Biographical essay by Oliver Wake
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.
