by OLIVER WAKE

Giles Cooper is widely recognised as having been Britain’s greatest radio dramatist. He was highly prolific, writing dozens of original plays and adaptations for radio across a period of around 13 years. He was responsible for many of the medium’s masterpieces during the 1950s and his accomplishments were acknowledged posthumously with the BBC’s radio playwriting award being named in his honour. He also wrote for the stage, having particular success with his 1962 play Everything in the Garden, a dark comedy of middle-class suburban hypocrisy and greed.

by OLIVER WAKE<\/h4>\n

Giles Cooper is widely recognised as having been Britain\u2019s greatest radio dramatist. He was highly prolific, writing dozens of original plays and adaptations for radio across a period of around 13 years. He was responsible for many of the medium\u2019s masterpieces during the 1950s and his accomplishments were acknowledged posthumously with the BBC\u2019s radio playwriting award being named in his honour. He also wrote for the stage, having particular success with his 1962 play Everything in the Garden<\/em>, a dark comedy of middle-class suburban hypocrisy and greed. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This work has unfairly overshadowed Cooper\u2019s career as a television dramatist. Writing for both the BBC and ITV, Cooper was even more prolific in television than he was in radio, producing a large body of work in which his characteristic skill as a dramatist was evident. He would undoubtedly be better known today had he not died tragically young while at the height of his talents in 1966. Marking the fiftieth anniversary of his death, this article aims to highlight Cooper\u2019s television career and argue that he deserves greater recognition as one of Britain\u2019s most remarkable television dramatists.<\/p>\n

Giles Stannus Cooper was born into an Anglo-Irish family in Carrickmines, Dublin, in 1918, but spent his early years in London. His father had been a naval officer in the First World War and then a barrister. The exact connection is unclear but he appears to have worked in this capacity for the Colonial Service, rising to become attorney-general of the Seychelles, where Cooper joined him and his mother for two years aged eleven. Cooper’s mother was a successful artist. Cooper was educated primarily at public school, including Lancing College. His father planned for him to join the British diplomatic service and sent him to Grenoble University to learn modern languages. Cooper also stayed briefly in St Sebastian in Spain around this time, studying Spanish, but left due to the Civil War, from which he was wounded when hit by a stray bullet. Spain would continue to hold a special appeal to him and featured in several of his plays. Instead of following his father\u2019s plans for him, Cooper set his sights on an acting career and joined the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art.<\/p>\n

In 1939, Cooper was conscripted into the Army, becoming an infantry officer with the West Yorkshire Regiment. In the Second World War he spent several years fighting the Japanese in Burma, a particularly gruelling theatre of war. In all, he spent seven years as a regular soldier. Anecdotal evidence suggests he conducted himself well as an \u2018officer and a gentleman\u2019, though he would later rarely talk about his war experiences. He was demobilised in 1946 with the rank of Captain and set about his much delayed career as an actor, while also being active in the Territorial Army. During periods of \u2018resting\u2019 he turned to writing and in 1950 had his play Never Get Out<\/em> performed at Edinburgh\u2019s Gateway Theatre. The same year his radio play Thieves Rush In<\/em> was broadcast by the BBC.^{1<\/a><\/sup> It was the start of a long and fruitful association with the medium.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n}

Thanks at least in part to the patronage of Donald McWhinnie, who would produce and direct much of Cooper\u2019s work for both BBC radio and television, Cooper rapidly became a prolific and popular radio writer. After a number of original plays for the medium he turned his hand to writing adaptations of novels and short stories from diverse sources, including Kipling, Dickens and Henry James. This led to him being taken on as a staff writer by the BBC in 1953 and in this capacity he turned out a steady stream of radio adaptations. <\/p>\n

After two years on the BBC staff, Cooper left to take up television work with ITV, but nevertheless continued writing radio plays. Amongst these were the plays that would cement his reputation as a radio writer of rare wit, insight and imagination: Mathry Beacon<\/em>, about a strange closed community, the radiophonic spectaculars of The Disagreeable Oyster<\/em> and Under the Loofah Tree<\/em>, and the sinister Unman, Wittering and Zigo<\/em>.3<\/a><\/sup> His adaptations continued also, with successes including versions of William Golding\u2019s Lord of the Flies<\/em> and John Wyndham\u2019s The Day of the Triffids<\/em>.4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

There was considerable overlap between Cooper\u2019s heyday as a radio dramatist and his early period as writer for television. His earliest television credit was for a 1951 BBC production of his stage play Never Get Out<\/em> (it was produced again in 1954).5<\/a><\/sup> He then wrote two adaptations in 1953: a six-part serialisation of Eric Ambler\u2019s novel Epitaph for a Spy<\/em>, and a version of Heinrich von Kleist\u2019s play The Broken Jug<\/em>.6<\/a><\/sup> In 1955 Cooper was quick to find work with the new ITV companies, collaborating with Jon Manchip White on a dramatisation of Stefan Zweig\u2019s story The Mossbach Collection<\/em>.7<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Late 1955 saw Cooper\u2019s first original television work, with two plays for ITV in quick succession. The General\u2019s Mess<\/em>, subtitled \u2018An Un-Military Escapade\u2019 in the TV Times<\/em>, was a farce about an ex-general, appointed Deputy Director of Inventions, coming into conflict with his family and his daughter\u2019s admirers.8<\/a><\/sup> The No-Man<\/em> was a light comedy about a young man who is always agreeable until an attractive woman inspires him to assert himself, and events get out of hand when he becomes involves with the wrong woman.9<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Cooper continued writing adaptations for ITV and had his first original BBC television play with Liberty Hall<\/em>, a drama about middle-aged adultery.10<\/a><\/sup> Inspired by their joyful times as childhood companions, the adulterous couple revisit the large house where they had spent happy hours as children. They find it converted into a country club and, with their romantic idyll ruined, conclude their affair. The Times<\/em> found it \u201ctrivial\u2026 an unhappily managed trip down memory lane\u201d.11<\/a><\/sup> Cooper reportedly became a staff writer\/adaptor for Associated Rediffusion during 1955 and 1956, but it is unclear which programmes he worked on.<\/p>\n

In the period 1956 to 1958 Cooper wrote prolifically for ITV but largely in partnerships with other dramatists under the collective pseudonym \u2018Peter Key\u2019. The writing team changed but \u2013 as far as it is possible to tell \u2013 Cooper was the constant in it. It seems likely therefore that Cooper was, in part at least, behind The Handshake<\/em>, a short play that formed half of the second instalment of ABC\u2019s Armchair Theatre<\/em> in 1956.12<\/a><\/sup> More certain are details of the \u2018Peter Key\u2019 partnership which wrote the five-part mystery serial Death to the First Lady<\/em>, an instalment of The Adventures of Sir Lancelot<\/em>, and a serial adaptation of the science-fiction horror The Trollenberg Terror<\/em>.13<\/a><\/sup> In these three projects Cooper was joined by George Kerr and Jack Cross. It seems likely that Cooper was contracted to Associated Rediffusion during at least some of these projects and the use of the pseudonym may have been intended to disguise this \u2018moonlighting\u2019 for the competition, although this is speculation only.<\/p>\n

\u2018Peter Key\u2019 was also credited with writing an episode of The Adventures of Robin Hood<\/em> and an adaptation of the thriller play The Rossiters<\/em> for Play of the Week<\/em>, though in these cases it is unknown which writers were using the pseudonym.14<\/a><\/sup> A little clearer is Cooper\u2019s role in Mary Britten MD<\/em>, a Southern TV serial about the then seemingly still novel concept of a female Doctor, in 1958.15<\/a><\/sup> Although it was ultimately credited to \u2018Peter Key\u2019, industry press reported while it was in development that the series was being written by Kenneth Hyde, Stanley Miller and Cooper. \u2018Peter Key\u2019 seems to have been retired thereafter.<\/p>\n

The late 1950s and early 1960s saw the earliest examples of a practice which would become commonplace for Cooper: the dramatist adapting his original work from one medium into another. This started with his radio plays Dangerous Word<\/em> and Without the Grail<\/em> being seen on television.16<\/a><\/sup> The former\u2019s eponymous word is \u2018justice\u2019 and the play examined the resentments and violence caused by attempts to impose it in a British colony in Africa. Although finding the script \u201cuneven\u201d, leaving \u201cactions and motives unexplained\u201d, The Stage<\/em> newspaper concluded that \u201cthere was some good character-drawing and a real attempt to show the pull of the opposing forces of idealism and practical behaviour. On the whole, this was a play to be applauded.\u201d17<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Without the Grail<\/em> concerned a British tea-planter and the feudal kingdom he had created for himself. The Observer<\/em> thought it \u201cadapted very successfully\u2026 a delightfully lively thriller of ideas.\u201d18<\/a><\/sup> Calling it \u201can unusual and exciting play\u201d, The Times<\/em> commended Cooper\u2019s adaptation, noting how he had \u201cswung this play round from a dependence upon images heard to an eloquent use of symbols seen. Enough of the original remains to give Mr. Donald McWhinnie, who produced both the sound version and last night\u2019s television performance, a motive for always inventive use of sound to create atmosphere and suspense.\u201d19<\/a><\/sup> Later, Cooper would reverse the process, adapting some of his television originals for radio.<\/p>\n

In 1957 Cooper had dramatised Georges Simenon\u2019s detective story Maigret and the Lost Life<\/em> for a BBC radio production.20<\/a><\/sup> Two years later he provided a new and highly successful adaptation of the same story for television.21<\/a><\/sup> The Times<\/em> praised how \u201cthe adaptation worked with the smoothness of a precision instrument. Mr. Cooper has an infallible instinct for the right length and shape of a scene, and his script was rich with visual puns which enable one episode to comment dramatically on the one that follows\u201d.22<\/a><\/sup> As a result of the play\u2019s success, the BBC recognised Simenon\u2019s Maigret<\/em> stories as the perfect material for a popular series. Cooper was appointed script editor, though he only stayed for the first series, disliking office work, and wrote numerous episodes himself. Legend has it that following his increasingly infrequent trips to his BBC office, he once arrived there to find it had disappeared altogether in a bureaucratic reorganisation.23<\/a><\/sup> Running for four series between 1960 and 1963, Maigret<\/em> proved a hit and won a number of awards, including a Guild of Television Producers and Directors award for Cooper in 1961. It wasn\u2019t his first award; he had received the OBE the previous year for \u2018services to broadcasting\u2019.24<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\nThe Maigret<\/em> pattern recurred a few years later. Cooper\u2019s successful dramatisation of Conan Doyle\u2019s Sherlock Holmes story The Speckled Band<\/em>, for the BBC\u2019s Detective<\/em> series, resulted in a full Sherlock Holmes<\/em> series, for which Cooper wrote a number of episodes (although in this case he did not script-edit).25<\/a><\/sup> His dramatisations for the series were frequently lauded by critics, with the following from The Guardian<\/em>\u2019s review of The Devil\u2019s Foot<\/em> being typical: \u201cIt was extremely well adapted by Giles Cooper and the play could not be faulted on its treatment of the plot.\u201d26<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The early 1960s was a particularly productive time for Cooper, with a series of imaginative original dramas, interspersed with a steady stream of adaptations. Where the Party Ended<\/em> used a seemingly small incident to conflate fears of \u2018the bomb\u2019, both big and small, and create a highly suspenseful drama.27<\/a><\/sup> A bank heist is interrupted by an unexploded Second World War bomb which falls into the tunnel dug by the would-be robbers and starts ticking. One of the gang, Jack, was a bomb disposal engineer in the war, but lost his nerve, resulting in forty deaths when he denied the presence of a bomb rather than face it. He flees the scene but meets up with a teenage \u2018beat\u2019 girl, Clare, who has seemingly lost her grip thanks to the ever looming threat of atomic war. With Clare\u2019s support, Jack is able to defuse the bomb. Where the Party Ended<\/em> is indicative of Cooper\u2019s ability to create imaginative scenarios that hint at greater things than what can be seen on the surface, and draw in characters of diverse backgrounds.<\/p>\n

Point of Honour<\/em> was, as the name suggested, an exploration of differing concepts of honour, notably the romantic and violent versus the conventional and pragmatic.28<\/a><\/sup> Edmund is travelling in a remote part of Spain with his wife and the man with whom he thinks she is having an affair. When the car breaks down Edmund finds himself in the same hotel as outlaw El Cazador, who is there to assassinate a man who dishonoured his daughter. Edmund is temporarily drawn to his violent code of honour but ultimately baulks at its consequences.<\/p>\n

Romanticism and pragmatism were again in conflict in Cooper\u2019s next play, this time in the arena of marriage. Love and Penguins<\/em> concerned Jane, widowed from her polar explorer husband Vincent before she really knew him.29<\/a><\/sup> She has remarried the boringly prosaic Adam but upon their return from honeymoon she starts receiving letters from Vincent, written before his death and posted in sequence by his explorer comrade Parsloe. It was Vincent\u2019s dying wish that Jane would marry Parsloe after his death. Jane begins to fall in love again with the romanticised image of her dead husband and is drawn to the excitement of the explorer\u2019s lifestyle. Ultimately, however, she opts to stick with the unheroic and conventional Adam.<\/p>\n

In The Lonesome Road<\/em>, a stranger inveigles his way into the home of a married couple, his baleful presence drawing out long buried secrets before his own violent past is revealed.30<\/a><\/sup> It was an effective parable about duality and the malevolence beneath the respectable facade of conventional lifestyles. One newspaper critic reported: \u201cIt would take a long time to remember a play for television which was written with a sharper or more confident understanding of what TV drama is about\u2026 [Cooper\u2019s] construction is masterly in the way the opening suggestion of fantasy deepens and clarifies into a study of a marriage on the rocks.\u201d31<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

The Power of Zero<\/em> was one of Cooper\u2019s many comedies of victimisation.32<\/a><\/sup> Rocket-research mathematician Frant is menaced in his lodgings by illusionist Beltane, seemingly with the aim of sabotaging the secret project Frant works on. Their landlady\u2019s intervention saves the day. It was likened to early Pinter by several critics but was not considered successful. Although noting how \u201cthe writing, particularly of characters with pronounced idiosyncrasies of speech like the scientist and the landlady\u2019s old mother, bears witness to Mr. Cooper\u2019s acuteness of ear\u201d, The Times<\/em> concluded that the play was \u201csuperficially gripping but ultimately unsatisfactory.\u201d33<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The Freewheelers<\/em> was a study of youthful rebelliousness turned sour by jealousy and betrayal.34<\/a><\/sup> A gang of upper-middle-class teenagers indulge in a game of \u2018borrowing\u2019 sports cars and racing them to random locations. This is all done for fun until the group is infiltrated by petty criminal Sid, who shows them how to profit by their thefts. The gang\u2019s leader, Jeremy, eventually betrays Sid \u2013 much to his comrades\u2019 revulsion \u2013 by setting him up with a bet to steal a hearse, and he goes to prison. Critical opinion was mixed but few came down wholly in the play\u2019s favour. \u201cThe sharpness of observation and the distinction of dialogue were there,\u201d said The Times<\/em>, \u201cas was the originality of mind which can treat a fairly conventional subject with the freshness that finds novelties in it. What seemed to be missing was the sinister quality by which [Cooper\u2019s] comedy is shadowed\u201d.35<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Cooper\u2019s next play was a departure for him. \u201cI have always wanted to write a conventional romantic story about ordinary people\u201d, he told a reporter.36<\/a><\/sup> The result was True Love and Limbeck<\/em>, a contrived romantic comedy about the eponymous British mining engineer in Spain and his chaotic entanglements.37<\/a><\/sup> The Daily Mail<\/em> found it a \u201csmooth running high comedy\u201d, while the Telegraph<\/em> complained that its opening situation \u201cpromised well but it took Mr. Cooper nearly an hour to bring his comedy fully to life.\u201d38<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The Double Doll<\/em> was a dark comedy of menace about a couple and their slow-witted maid, who becomes the worm-that-turned after an episode of marital strife.39<\/a><\/sup> Its masterful construction and development was much admired. Dennis Potter reported how \u201cCooper allowed events to thicken almost imperceptibly. Nothing was hurried. Even the sense of menace gathered as slowly as a blind boil.\u201d40<\/a><\/sup> The BBC\u2019s ITV monitor was equally impressed: \u201cWritten with beautiful economy. A subtle plot which seems to meander like life: one is never sure where it is going, though by the end it is clear that everything has happened just as it should.\u201d41<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Cooper\u2019s next play took him into outright science-fiction, though with a playful edge, showing television itself used as a weapon. In Loop<\/em>, a village becomes the bridgehead for an invasion of the present from a debased humanity of the far future seeking to avoid cosmic destruction.42<\/a><\/sup> Those watching television at a specific moment are sent into a state of suspended animation, ready for occupation by another intellect. Unaffected villagers mount resistance, in true British style, from the pub. When the threat is resolved, time appears to reset itself back to the beginning of the story, but leaves those who were involved with a hazy image of their experiences. <\/p>\n

\u201cA spine-chilling opening and a well-sustained investigation of circumstances and motivations\u201d, reported the BBC\u2019s ITV monitor. \u201cOnly at the end were we allowed a Wellsian glimpse of future humanity (Gremlin-like creatures existing in isolated cells).\u201d43<\/a><\/sup> The Daily Telegraph<\/em> noted its \u201clight touches of humour\u201d and found it \u201cfascinating viewing, even though the last few moments were rather head-spinning.\u201d44<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The nature of the world as seen through fresh eyes, and the contrast of optimistic dreams of space exploration with the sordid realities of everyday life, were the subjects of A Wicked World<\/em>.45<\/a><\/sup> Roland starts the day playing at spacemen with his son, pretending to be arriving on Saturn. He leaves for work in a mind-set to see the world around him as if he were exploring an alien planet. He looks at his workplace anew and his inquisitiveness draws him to a competitor\u2019s office across the road. From this vantage point he witnesses his assistant seducing his secretary, and is then accused of spying both there and back at his own office. To extricate himself, he throws blame on the assistant, who kills himself. Roland returns home, angry and disgusted, and finds his son has given up his game having learned that Saturn cannot support life.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt showed to a remarkable degree Mr Cooper\u2019s gift for finding the strangeness in familiar things and people\u201d, noted The Guardian<\/em>, \u201cSo nothing in the play was quite naturalistic and everything was a little bent to suggest an odd dimension of greater significance than what we could see.\u201d46<\/a><\/sup> The BBC\u2019s ITV monitor was impressed: \u201cA light comedy turns by neat surprises and reversals into savage satire. The plot is perfect of its kind, unpredictable until the final minute, yet every surprise seems inevitable on recollection. Characterisation, theme and atmosphere are all integral to the story. Without a hint of didacticism, we have been made to look at part of our own world from a new, critical angle, and been disturbed, as well as vastly entertained, by what we saw.\u201d47<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Cooper\u2019s television magnum opus<\/em> appeared in September 1964. The Other Man<\/em> had originally been pitched to the BBC as a three-part drama but ultimately was accepted by Granada as a vast single play.48<\/a><\/sup> At two-and-a-half hours, with around 60 speaking parts and 200 extras, The Other Man<\/em> was one of the most ambitious television drama productions seen up to that point. In an exploration of the nature of free will, Cooper presented an alternative timeline in which, following Churchill\u2019s death in 1940, Britain made peace with Germany, becoming a Nazi puppet state. This scenario is dramatised via the career progression of ambitious British Army officer George Grant, played by Michael Caine. He starts off a seemingly decent officer, with the prospect of a good army career ahead of him. But progressively he makes compromises to advance his career that push him ever further in the direction of fascism.<\/p>\n

Towards the play\u2019s conclusion, Grant breaks down under his guilt and tries to get himself killed while on the Eastern front in the Axis powers\u2019 war against Russia. In one of Cooper\u2019s characteristically macabre turns of events, Grant survives \u2013 just \u2013 and wakes in a military hospital much later to learn that he has been patched up using organs transplanted from prisoners of war thanks to the same advances in Nazi medical science that have guaranteed Hitler\u2019s longevity. In a final twist of the knife, he is to be paraded as a hero of the Reich for his actions on the Eastern front, a pretence his estranged wife is forced to maintain with him to present the proper wholesome image of a Nazi idol. The play ends where it began, with Grant in the present giving a speech at the opening of his old regiment\u2019s museum, in both the real and alternative timelines, and there is little to distinguish the two. Cooper seems to be saying that for all Britain\u2019s pride at resisting Nazism, the nation\u2019s present vales and lifestyle may not be so different from what they would have been had it not prevailed in the Second World War.<\/p>\n

Despite its heavyweight theme and grotesque elements, The Other Man<\/em> is also not without a streak of Cooper\u2019s signature comedy, notably in the sadly short-lived character of officer \u2018Nanny\u2019 Norris, who maintains an amusing British gentility in the face of Nazi officiousness. A large chunk from the middle of the play is missing from the archive but the surviving portions are enough to show The Other Man<\/em> to be a compelling and fascinating drama, exploring a theme somewhat ahead of its time. The critics were generally impressed, albeit with reservations. Some objected strongly, however, to the play\u2019s theme. \u201cCertainly it held the attention throughout with its steady corruption of British Service life\u201d, noted the Daily Mirror<\/em>, \u201cBut in doing so it stank of bestiality and distortion of the British character.\u201d49<\/a><\/sup> Cooper also wrote the story as a novel of the same name which was published on the day of the play\u2019s transmission.50<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The following month the BBC broadcast Carried by Storm<\/em>, a rare historical subject for Cooper, and one which he had written as early as 1959, inspired by a series of Goya paintings.51<\/a><\/sup> It concerned the capture of Badajoz in Spain, where Cooper had researched the play, by the British in 1812 during the Peninsular War against France. While the city falls into chaos, English soldier Dick Jervis hides away in a bolt hole, where he makes a personal truce with Franco-Irishman Louis Dillon. They plan to sit out the carnage and then desert but, seemingly corrupted by the life of violence to which they have been conditioned, Jervis ultimately betrays Dillon, leading to him being hanged for a rape he didn\u2019t commit. \u201cA splendidly written play with a well-projected message\u201d, said The Stage and Television Today<\/em>.52<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

In 1965, the BBC recognised Cooper\u2019s status as probably television drama\u2019s leading serious writer with a trio of productions in the Theatre 625<\/em> anthology, which specialised in drama with \u2018depth\u2019 and aimed for the profound exploration of dramatic themes.53<\/a><\/sup> Introducing the plays for the Radio Times<\/em>, Cooper denied they formed a trilogy, having \u201cnothing in common except their author\u201d.54<\/a><\/sup> He went on to find some rather opaque thematic similarities, with the characters all standing \u201cin a curious relationship to the outside world\u201d and belonging to closed groups. He expanded: \u201cPerhaps, though, the worlds of these three plays do have something in common. They have all stopped moving and are therefore ripe for dissolution.\u201d Cooper concluded on a morbid note, conceding one concrete similarity: there was a corpse in each play.<\/p>\n

The first of these plays was actually an adaptation of one of Cooper\u2019s most successful radio plays, the sinister and subversive Unman, Wittering and Zigo<\/em>.55<\/a><\/sup> Writing about the original radio version of the play, Cooper reported: \u201cSometimes I dream that I am back in my kindergarten being taught how to site machine-guns – in Latin – by a bearded French professor.\u201d56<\/a><\/sup> This association of an educational establishment with nightmarish absurdity and potential violence strongly informs Unman, Wittering and Zigo<\/em>. Set in a nondescript public school, the play follows the early days of new master John Ebony as he slowly comes to learn that his pupils have murdered his predecessor, Pelham, and that he features in their further plans. The Daily Mirror<\/em> wrote that: \u201cthis was the well-balanced work of a master craftsman. It showed how closely farce and drama really are\u2026 For tension, writing, acting and directing I give this play ten out of ten.\u201d57<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The play is widely regarded as one of Cooper\u2019s greatest achievements, and aside from its radio and television versions, it has been adapted for stage and film. The Theatre 625<\/em> production became the BBC\u2019s drama entry for the European Broadcasting Union\u2019s Italia Prize the following year.58<\/a><\/sup> Amongst Cooper\u2019s many influences in writing the play was his experience in adapting Lord of the Flies<\/em> for radio, which made him think that \u201cevil might be imposed and not natural\u201d.59<\/a><\/sup> In Unman, Wittering and Zigo<\/em> Cooper suggests that power corrupts not just those who wield it, but also those it is wielded over. It\u2019s the hierarchies of power and obedience that form the bedrock of such institutions as public schools that allow \u2013 even encourage \u2013 group crimes like Pelham\u2019s murder.<\/p>\n

The other two plays in the sequence, Seek Her Out<\/em> and The Long House<\/em>, were new works for television.60<\/a><\/sup> In Seek Her Out<\/em>, a woman witnesses a man falling to his death beneath a tube train. She also sees who pushed him and in consequence is pursued across London by the killers. Reaching home, she summons the police but her story is not believed. The three villains \u2013 terrorists from an unnamed British protectorate \u2013 confront her at her home, putting her on trial for passing information to the police and sentence her to death. \u201cThere was an eerie quality about this play that kept me glued to the screen lest I miss one word\u201d, wrote Bill Edmund in The Stage and Television Today<\/em>, continuing: \u201cOn one level it was a neatly constructed thriller, on the other it showed how easy it is to have contempt for human life if your victim is unknown to you.\u201d61<\/a><\/sup> There was a hint of the comedy of menace about it, as is characteristic of much of Cooper\u2019s work, with the killers\u2019 dialogue reported to be cheerful in tone.<\/p>\n

The Long House<\/em>, named after and taking inspiration from a communal structure common to several pre-historic peoples, featured one of Cooper\u2019s favourite themes: the closed community. Young couple Ben and Kathie leave the pretentions of Hampstead to live in south London. They discover that their neighbours have removed the internal walls that divide their terrace houses to live together in one \u2018long\u2019 house. Kathie is drawn to join them and, reluctantly, Ben knocks down their own separating wall. The reality of communal living proves unsustainable, with peer pressures, failures in collective decision-making and the threat of exposure to the outside world. The hiding of the death of an old man, so as not to reveal the commune to the authorities, creates a divide. Meanwhile, a deranged old lady attempts to murder a child\u2019s visiting school friend to ensure his silence. Ultimately, inevitably, the dividing walls go back up.<\/p>\n

It was a popular production which examined and neatly satirised the then-trendy notion of a return to communal living. The Daily Mirror<\/em> found it \u201ccompulsive viewing\u201d, while The Times<\/em> wrote that the play: \u201cshone out like a good deed in the world of television drama. It is not perhaps the most plausible of plays, but Mr. Cooper\u2019s inventiveness and grotesque humour compelled us to accept it. Inevitably, a disturbing set of ideas found itself entirely embodied in a strange story.\u201d62<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The rest of 1965 and 1966 was filled with adaptations. Most notable of these were serial versions of Ernest Hemingway\u2019s seminal novels of love and war For Whom the Bell Tolls<\/em> and A Farewell for Arms<\/em>, for the BBC.63<\/a><\/sup> Also screened in early 1966 were episodes for ABC\u2019s supernatural anthology Mystery and Imagination<\/em>.64<\/a><\/sup> Cooper spent the rest of the year working on a handful of prestigious projects for broadcast the following year.<\/p>\n

In what sounds almost like a device from one of his own plays, Cooper\u2019s body was found by a railway line close to Surbiton on 2 December 1966. He had fallen from a fast moving train while on his way home from a writers\u2019 dinner in London. He was aged just 48 and working at the height of his powers as a dramatist. As well as his prolific output for television and, decreasingly, radio, he had experienced some success in the theatre since Everything in the Garden<\/em> in 1962. There have subsequently been unsubstantiated suggestions that his death was suicide, but the inquest heard that Cooper had been drinking that evening and returned a verdict of death from misadventure.65<\/a><\/sup> Cooper left behind a widow and two sons. He also left a large number of completed but as yet unmade scripts, such that at least eight of his plays would be produced posthumously. <\/p>\n

Cooper had spent much of 1966 writing a three-part dramatisation of Evelyn Waugh\u2019s Sword of Honour<\/em> trilogy for BBC2\u2019s Theatre 625<\/em>.66<\/a><\/sup> Following the aristocratic Guy Crouchback through the Second World War, Waugh\u2019s story was a lengthy treatise on the pursuit of chivalry and the decline of aristocratic tradition. Sharing elements of Crouchback\u2019s background and having also served as a British officer in the war, Cooper was well-placed to adapt Waugh\u2019s novels to television. He provided a highly effective trilogy of plays, cutting or telescoping events as necessary for the screen time and production resources available, but always remaining true to the characters, spirit and central narrative of Waugh\u2019s original.<\/p>\n

Sword of Honour<\/em> was a great success, thanks not just to its excellent script but also an impressive central performance by Edward Woodward as Crouchback and sensitive direction from regular Cooper collaborator Donald McWhinnie. \u201cI doubt whether a more human play, at once compassionate and quietly sardonic, has ever been done on television\u201d, wrote The Times<\/em> of the first of the trilogy. \u201cIt is not merely that the late Giles Cooper, whose recent death deprives the medium of one of its foremost dramatists, was the obvious man to interpret the full range of Mr. Waugh\u2019s masterpiece. The task has been illuminated by his own rare perception, above all by his strong sense of irony\u201d.67<\/a><\/sup> The trilogy was repeated twice the following year, once \u2018promoted\u2019 to BBC1 for the benefit of viewers unable to receive the still-new BBC2. <\/p>\n

Written by the end of 1965 but only reaching the screen in 1967 was I Am Osango<\/em>, a macabre and satirical original play for Armchair Theatre<\/em>.68<\/a><\/sup> Spot welder Aaron Tuft is confined to bed following an accident at work. Toft and his wife Hilda have not been speaking for years, using daughter Ivy as their intermediary. Suddenly stuck at home and dependent on Hilda, Toft reluctantly enters into dialogue with her, but only under the understanding that it\u2019s because of this unfamiliar situation and the medication he\u2019s taking. \u201cYou\u2019re not yourself,\u201d she agrees, setting the stage for the exploration of the unspoken question: so who is he?<\/p>\n

After Hilda has read to him from a newspaper about Aaron Osango, an African political prisoner (and one-time spot welder) condemned to death, Toft comes to believe that he is Osango, describing his prison conditions and developing the stigmata of bruising from wrist manacles. This seeming-delusion continues even after Osango escapes. Visiting Tuft, Osango reveals he had never been in real danger and had not been manacled. As Tuft nevertheless narrates the execution party\u2019s arrival, Osango explains that there had been a petty criminal, \u201ca nobody\u201d, due to hang that day, and Tuft dies. <\/p>\n

It is a highly effective play, with many more layers of meaning than a brief synopsis can convey. Cooper satirises the cynical reactions to far off injustices of politicians and journalists, who see Toft as merely a publicity gimmick, and uses television vox pops to suggest that despite the media scrum public interest in such distant events is minimal. Meanwhile, Osango himself becomes less sympathetic upon his escape, showing no interest in the real condemned man, who remains unknown to the world thanks to his lowly status. Like Toft before \u2013 and after \u2013 his brief period of newsworthiness, the hanged convict is just another little man in a world obsessed with celebrity.<\/p>\n

Cooper\u2019s final original plays to be produced on television were Kittens Are Brave<\/em> and To the Frontier<\/em>, in 1967 and 1968 respectively.69<\/a><\/sup> Written in 1963, Kittens Are Brave<\/em> concerned a television personality known for devastating honesty who tracks down and exposes a vicar who had sent him a poison pen letter, with unforeseen consequences for both men and their families. The play was seemingly a treatise on honesty, hypocrisy and the mutability of these concepts in public perception. The Stage and Television Today<\/em> found it \u201ca darkly entertaining play [but] by no means one of Cooper\u2019s best\u201d.70<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

To the Frontier<\/em> was a Kafkaesque nightmare of a holidaying schoolmaster finding himself in the demilitarised zone between a British overseas territory and the \u2018republic\u2019, unable to gain entry at either border. The play \u201ccame over as a parable of lost innocence \u2013 a parable depicting present-day humanity struggling to remain sane and civilised in an insane uncivilised world\u201d, wrote The Stage and Television Today<\/em>.71<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Cooper kept up writing adaptations until his death, the last being a version of Victor Hugo\u2019s Les Miserables<\/em> for the BBC. Cooper had just started on episode four when he died, and Harry Green completed the 10-part dramatisation for broadcast in late 1967.72<\/a><\/sup> Cooper had also adapted Lawrence Durrell\u2019s Stiff Upper Lip<\/em> for ITV and David Garnett\u2019s A Man in the Zoo<\/em> (which he had previously dramatised for radio) for the BBC, although the latter was not screened until 1975, nearly a decade after Cooper\u2019s death.73<\/a><\/sup> Cooper\u2019s Madame Bovary<\/em> script from 1964 was produced again, also in 1975.74<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

Like any dramatist, Cooper wrote a number of synopses and scripts which didn\u2019t reach production. Amongst these were a bizarre thriller serial called Operation Cheeseboard<\/em> and The Carboy<\/em>, both proposed in 1965.75<\/a><\/sup> The latter was an unusually philosophical play about a scientist who creates life in the laboratory, in the form of miniature humanity with greatly accelerated lifespan. Whilst inside the carboy the new society evolves rapidly through a variety of social and economic systems, outside of it the scientist becomes involved in an ultimately murderous love tringle. When a bullet smashes the carboy, the miniature humans escape into the wider world. Coming across a dead body, they can only speculate that this \u2018giant\u2019 lifeform became extinct as its body was too large for its brain. For a time after Cooper\u2019s death The Carboy<\/em> was under contract to Thames Television but it ultimately went unproduced.76<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

It is tempting to speculate as to what other works might have followed, or what his reputation might now be, if Cooper had lived, but this shouldn\u2019t distract us from the fascinating body of completed works he left behind. Talking in 1961, Cooper referred to radio and television dramatists such as himself as \u201cthose whose names are writ in the air\u201d and it is this perception of broadcast media as wholly ephemeral that is largely responsible for his present obscurity. Nevertheless, Giles Cooper has to be recognised not only as radio drama\u2019s foremost practitioner, but also as one of British television\u2019s most versatile, prolific and \u2013 in his time \u2013 celebrated dramatists.<\/p>\n

Oliver Wake<\/p>\n

With thanks to Nick Cooper, the British Film Institute and the BBC Written Archives Centre.<\/em><\/p>\n

Originally posted: 30 September 2016.
\nUpdates:
\n8 October 2016: added three new images (in addition to existing ‘by Giles Cooper’ images)
\n16 October 2016: two minor typographical corrections
\n31 May 2024: amended (or added to) details relating to Cooper’s father’s work, Cooper’s time in Spain and Cooper’s army service. Added Radio Times coverage of the Theatre 625 plays and the radio Zigo. Brief addition to The Long House and an office anecdote relating to Maigret. Clarified Cleveland source and citation. Other minor prose and typographical amendments.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n