuing affinity with subjects drawn from the theatre. For Barry, ‘the real interest lies in the way television and a theatre enterprise of the first order have worked together to produce a television recording of what has taken place on the Strafford stage … to make it available to all the hundreds of thousands of people in this country and abroad who could not see it.’⁵³ The Stage and Television Today called it ‘a triumph of co-operation between television and the theatre’, arguing that:

the full potential of a television version was realised and everything of the stage version was preserved without distortion. The plays are not merely stage productions photographed but television productions in their own right. Television has made it possible to expand on the original production where the material was improved by it – the crowd and battle scenes, for example, could encompass more on television.⁵⁴

Away from television, in 1965 Barry was appointed literary adviser to provincial theatres by the Arts Council, of whose drama panel he had been a member, to promote new and neglected plays. In 1967 he briefly returned to theatre directing. He later became Professor of Drama for California’s Stanford University, before returning to Britain in 1972 to become the Principle of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He finally retired in 1978. He completed a memoir of his time as a television producer, entitled From the Palace to the Grove, which was published posthumously in 1992. Michael Barry died in 1988 at the age of 78.

In the time since he left his Head of Drama post it has become common for lazy critics to dismiss the BBC’s drama output under Barry as staid and stage-bound, particularly in comparison to the more populist fare of his self-aggrandising successor, Sydney Newman. Whilst Barry’s theatrical background was certainly reflected in his drama policy, this is an unfair simplification. Barry did much to encourage new television writing, to support ambitious producers in telling bold stories, and to improve the technical quality of the department’s output. In doing this Barry provided the firm foundations upon which Newman and his successors were able to build and further expand the scope and popularity of the medium. It is therefore a mistake to downplay Barry’s successes and ignore his contribution to the development of television drama, without which it would have remained in the nursery for much longer.

This is an expanded and revised version of an article originally published in This Way Up issue 22 in 2009.

1. Michael Barry, From the Palace to the Grove (London: Royal Television Society, 1992), p.9. This work is the main source for much of the first half of this article.
2. Derived from a manuscript, adapted by Henri Gheon. tx. BBC, 17 April 1938.
3. Barry, From the Palace to the Grove, p. 22.
4. Anonymous, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, The Times, 30 May 1938, p.21. Pride and Prejudice, tx. 22 May 1938
5. Barry, From the Palace to the Grove, p. 47.
6. tx. 7 June 1946.
7. They Flew Through Sand, tx. 14 June 1946. Adventure Story, tx. 29 Jul 1964.
8. Barry, From the Palace to the Grove, p. 63.
9. I Want to be an Actor, tx 6 October 1946.
10. Barry, From the Palace to the Grove, p.81. I Want to be a Doctor, tx. 20 May 1947. It was reproduced later the same year and again in 1950.
11. Anonymous, ‘New Films in London’, The Times, 6 June 1949, p.7 and Barry, From the Palace to the Grove, p.101.
12. The Passionate Pilgrim, tx. 7 August 1949.
13. Lejeune was writing in the Observer. Both reviews are quoted in Barry, From the Palace to the Grove, p.114.
14. Promise of Tomorrow, tx. 16 April 1950.
15. Barry, From the Palace to the Grove, p. 125.
16. Quoted in Ibid, p. 127.
17. Tx. 28 May 1950.
18. Tx. 30 July 1950.
19. Barry, From the Palace to the Grove, p. 140.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid, pp. 145-146.
22. Ibid, pp. 138-139.
23. Tx. 15 April 1951.
24. Quoted in Barry, From the Palace to the Grove, p. 179.
25. Ibid, p. 187.
26. Ibid, pp. 186-187.
27. Quoted in Robin Wade, Where the Difference Began (BBC internal document detailing history of the Drama Script Section, not formally published, 1975), p. 6.
28. Statistic quoted by Donald Wilson in his Introduction to Michael Barry’s The Television Playwright (London: Michael Joseph, 1960), p. 14.
29. Barry, From the Palace to the Grove, p. 187.
30. Tx. 11 January 1959.
31. Barry quote from Anonymous, ‘I Believe in the Freedom to Create’, The Stage and Television Today, 1 June 1961, p.10.
32. For more on the Langham Group see John Hill, ‘‘Creative in its own right’: the Langham Group and the search for a new television drama’, in Laura Mulvey and Jamie Sexton (editors), Experimental British Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
33. For an account of Nineteen Eighty-Four, see Jason Jacobs, The Intimate Screen: Early Television Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).
34. Quoted in Peter Cotes, ‘Mr Michael Barry’, The Times, 4 July 1988, p. unknown.
35. The Man with a Load of Mischief, tx. 14 December 1952. Heartbreak House, tx. 2 February 1958.
36. Anon, ‘On the Air’, The Stage, 4 December 1952, p.7 and Anon, ‘BBC-TV Play to Honour Elizabeth I’, The Stage, 20 November 1958, p.1. Till Time Shall End, tx. 30 November 1958.
37. Derek Hoddinott, ‘In Vision’, The Stage and Television Today, 30 July 1959, p.7. Sunday Night Theatre: Shadow of Heroes, tx. 19 July 1959.
38. Don Taylor, Days of Vision – Working with David Mercer: Television Drama Then and Now (London: Methuen, 1990), pp.99-100.
39. Anon, ‘BBC-tv shows the way it can be done’, The Stage and Television Today, 21 January 1960, p.11.
40. Taylor, Days of Vision, p. 99.
41. Anonymous, ‘Television Awards’, The Times, 29 November 1961, p.15.
42. Peter Black, ‘BBC Drama’ (letter), The Times, 14 October 1967, p.9.
43. Anonymous, ‘Mr Michael Barry’, The Times, 30 June 1988, p. unknown.
44. See Michael Brooke, ‘An Age of Kings’, Screenonline, http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/527213/.
45. Taylor, Days of Vision, p. 100.
46. Peter Cotes, ‘Mr Michael Barry’.
47. Anonymous, ‘BBC-tv shows the way it can be done’, The Stage and Television Today, 21 January 1960, p.11.
48. Anon, ‘Mr Michael Barry’.
49. This speculation in ‘What Happens to Barry Now at the BBC?’, The Stage and Television Today, 27 September 1962, p.9.
50. Broome Stages: BBC2, eight episodes, 25 October 1966 through 13 December 1966.
51. The Wars of the Roses: ‘Henry IV’ (BBC1, 8 April 1965), ‘Edward IV’ (BBC1, 15 April 1965), ‘Richard III’ (BBC1, 22 April 1965). The plays were repeated on BBC2 the following year.
52. Quoted in Anonymous, ‘BBC’s version of the Wars of the Roses’, The Stage and Television Today, 14 January 1965, p.10.
53. Barry, quoted in Ibid.
54. Anonymous, ‘Shakespeare from BBC’, The Stage and Television Today, 8 April 1965, p.10.

For anyone interested in British television drama or cinema, this second volume of Michael Palin’s diaries is just as engrossing as the first. Although some reviewers wonder if this book will be about ‘the less exciting stuff that happened in between’ the peak period of Monty Python covered in the first volume and the travel programmes that Palin embarks upon as this volume closes, it is all the more enjoyable and rewarding for its grounding in the reality of solo writing and the production process.¹

For visitors to this site, I recommend Palin’s detailed coverage of East of Ipswich (1987)², from gestation and writing through casting, production, post-production, critical reception and awards nominations (plus Palin’s unusually scathing comment that the London Film Festival were ‘Snobs’ to pass on it).³ I’ve adored East of Ipswich for many years, so I’m delighted to see Palin assert that ‘Nothing I’ve done gives me as much unqualified pleasure’ and that ‘I’ve never felt something done as close to the way I wanted it done as this’.⁴ Other material relevant to British television drama includes Palin’s script for Number 27 (1988)⁵ which starred the legendary Joyce Carey, working relationships with Tristram Powell, Charles Sturridge, Innes Lloyd and others, and television’s importance in British filmmaking: with fifteen films made a year and directors like Gavin Millar and Alan Clarke involved, ‘this shabbily-appointed fifth floor at TV Centre is where the British Film Industry exists’.⁶ Palin details the postponement of Sturridge’s Troubles (1988) after a week of filming with Palin in a major role, after which it was remounted without him.⁷

Of course, there is much more here than coverage of British television drama. There are later Python entries such as Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album (1980), Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (staged 1980) and Monty Python’s Meaning of Life (1983), plus vital British films either written by, co-written by or co-starring Palin, including Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985), The Missionary (1982), A Private Function (1984) and A Fish Called Wanda (1988), plus involvement with several others. Productions result in engaging actorly anecdotes and sometimes more detailed discussion of process than in the first volume, where we learned when and where key Python and Ripping Yarns material was written, but (for me at least, as I’m greedy) could have had more insight into how those ideas emerged. But then, Palin is still playful when describing Python’s impact: for instance, when acting to protect the ‘Lumberjack Song’ against unagreed exploitation, Palin finds it ‘silly’ to ‘pretend’ that this ‘bit of nonsense’ is ‘of great significance – a piece of modern culture’.⁸

The 1980s is a period of success and variety for Palin the writer, but with hard slog balanced by what Palin feels to be a sense of drift, claiming to be ‘a lazy writer’⁹, as he is worn down by struggles to finance projects such as American Friends (1991), and experiences moments of ‘typewriter fright’¹⁰ including a lovely moment of writerly self-deprecation in 1980 that could slot alongside Oscar Wilde or Jerome K Jerome: ‘Tried to write a startlingly new and original, brilliantly funny and thought-provoking piece for Python. Did this by staring out of the window, playing with paper clips and shutting my eyes for long periods.’¹¹ Despite the floating of new ideas (including John Cleese’s rumination on a new Python TV series in an impromptu meeting in Hull), Python here moves from a writing job to a business management task, a reference point for critics and fans, or a source of bemusement as real-life people behave more oddly than most Python inventions. The most important legacy is friendship amongst the Pythons, which shines through in collaborations and social meetings, recorded – despite memorable comments on Cleese’s financial motivations and lack of pop culture savvy – with warmth and generosity.

Palin the actor is also introspective, as he craves different kinds of roles – the cancellation of Troubles deprived him of this, but the next volume can pick up his chance to stretch himself as a dramatic actor in Alan Bleasdale’s superlative G.B.H. (1991)¹². Although a key face in hugely successful films in the 1980s, Palin (as the volume’s title suggests) settles on writing ‘little’ films as ‘more rewarding’ than ‘doing a “cameo” for some American film’¹³, an attitude which is strikingly different from that demonstrated by Eric Idle and John Cleese elsewhere in the diaries. Palin details several Hollywood films which he either rejected or did not get. Indeed, he sees A Fish Called Wanda as ‘one I shall do for money, rather than love’¹⁴, until its efficient organisation and inclusive production process engagingly fire his enthusiasm. The Wanda section is particularly lovely, and even disquiet with Kevin Kline’s intensity is drawn with characteristic affection or wit: ‘even when he’s done the most brilliantly inventive take he stands, shrugs, and looks like a man who’s just been given a tin of contaminated beef’¹⁵. In encounters with everyone from random bypassers to Spike Milligan and Peter Cook and other noted diarists such as Lindsay Anderson and Alan Bennett, Palin’s descriptive powers are increasingly sharp. He is also aware of post-Python comedy trends, including an amused experience of the BBC incorporating alternative comedians (whose early work Palin attends) into the establishment.

The dichotomy underpinning Palin’s career in this period is epitomised by his involvement in It’s a Royal Knockout, a celebrity-crammed event whose legend (or infamy) is such that Danny Baker, in a recent interview with Palin, admitted to having sometimes wondered whether it really happened.¹⁶ Having regretfully turned down a part in Chris Menges’ A World Apart (1988) because of the rehearsal dates for Wanda, Palin was instead committed – with other Wanda leads – to It’s a Royal Knockout (1987)¹⁷, and his reflection on it is pointed yet wittily observed: ‘it looks as if I shall be wearing huge mouse masks and falling into water rather than playing one of the most important figures in the struggle for South African liberation.’¹⁸

Palin often displays the diarist’s skill in combining observation and perspective, describing how he ‘saw through power’ during an airport incident¹⁹ , and shifting in consecutive entries from noting the loss of ‘magic’ experienced when meeting actors backstage in their underpants to describing Reagan’s America as ‘power without intelligence, the world bully’²⁰ . He shifts between charming, surreal moments – co-presenting Saturday Night Live with his octogenarian mother or observing security guards chasing cows away from Nigel Mansell’s helicopter – and an engagement with the world around him, with thoughts on privatisation, education, criticism of the Thatcher government’s assault on the unions, and comments on transport acted upon through involvement with Transport 2000. Most powerfully, he documents the impact of his sister’s struggles with depression, demonstrating sensitivity and unearthing a powerful universal truth: ‘I’ve a lot to learn about my family. It seems that they have to die before I can really find anything out.’²¹

Both volumes so far have been informative, entertaining, surprising and thoughtful, and are typically Palinesque: a superb achievement marked by understatement and skill.

Michael Palin, Halfway to Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009) is available now in hardback.

1. Alfred Hickling, The Guardian, 17 October 2009.
2. Screen Two:‘East of Ipswich’, tx. BBC2, 1 February 1987.
3. Palin, p. 435.
4. Palin, pp. 447, 425
5. BBC, 23 October 1988
6. Palin, p. 416
7. Adaptation of the novel by J.G. Farrell. A dispute over the cinematography escalated. The remounted version was ultimately transmitted on ITV in two parts, 1 and 8 May 1988.
8. Palin, p. 419
9. Palin, p. 435
10. Palin, p. 15
11. Palin, p. 17
12. 7 episodes, Channel 4, 6 June-18 July 1991.
13. Palin, p. 460
14. Palin, p. 474
15. Palin, p. 507
16. The Danny Baker Show, BBC Radio 5 Live, 21 November 2009.
17. BBC, 15 June 1987.
18. Palin, p. 488.
19. Palin, p. 418.
20. Palin, p. 417.
21. Palin, p. 545

There are many reasons why a television series may languish in obscurity, perhaps primarily because it simply does not merit any interest. However, this is not the case with ABC’s 1962 series Out of this World – British television’s first science fiction anthology – which suffers due to two factors independent of the programme itself. Only one episode is known to exist, leaving little scope for re-evaluation, and the series has long been overshadowed by its celebrated longer-running BBC cousin Out of the Unknown. However, Out of this World is not just worthy of attention as a curiosity, but as an original and successful series in its own right.

By 1962, ABC was already the most prolific of the ITV companies in the production of science fiction. In 1960-61 they had produced Malcolm Hulke and Eric Paice’s children’s serial Target Luna and its three Pathfinders (in Space, to Mars, to Venus) sequels. Many juvenile science fiction adventures in the same mould, such as City… and Secret Beneath the Sea, followed over the next few years. ABC also made adult science fiction, with its prestigious drama anthology Armchair Theatre producing a number of examples of the genre, both original teleplays and adaptations of on pre-existing works. The former, such as I Can Destroy the Sun (1958) and The Man Out There (1961), were the more interesting, often being inspired by contemporary subjects, usually the space race or cold war tensions. Clearly both the resources and, more importantly, the inclination, for adult science fiction were present at ABC, but never had they come together to form a regular series.

The initial idea for Out of this World came in 1961 from Irene Shubik, a story editor on Armchair Theatre. She presented her concept for an anthology of science fiction plays to ABC drama supervisor Sydney Newman. In her 1975 memoir, Shubik recalled that “Science fiction of the ‘adult’, as opposed to the ‘bug-eyed monster’, kind had always been a pet subject of mine”. Shubik believed that science fiction was responsible for some of ‘the most original and philosophical ideas to be found in fiction writing today’.¹ She wanted to present stories that weren’t mere pulp fiction but satirical and relevant to contemporary life. Newman was won over by the potential of the series. ‘Having given me the go-ahead,’ Shubik wrote, ‘I believe he began to worry that I would come up with a collection of metaphysical works by authors like Karel Capek, instead of “a popular adventure TV series”‘. Newman promptly assigned Shubik an assistant from the ABC accounts department who was a life-long science fiction fan. ‘Shubik’s bug-eyed monster’, as he became known, was to be a watchdog to ensure that the story editor didn’t deviate too far from popular taste.²

When it came to choosing material for the series, Shubik had not only her ‘Bug Eyed Monster’ for assistance but the good will of other experts in the field, such as Edward John Carnell. Carnell was the original editor of the New World science fiction magazine, amongst others, and a luminary of the fantasy fiction fraternity. His co-operation, suggestions and extensive list of contacts was invaluable. When it came to turning these stories into teleplays, Shubik was glad to discover that several top television dramatists were also science fiction aficionados. She was able to engage Clive Exton, who had made his name with ground-breaking Armchair Theatre scripts, to adapt stories for the series. Only too late did she discover that David Mercer, perhaps the most famous television writer in 1962, would also have been willing to lend his talents to the anthology. The series found a producer in the form of Leonard White, who had previously been responsible for Armchair Mystery Theatre, a summer replacement for its parent programme, as well as the first series of The Avengers and episodes of Inside Story and Police Surgeon. The new series took the same format as Armchair Theatre: one hour plays broken into three ‘acts’ by commercials, and was recorded by the same technical crews at ABC’s Teddington studios.

John Wyndham’s 1952 short story Dumb Martian was chosen to begin the series in June 1962. In the cautionary morality tale, a boorish spaceman purchases a mute Martian girl to be his ‘wife’ on a five-year assignment to a remote space station. However, after suffering much abuse, she proves not to be so ‘dumb’ and turns the tables on her ‘husband’. Dumb Martian was not ultimately transmitted as an Out of this World production, with Newman shrewdly poaching the play for Armchair Theatre as a teaser for the science fiction series which then started the following week. Boris Karloff appeared at the conclusion as the dinner-suited host inviting viewers to tune in to the new show. In this role, Karloff would top and tail each episode of Out of this World, introducing the story and trailing the following week’s play. It was an American practice, used to maintain an element of continuity across the otherwise unlinked plays of an anthology series, which White had previously employed on Armchair Mystery Theatre, with Donald Pleasance hosting. White felt the 75 year old Karloff brought an appropriate ‘touch of “other worldliness”‘.³

The series got off to a fine start at ten o’clock on Saturday 30 June with The Yellow Pill, based on a story by Rog Philips. The play tackled the thorny issues of reality and delusion. Under interrogation by a psychiatrist, an alleged murderer claims to be onboard a spaceship thirty years in the future, in which the doctor is his shipmate. The doctor urges him to take a yellow pill which will help him throw off the hallucination. But is he really mad or is there substance to his apparently lunatic ravings? Inevitably, it’s the latter, as the doctor eventually discovers when he takes the pill himself and finds himself back onboard ship. The play drew a large audience of eleven million and took eleventh place in the week’s ratings.⁴

Little Lost Robot, from an Isaac Asimov story, is the only episode of the series of which a recording exists, though it too was originally thought to have been lost. The telerecording was rediscovered in 1991 by TV enthusiast group Kaleidoscope at the Pinewood film store of Lumiere, who had taken possession of ABC’s archive. The play opens with the standard title sequence, a time-lapse montage of what might be microscopic organisms or plants twitching, growing and surging. It isn’t clear exactly what they are and this ambiguity, coupled with the plonking minimalistic piano and drum music, makes for an eerie opening. Then the plummy Karloff introduces us to Hyper-Base 7, a research facility in the vicinity of Saturn. There, in a moment of anger, Mr Black (played by ex-Pathfinder Gerald Flood) orders a comically lumbering petrol-pump-like robot to ‘get lost’. It does this in the most effective way it can, by hiding itself amongst twenty other identical robots. They are ‘Nestors’, highly advanced and very expensive. However, this one robot has a modified First Law, meaning that while it still should not hurt a human, it may not always take steps to prevent one from coming to harm. A small difference, but a potentially deadly one. If the robot is not found, all twenty-one must be destroyed, at great expense. Icy robot psychologist, and regular Asimov character, Dr Susan Calvin is called in to help.

Finally identified in the third act after a variety of tests, the ‘lost’ robot goes berserk and kills Black before being fried with gamma-rays. ‘I lured him to his death,’ weeps Calvin, referring to the robot. Nobody seems terribly bothered about Black. Calvin’s aide ponders: ‘Twenty robots… whirling through the universe with a sense of evil. Is this what we have achieved?’ Then Karloff leads into the credits with a suave: ‘and now for tonight’s cast.’

Asimov’s original story is much embellished by dramatist Leo Lehman, who fleshes out the characters with details such as station commander Kellner’s hobby of rose growing. However, he also has a penchant for melodramatic dialogue, and inserts the (entirely inappropriate, within the play’s own narrative logic) murder of Black to spice up the quieter ending of the original story. Little Lost Robot was the first of two instalments to be directed by Guy Verney, who had previously directed the Pathfinders serials.

Clive Exton’s first script for the series was Cold Equations, from the story by Tom Godwin. It starred Jane Asher and Peter Wyngarde in what was nearly a two-hander about a girl who, hoping to see her brother, stows away on a rocket rushing a life-saving serum to a frontier world. However, the rocket has only enough fuel for the calculated payload, and either the pilot must put her out into space to die or the rocket will crash. It was a gloomy play with the inevitability of Asher’s eventual expulsion into space clear from very early on.

Philip K Dick’s Impostor was the next short-story in line for dramatisation. It is set in a future where humanity lives under a vast protective dome due to the continuing nuclear war with the ‘Outspacers’. The fate of the world depends on top boffin Roger Carter, who is suddenly accused of being an impostor, a robot bomb sent by the enemy. He is put on trial, but how can he prove his innocence when surely the robot impostor would be programmed not to know that he is an impostor? In a bid to clear himself, he hunts down the other Carter who he believes to be the actual impostor, but who turns out to be the genuine article. Carter’s realisation that he is indeed the impostor is the bomb’s trigger, and the assassination plot is completed. It is a fascinating story, including all the themes of identity and authenticity that preoccupy the writer, within a gripping thriller plot. It remains the only PKD adaptation to have been produced for British television and it’s tragic that no recording exists. The story’s dramatist, the comedy-writer Terry Nation, would make his fortune over the next few years writing for the BBC’s Doctor Who⁵ and his scripts for the series betray the lasting influence of Imposter.

Immigrant, about the mysterious paradise planet Kimon, from which no one returns, was another Nation adaptation later in the series, this time from a Clifford D Simak story. More importantly, Nation also wrote the first of only two original scripts presented by the series. Botany Bay was a horrific tale with some effective plot twists and direction. The Times’s ‘Special Correspondent’ noted that the play was ‘Particularly disturbing’, noting how Verney’s direction derived ‘the maximum effect from keeping us – literally as well as metaphorically – very much in the dark’. Set in a sinister psychiatric institute, the story concerned criminal aliens transferring their minds into those of the inmates. The final twist reveals that the story is not in fact set on earth after all, nor is it the aliens who are the villains. The Special Correspondent found it as gloomy as previous episodes, ‘doubly so, in fact, since not only did we see intelligences – apparently evil intelligences – from another planet triumphing over ordinary people like you and me, but worse, by an ingenious twist at the end we were made to realise that we ourselves, the inhabitants of earth, were the sinister intruders on some simpler future world: that not only were the wrong ‘uns winning, but they were us after some further centuries of decadence.’⁶ As an original and intriguing teleplay in a series largely comprised of adaptations it is sad that no recording of this instalment survives.

Medicine Show, a story by Robert Moore Williams about two strange doctors who ask for seeds in exchange for their miracle cures, had a peculiar effect on some of its audience. Following transmission, Shubik received many letters from those wanting to take advantage of the extraterrestrial medicine men’s services.⁷ ‘Quite an enjoyable hour of space mysticism’, was the verdict of The Stage and Television Today⁸. Another play that stuck in Shubik’s mind was Pictures Don’t Lie, dramatised by Bruce Stewart from Katherine Maclean’s short story. After making first contact by radio, the arrival on earth of an alien vessel is awaited. As they come in to land at the arranged spot, the aliens report over the radio that their ship is sinking into marshy ground and that they are besieged by hideous creatures. Scale is the issue, the great difference in size between human and alien unknown to each party. The spaceship is microscopic.

A more light-hearted episode followed. Vanishing Act was an original play by Richard Waring which starred Maurice Denham as the aspiring conjurer Edgar Brocklebank, who comes across the rather too effective vanishing cabinet of the late ‘Great Vorg’. Divided We Fall was a serious tale reminiscent of the earlier Impostor, with its central dilemma revolving around the disputed existence of the synthetic people, the ‘Syns’. In 2033 the world’s greatest computer announces that the Syns are secretly working against humanity. But do the Syns, indistinguishable from humans, even exist? The Dark Star was dramatised from Denis Butler’s novel Ape of London and concerned a disease which initially gives its carriers superhuman strength and seems to choose its victims for hierarchical progression through society.

Target Generation was the second Clifford Simak story to be dramatised and Clive Exton’s second adaptation for the series. It was the story of a spaceship that has travelled for centuries in its journey to another world. As generations of the crew have lived and died, knowledge about the ship and its mission has been lost. Can the young crew make sense of the instructions that have been left for them and recognise the signal of the end of their journey? The series ended on a less serious, more satirical note, with The Tycoons, from the story by Arthur Sellings. Three aliens on earth are preparing a weapon to control humanity. They operate under the cover of a business producing animated dolls created using their advanced technology. But as the front-business prospers, the aliens’ original mission is neglected.

By the time it concluded, the series had proved a critical as a well as a ratings success. The Yorkshire Evening Post was impressed, preferring Out of this World to the BBC’s recent science fiction serials and admiring its ’shape, form, lucidity and sheer ingenuity’. Their critic, H F Hall, felt it was ‘the most accomplished thing of its kind that TV has yet produced’ and admired its ‘well-schemed scripting and disciplined production’.⁹ Meanwhile, Tony Gruner, writing in the Kinematograph Weekly, thought the series ‘the most intelligent and best written of its genre since Quatermass‘ and praised White for ‘providing rich production values from what might appear to have been a limited budget’.¹⁰ Even the Times’ ‘Special Correspondent’, who had complained that the series was ‘not for the most part even superficially cheery’, had found it entertaining. Although asserting that the genre existed largely to chill and divert, like a Gothic novel, he felt that the programme’s ‘general level of writing and direction has been encouragingly high’.¹¹ However, White’s favourite piece of feedback came from the comedian Michael Bentine in a telegram that read: ‘WONDERFUL SHOW OUT OF THIS WORLD PLEASE CONVEY JOYOUS CONGRATULATIONS FOR WONDERFUL ENTERTAINMENT AND KEEP SOME FOR YOURSELF’.¹²

Shubik’s contention that science fiction could, and should, have relevance to contemporary life and issues struck a chord with at least one critic. In the Sunday Times, Peter Laurie commended the series as an example of ‘what science fiction is good at: making us think about ourselves and our societies from the outside, making us realize that what we often assume is immutable is, in fact, only an adaptation to the very particular circumstances of our world. Soon, whether by technical development, or atomic war, or space travel, our civilisation is going to be faced with new problems on a vast scale. Science fiction is one way of preparing to deal with them.’¹³ It seemed the experiment of producing a science fiction anthology for adults, tackling serious issues, had paid off.

Out of this World was a product of its age and it benefited from it. It aired as the nation began to burn with what Harold Wilson would call the ‘white heat’ of the technological revolution a year later, but, crucially, as Shubik recalled, ‘before the moon landings made space seem not so far away after all’.¹⁴ Looking back in 2003, White recalled that the series was ‘a great pleasure to make, getting away from today and exploring the unrealities (or so we thought) of tomorrow. An opportunity for the suspension of disbelief even in the here-and-now ambience of television.’¹⁵ Despite its success, no second series followed. Perhaps the defection of Newman to become the BBC’s Head of Drama, arranged while Out of this World was transmitting and taking effect in 1963, was one reason for this. The format, however, did not die. Shubik joined Newman at the BBC and, in 1965, with a rush of programming required for the new BBC2, the pair created Out of the Unknown. With Shubik producing, the series took the same format as Out of this World, minus the Karloff host role. Out of the Unknown re-used dramatists (Terry Nation, Bruce Stewart, etc), sources (Asimov, Simak, etc) and even whole scripts (The Yellow Pill, Target Generation) from its predecessor. That series, however, is another story…

This is a revised and updated version of an article published in This Way Up issue 16 in 2005.

This article © Oliver Wake 2005 and 2009.

1. Irene Shubik, Play for Today: The Evolution of Television Drama Second Edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 36.
2. Ibid, p. xiii.
3. Leonard White, Armchair Theatre: The Lost Years (Tiverton: Kelly Publications, 2003), p. 72.
4. Ibid.
5. Nation invented the Daleks, who made their first appearance in the series’ fifth episode, first broadcast on 21 December 1963.
6. Anonymous, ‘Not Taking It Easy This Summer’, The Times, 4 August 1962, p. 10.
7. Shubik, Play for Today: the evolution of television drama, p. 38.
8. Anonymous, ‘ABC’s science fiction series provides… An enjoyable hour of space mysticism’, The Stage and Television Today, 9 August 1962, p. 9.
9. Quoted in White, Armchair Theatre, p. 78.
10. Ibid.
11. Anonymous, ‘Not Taking It Easy This Summer’.
12. White, Armchair Theatre, p. 79.
13. Quoted in Shubik, p. 37.
14. The most famous part of Wilson’s speech, given at the 1963 Labour party conference, is commonly quoted as referring to ‘the white heat of technology’ or ‘the white heat of technological revolution’, but the exact phraseology was a little different, though the meaning much the same, hence the careful use of quote marks above. Shubik quote from Shubik, p. 37.
15. White, p. 72.

The work of Nigel Kneale is held in high regard by television drama enthusiasts, and by those with an interest in the science fiction and horror genres especially. His scriptwriting work, spanning five decades, produced a number of prophetic, macabre and disturbing pieces that have lingered long in the minds of viewers. It was these productions which made Kneale’s reputation, yet he wrote a great deal more besides. It would be a shame to ignore Kneale’s work in the discipline that we could call, perhaps pretentiously, ‘straight’ or ‘serious’ drama, much of which is as powerful and worthy of discussion as his better known material. One of these dramas is Mrs Wickens in the Fall from 1957, a play which has received little attention despite the script having been published in a 1960 compendium of television plays. This article is an attempt to redress that imbalance slightly.

Mrs Wickens in the Fall was Kneale’s first original teleplay having resigned his position as a staff writer with the BBC’s Script Unit. It was also the author’s first original non-fantasy drama for television, his only other original works being the first two Quatermass serials and 1955’s ‘yeti’ mystery The Creature. The difference in style, form and subject from all his earlier pieces is interesting, denoting a conscious effort on Kneale’s part to attempt something fresh. It is not, however, the beginning of a new era for Kneale; he would provide a third Quatermass serial the following year and continue to refine his unique brand of science fiction over the next decade. As such, Mrs Wickens in the Fall is something of an oddity in the Nigel Kneale canon.

The Radio Times synopsis for the play gives the slightly inaccurate impression that the drama is about the sterility and absurdity of the ’special floating dimensions of the tourist’ and the culture shock experienced when the tourist steps outside those dimensions.¹ The first half of the play is indeed concerned with this, but only as a build-up to the greater issues of the second. The play is really about the aftermath of war, its brutal legacy and the difficulty of people who have never experienced war to understand the lives of those who have lived through it. According to Andy Murray’s 2006 biography of the writer, Kneale had been holidaying in France when he was ’struck by the lingering after-effects of World War II: the resentment towards former Nazis collaborators and the web of affiliations and hatred between the assorted nations of Europe.’²

To articulate these notions, Kneale places two ageing American tourists into a small French town still scarred by the German occupation of the Second World War. It is set in 1956, just a decade after the war ended. The tourists, Bob and Lyddie Wickens, encapsulate the ignorant parochial mindset that – rightly or wrongly – was thought to characterise post-war America. The Wickens’ one point of empathy with the French is the shared feeling of irrevocable loss, the couple’s son having been killed serving in Korea. This devastating grief is contrasted with the equal tragedy of a local boy, a casualty of war in a different manner. The orphan of a local girl and an occupying German soldier, he is unwanted by society and unloved by his remaining family.

Kneale’s script is unusual in its visual economy and use of language. With Kneale’s original material of the era we associate the innovative ‘televisual’ style of his usual collaborator, the producer/director Rudolph Cartier: a strong visual impact and ambitious use of filmed inserts. Mrs Wickens in the Fall uses no inserts at all, requires only four full sets, and calls for no special effects or fancy camerawork. This simplification makes for a more traditional television production than those that made Kneale’s name, though Donald Wilson, then head of the BBC’s Script Section, was quick to pre-empt any suggestions of crudity. In his brief introduction to the published script, he calls it a ‘completely non-theatrical play’, praises the author’s skill in invoking ‘the atmosphere of a French provincial town without the need for any “establishing” shots on film’, and recognises the drama as the result of ‘the complete combination of creative power and technical virtuosity’³.

The dialogue of the main characters also indicates a departure for Kneale. Previously, his main characters had been scientists and journalists speaking, for the most part, stuffy ‘BBC English’ in received pronunciation. Kneale’s occasional working class characters (as seen in the Quatermass serials) were rarely credible. In Mrs Wickens in the Fall, Bob and Lyddie, though perhaps classless, are not intellectual or articulate speakers. Kneale’s script however does indicate a compelling mode of speech which, through faltering and gabling, perfectly conveys the characters’ humble simplicity. Against convention, the script also allows the French characters to use their own language when talking amongst themselves. Kneale explains his intention:

Some of the dialogue in this play is in French. It is the story of an American woman paying her first visit to a foreign country, and meeting language and other barriers. So that the audience can share her viewpoint, strict realism is essential.

In the few scenes where characters speak only French, the meaning should be quite plain to an average audience… either through strongly expressed emotions, or by the routine familiarity of the action⁴

Wilson concurred with Kneale’s approach, calling it ‘one answer – the best in my opinion – to a recurrent problem. It is handled so skilfully that viewers without any knowledge of the language were never at a loss.’⁵ Indeed, this is true and the bonus is that the viewer should never feel patronised by the play, nor alienated from it.

Mrs Wickens in the Fall was transmitted under the Sunday-Night Theatre banner on 8 September 1957, running for approximately 90 minutes from 8.00 pm. The play was produced and directed (both roles were one under the title ‘producer’ in BBC drama at that time) by Michael Elliott, a noted stage director who had joined the BBC Drama Department in 1956 and had already tackled over twenty television plays. He would work with Kneale again in 1964 on The Crunch, the opening play for ATV’s Studio ’64, a strand which aimed to pair sympathetic writers and directors to craft a play from germination to transmission with complete artistic freedom. They came together at the BBC once more for Theatre 625’s acclaimed futuristic drama The Year of the Sex Olympics in 1968. Interviewed in 2000, Kneale recalled Elliott with affection and admiration, calling him a ‘brilliant director’.⁶

2

The play opens inside a French château, the camera lingering over a medieval tapestry of knights in battle. Swords and daggers are seen next, then an armoured helmet with a human hand exploring it. The hand belongs to Lyddie Wickens, ‘a mild-faced American woman in her early sixties. Her clothes are new but not expensive – a new vacation outfit, chosen in the staider stores of a mid-Western town’⁷. Her face is ‘pinched with what seems to be the effort of concentration’, then she ‘glances down towards her feet with a little sigh of acute discomfort’ – the first indications of both her unworldliness and the affliction which will provide the catalyst for the drama.

Next we are introduced to a group of tourists of various nationalities and Lyddie’s husband Bob: ‘Like her, he wears a new vacation outfit, a straw hat with a patterned band. A cheap but shiny American miniature camera is slung across his chest. In his hand is a guidebook’. While the tour guide moves the group along, the American couple stay behind as Lyddie struggles with the pain of her swollen feet. Surveying a suit of armour she comments: ‘I guess these French must have been awful warlike people’. They are both amazed at the idea of a man wearing the armour to fight. The brief exchange sets up the premise of the play and reveals why Kneale went to the trouble of giving such detailed descriptions of the initial setting and props. He has economically established the location’s long history of conflict, the protagonists’ ignorance of such matters and, more importantly, their inability to comprehend the nature of a society shaped by the ravages by war.

As the couple catch up with the tour, their feeling of alienation grows. They can’t understand the tour guide and having appealed to a pair of English women, Lyddie is confused by their familiarity with French, ‘hazy about where England is’. Soon Lyddie’s feet give out entirely and she collapses into an armchair, though the tour guide is more concerned with the antique furniture than her well-being. Bob is finally able to obtain his assistance by resorting to the universal language of money.

The next scene establishes the provincial hotel setting which is to provide the backdrop for the rest of the play. The veranda and foyer are ‘the most imposing parts of the hotel’ as ‘The Charcot family, who own it, consider that first impressions are not only all-important, but all that matter.’ The twelve-year-old François Charcot enters the hotel without the maid acknowledging him, indicating something of his standing. Cutting to the hotel interior, we meet Jean-Jacques Charcot, ‘a heavy-faced young man’, whose casual lounging at the reception desk with a radio to his ear indicates that he enjoys a somewhat higher standing than François. Cecile, another maid, is also present, who curses François, before being embraced by Jean-Jacques. The pair are interrupted by the arrival of a taxi and the entrance of Lyddie and Bob, the energetic young couple effectively juxtaposed with their decrepit elderly counterparts.

Jean-Jacques regards them ‘insolently’ as Bob attempts to solicit their aid. Fortunately Madame Charcot (‘a heavy, cold-eyed woman in her late fifties’) arrives and is able to arrange for an English-speaking physician to visit. Jean-Jacques dials for the doctor with ‘deliberate slowness’. Up in their room, the American couple begin to question their decision to take their once-in-a-lifetime holiday so far from home. Sobbing, Lyddie bemoans the attitude of the locals:

We came all this way to Europe – and what do we find? People we can’t talk to, we don’t understand! Bob – they don’t want us. They only want our money! … It’s true! You can feel it in the way they look at you! We’re kind of… We’re rich foreigners! Like we got all our pockets stuffed with money and we’re too stupid to know it’s worth anything!⁸

Bob too is concerned by their expenditure but reiterates their reasons for coming in a manner which, to Kneale’s credit, largely manages to avoid sound like the exposition that it is. As one of the liberating US soldiers in France in 1945, Don had developed an affinity for the country. Attempting to share his enthusiasm upon his return home, he made his parents agree to a family holiday there one day. The trip was postponed and Don went to fight in Korea, where he was killed. Now they are making the trip as a pilgrimage to their son’s memory. ‘That must have been a happy time’, Lyddie says, ‘I like to think of Don here then’.

Bob is ‘forcing it’ as he asserts: ‘We’re having good times, like he knew we would. Seeing places we only read about in books… Historic things, artistic. An experience we’re going to treasure till-’. He is stopped by Lyddie, who recognises that cameras and guidebooks are no substitute for their son’s enthusiasm and empathy. The sensitive edge of Kneale’s pen is at its most evident here and we begin to see the Wickenses as tragic characters.

The doctor duly arrives and orders that Lyddie must rest her feet for several days. The couple are horrified at the prospect of dropping out of their tour which is due to move to yet another town the following day. Although Bob stubbornly tries to discredit the doctor’s advice (“If only we had an American doctor!”), Lyddie accepts it regretfully, bemoaning: ‘We’re too old! … Too old in our bodies and too old in our minds. In every way we left it too late!’

With the departure of the tour group the next morning, Bob and Lyddie find themselves stranded, waiting for a returning bus to take them back to Paris. While his wife rests, Bob ventures out to revisit the town’s modest attractions. Having tired of bed rest by lunch time, Lyddie heads towards the lobby, interrupting a confrontation between Jean-Jacques and François, and meeting the gallant local postman. It is here that she begins to observe the real life of the location around her, rather than the sterile tourist version. On Bob’s return she is able to tell him that she has enjoyed:

Just watching people… the French people. Don was so right. They’re full of … character, he said. You’ve just got to sit and let them go by. They’re so amusing. … But you don’t really see them properly till you stop hurrying around – I’ve just been realising that. I guess it’s what’s wrong with these tours – they keep you on the move. They tell you what to look at all the time – castles and places that nobody lives in and you can’t really imagine that folk ever did.⁹

At lunch the couple observe a disabled elderly man whose method of eating is comic. Later Lyddie is shocked to learn that he was a member of the Resistance, maimed while committing sabotage. Mme Charcot explains: ‘You [do] not understand – you are Americans. Here we know wars. They do not end clean. They leave things crawling about’. Imagining her lost son in the man’s place, Lyddie cannot accept Mme Charcot’s suggestion that it would have been ‘better if he had died.’ Hysterically she asserts to Bob: ‘I’d have wanted him back… even like that, all twisted”. Yet this thought is even more troubling to her, and in a whisper recognises that Don ‘couldn’t have borne it’. Lyddie only now begins to understand the full horror of war, recognising that the outcome for some is not an extreme of either life or death, but a middle ground of prolonged suffering.

That afternoon, Lyddie witnesses Françoise being pelted with stones by a gang of local children as he returns from school. On entering the hotel he faces hostility from the two elder Charcots and a slap from Jean-Jacques. Françoise disappears to the sanctuary of his small attic bedroom. Later Lyddie watches as Jean-Jacques drags Françoise downstairs and, under Mme Charcot’s watchful eye, into the back room for a private confrontation. Incensed at Francois’ treatment, Lyddie bursts into the Charcots’ living room, where the family is gathered. She questions their attitude to the boy and is met by the anger of Jean-Jacques, who calls Francois ‘a little Nazi, full of evil and savagery’, and scoffs at the idea that Françoise even has any parents. Jean-Jacques comes close to striking Lyddie, and forces her from the room with a tirade:

You don’t understand… But that doesn’t stop you interfering! You – you’re like all your people! Americans! You can blunder about the world to put it right – that means to make it the way that suits you-!… You want a world where everybody drinks Coca Cola! So they can lick your boots better! The great American way of life! But the people know you – they’re going to drive you out! Out of Europe! Out of everywhere on earth!¹⁰

Reflecting the hysterical preoccupations of its period, Lyddie accuses him of being a communist, only for Jean-Jacques to proudly to assert that indeed he is, ‘with a twisted amusement at the effect’. Overcome, Lyddie flees to the hotel foyer. Mme Charcot wishes to offer Lyddie an explanation, and takes her to a nearby side street which contains a memorial to the Resistance fighters who died there. Lyddie is puzzled that she places flowers despite having never known either of the men named. On their return, Mme Charcot relates her story.

German soldiers had been billeted in the Charcots’ hotel during the occupation, one of whom fell in love with their nineteen-year-old daughter Nicole. When the Germans retreated, Nicole was left pregnant and despised by the locals for her collaboration. Bitterly Mme Charcot recalls how after the liberation her daughter and other similar women had their heads shaved and were whipped in the streets. The fifteen-year-old Jean-Jacques was made to watch, and shamed. Records indicate that the soldier died later. ‘I hope so!’ says Mme Charcot. She goes on:

When her baby was born … she was in the hospital. Maybe they did not look after her as they should have done. Anyway, she died … You think they would have destroyed the child! Perhaps they tried, but he had the strength of his … kind! … We gave him a good French name, but Françoise is like the father. … Madame, I think we have done enough. We have clothed him and fed him and raised him – … We have done our part. You cannot ask us to love him.¹¹

Later, Lyddie relates the incidents of the day to Bob, who is more interested in his wife’s treatment than Françoise’s predicament. He rushes downstairs to confront Jean-Jacques, but is pacified by an apology from Mme Charcot. Meanwhile, Lyddie is attempting to talk with Françoise in her room. Despite the fact that neither speaks the other’s language, the usually meek Françoise is able to convey his hatred for Jean-Jacques. They manage a basic form of communication, and Lyddie asks him if he would like to go to America. She shows him a picture of Don and her treasured possession, a pendant he had given her. On his return Bob is initially dismissive of Françoise but soon softens, giving the child chocolate.

Lyddie has been deeply affected by the plight of the young boy and is beginning to see him as a potential surrogate son. That night she wakes Bob to suggest that, since Françoise was so unwanted, they could take him back home with them. Bob is shocked and tries to dissuade his wife but, imagining it will be impossible anyway, suggests that the next day they investigate the legal position. The next scene sees them doing just that and they are indeed told that such an adoption would be impossible. However, Bourget, the official responsible, probes into the specifics of the situation, and realises he is already familiar with the case. He points out that legally nothing can be done for Françoise because he is not technically a neglected child, but comments:

I have seen that poor hated creature in the streets, and I have wondered: what shall he become? A thief? A murderer? A guard in some concentration camp of the future, taking revenge on the society that has … not neglected him? Or, if he is a strong enough, a good citizen…?¹²

Bob, previously only humouring his wife, comes to appreciate the importance of their intervention in Françoise’s life. The sympathetic Bourget is able to offer an alternative to adoption: with the Charcots’ consent it would be possible for them to take Françoise away for ‘A long vacation’. The pair return to the hotel in the hope of securing the necessary permission. With her new sense of purpose, Lyddie finds that her feet no longer trouble her, implying a psychosomatic link between her emotional emptiness and her pain.

Mme Charcot is understandably surprised when Lyddie makes her proposal but agrees to discuss it with her family. At the meeting, with Bob and Lyddie in attendance, it does not take long for an arrangement to be made. The Charcots are happy to be rid of Françoise and Mme Charcot specifies that he should never return. However, Jean-Jacques remains cynical about the Americans’ intentions, and attempts to discourage them by displaying some of Françoise’s few possessions. In a cardboard box he has kept relics of the father he never knew: the remains of his army tunic, a ‘battered jackboot’ and a bayonet. The assertion that Françoise had killed a dog with the bayonet shocks Lyddie, though she recognises the behaviour to be indicative of his mistreatment, not of the evil nature that Jean-Jacques suggests.

Next Jean-Jacques pulls out an old newspaper depicting his terrified, shaven-headed sister. The same picture is on a large poster which displays the legend ‘Collaborateuse’ and ‘Votez Communiste!’ Lyddie is unswayed, realising that it was Jean-Jacques who had initially hoarded the items while Françoise was a baby. Jean-Jacques’ final trick is to produce Lyddie’s pendant, stolen by Françoise earlier that day. Françoise denies taking it but, as a mother, Lyddie ‘knows the sound of a child’s lying’. Bob is unimpressed but, before he can move to leave, Françoise snatches up the pendant, along with the other items, and flees.

Lyddie catches up with him in his bare attic room, decorated only with the hastily replaced mementos of his parents. On the defensive and without time to barricade the door, Françoise warns Lyddie off with the bayonet. Surveying the scene, she is moved to see that Françoise has pinned her pendant around the neck of his mother’s image on the poster. ‘So these are your folks’, she says, sitting and abandoning her walking stick. Cautioning the concerned Bob to keep away, Lyddie is able to gain the boy’s confidence. Finding Françoise’s battered suitcase, she packs up his belongings with care, recognising that the items have a similar value to Françoise as her pendant has to her. Then she allows him to put the pendant into the suitcase along with the poster. Lyddie is relieved when he finally sheathes the bayonet and adds that too to the suitcase. ‘Let’s take them home…’ she says and they exit. The final shot is of an abandoned newspaper depicting Françoise’s mother, with Lyddie’s discarded walking stick lying beside it.

It’s a sudden ending, but the point is made. Lyddie’s motherly instinct wins through and her actions, inspired by her new knowledge, redeem her for her earlier ignorance. In adopting Françoise, and treating his shabby mementos with respect while letting him keep her own, she has recognised that, although important, the past should not be allowed to ruin the present and that new life must be embraced as much as the dead are lamented. By leaving her stick behind, she confirms the psychosomatic link to her grief and indicates that Françoise’s adoption will allow her to move on from dwelling on her loss.

3

The critical reception to the play was decidedly mixed. Maurice Richardson in The Observer argued that ‘though very uneven’ the drama was ‘much the most interesting play of the week.’¹³ The Times on the other hand was distinctly unimpressed:

It was with disappointment that one began to realize halfway through Mrs. Wickens in the Fall that the sentimental journey was to receive sentimental treatment. Mr. Nigel Kneale’s television play, presented last night by the B.B.C., declined progressively from a large authentic situation to a trivially artificial conclusion.¹⁴

The unnamed critic goes on to complement the ‘beautifully observed’ American tourists, but finds them ‘betrayed’ by ’so stereotypical an ending’. J. C. Trewin, The Listener’s television critic, was equally unhappy. Having expected ‘a very quiet autumnal comedy, wavering on a hair-line of pathos’, he found the drama ‘a quite implausible anecdote’. Echoing the questions of the character Bourget, Trewin ‘kept wondering about the next chapter. The real play was untouched: the child – what would he become? A modern Ibsen would have begun five years farther on: Mr. Kneale was content to be a prologue.’¹⁵

Writing for the Daily Mail, Philip Purser gave a largely positive review, calling Kneale’s script ‘a superb and touching piece of writing”. Although asserting: ‘my only reservations of any kind are with its rather deliberate lesson’, he also criticised the forced and melodramatic’ climax and the ‘histrionic’ acting of the Charcot family.¹⁶ More positive was the Daily Mirror’s Raymond Bowers, who wrote that the play was ‘one of those rare surprises – a thoroughly sad story battling through to a heart-warming finish without any corny touches … I have seldom felt happier about a happy ending to an unhappy situation than author Nigel Kneale made me feel last night.’ He also reported that the scene in which Jean-Jacques attempts to discredit Françoise in front of Lyddie with his box of possessions was ‘one of the best I have seen on TV’.¹⁷

The critics were universally impressed by Natalie Lynn and MacDonald Parke as the American couple. Purser felt they gave ‘matchless performances’; The Times thought the characters were ‘finely played’ and Trewin called Lynn ‘a good actress’, whilst Parke was ‘precisely right’ as Bob.¹⁸ Kneale himself was apparently less impressed with Lynn, recalling her later as ‘a very tough lady… who was not going to be told what to do’. He recalled Lynn pretending to go along with the director but ‘when the live transmission was about to go out, she came over to me and she said ‘now tonight I am gonna do it my way!’ And my God, she did! The less said about that the better…’¹⁹

With no extant recording, it is now impossible to review the play as performed. However, I would like to give a few further thoughts based on the published script. Kneale’s characters are, by and large, excellent. The central couple are well drawn and, although by necessity sudden, Lyddie’s emotional involvement with the Charcots is moving. However, Bob, the more reticent of the American couple, remains largely sidelined. As the title indicates, the story is very much Lyddie’s, but a little more detail about Bob would have been welcome. Does he, for example, carry his own memento of his lost son?

The other tourists we briefly meet are stereotypes: prim and prudish English women, the polite Indian, etc. They exist merely to flesh out the backdrop and provide a contrast to the American protagonists. They are not intended to be characters in their own right, so perhaps Kneale’s use of stereotypes can be forgiven. Jean-Jacques is a little one dimensional, very much the stereotypical fanatical young communist. It is also easy to wonder whether, having housed and fed him for twelve years, the Charcots could really care so little for François. But, of course, that’s the point of the play. The characters live in a different world from ourselves. We haven’t lived through what they have and we can’t judge them by our normal moral standards. On this level the play is a success. It confronts us with a situation which is alien to us, but which was all too real for some at the time of transmission, and worthy of dramatic exploration. It also has some relevance today, with Jean-Jacques’s views of Americans as ignorant and empirical as prevalent now as then.

As The Times’ critic noted, the play is sentimental, but with such a delicate and sensitive storyline, it is hard to imagine how it could have been otherwise and still engage an audience, and without resorting to the documentary style which was then not yet fashionable in television drama. Equally, I have some sympathy with Trewin’s comment regarding the limitations Kneale placed on his own narrative. There is enough back-story and scope for future drama to sustain several plays. I can’t help imagining how Kneale could have developed his play in the style of Iain McCormack’s popular 1954 ‘cycle’ of teleplays The Promised Years, which began in wartime Italy, then followed its various characters into the Korean war and the Berlin Airlift, before returning to the original location to explore the aftermath of the earlier events. It’s intriguing to imagine what could have been if Mrs Wickens in the Fall had been conceived as the second in such a cycle, which could begin concentrating on Françoise’s mother and the child’s birth, then later depict his acclimatisation to America, before finally returning him to France as an adult to effect some form of closure with his family.

In 1958, the script of Mrs Wickens in the Fall was purchased by American television network ABC and produced as part of their sponsored drama slot The United States Steel Hour. Lois Jacoby significantly reduced Kneale’s script to make it run less than hour and was credited as ‘writer’, with Kneale receiving a ‘story by’ credit. It was retiled The Littlest Enemy. It was directed by Don Richardson and starred Mary Astor as Lyddie, with Frank Conroy as Bob. Kneale with disgusted with the way his script was treated, telling his biographer how he felt at the time: ‘to be treated to the humiliation of having your play ripped to bits, and practically thrown in the waste paper basket, in order to get sponsorship from some probably now bankrupt company, United States Steel: yuck, yuck, yuck! It as enough to put you right off America.’²⁰

But to return finally to the play as Kneale wrote it. The original script is both fascinating and highly effective. It is imperfect, but remains an intriguing oddity, and worthy of continued interest, amongst the body of Kneale’s better-known television work.²¹

This article © Oliver Wake 2006 and 2009

1. Anonymous, ‘Mrs Wickens in the Fall, Radio Times, 6 September 1957, p. 11.
2. Andy Murray, Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale (London: Headpress, 2006), p. 60.
3. Donald Wilson, in Michael Barry (editor), The Television Playwright (London: Michael Joseph Ltd, 1960), p. 150.
4. Barry, The Television Playwright, p. 148.
5. Wilson, in ibid, p. 150.
6. Nigel Kneale interviewed by Julian Petley at the National Film Theatre, London, 14 March 2000.
7. Nigel Kneale, Mrs Wickens in the Fall, reproduced in Barry, The Television Playwright, p. 151. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent quotations related to the script come from this script. I have indicated page references only where there is a substantial quotation.
8. Ibid, pp. 160-161.
9. Ibid, p. 174.
10. Ibid, pp. 184-185.
11. Ibid, pp. 188-189.
12. Ibid, p. 200.
13. Maurice Richardson, ‘Mother Television’, The Observer, 15 September 1957, p. 12.
14. Anonymous, ‘B.B.C. Television’, The Times, 9 September 1957, p. 3.
15. J. C. Trewin, ‘The Critic on the Hearth’, The Listener, 12 September 1957, page unknown.
16. Philip Purser, ‘Teleview’, Daily Mail, 9 September 1957, p. 10.
17. Raymond Bowers, ‘A right happy ending…’, Daily Mirror, 9 September 1957, p. 16.
18. See earlier citations for Purser, Anonymous (Times) and Trewin.
19. Kneale, in Murray, pp. 60-61.
20. Ibid, p. 66.
21. This is a slightly amended and updated version of an article that was written for the internet in 2006.

Essay by John Wheatcroft

Political drama which carries a left-wing punch can usually expect to find a few dissenters among the majority of journalists – or at least their employers – for whom such views are anathema; it’s easy to review the politics rather than the art. It’s a huge testimony to Alan Plater’s skill as a dramatist that A Very British Coup was received with equal acclaim by commentators from every shade of the political spectrum. Plater believes that the right-wing press can sometimes be more generous than the left, so long as they understand that no attempt is being made to convert them.¹

The three-part Channel 4 dramatisation² of Chris Mullin’s 1982 novel of the same name, A Very British Coup is about the election of a genuinely socialist government, headed by former steel worker Harry Perkins (Ray McAnally). The drama is hardly a call to arms to vote Labour, because, as Plater points out, no government has ever pursued such an agenda.³ However, Perkins proves to be a different kettle of fish, as even his opponents such as Secret Service head Sir Percy Browne (Alan MacNaughton) have to admit, and he will not be deflected. Perkins continues on his socialist path with something as close to total integrity as politics allows. This makes A Very British Coup quite different from many left-leaning dramas, as Mark Lawson remarked: ‘Political drama on television tends to pursue the view that Labour leaders willingly surrender their beliefs in power. A Very British Coup is about something darker, the theft of good intentions.’⁴

Plater sugars the pill by employing the lightest of touches. Like Toto Le Héros, (1991), the Belgian black comedy in which an old man tries to destroy his childhood enemy, A Very British Coup is a downbeat story told in an upbeat fashion. Director Mick Jackson observed: ‘The joy of working with Alan Plater is that you can make a drama about something very serious and not appear to be.’⁵ Jackson’s role in creating this mood should not be underestimated. The first 20 minutes of A Very British Coup is a giddy roller-coast ride. Perkins is elected to massive popular acclaim and the establishment looks on with growing concern. Jackson cuts crisply between the euphoria of crowd scenes, such as Harry walking from Buckingham Palace to Downing Street carrying his Sheffield Wednesday bag, to the interiors where a handful of bureaucrats are already plotting.

All this comes to a sudden halt when Harry arrives at 10 Downing Street to meet his huge staff. From here the pace slows as the new Prime Minister has to take stock. The election-winning euphoria is over. As Plater put it in interview, ‘The sudden change of tempo shows us that this is where the hard work has to begin’.⁶ The mood of reflection continues as Perkins goes into the Cabinet room. Plater’s writing reflects Perkins’ personality brilliantly. “You can almost touch the history,” he says, as most of us might. But then he adds: “And there’s the odd whiff of betrayal, we must do something about that.”

Jackson, director of the BBC’s nuclear holocaust drama Threads (1984), has a background in documentaries, including the corporation’s long-running science series, Horizon, for which he directed The Double Helix (1987), a drama about the discovery of DNA’s structure. Plater says that Jackson was very good at conveying information visually – such as through the shots of banks of computers showing stock markets falling rapidly – and he observes that you see a lot of these techniques used routinely now in news and current affairs reporting.⁷

Analyse any brief section of A Very British Coup, and you will be struck by how much ground it seems to cover, and how much it tells you. When Perkins gives his speech on television in which he says he is going to call an election, a soldier’s epaulette at the front of the screen goes in and out of focus, presaging the likely military intervention to come. Nancy Banks Smith picked up on this, commenting: “There’s hardly a shot which does not show two things at once, rubbing them together like a spark.”. The drama assumes, she says, the ‘quick televisual mind’ with which Alan Plater always credits his audience.⁸ Plater says: ‘I take the view that the audience is as bright as I am. Armando Iannucci said that there is too much television these days made by people with degrees, creating programmes they think are suitable for people who do not have degrees. Television viewers have seen hundreds of films. They have an instinctive understanding of the grammar of movie-making. When Harry Perkins whistles the theme music [Mozart] while peeing we know that this is an educated man as well as a steel worker, and the viewers will pick that up.’⁹

A Very British Coup starts with a petrol bomb exploding. This image, together with Harry Perkins’ neo-biblical voiceover explaining the chaos into which the UK has descended, is tougher than the opening of Chris Mullin’s novel. It has to be, because the political landscape had changed in the six years between the book’s publication and the first screening of Plater’s work; the scene has to be set in such a way that public disaffection could make a left-wing government possible. In the late 1980s, that wasn’t the case. It really looked as if Thatcherism could be around for ever.¹⁰ However, as Mullin remarks in the preface to the 2006 edition of his novel, the proposition was ‘not as fanciful as it now seems…. [in 1980, when he conceived the idea]…there was a real possibility that the Labour Party would be led by Tony Benn’.¹¹ Pre-Falklands, and with rapidly rising unemployment, Thatcher seemed to be vulnerable.

Plater’s ending is a long way removed from Mullin, too. In the novel, the cabinet’s token ‘moderate’, Wainwright, becomes PM and Perkins eventually returns, as a broken man, to the Commons. In the TV drama, Perkins has called an election and the viewer can infer from the overhead drone of helicopters that the military is poised to oust Perkins if, as seems likely, he wins. The final draft of Plater’s script makes no mention of a chilling addition to the screen version: a BBC newsreader’s voiceover which puts the constitutional crisis second on the news behind an earthquake in Santiago.¹² It prompted one of Plater’s admirers and regular correspondents to write to him saying: ‘How did you get away with it?’¹³

In fact, Plater admits that there was much debate about the ending, and thinks that the newsreader addition, with its reference to Chile, might actually have been Jackson’s work. It can hardly be a coincidence that the country chosen for the earthquake had been the subject of a vicious military coup in 1973. For left wingers, Chile was a cause célebre. Plater describes the nation’s name as a ‘loaded word’, one of several in A Very British Coup. “Another example is where Perkins meets his team at no. 10 and says he is looking forward to meeting them collectively, the sort of word which the establishment Apparatchniks will hate,” he says. One of Plater’s friends was moved to write: ‘Isn’t it about time you became a full-time writer/script editor of the Labour Party?…that dry irresistible wit of yours would destroy Margaret Thatcher overnight?”¹⁴

A rare dissenting voice among the critics came from The Times in whose correspondence columns Mullin says his book had been ‘helpfully denounced’ a few years earlier. ‘Since that time I have realised that, when it comes to selling books, a good high-profile denunciation is worth half a dozen friendly reviews and I have always done my best to organise one,’ Mullin wrote.¹⁵ Times reviewer Martin Cropper said that A Very British Coup was ‘Television drama in love with television. Its title hardly encourages one to pursue the plot in search of surprises and Alan Plater’s script is the dullest he has produced in years.’¹⁶ It’s a curious observation because, far from being predictable, there’s an ambiguity even to the title of the drama, and there are numerous moments where things pan out very differently from the way the viewer expects. When journalist Fred Thompson is released from prison he seems the perfect choice – before we learn that he’s a journalist who was jailed for refusing to reveal his sources – to help engage in dirty work against Perkins, especially as he is played by Keith Allen, an actor whom Plater describes as ‘always having an air of danger about him’.¹⁷ In the novel, Thompson hasn’t been inside. The idea was suggested to Plater by events a few years earlier at GCHQ, Cheltenham. He also thought that Thompson emerging from prison, to be greeted by his posh girlfriend Liz (Christine Kavanagh) supplied a strong image.

A Very British Coup juxtaposes contrasting scenes to great effect. A scene of the UK in a power cut gives way to the newspaper proprietor (Philip Madoc) on his lilo in a sunshine retreat, manipulating the way the story back home is reported. When the power cuts look as if they are about to destroy the Perkins government we cut back and forth between a despondent Harry and his finest hour, the triumphal parade which is brilliantly lit in almost washed-out colours, as if emphasising that this moment belongs to some never-to-be-recovered, perfect past. There are lot of what Plater calls ‘cinematic wheezes’¹⁸, such as the way the camera pans out from the view of the BBC reporter covering Perkins’ election victory to show journalists (including one from the USSR) covering the event in half a dozen languages, revealing the global magnitude of the event.

The biggest and most cinematic moments also include fascinating, small details. As an awestruck nation watches a nuclear warhead being dismantled, white doves are released against the black background of the night sky and barbed wire. The reflection of this image is then seen through the eyes of people gazing into a television shop window. And even the vision mixer in the television studio has finally stopped her knitting, so that she can give the events on screen her full attention. When Thompson uses a blackboard to explain the web of deceit which is being created around Harry, his chalk marks begin to look like a Masonic symbol.

The Americans figure strongly among the villains of the piece. Plater says that Britain has been in their back pockets since the Second World War and that ‘the forelock-tugging habit is hard to shed’. He admires the stance that Harold Wilson (who as British Prime Minister was allegedly investigated by MI5 in the 1960s) took against the Americans, refusing to send troops to Vietnam.¹⁹ A Very British Coup won an Emmy in the U.S. to stand alongside the BAFTA award it picked up for best drama series, and the American press took it on the chin, acknowledging that it was a fine piece of work. The Blade Toledo said that, U.S. bashing or not, it was very entertaining, while admitting that ‘a few items might prickle the sensitivities of some American viewers.’²⁰ Graham Fuller tacitly acknowledged the American stranglehold on British politics when he commented: ‘Thatcher’s permanent revolution has virtually dismantled the system whereby a socialist government could rule in Britain or secede from the U.S.’²¹ Another review felt that the serial represented an impressive change from the cosiness of much British drama – ‘about a conspiracy to overthrow the PM of England (sic) which would send your eyeballs spinning’.²²

John J. O’Connor also opted to be generous despite the anti-American element, commenting that A Very British Coup is ‘certain to knock a good many Reagan-Thatcher noses out of joint but the production is so remarkably good…. that pouting would be pointless’.²³ Everybody was bowled over by Irish actor Ray McAnally as Harry and the New York Times described his performance as ‘extraordinary’ when it was shown on Channel 13’s Masterpiece Theatre slot. The show was hosted by Alistair Cooke, who reassured viewers that ‘this has never happened’.²⁴ In Australia, Robert Cockburn saw some historical parallels in the way Perkins was chewed up by the Establishment. He said that it was good for Plater that the drama was to be screened on November 9, so close to the day (November 11) when two Australian mavericks were destroyed, Gough Whitlam and Ned Kelly.²⁵

The UK’s right-wing political weekly, The Spectator, chose not to review A Very British Coup at all, but its left-wing cousin, New Statesman and Society, gave it coverage over two issues. Nick Kimberley said that it was observed with humour and breathless pace, including a sardonic sense of Britain’s love for social display. He wrote of the ‘media-saturated environment’²⁶, in which the Perkins government has its brief life, an observation that is even more pertinent today. The following week, a New Statesman editorial speculated about whether Harry Perkins was the best leader Labour would never have, and suggested that he was the sort of man who Tony Benn would like to have been. The leader writer reckoned that the drama gave the UK’s centre ground, the Social Democratic Party and the Liberals, the most to grumble about. “How can they appeal to the shires if it looks as though they might be contributing to letting in Harry Perkins.”²⁷

Perhaps Glenys Kinnock put her finger on Coup’s appeal when she said that it succeeded in ‘depicting what people of all political persuasions know to be real about British politics and what people of all persuasions who believe in elected government hope is unreal.’²⁸ In other words, people of every political hue could take something from it.

With everyone out to get Perkins, he cannot possibly win. Plater tells the story of Aneurin Bevan who was fond of saying that, as he rose up the political ladder, from councils and trades union groups in South Wales to Parliament and, ultimately, the Cabinet, he always thought he was getting to the hub but admitted that he ‘never found the power’.²⁹ In the end, that’s Harry Perkins’ tragedy.

1. Alan Plater, telephone interview with John Wheatcroft, 19 May 2009.
2. The three episodes were first broadcast on 19 June, 26 June and 3 July 1988 respectively.
3. Plater, telephone interview.
4. Mark Lawson, The Independent, 20 June 1988.
5. Robert Cockburn, Green Guide in The Age (Melbourne), 2 November 1988. Accessed in the Plater archive, DPR 7/13.
6. Plater, telephone interview.
7. Ibid.
8. Nancy Banks-Smith, The Guardian, 20 June 1988.
9. Plater, telephone interview. In addition to John Keane’s score, the serial makes use of the Credo from Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor (as its theme), with other sections (such as the Kyrie and Sanctus) are used as incidental music. The Mozart recording is the London Symphony Orchestra and Choir, conducted by Colin Davis. Thanks to Nick Cooper for this information.
10. Ibid.
11. Chris Mullin, preface, A Very British Coup (London: Politico’s, 2006), p. 1.
12. A Very British Coup script, Alan Plater Archive, University of Hull, DPR 4/69.
13. Correspondence, Alan Plater archive, ACC.2004/23 box 2B.
14. Ibid.
15. Mullin, preface, A Very British Coup, p.1.
16. Martin Cropper, The Times, 20 June 1988, p. 1415.
17. Plater, telephone interview.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Tom Ensign, The Blade Toledo, 13 January 1989. Accessed in the Plater archive.
21. Graham Fuller, Village Voice, 13 January 1989. Plater archive.
22. Memphis Commercial Appeal, 13 January 1989. Plater archive.
23. John J. O’Connor, The New York Times, 13 January 1989. Plater archive.
24. Ibid.
25. Robert Cockburn, Green Guide in The Age, 2 November 1988. Plater archive.
26. Nick Kimberley, New Statesman and Society, 17 June 1988, p. 46.
27. Leader page, New Statesman and Society, 24 June 1988.
28. Glenys Kinnock, ‘Thriller that gets my vote’, TV Times, 18-24 June 1988, p. 10.
29. Plater, telephone interview.

Essay by Dave Rolinson

The probability of total destruction increases with time and, in the course of the months and years throughout which we are told to expect the Cold War to continue, it becomes almost a certainty’¹.

The War Game is one of television’s most notorious banned programmes. A harrowing dramatised documentary portraying the after-effects of nuclear holocaust and calling for public education in nuclear deterrent policy, it was made by the BBC for 1965 broadcast but was not transmitted for twenty years. Among the reasons given for the ban were its brutally graphic scenes, its apparent left-wing bias and its controversial fusion of journalistic fact and hugely alarmist fiction, although there is now evidence that it fell victim to the political suppression of nuclear discussion that was happening at the time across all media. Its director, Peter Watkins, quit the BBC and fought to get it a cinema release abroad, resulting in critical acclaim and a Best Documentary Oscar. After its eventual transmission in 1985, critics agreed that the BBC had suppressed one of the greatest dramas ever made.

That The War Game got made at all testifies to the reputation that Waatkins had acquired at the BBC. After making a number of short films including The Forgotten Faces (1961), an award-winning portrayal of the 1956 Hungarian uprising – he made a brilliant BBC debut with Culloden(1964)². This dramatisation of the genocide of the Highland Scots in 1745 was shot as if a news crew had been present at the time, a stunning intermingling of drama and documentary made – like The War Game – by the documentary department. Although Culloden was controversial, it won Watkins a British Screen Writers Guild award and much critical acclaim hailing a true television pioneer.

Drama-documentary has long been a controversial genre, because of the common, simplistic, view that it blurs the ‘truth’ of documentary with the ‘lie’ of fiction³. Rather than being simply the ‘truth’, documentaries are shaped by their maker’s opinions, choice of subject, camera placement, editing, the subject’s response to being filmed or, according to theoretical readings, the inevitable narrative structures of documentary (which is itself subject to fictive construction rather than inherently ‘objective’) or even history. A conflation of journalistic research and dramatic staging that combines factual statements with events that provoke emotional responses⁴, The War Game is hard to categorise. Perhaps his style owes a lot to Humphrey Jennings, who during the Second World War developed reconstruction dramas with documentary techniques and the innovative use of non-actors, in particular in his only full-length feature, Fires Were Started(1943). The most striking connection is that between The War Game and Jennings’s The Silent Village (1943), which begins as a documentary observing the minutiae of everyday life in a Welsh village, then applies this observational style to a horrifying dramatisation of Nazi invasion and reprisals to resistance, fictionalising actual Nazi atrocities against the Czech population of Lidice after the assassination of Heydrich. An attempt to bring Nazi atrocities closer to home, The Silent Village pioneers a style which Peter Watkins develops with immense power.

Like The Silent Village, The War Game is primarily a ‘documentary film’ – it calls itself this in the credits, and Watkins strives to make it viable as such. It has a serious voice-over by then-newsreader Michael Aspel. It supports its hypotheses with Watkins’s vast research, with quotes from cited sources, including NATO briefings and American strategists. Just three years on from the Cuban missile crisis, it contextualises the outbreak of war in the Cold War climate, with the East-West divide in Berlin providing the flashpoint. Using documented knowledge of national emergency provisions, the film includes the devolution of power to fifteen regional commissions and local committees. Using government estimates, it demonstrates the potential difficulties of evacuating all except able-bodied male adults, and enforced billeting (along with other social tensions, such as the awkward moment when one woman asks, ‘Are they coloured?’). The portrayal of the nuclear blast has a sound scientific grounding in all its stages, from shock front to firestorm, although it is melodramatically described as ‘an enormous door slamming in the depths of Hell’. It is not until after the bomb has dropped that fact is replaced by hypothesis presented as fact (though these are based on documented experiences in bombed cities like Hiroshima, Hamburg and Dresden).

It is a masterpiece of technique. It has a documentary feel, with hand-held cameras and real sound (with chilling use of effects and, often more chillingly, silence). Watkins employs vox pops with the man-and-woman-in-the-street. We are given locations, dates, prices, names, and a massive amount of detail to add verisimilitude. We are told that ’such scenes as these would be almost inevitable’, but this hypothetical quality to these fictional scenes is a problem. If a certain number of devices are launched, if a certain number of people are wounded, if these wounds are of a certain severity, if the hospitals cannot meet the demand, if there is a policy of leaving the wounded to die untreated in holding sections, and if these victims reach a certain number, then we may see armed bobbies putting them out of their misery. It is possible – even probable – but the production teams imply an acceptance of such hypotheses as fact.

Scenes of intense human suffering are shot like news footage, with all-too-familiar sequences of corpses and a camera being pushed in the faces of the shocked, charred and mutilated. The film was so realistic that Grace Wyndham Goldie, former head of BBC Talks and Current Affairs (who had worked with Watkins on Culloden) alleged that Watkins underfed the cast and used such gimmicks as tripwires, which everyone involved vociferously denied⁵. The soundtrack features unseen women and children crying, which, combined with tight close-ups during scenes of mass devastation, encourages us to use our imaginations. And this is the important point – it may feel as though a detached camera crew are wandering around chaotic scenes, but every second was meticulously scripted, down to the inarticulate ‘uhs’ of those in pain. Despite its dramatic techniques, it is presented as journalism. Chillingly detached voiceovers counterpoint the often-traumatic portrayal of acute hysteria. An unseen reporter is denied access to a room in which bodies are being burned. The camera reacts to events, often in shock: in a firing squad scene, the shots are accompanied by a violent shocked camera judder, on which Watkins freeze-frames, capturing the aesthetic of photo-reportage. However, although scenes like this are in themselves gruesome, it is the context which causes problems, as Watkins dwells on the (seemingly inevitable) breakdown in social order.

Indeed, there are various subtexts which prove that The War Game is about more than nuclear war. One aspect, which would have been particularly striking at the time, is the subtext criticising Britain’s conduct in the Second World War. Despite its futuristic atomic background, The War Game features much Second World War imagery, with evacuations, rationing and rubble. The suffering, we are told, is based on events in Hamburg and Dresden (bombed by the Allies) and Hiroshima (nuclear-bombed by the United States). When bodies are burned, we are reminded that ‘Everything you are now seeing happened in Germany after the heavy bombing in the last war’. We are told that the Allies might fire first, and then see vox pops with members of the public who are shocked by the idea. Before the bomb falls, there is a move towards profiteering and black marketeering which makes many incapable of surviving (arguably connecting the bomb with capitalism).

At the time, the Evening Standard summed up a major area of complaint, arguing that ‘While the presentation seems authoritative, the film is straight propaganda for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’⁶. Watkins uses interviews to put across his wider pacifist message. The Atomic Age and the Stone Age are said to be the same, as the bomb is compared with the Aztecs who sacrificed thousands to their Gods to maintain the status quo. The film’s subsequent portrayal of regression to barbarism fits in with the famous statement of an American officer that America could bomb Russia ‘back to the Stone Age’. Vox pops in which people maintain that we should stand up for ourselves and bomb Russia back (‘a vicious circle’) would fit an earlier era of war, but not this one. The ‘deterrent’ idea inherent in the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (whose acronym, of course, was MAD) is shown to make escalation inevitable, as having a nuclear stockpile makes it imperative to hit before you get hit. Watkins makes the audience complicit with nuclear war: an intellectual tells us that, if voters give power to a government that does this, we must ‘accept the moral responsibility’. This is a dangerously political (in the sense of potentially influencing votes) message that connects as an experience through the use of drama documentary technique. By stating that this could happen to its audience (before 1980, it claims), the film wants to scare its audience out of complacency, to get them to ask questions, to make their voices heard in a world on the brink of self-imposed destruction. As a drama documentary, it had and has the power to move an audience which could possibly not be matched by the use of cold, hard facts (although this should not underestimate the power of documentary). Indeed, statistical thinking is the cause of the madness: an American strategist coolly predicts a pause for governments to plan World Wars Four thru Eight.

Another element in the banning of the film is its treatment of the Church. Captions quote statements from an Ecumenical Council meeting, showing that the Church would accept the bomb if it was ‘”clean” and of a good family’. This is juxtaposed with a child suffering severe retinal burns. The dog-collared interviewee who states that ‘our nuclear weapons will be used with wisdom’ in this ‘war of the just’ is followed by burning families and suffering children. The Sun was appalled: ‘Not an opportunity is missed for a sneer at the Civil Defence or the Church’⁷. With man-made devastation overpowering nature, religious figures exercise what seems like banal morality as if their time has passed.

Most provocative, however, is the criticism of the existing social order implicit in its post-apocalyptic breakdown. Unlike the stoical way the British are supposed to have handled the Blitz (although history tells us of soaring crime rates and class dynamics that problematise the attractively easy myths), here, as in Hiroshima, people become ‘apathetic and profoundly lethargic, people living in their own filth in total dejection and inertia’. Before the bomb falls, a man shows the gun he will use to stop outsiders getting into his shelter (actual advice given by the American government). This every-man-for-himself ideal runs rampant after the bomb falls. There are hunger riots triggered by a food hoarding system for the state’s helpers, and soon the police are murdering, and being murdered, in the streets. Even ‘decent middle-classes’ are seen to ‘develop an attitude of indifference towards the law’, and to indulge in looting, black market and petty theft’, including a housewife dubbed an ‘anti-authority figure’ for her part in a murderous raid on a food control centre. The post-apocalyptic world is a reflection of the tensions at the heart of our society, and the mechanisms used to maintain the seeming naturalness of the unfair distribution of wealth. Filthy children growing up in poverty state their ambitions in life starkly: ‘I don’t want to be nothing’. The idea that the poor will rise up against their rulers is inescapably revolutionary. The police maintain the status quo, but here are ‘normal human beings’ who can ‘go under’ with the mental strain, although those who refuse to help the administration may be shot.

As great as The War Game is, it is the ban that has made it notorious. Shot over four weeks in the summer of 1965, it was intended for broadcast in the week of 6 August, the twentieth anniversary of Hiroshima, but failed to appear. Its graphic scenes make the idea of it being banned purely on content seem plausible (the Director General insisted that ‘I did it for purely humanitarian, not political, reasons’), but it was ultimately a political suppression. Concerns over the existence and testing of nuclear weaponry had been vocally made since the 1950s, with protest meetings resulting in the formation of the CND in 1958, and the annual Aldermaston march – an outpouring of public concern smeared by the media (as was the CND) as leftie beatnik indulgence. Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell, co-founder of the CND until he joined the militant Committee of 100, was imprisoned at the age of 89 for sit-down protests against the arrival of America’s Polaris submarine in 1959. A plea for nuclear education (as opposed to bland propaganda), The War Game fell foul of the blanket of silence it was attempting to address. It quotes a Home Office manual from 1959, which states that ‘Public education in the matters of radioactivity will be progressive during the next few years’. When a pamphlet is distributed to the people, detailing Your Protection Against Nuclear Attack, we learn that it has existed for some time but ‘It didn’t sell very well’, prompting the on-screen reply: ‘It wasn’t free?’). However, security papers released in 1999 proved that, from 1954, British governments imposed censorship on discussions of nuclear issues, aiming to ‘retain control of the manner in which the effect of nuclear weapons were made known to the public’. This adds irony to the film’s ending, in which the documentary form reasserts itself to clarify the message:

On almost the entire subject of thermo-nuclear weapons, on the problems of their possession, on the effects of their use, there is now practically a total silence in the press, in official publications, and on television.

As news reports since the 1990s have revealed, this silence covered up narrowly-averted potentially catastrophic nuclear accidents, from an American bomber crashing into a depot containing nuclear devices near Cambridge in 1957 (which could have wiped out most of East Anglia) and the break-up of a bomber over North Carolina which resulted in the release of two 24-megaton nuclear bombs (one of which – a thousand times more powerful than that dropped on North Carolina – had suffered failures to five of its six safety devices). At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, the world came close to nuclear annihilation because of a software test, a harmless space satellite and even a bear climbing over a fence in Minnesota… and you thought Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was silly.

Watkins’s fight against the BBC, to gain a film release for The War Game, made it difficult for him to get work in Britain, but he has been making films and television dramas in the subsequent decades. A principled, political and anti-establishment figure, he has been marginalised as a person (caricatured as a paranoid drifter) and even, despite his acknowledged talent, as a director. The underrated if undisciplined parable Privilege (1967) written by Johnny Speight, shows the establishment’s use of a pop star to maintain social control, predicting (at the height of the ‘cultural revolution’) the appropriation of rebellious counter-culture into the mainstream that would recur over the next few decades of popular culture. In the near-decade since I wrote this piece, his mid-period work seems to have been rediscovered by critics to an extent, particularly Punishment Park (1971) and his four-hour production for Norwegian and Swedish television, Edvard Munch (1975). More recent work includes La Commune (2000), a French film utilising techniques comparable with The War Game about the 1871 Commune massacre.

The eventual broadcast of The War Game accompanied the escalation of ‘deterrent’ policies following Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (the ‘Star Wars program’) and fitted in superbly with the Barry Hines-scripted Sheffield-set post-apocalyptic drama Threads (1984), Troy Kennedy Martin’s nuclear-based political thriller serial Edge of Darkness (1986), and elements of Alan Plater’s adaptation of A Very British Coup (1988) directed, like Threads, by Mick Jackson. Watkins’s film now seemed uncannily prescient, given that – as Michael Wearing, the producer of Edge of Darkness, argued – ‘the nuclear state is a state-within-a-state, and has grown up without public debate or democratic control’.

More widely available than when I originally wrote this article, The War Game is studied for its value as a film, television programme or documentary, but is safer politically owing to its distance from its context – had it been shown in the mid-1960s, its effect on public opinion may have been electrifying. This explains why it remains a controversial film to talk about. In the years since I wrote this article, academics have debated the extent to which this The War Game fell victim to a ‘political conspiracy’. In the Journal of Contemporary History, James Chapman’s argument that its suppression instead was ‘largely consensual’ and ‘demonstrates a rather more ad hoc process through which a range of institutional and cultural factors determined the BBC’s decision’⁸ was criticised by Mike Wayne, partly for methodological issues that don’t concern us here, but also because Wayne found ‘the deference to state and media power alarming in the context of the so-called “war on terror”‘, and encouraged greater ‘critical media scrutiny’ of ‘media and state collusion and media self-censorship’ particularly in line of the treatment of the BBC after the death of Dr David Kelly and the Hutton Inquiry⁹. All this demonstrates that, although The War Game was one of the most shocking and effective television programmes ever made, it could have been one of the most important television programmes ever shown.¹⁰

Visit Peter Watkins’s website: http://www.mnsi.net/~pwatkins/

The War Game was released on DVD by the British Film Institute in 2002.

This is mostly reproduced from my article of the same name in Circus Issue 9, Spring 2002. There are some changes: brief new material near the end quoting recent debates on the film’s banning, minor typographical changes and the removal of sections that have since appeared in my work on drama documentary elsewhere. However, I have resisted the urge to rewrite it wholesale to reflect the more academic work I have written on the film in recent years, particularly my use of documentary theory.

1. Bertrand Russell, Has Man A Future?, 1961.
2. See my piece on Culloden for the BFI’s Screenonline website, at http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/520802/.
3. See Screenonline piece by Dave Rolinson
4. see my Screenonline section for how the distinctions between these are discussed as sub-categories
5. Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 1966.
6. Tom Pocock, Evening Standard, 8 February 1966
7. The Sun, 9 February 1966.
8. James Chapman, ‘The BBC and the Censorship of The War Game, Journal of Contemporary History, 41:1, 2006, pp. 75, 93.
9. Wayne supports his arguments with a new interview with Watkins. Mike Wayne, ‘Failing the Public: The BBC, The War Game and Revisionist History: A Reply to James Chapman’, Journal of Contemporary History, 42:4, 2007, pp. 627-637. Quotation here from pp. 627-628.
10. See John R. Cook and Patrick Murphy, ‘After the Bomb Dropped: the Cinema Half-Life of The War Game‘, Journal of Popular British Cinema 3, 2000, pp. 129-132. Cook and Murphy have also been working with Watkins on what promises to be a definitive account of Watkins’s films.