by IAN GREAVES

Playhouse Writer: Philip Martin; Producer: Peter Ansorge; Director: Michael Custance

There isn’t a gag within a mile of this. On the face of it, the BBC-2 schedule for the evening of 16 May 1980 is a pretty unforgiving affair. Working back, we have the late-entry Outer Limits episode ‘Counterweight’ at 11.30pm, a fifty-minute wave of paranoia as an extraterrestrial light invades the passengers one-by-one on a long-haul space flight. Newsnight doubtless explored the political hotbed of an Afghan settlement, and as an appetiser, Louis Hellman’s cartoon Boom at 10.40pm chilled the unsuspecting viewer.

{"id":4385,"date":"2014-01-31T06:00:41","date_gmt":"2014-01-31T06:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/?p=4385"},"modified":"2024-08-30T11:38:23","modified_gmt":"2024-08-30T10:38:23","slug":"cheer-up-it-might-never-happen-the-unborn-1980","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/?p=4385","title":{"rendered":"Cheer Up. It Might Never Happen: The Unborn<\/em> (1980)"},"content":{"rendered":"
by IAN GREAVES<\/h4>\n
Playhouse<\/em> Writer:<\/strong> Philip Martin; Producer:<\/strong> Peter Ansorge; Director:<\/strong> Michael Custance<\/p>\n
There isn\u2019t a gag within a mile of this. On the face of it, the BBC-2 schedule for the evening of 16 May 1980 is a pretty unforgiving affair. Working back, we have the late-entry Outer Limits<\/em> episode \u2018Counterweight\u2019 at 11.30pm, a fifty-minute wave of paranoia as an extraterrestrial light invades the passengers one-by-one on a long-haul space flight. Newsnight<\/em> doubtless explored the political hotbed of an Afghan settlement, and as an appetiser, Louis Hellman\u2019s cartoon Boom<\/em> at 10.40pm chilled the unsuspecting viewer.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The centrepiece, however, was this evening\u2019s Playhouse<\/em>, The Unborn<\/em>, forming part of the single play strand\u2019s sixth series and another entry from the rogue BBC Birmingham drama department headed by David Rose. Placed in direct competition with Starsky & Hutch<\/em> on BBC-1 and The Gentle Touch<\/em> on ITV, viewers were confronted with the unique choice of Huggy Bear, Jill Gascoine or nuclear annihilation.<\/p>\n
The Unborn<\/em> is a further example of writer Philip Martin (Gangsters<\/em>, Doctor Who<\/em>) cannibalising a genre and fashioning something new, in this case a brilliant and bleak distillation of faith and rationalism shot through with black magic and a very well worn copy of Rosemary\u2019s Baby<\/em>. As narrator, Martin opens the play in a futuristic white-light space, his outfit somewhere between theatrical garb and a straitjacket. His words have a curious ambiguity too, balancing the tone of a forbidding Man in Black<\/em> scene-setter with the modesty of a Shakespearian player who seeks “only to entertain”. This being a Philip Martin script, however, nothing is quite so simple.<\/p>\n
The action unfolds in a fashion familiar to anyone who loves a supernatural tale. Colin and Diana, played by Jack Shepherd and Mary Larkin, have just settled at their new Lancaster home and are trying for a baby. Colin keeps waking in the night because of a figure at the end of the bed, but as he\u2019s a scientific type who works at the local nuclear plant he dismisses this as a \u2018hypnagogic phenomenon\u2019, a hallucinatory moment between sleep and waking. \u201cI can\u2019t stand mystery,\u201d he mutters before resting again. \u201cIt has no place, not in this bank.\u201d<\/p>\n
In truth, he\u2019s terrified of contaminating his wife\u2019s foetus by even the smallest exposure to radiation at his workplace. This upsets Diana who, when she does announce her pregnancy, feels spurned by a cold husband incapable of joy. Roma, a clairvoyant played by Judy Parfitt, offers support for the expectant mother, stealing a jade figure from the house when Diana is not looking. A palm reading ensues which shocks Roma into fearful silence. On hearing of this, Colin, who is angry at both the theft of the figurine and the upset caused to Diana, decides to pay the \u2018charlatan\u2019 a visit.
\n<\/iframe> \nRoma\u2019s assertion that \u201cneither of us knows the true source of power\u201d is the key to the play, which soon becomes a battle of ideologies with self-doubt a form of mental imbalance. Are Colin\u2019s night visions, depicting his son in a war room, a sign of his own ability to have premonitions, or madness? Is the “power” Roma speaks of in fact his own, his seed destined to result in a son who will destroy huge swathes of the population in a nuclear war? As someone rightly obsessed by the need for security at the nuclear plant, what irony that Colin should now play a part in the creation of this deadly progeny. For Diana too there is a shift from superstition to rationalism and back again, the couple\u2019s fluidity of reason acting as the dreadful pulse of the play.<\/p>\nPerhaps the peak of self-doubt comes in this next sequence, where Colin\u2019s sleep is disturbed by his most powerful vision which forces him to consider retiring from his job. It\u2019s also a fantastic piece of design, incorporating the bed-head and with it decisively dissolving the gap between premonition and reality. \n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" id=\"_ytid_37414\" width=\"584\" height=\"329\" data-origwidth=\"584\" data-origheight=\"329\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/S-yDooH8PcY?enablejsapi=1&autoplay=0&cc_load_policy=0&cc_lang_pref=&iv_load_policy=1&loop=0&rel=1&fs=1&playsinline=0&autohide=2&theme=dark&color=red&controls=1&disablekb=0&\" class=\"__youtube_prefs__ epyt-is-override no-lazyload\" title=\"YouTube player\" allow=\"fullscreen; accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen data-no-lazy=\"1\" data-skipgform_ajax_framebjll=\"\"><\/iframe> \nThe trick behind The Unborn<\/em> is that at no point are you asked to question the existence of the supernatural. The viewer is presented with visual evidence and an assembly of genre tropes that we take in trust. Even the s\u00e9ance is authentic and indisputable, even though it is presaged by a giant rubber dragon emerging from an egg. (For readers embarrassed by the snake in Doctor Who<\/em>‘s Kinda<\/em>, take heart.)<\/p>\nPhilip Martin\u2019s greatest achievement in The Unborn<\/em> is to put belief over simple questions of good and evil. The motives of Roma are too ambiguous for that, with hints that this may be a political targeting of Colin rather than the routine visiting of pregnant women or the overthrow of her rivals. These dark corners are what elevate it above the trashier end of supernatural anthology series, and the means by which viewers can derive their own doubts.<\/p>\nThis piece was first published on Tachyon TV<\/em>, May 2011.<\/p>\nOriginally posted: 31 January 2014.<\/em><\/p>\n<body> \n<script type=\"text\/javascript\">\nvar sc_project=5750652; \nvar sc_invisible=1; \nvar sc_partition=68; \nvar sc_click_stat=1; \nvar sc_security=\"6dd1aa39\"; \n<\/script><\/p>\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"\nsrc=\"http:\/\/www.statcounter.com\/counter\/counter.js\"><\/script><noscript>\n<div \nclass=”statcounter”><a title=\"wordpress stats \" \nhref=”http:\/\/www.statcounter.com\/wordpress.org\/” \ntarget=”_blank”><img class=\"statcounter\" \nsrc=”http:\/\/c.statcounter.com\/5750652\/0\/6dd1aa39\/1\/” \nalt=”wordpress stats ” ><\/a><\/div>\n<\/noscript> \n<\/p><\/p><\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":null,"protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[137,142],"tags":[450,171,432,451],"class_list":["post-4385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","category-ian-greaves","tag-nuclear","tag-philip-martin","tag-playhouse","tag-supernatural"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4385"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8273,"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4385\/revisions\/8273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}