Docudrama – Notes #1: TV sets & TV Centre

DAVID ROLINSON

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Near the end of Castles in the Sky (2014), the docudrama about the invention of Radar broadcast on BBC Two earlier this month, Robert Watson-Watt (Eddie Izzard) shows his colleagues a television set.¹ This produces another of the little scientific breakthroughs that form the core of this quietly endearing piece. The set is at once modern and archaic: in the programme’s 1930s setting this gleaming new object is a technological marvel, proposing a solution to a challenge on which the defence of the nation rests, but in the visual rhetoric of the 2014 drama it appears almost comic. This reminded me of some of the tensions that sometimes result when television technology appears in docudramas, either in terms of sets or studios. This article runs through a few such moments in pieces including The Fools on the Hill (1986), The Road to Coronation Street (2010) and An Adventure in Space and Time (2013).

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Castles in the Sky, wr. Ian Kershaw, dr. Gillies McKinnon, tx. BBC Two, 4 September 2014. More information on this “factual drama” from Hero Film and Television – with BBC Scotland, BBC Worldwide, Creative Scotland, the Robert Watson-Watt Trust and Brechin Civic Trust – can be found in the BBC Media Centre press release here. ↩

Women and Work: Leeds United! (1974) Part 3 of 3

DAVID ROLINSON

Play for Today Writer: Colin Welland; Producer: Kenith Trodd; Director: Roy Battersby

This essay continues from Part 2 and Part 1.

The debate

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Producer Kenith Trodd faced criticism and praise from local workers, employers and critics in an edition of the discussion programme series In Vision (1974-75) that was dedicated to Leeds – United!¹ The play had a largely female cast who were positioned as participants: its lead actors and its extras were social actors, as mass crowds reconstructed their real-life participation in the 1970 events. The guests on In Vision include women workers who respond to the techniques by which their experiences were depicted by that male-authored text. There is a revealing tension between the play and the discussion programme. Women are addressed variously as subjects, participants and audiences, and this problematic movement is one with which the women workers are partly complicit, as we shall see. Women are the minority – 3 out of 10 guests – and are addressed in part as audience members, albeit in order to comment on the textual representation of their social participation. The programme opens up gendered discourse relating to the workplace and drama, or even contributes to that discourse. Of course, In Vision is a different type of text, with its own codes and conventions as well as its own guidelines on issues such as balance.

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In Vision, BBC2, tx. 1 November 1974. ↩

Women and Work: Leeds United! (1974) Part 2 of 3

DAVID ROLINSON

Play for Today Writer: Colin Welland; Producer: Kenith Trodd; Director: Roy Battersby

This essay continues from Part 1.

The play

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Early in Leeds United!, Annie (Teresa Anne Keegan, played by Josie Lane) walks along early morning streets, picking up a friend and arriving at the bus stop on her journey to work. An ambitious crane shot accompanies her walk, leaves her in order to reverse across a street and rises above outhouses to find her further on. As she walks, we hear a male voice-over set out her new contract, the terms of which have reduced her rights. This sequence “set the tone”, according to Clive James:

ably combining the humanist touch with the analytical glance. […] their company contracts were read out in plummy tones on voice-over. ‘The company has no contractual pension arrangements covering your employment.’ Which meant that you work for half a century and they scrap you.¹

This practice was so common that Welland heard about another example just a few weeks before the play was broadcast: “a 61-year-old seamstress who works in the same clothing factory as Colin Welland’s mother-in-law in Leeds was made redundant. She had worked in the same place for 25 years but because she was over retiring age she was not entitled to any redundancy pay.” Welland’s response: “Bastards, they are”.²

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James, The Observer. ↩
Sheridan, ‘Tailor made for drama’. ↩

Women and Work: Leeds United! (1974) Part 1 of 3

DAVID ROLINSON

Play for Today Writer: Colin Welland; Producer: Kenith Trodd; Director: Roy Battersby

“When a woman looks at her wages and thinks of the hours she works and the conditions, she knows she is a slave…”

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Leeds United! dramatises the 1970 dispute in which over 25,000 clothing workers, the majority of them women, went on strike across Leeds, other parts of Yorkshire and the North East.¹ Katrina Honeyman, in her history of the Leeds clothing industry, argued that the strike symbolised “the response of women workers to several decades of oppression by both employers and the male union hierarchy” and showed the “talent of women for political organization, [which is] so often overlooked in labour history”.² Leeds United! reflects this talent in its methods of retelling, and reconstructing, the strike. According to director Roy Battersby in 2009, the play’s “ambition was to try to understand” how their “courageous” action took them to “the verge of winning” and how “within a few days that was turned into […] a miserable, heartbreaking compromise”.³

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Play for Today: Leeds United!, tx. BBC1, 31 October 1974. ↩
Katrina Honeyman, Well Suited: A History of the Leeds Clothing Industry, 1850-1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 209. ↩
Roy Battersby, in Q&A with John Hill and Kenith Trodd at BFI Southbank on 25 November 2009, in the Radical Television Drama season. Available to view here. ↩

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

NEIL SINYARD

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

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

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

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The Girl, tx. BBC2, 26 December 2012. ↩
Appropriate Adult, tx. ITV, 4 and 11 September 2011. ↩
Tony Lee Moral, Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie (Scarecrow Press, 2005). ↩