Roger Marshall interview Part II: ‘Missing From Home’ (1984) and Douglas Camfield

 

 

This article was first published on the (now defunct) University of Reading 'Spaces of Television' blog on 05 September 2012:

 Last February, I had the good fortune to interview one of the great screenwriters of British TV drama, Roger Marshall in his Richmond home. His extensive C.V. has included episodes of The Avengers, The Sweeney, The Professionals, two plays for Armchair Theatre, the serials Missing from Home, Traveling Man and Floodtide. He was also the creator of three series: Zodiac, Mitch and (with Anthony Marriot) Public Eye. In this part of this interview he discusses his 1984 BBC1 serial Missing From Home – an exceptionally successful and popular drama that has subsequently been all but forgotten – and the work of its director, Douglas Camfield:

Douglas Camfield

RM. I was reading in your note that you’re a fan of Dougie Camfield. I was just remembering with my wife, the first came that he came into our house we were in the front and he said to me “So this is where you churn them out, is it?” and that wasn’t the greatest start to our friendship, but we did survive that! He did a very good job on Missing From Home, without a doubt. I thought that Judy Loe came out of it best of all, and he came out of it second best, and I think that I was probably third best. I didn’t like the ending much.

BS. Missing From Home is an interesting production in your career because, first of all, it’s a BBC production, of which there aren’t many.

RM. No, there aren’t. A producer in the BBC told me quite early on that, “The problem with you is you’re too expensive.” And I said, “Well, you’ve never even asked how much I’m on!” You know, this is agent talk. So until Missing From Home I’d never really cracked the BBC, you’re right.

BS. I only know the one episode of Survivors before then –

RM. Rubbish! Nothing to stick your chest out about. But later, I did quite a few Lovejoys for the BBC.

BS. Missing From Home was a serial rather than a series, the form for which you’d become extremely established for writing. Would that have been more difficult to get commissioned and get off the ground?

RM. It came about because Ron Craddock, the producer, actually contacted me and said “We’d love you to do something for us at the BBC. Have you got any ideas?” I said “Well, I have got an idea.” He said well tell me and I told it to him and he said, “Could you put that on three or four pieces of paper and we’ll take it from there.” And good as his word, he did. So, one of those things.

BS. What sort of form did you envisage the story taking?

RM. I envisaged it taking the form that it did, really. Six interrelated hours, like six chapters of a book.

BS. One of the things that I particularly like about it is it’s a very good illustration of the merits of how television drama was made at the time; the interiors of the studio, and the exteriors on 16mm film.

RM. Yes, it was conventional old-fashioned television in that sense, with the studio and the filmed inserts. Because that’s now gone, hasn’t it? The sad thing about it was that it was very successful with the viewers and it topped the ratings – I was working in Granada when it was shown and we went to have a drink in the bar one lunchtime and somebody came up to me who I didn’t recognize and said, “Your show has just knocked the Street off the top of the charts.” I said, “Yes, its good, isn’t it?” He said, “Well, once is alright, but twice is a kneecapping” and then he turned on his heel and walked away, and I said to somebody “Who the hell was that?” and he said, “That’s Bill Podmore, he’s the overall producer of the Street” I never spoke to him again, he never spoke to me again, and that was the end of that.

 But sadly, after its terrific success the show sort of disappeared; it didn’t get sold anywhere, its never been repeated. I’ve no idea why, you never know. Everybody worked on it, including the producer who was employed by the BBC would have wanted it to go on, and it didn’t happen.

BS. What do you attribute its particular success to?

RM. Well, I think that it probably worked on the level of “I’ve got to watch the next week, just to see what happens next”, on that basic level. And Judy Loe was very good in it. How did you see it? I’m interested in how anyone would get to see it today. I’d imagine that few people would have heard of it now, its just a name.

BS. I saw it for the first time recently, but I do remember my parents watching it when it was on. I didn’t see it myself because I was still at primary school, but I remember the simplicity of the title – Missing from Home – capturing my imagination.

RM. Did your parents enjoy it?

BS. Yes, they watched it for six weeks!

RM. Well, that’s good enough, isn’t it? It was a good success. There are bits of it that I remember with great affection, and I think that Dougie did it very well. I was trying to think, prior to your coming, if I’d worked with him on something else.

BS. Yes, there’s one Sweeney, ‘Bad Apple’ (Thames, 11 October 1976) –

RM. About corruption in the force. I’d forgot he did that, and I think he did a Professionals.

BS. Yes, an odd episode (‘Take Away’, LWT, 12 October 1980).

RM. The Chinese one. Yes, I thought he did that very well. It was interesting, I’d been working in Hong Kong and I was sort of gung ho on the Chinese at the time, so I sold them the idea. I got a very sweet letter from a Chinese actress in it that said it was lovely to work on something that restores my belief in British television. I don’t know who she is or where she went, but it was good.

BS. The only other thing that I’ve seen her in is Philip Martin’s Gangsters where she plays a Chinese gangster’s moll.

RM. Of course, with things like The Professionals there was no read-through where you’d meet, so we probably never came across each other.

BS. Thinking about Missing From Home, one of the points where it fits in quite interestingly with Camfield’s career is that it has a continuity with the programme that he’d directed immediately before, The Nightmare Man (BBC1, 1981), in that they both use a lot of location and are set in secluded places, but also the way in which the viewer understands the story changes throughout the run of the series. So the first episode of Missing From Home could be a thriller, when the police investigate the husband’s secret service connections, and the drama then changes to become increasingly domestic and internal.

RM. That’s true. Dougie Camfield of course worked a lot at Thames, as did I, so we came across each other quite a lot, and he lived just across the bridge in Twickenham, so we knew each other reasonably well. It was very funny, when he got the script he came over and said, “Who have you got in mind for the lead?” and I said, “Well, there’s a girl I worked with a couple of times at LWT, Judy Loe” and he said, “I don’t think I know her”. And we got Spotlight out and we saw a picture of her and he said, “I can’t make a comment but I’ll at least meet her and talk to her”. That weekend, he went up shopping in Peter Jones in Sloane Square and, lo and behold, it’s not believable, across the counter buying something for her child was Judy Loe. So he said that he did a sort of Philip Marlowe and followed her round the store, keeping an eye on all her reactions and who she spoke to, and he said, “She looks interesting. I will definitely meet her” and the rest you know.

BS. Something that’s particularly good about both her performance and the way that Camfield turns it out, which is very specific to the way that television studio drama of that period worked, is the way that she responds to rooms and is aware of space. It’s particularly striking to see the amount of time that’s devoted to showing her alone in her domestic space in that series.

RM. Yes. That was an integral part of the story. That suddenly there’s a lot of time when she is on her own, with one boy at school and another one at home, but no man around the place, and suddenly she’s got time to look around and consider.

BS. Camfield brings out a tremendous rhythm that must be there in your script, alternating between quite silent, slow, domestic scenes and her then visiting other peoples’ offices and being fobbed off.

RM. Yes. I think that’s more instinctive in the writing than considered – You don’t think ‘that will balance that’, it sort of happens.

BS. With the best directors of that period, the sense of rhythm in the script is much more apparent.

RM. Yes, well that depends upon the quality of the director. The good ones get it and those who are not so good miss it.

BS. The Suffolk locations in Missing From Home are particularly distinctive.

RM. I placed it there because it was a part of the country that I knew. We had an actress friend who had a cottage just outside Saxemunden. We took it a couple of times, so we got to know the area, and it seemed relatively unexplored in terms of television, so we honed in on that, everybody liked the idea.

 That tale reminds me of a rather funny story that when we took this cottage the first time it was a very, very, hot summer and we took the kitchen table into the garden, there were a couple of apple trees, and we had our meals out there. One day we were sitting having our lunch and our son, who would have been four at the time, was sitting at the table and he had his chin literally on the table. We said “Sit up, Christopher, sit up.” He said, “I am sitting up, I haven’t got a very big chair”, they were his lines, I remember. And he hadn’t, he’d got this dinky little chair, so we changed it around and went on. A year later, we went to see an Alan Aykbourn play, Table Manners, with this vet sitting with his chin on the table. I mean this was ridiculous; it was exactly the same scene. I said to the actress who had hired us the cottage “You didn’t have Alan Aykbourn?” She said he had it the year before you did. Obviously, the same thing had happened to Alan Aykbourn as happened to us. Lovely little coincidence.

BS. With the rooms and the houses that Judy Loe visits in Missing From Home, in the end when she meets her husband’s mistress, there’s a very immediate and intricate sense for the viewer of this being a different space, in the way that all of the mistresses’ furnishings reflect the way that she lives her life. Do you think that this was something that worked particularly well in studio drama?

RM. I can’t remember that, it’s been a long time since I saw it. I imagine that it would have been something that Dougie had done very deliberately, to have visually set up what was happening in the relationship. I didn’t even remember that one saw the husband’s mistress.

BS. The casting of it is also interesting in that Camfield used a kind of repertory company, so there are people like Jonathan Newth in it –

RM. Well, he was the man that she met when she went to the school. He was a father. I thought that those scenes together worked very well, I thought he was excellent.

BS. There’s a counterpoint to the interior, studio, scenes in the way that Judy Loe responds to the Suffolk countryside and locations like the railway station and canals. Do you have a kind of geographical sense when you’re writing of the topography of where things are set and how the viewers come to understand them?

 

RM. Well, it was particularly appropriate in the shows that I did at Granada, the two big ones where I wrote all of them [Travelling Man and Floodtide]. Because they were such a long stint of work, four years or something, I got to know all the Production Managers, and got to a sort of wonderful thing that you can’t really achieve in television very often when I would be able to say to them, “Look, give me a location and then take me to it and show it to me, and then I’ll write the script about what you’ve shown me” and they said that’s fabulous, because it suddenly brings them into the forefront of the production, and it worked terribly well on both of those series. And then in Floodtide I went with them to France and it paid off again. Not easy to do – I mean it was easy for John Ford to go up to Monument Valley and the rest of Hollywood will wait. Television doesn’t work that way. Not often, but it did on these two occasions.

BS. I’ve read that both of those series were shot on Outside Broadcast on single camera. So when you initially went to the locations were you recording them on a camcorder?

RM. Oh no, I just went with a pad. They’d say, “Well there’s that farm over there, and if you’d get… I think that it might be good, and you could see the hill behind and the train.” So it was evolving, and it just required me to move the pieces around in the front, which was great fun.

 The two series that I made for Granada were interesting in your relation to the theory of space. They’re both heavily full of location, but the locations came before the story which was a lovely, luxurious way to work in that you were writing a scene for a place that you know exists and you can visualize it. It was just lovely. It gave the whole show a lift – particularly when you’re walking around Harfleur on the French coast and you see the fisherman with their nets and you think, ‘Oh God, this is all there, isn’t it? I don’t have to do anything!’ Lovely, a great privilege.

BS. Single camera was very much a different discipline to film or studio. Did you approach that warily?

RM. No, I didn’t. I left that to them. I’m not sure that many directors want too much in the way of camera instruction, and I certainly didn’t give it to them. But then, of course, in this particular instance one guy was directing them all as I was writing them all, so we had a sort of shorthand, where he would say “I’m not happy about… I think we could…” etc, that give and take.

BS. Something that I’m very interested in historically is the relationship between the writer and the director. In the series that you initially worked in the sixties and seventies, were you aware of whom the director was going to be, or be likely to be?

RM. Well just occasionally you had a director who brought so much more to it than you imagined that anyone could do, that you immediately thought “He’s somebody I’d like to work with again” and I sort of evolved the idea that the writer-director relationship was a great element so – you mentioned Public Eye. Well, the original director of that, Kim Mills, stayed with it all the way through, of course, and we had a very profitable relationship.

BS. Because he produced the Brighton series as well –

RM. As well as directing three of that series. That was just marvelous.

BS. It’s interesting that you talk about this close relationship between the writer and the director with Public Eye, Travelling Man and Floodtide – it being both a preferable state of affairs, but also quite a rare one.

RM. Yes it is, I don’t know why it should be that rare. But the most successful things that I have ever been associated with, The Avengers or whatever, have been with a small handful of particularly good directors.

Dougie was never very strong. He had a bad heart, which killed him in the end

BS. You were fortunate to get his work right at the end. Missing from Home was shown posthumously.

RM. Oh God, that’s terrible. Another strange thing is that Judy Loe was absolutely rock solid – super performance all the way through – and the next year nobody wanted her, because she was a star now, so they thought they couldn’t afford her. And the next thing that she did was a part in Travelling Man. That was the first time that she’d worked since. She knew Leigh Lawson quite well, so it was marvelous to see her working.

BS. She’d recently been widowed when she made Missing from Home.

RM. Yes, Richard Beckinsale. We watched an episode of Porridge at Christmas. He was so good, such a tragedy. She’s married now to a director, ex-BBC.

BS. In comparison with contemporary television drama, it’s interesting that you could have such a successful series that wasn’t predicated or marketed around any star casting.

RM. No, but then you can be very badly served by your masters. I did a series for LWT with John Thaw called Mitch (LWT, 1984) and we started with a series of thirteen and then we were cut down to ten because they were in some sort of financial difficulty. And then because of this mythical financial difficulty we were on the shelf for eighteen months, so by the time that the opener, which was about policing the streets of Brixton, was transmitted it was about as topical as Victoria’s Coronation. We never got any publicity although we had the hottest actor in British television playing the lead. But it was a good idea, well done with no reward at all. Very disappointing. That happens.

Roger Marshall interview Part I: ‘Public Eye’

 

 

This article was first published on the (now defunct) University of Reading 'Spaces of Television' blog on 05 September 2012:

 Last February, I had the good fortune to interview one of the great screenwriters of British TV drama, Roger Marshall in his Richmond home. His extensive C.V. has included episodes of The Avengers, The Sweeney, The Professionals, two plays for Armchair Theatre, the serials Missing from Home, Traveling Man and Floodtide. He was also the creator of three series: Zodiac, Mitch and (with Anthony Marriot) Public Eye. In this part of this interview he discusses Public Eye.

BS. I would imagine that writing for the studio series and the film ones would have required different skills.

RM. I don’t know whether the writer thinks in terms of film and studio. I’m not aware of a tremendous switching off or switching over. Obviously, when you started on The Avengers in the studio days, the Honor Blackman days, there were severe limits to what you could do. You could have four sets and two corners, that’s all there would be. So it was interesting having to work your story around this scale. But there was one that Bill Bain did called ‘Mandrake’ (24 January 1964) and he built a cemetery and it was stunning. I remember scores of letters coming in from people who lived in Teddington saying, great television but is it fair that you do all that malarkey in a cemetery, and of course it was a studio. But it was very well designed. Whenever you’re talking about Thames always remember that the budget for Thames design was that much greater than anybody else’s, so the shows always looked very good, however nonsensical. And a lot of their designers went on to become directors, which wasn’t the regular occurrence.

BS. It’s true that Thames and BBC productions always tended to look much better than the other ITV companies. There’s an interesting point in 1967 when the way that television looks changes, because it goes over to 625 lines in preparation for colour. And the rules for design change overnight, in that exteriors made in the studio look much less convincing than they had done earlier.

 I’m always interested when I read about programmes that were made in the studio with filmed inserts, the gap between the filming of the inserts and then the studio recording. Was much rewriting ever required between filming and recording?

RM. No, I don’t think so. I watched some of the Brighton Public Eyes recently and there’s one where Stephanie Beecham comes to the digs where Marker’s living, and she tries to commit suicide and he saves her (‘My Life’s My Own’, 20 August 1969), and there’s quite a long sequence of him walking her up and down the seafront, watched by the police. No, as a writer you filter that in and pick it up in the rehearsals for the studio the next day or whatever.

BS. That works really well in the Brighton series. I was thinking about that because I was watching an episode of the Birmingham series with my colleague (‘Don’t Forget You’re Mine‘, 9 July 1966) , and it climaxes with one big sequence that clearly required a lot of money and effort of a chase in New Street Station. That scene’s great, but the preceding scene in the studio feels odd, because Marker immediately decides to head off to the station and chase after this woman.

RM. Yes, I can well remember that there was no editing of the tape in those days, because if you edited the tape then it suddenly became a different deal. I remember Alfie Burke doing something quite wrong in a scene and he said, oh I’m sorry, we’ll have to do that again and they said, no, go on. They carried on whatever he did, so eventually to force their hand he walked off the set, but they still didn’t stop, until they realized that the leading man wasn’t there anymore, but it went on. It was like trying to stop the night train.

BS. There’s a lot to talk about with Public Eye. Its unfortunate that so little of the ABC series has survived. How involved were you with the last three series set in Surrey?

RM. I would write the odd one or two. For the record, I thought that it got a bit cosy then. My thesis was that Marker was a loner, and he didn’t need women who’ll cook his supper or friendly policemen. I can remember when we were writing the original brochure I came across a phrase from Kipling; “He travels fastest who travels alone” and that seemed to sum up, for me, what Marker was about. Inevitably, probably, as the years went on, they needed other things to take the weight off Alfie, but I didn’t like antique shops and the like. Too cosy.

BS. So you weren’t involved with the scenario of him moving to Windsor or establishing the new regular characters?

RM. No, but the Brighton series was certainly me, because I had a big relationship with Brighton at the time, and it fitted very well with Marker being in Ford Open Prison – the now notorious Ford Prison!

BS. The Brighton series is unusual in that it works as well as a serial. Was that an innovation at the time?

RM. Oh yes! Credit to the Head of Drama, Lloyd Shirley. He was keen on the series and wanted it to go on. I said to him that I would like to do a batch that is not about the client and his problem, but about Marker, the detective, and his problem. And he said, “Well that’s very interesting, I’ll go for that. Let me know what you want and I’ll make it happen” which was excellent of him.

BS. How did you reach the decision of Brighton, because so much of the mood of that series is specific to the place?

RM. Yes, he was put into prison in Winson Green in Birmingham. When became obvious that he wasn’t a villain or a hard nut, they transferred him to Ford, and Ford is geographically one stop on the train from Brighton, and Brighton is a lovely place to work from.

BS. The quite unfamiliar Brighton setting then dictates several of the stories in that series, which could only happen in a seaside place. So there’s the beachside café where the bikers work their scam (‘Divide and Conquer’, 6 August 1969) –

RM. – When Marker is building a sea wall, one of the jobs that he got from the builder. And while he’s working on the wall, a couple of thugs come to duff him up.

BS. The end of the pier show one is remarkable, too (‘The Comedian’s Graveyard’, 3 September 1969).

RM. With the comic, yes. When the director, Jonathan Alwyn came he said, “Have you got anyone in mind for the comic?” I said, Alfie Marks because I’d worked with him – disastrously. So a lot of this comic was written for the Alfie Marks that I knew, even down to him building a model galleon in his hotel room when he was in Brighton. And Jonathan said, I don’t think I can work with a comedian, I’ve got Joe Melia in mind, and I said, oh, he’d be marvelous if we could get him, and he was brilliant – I worked with him since.

BS. You get that sense of sadness about a comedian not being very good, that you might not get if it was an actual comedian playing the part.

RM. That’s absolutely true. It’s just that when I was working with Alfie Marks he was working in Brighton, and we went to see him in this little kosher hotel on the outskirts of Hove, so it was Alfie Marks in my mind.

BS. The Brighton series looks more elaborate and expensive than the previous ones.

RM. I’m sure that it wasn’t. It’s just easier to make Brighton look good than Birmingham.

BS. I thought that it might have been because ABC had changed into Thames.

RM. It’s possible. Certainly, the move to Birmingham was precipitated by the fact that ABC was a Midlands company. It was interesting for me that the Brighton series was very popular, which was lovely. I remember that we all went to Ford Prison when we were doing the recce, and the designer was there and they duplicated the size of the cells absolutely to the inch, and when it was started it was reviewed in the Mail by a lady called Virginia Ironside who said that the sets were ludicrous, that any prison cell that you see on television was much bigger than the reality!

BS. I think that I’m right in saying that the Brighton series includes a lot more location filming than the previous series had. In the episode where Marker confronts the bikers on Brighton Beach, that sequence is all on film and goes on for eleven minutes.

RM. Really? Well, that’s the director making a statement, isn’t it? I didn’t know that.

BS. It’s interesting how that episode works dramatically – A showdown with two toughs is always a good way to end an adventure story. You could compare it with your episode of Survivors (‘Parasites’, 2 June 1976, BBC1) where a similar sequence is shot on OB and there isn’t the opportunity to cut the scene so dramatically.

RM. The only interesting thing about Survivors is that it features canals and barges, which became a recurring theme later on for me.

BS. For the viewer, that episode of Survivors is surprisingly brutal. For the first ten minutes, Partick Troughton arrives on his barge and is a mystical Doctor Who-type character, and you think, oh this nice old man is going to improve things, and then the yobs murder him. The juxtaposition between the gentle and the nasty is quite distinctive.

RM. Well, it was always an idée fixe of mine that you put your girlfriend or your wife and your two children on this barge and you go sailing off and you don’t know where you are, you’re completely at the prey of anybody. I wrote one story where they’re going under a bridge and a bloke leans over and spits and it lands on the girl’s head – and suddenly you’re into a dramatic incident.

 On a more ridiculous level we knew a couple who knew that we were mad on canals and barges and they hired one and they’d only been out a quarter of an hour before the woman got her hand jammed between the barge and the brick wall, so…

BS. This might apply more to the Surrey series, but I think that Public Eye was particularly well suited to the studio mode of drama. In the way that the character of Marker is realised through his understanding of the rooms that he’s in, so; the way that his office is shabby, and different ways that directors shot it…

RM. Yes, Marker was always pushed for another fiver, particularly in the beginning. In the very first series his office was supposed to be within sight and sound of Clapham Junction, and you could hear the announcements at his window.

BS. And in the Birmingham ones his office is above a timber yard, which has the same sort of effect.

 And the way it works spatially is that most episodes involve Marker going from his own office into someone else’s house or office and – particularly through Alfred Burke’s camera sense, how Marker responds to the room – it gives the viewer such a sense of narrative and character even without dialogue.

 I understand that Thames wanted you to make a final series, but with Euston Films –

RM. Yes, that’s absolutely true. It’s a big personal regret of mine that we didn’t. I won’t say anything against Alfie if we sit here for a year, but he turned it down, and I think he was wrong. Because he feared that it would just become cops and robbers and chases to utilize the meaning of film. Well, a couple of years later Minder completely put the lie to that, and that was a really good series.

BS. Do you think that you’d have had to change the mood and feel of it to make it work for Euston?

RM. Yes, it would have been a change of pace, but I think that we could have done it. We saw Alfie at Christmas, he’s still going strong, 92. (sadly, Alfred Burke died a fortnight after this interview was conducted)

BS. I saw him as the old shepherd in Oedipus at the National a couple of years ago.

RM. Its very interesting, he’s too old to get insurance, so when the National called him he said, I’m sorry, of course I’d love to, but I’m too old to get insurance. And the director (Jonathan Kent) said, I’ll take the risk – whether he told the powers that be what he was doing, I don’t know. Because prior to that, he’d been offered a part in Aristocrats at the National, and he didn’t get it for the reason I’ve just told you. We went to see it and the character that he would have played was played by T.P. McKenna and all that you got was this voice over a speaker from upstairs, and then he came down from upstairs an hour later and he dropped dead. When we saw Alfie and he hadn’t got this part we said, we saw it and I have to say, as a fan, I’m thrilled that you didn’t get it, because it would have been an insult. He said, I understand where you’re coming from but it would have just ticked the box, getting work at the National.

BS. I saw him in a lot of things at the RSC in the nineties, before I was aware of his television persona.

RM. Unlike a lot of actors, when a series of Public Eye finished you’d say to Alfred, what’s next and he’d say, I’m going to do a Strindberg in Oslo or something. He was always doing something, something very different, and usually very challenging. He didn’t just sit on his money and dream, he was off.

[This post attracted a few comments over the years, which are preserved here - https://web.archive.org/web/20240718123043/https://blogs.reading.ac.uk/spaces-of-television/2012/09/05/roger-marshall-interview-part-i-public-eye/ ]

Recording ‘Public Eye’ (ABC) on location in Birmingham (1966)

 

Guy Verney directs Alfred Burke on location

 This article was first published on the (now defunct) University of Reading 'Spaces of Television' blog on 04 September 2012. It predates the 2015 publication of Andrew Pixley's definitive Public Eye production history, Public Eye: Six Guineas A Day, Plus Expenses (now out of print), which provides the answers and explanations for my speculations here.

 Few major British television drama series of the 1960s have a worse survival rate than that of the first three series of Public Eye (ABC, 1965-68/ Thames 1969-75). Of the 41 episodes of the first three series made by ABC, only five survive, which have just been released on DVD by Network (the four later series made by Thames thankfully survive in their entirety). Much of the reason for Public Eye’s poor archival status must lie in the sort of programme that it was, recently described by Dave Rolinson as “a magisterial detective-based drama (…) which got huge ratings for many years with its alliance of inventiveness, character focus, an unconventional lead and sometimes minimalist narrative”. A downbeat series about the cases taken on by a shabby enquiry agent (Frank Marker, played by Alfred Burke), the concerns of Public Eye seem low-key and parochial in comparison with ABC’s great success The Avengers, and achieved little in the way of equivalent cult status or international commercial export. Similarly, popular crime series were commonly held in lower esteem than other, more apparently ‘authored’, forms of drama such as the single play, hence the much greater retention of contemporaneous ABC Armchair Theatre plays.

 The paucity of surviving material from the original Public Eye series makes attempting to imagine what these lost programmes must have been like an archeological process in reconstructive imagination. As even the camera scripts don’t appear to still exist, such patchy sources as a few press cuttings and the Public Eye novelization have come to hold disproportionate weight. But one extra on the DVD set provides a remarkable insight into the conditions of Public Eye’s recording and how they affected the form that the programme took onscreen.

 Although the second series episode ‘You Can Keep the Medal’ (30 July 1966), does not survive, footage of it being recorded on location in Birmingham does, in the form of a five-minute feature recorded for the midlands local news programme ATV Today, transmitted on 3 June 1966. The feature consists of a scene of an encounter between Marker and a policeman (Timothy West) by a canal being recorded by an Outside Broadcast unit, the director making suggestions for a retake and an interview with Alfred Burke during a snatched tea break. Burke’s reflections about the value of different forms of TV recording are pertinent, and when viewed alongside another episode from the same series, the feature helps the viewer to understand why Public Eye took the form that it did, and the qualities that were particular to the programme.

 The second series of Public Eye marked a development for the programme. Where the first series had been set in London and filmed entirely in the studio, the second moved Frank Marker to Birmingham and started to incorporate location footage. In his ATV Today interview with Reg Harcourt, Alfred Burke explains the thinking behind this decision:

Well, we felt the lack of location work last time. There were a good dozen occasions where we could with advantage have gone outside and widened the scope of it, particularly with the character of Marker who does a great deal of footwork from door-to-door

 Birmingham hasn’t been exploited on the television screens. In fact, it hasn’t been seen to my knowledge. A big city, with all the sides of life that it contains – the sordidness and the squalor as well as the smart residential areas – is the sort of area in which Marker operates and gets most of his employment.

 These changes can be felt when watching the two surviving episodes from the London series back-to-back with the three that survive from the two Birmingham series. While the London episodes present rather generic stories of gangsters and prostitutes, the combination of second city local colour and sequences in actual locations create stories that feel more idiosyncratic and distinctive to the viewer. Burke describes this sense of actuality being evoked onscreen when he compares the processes of performing in the studio and on location:

 Well, naturally it’s a different thing. Working in the studio, everything is much more under your control. On the other hand when you’re out here everything is real, you’re enabled to be a great deal more spontaneous because you’re in a real street, by a real canal, or on a real farm, as we were yesterday.

 Much (but perhaps not all) of the location footage for Public Eye‘s second series appears to have been shot on Outside Broadcast equipment, meaning that it was recorded electronically onto videotape by a similar process to the one in the multi-camera studio, with the signals from the cameras on location being relayed by cable to a director sat in a mobile recording van, who would mix the images in the same way that he would do in the television studio gallery.

 Sometimes the director’s absence from the site of recording could be problematic for performers on the ground. When asked a general question about how location work is going by Reg Harcourt, Alfred Burke’s reply appears to conflate both experiences of working on film and on Outside Broadcast, but is useful in understanding the specific problems faced by actors in the conditions of television drama production in the 1960s:

 It’s going very well. It’s going the way it always does – a great deal of hanging about. The trouble with doing filming for television is that it’s alright when you’re actually doing it, but in the meantime it’s cosmically boring, because you have to do your own standing in and you’re usually standing in for your own left ear, or you’ve got to change your position and you find your foot’s in a hole or something of that kind, and the director – who is sitting 500 yards away in a mobile recording van – can’t understand why you can’t get the right position, you have to tell him that you’re half way up a mound of earth or something, but otherwise it goes alright.

 The ATV Today footage does illustrate some the limitations of Outside Broadcast recording, with the cumbersome camera equipment appearing difficult to manouvre. One of the two cameras on site attempts a mobile panning shot that requires two members of the crew to push it, and a third person to steer it.

 Such techniques were achievable on relatively flat and even surfaces such as canal walkways, but would have been hard to manage in bumpier or more remote locations.

 The benefits of the use of Outside Broadcast location and the Birmingham setting to Public Eye can be seen in the first surviving episode of the second series, ‘Don’t Forget You’re Mine’ (9 July 1966). A standard scene of Marker visiting a school in the hope of discovering information about a missing person is enlivened by being set in a real schoolyard:

 The narrative purpose of such a scene would have been just as apparent if realised through small cutaway set of the corner of a schoolyard in the studio, with sound effects of children playing, but the real setting provides the scene with the sense of spontaneity that Burke mentions. Having to speak above a noise made by the children at the same time and respond to the elements while conveying the plot means that the scene has a sense of occurring in the specific conditions of the moment, and adding considerably to the viewer’s imaginative understanding of the door-to-door work of a private detective.

 Although most of the location inserts in the episode are similarly modest scenes, the episode culminates in one highly ambitious sequence in a distinctive Birmingham landmark, when Marker sprints around New Street Station in pursuit of an endangered and unhappy girl: 

 Enjoyable and evocative though this ambitious sequence is, it has to be said that it isn’t seamlessly integrated into the narrative of the story, appearing to come out of nowhere – the woman leaves her room and Marker suddenly tells her husband that she’s in grave danger and they must comb the streets for her, an assertion unsupported by her previous behaviour in the episode.

 It can be much harder to ascertain whether inserts are recorded on videotape or 16mm film in black-and-white programmes than it is for later colour ones, so my instinct that this sequence was made on both film and video can only be an informed guess. What is apparent about this scene is that it locates the programme into a precise point in space and time – Central Birmingham in the mid sixties, when New Street Station is being rebuilt, with the sight the Rotunda and the Bull Ring in the background signifying modernity and the urban to the ITV audience of 1966.

The Public Eye website ‘A Marker for all Seasons’ is an exemplary source of available information and appreciative and thoughtful reviews of the series – http://www.publiceye1965-1975.uk/

 ['A Marker For All Seasons' has since changed its domain and its name to 'Public Eye - Frank Marker Investigates' and I have updated the link. This post attracted a lot of comments from Public Eye enthusiasts over the years, which are preserved here - https://web.archive.org/web/20240919233100/https://blogs.reading.ac.uk/spaces-of-television/2012/09/04/recording-public-eye-abc-on-location-in-birmingham-1966/ ]

Plot inflation in Greater Weatherfield: Coronation Street in the 1990s

Coronation Street #3109 (17 August 1990) Class war reaches Weatherfield as Des and Steph Barnes move into the new home at Number 6.

 This article was first published on the (now defunct) University of Reading 'Spaces of Television' blog on April 17 2013:

Snooping on Don Brennan from the Back Garden: Watching Coronation Street in the 1990s.

 For much of my twenties in the 1990s and early 2000s, before my eventual career as a Television Studies academic, I worked as a library assistant. Over years of tea breaks in library staff rooms I overheard (and occasionally contributed to) many conversations about soap operas, always Coronation Street (ITV, Granada, 1960-) and EastEnders (BBC1, 1985-). The content of these conversations generally took two forms: judgment over the rightness or wrongness of characters and their actions (“I was really sorry for Gail when Martin had a one night stand with that nurse“), and speculation as to how events would progress (“Who do you think shot Grant Mitchell?”). More general consideration of these soaps as programmes in themselves was infrequent and generally took the form of complaints about how they weren’t what they used to be (“It’s too depressing these days/ there are too many young people/ gangsters in it now”)

 Because of this, one very atypical tea break discussion has always stayed in my mind. Decades later, thanks to the invaluable and exhaustive resource of Corriepedia I can trace the precise episode that we were talking about – #3395, 10 June 1992. The reason why this conversation was so unusual is because we weren’t talking about Rita‘s marriage to Ted Sullivan, or Emily Bishop‘s protracted nervous breakdown, but how the programme was shot and the means by which the director (Julian Farino) had conveyed plot information to the audience. A routine scene –  “Don Brennan takes time out to track Julie Dewhurst down and give her lifts in the cab. She cooks him a meal when he persists being with her.” – had not been shown from inside the living room where it was taking place, but partially observed though a window from Julie’s back garden. What was all that about? We couldn’t understand what it was supposed to signify. Did this mean that somebody else was aware of Don’s actions and was spying on him? Surely not Ivy? If so, then why weren’t we subsequently shown who the watcher in the garden was?

 What none of us understood at the time was that the odd way that this scene had been realised was not because of anything to do with the story of Don Brennan’s hoped-for infidelity, but because the visual grammar of how Coronation Street was made was changing before our eyes. Although much of the appeal of, and emotional investment that the dedicated viewer places in, Coronation Street derives from a sense of familiarity and continuity, throughout the 1990s the form, structure and feel of the programme was actually radically, but largely invisibly, changing. What was most significant about the audience being placed in Julie Dewhurst’s garden was that momentarily – through an incidence of badly misjudged direction – the curtain was lifted and viewers such as my colleagues and myself were made aware of the changing ontology of Coronation Street as it occurred.

Changing production and broadcast of Coronation Street in the 1990s.

 Coronation Street underwent two near-concurrent major changes to its production practice towards the end of the 1980s, changes that inexorably altered both the form and dramatic function of the programme. The first change, in 1988, was switching the recording of location sequences from 16mm film to videotaped Outside Broadcast (OB) (Little, 2000: 188). Using more transportable and flexible OB recording technology enabled the programme to use many more exterior scenes than previously, creating a more mobile mise-en-scene more in line with the contemporary continuing series Brookside (Channel 4, Mersey TV, 1982-2003) and The Bill (ITV, Thames, 1984-2010). This increase in location sequences meant that for the first time the world of Coronation Street could regularly, rather than infrequently, go beyond the familiar cobbled street and onto the streets, houses and institutions of the wider world (from hereon referred to as ‘Greater Weatherfield’), with the programme featuring three or four outside locations each week by the 1990s (Hanson & Kingston, 1999: 58).

 The second major change to the programme was a move to production and broadcast of three episodes per week in October 1989, Coronation Street having previously run twice weekly since its launch in 1960. Transmitting an extra edition of its highest-rated programme was a highly popular move within the ITV network, which had long suffered a problem with attracting substantial audiences on Friday nights (Kay, 1991: 24-5). The Street‘s executive producer David Liddiment (1988-92), explained the move to a third episode:

“We had already made the decision to increase the volume of location material and we were looking at a schedule to give us more time on location and the same time in the studio. I didn’t want the process we’d started, of increasing the production values of an episode, to be neutralised by the need to make a third episode. I wanted to make sure we could continue to enhance the production values of the programme and do a third episode. But there was a kind of rhythm about Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and the fact that Neighbours and Home and Away were being shown five days a week with healthy audiences was. I felt, indicative of our ability to hold an audience for an extra episode.” (1991: 24)

 What is interesting about Liddiment’s justification is that it links both changes (mode of recording and amount of episodes) together, with increased location scenes constituting an increase in “production values”, an artistic advance that must be safeguarded.

 Preparations for the introduction of a third episode were carefully considered, resulting in extensive changes to several essential aspects of the programme. The composition of the street itself was altered, with the demolition of the Baldwin’s Casuals clothing factory and Community Centre creating space for three new homes (numbers 4, 6 and 8). New houses required new residents, broadening the social mix of the series’ characters, a change that returning producer Mervyn Watson (1982-85, 1989-92) saw as creating fresh dramatic possibilities for the series:

 “The reconstruction of the even-numbers side of the street has opened up a new swathe of stories and characters. It was appropriate that the first occupants of No 6 Coronation Street should be newcomers, the hot-tempered newlyweds Des and Steph Barnes. By mixing old and new, our well established characters have been given new possibilities and a new lease of life.” (in Kay, 1991: 31)

 In order to fill 52 extra episodes per year without increasing the workload of the show’s actors, the number of regular and semi-regular characters increased from around 30 to around 40. In order to incorporate the greater number of characters and locations, the show also became faster-paced, incorporating more (and therefore shorter) scenes per episode.

 At the same time that new outside broadcast technology was introduced, radical alterations were also being made to Granada’s facilities for the interior studio scenes that formed the bulk of Coronation Street‘s settings, with the opening of Stage One, an enormous new studio exclusively for the production of the programme, in 1990 (Hanson & Kingston, 1999: 51). The size of Stage One meant that permanent standing sets could be kept for interiors of all the Street’s houses and businesses for the first time, previously only kept for the main Rovers Return interior in the old studios (Podmore & Reece, 1990: 171). A further change to the making of studio scenes in the 1990s came with the introduction of Avid digital editing technology, greatly increasing opportunities for postproduction (Hanson & Kingston, 1999: 98).

 Like Watson, Liddiment described the combined effect of these changes as creating opportunities to offer viewers a broader, more diverse and exciting dramatic experience than before:

“In the last few years, we’ve transformed the way we make programmes. Until a couple of years ago, each episode would probably have more than four or five different settings – either the shop or café and two or three interiors of houses, plus, at the most, two scenes shot outside on the street set or at a separate location. And each episode would have no more than 14 scenes. A typical episode now has eight or nine different interiors and four outside locations, and anything up to 22 or 23 scenes. We go more on location. We see more of Weatherfield than we used to. We see more of the street. At one time, that wouldn’t have happened because it was a luxury the schedule didn’t allow, but we make TV now with lighter equipment that requires less lighting, so you’ve got more time.” (in Kay, 1991: 26-8)

 A more sceptical reaction to the changed production conditions of the late eighties was revealed in the memoirs of Watson’s predecessor, Bill Podmore (producer 1976-7, 1977-82, 1987-8, executive producer 1982-7). As well as expressing general concern about overkill dissipating viewers’ attachment to the series, Podmore had specific qualms about the increased volume of characters and storylines:

“New houses are to be built along the street and inevitably the cast must grow. It worries me just how many characters the viewers can absorb and care about. The more characters you have, the more each individual is diluted; you can’t feature them all at any one time. I thought we had already achieved the optimum balance, and perhaps even tipped the scales slightly on the down side. When I retired the cast numbered almost thirty and was the largest in the programme’s history. We would be constantly reminded of the dangers of an expanding cast at the writers’ conferences; we had trouble enough creating good story-lines for the characters we had, let alone others we might have like to introduce. The writers often complained we had too many as it was. To add perhaps another ten will mean that some characters – and possibly firm favourites with the viewers – may not be seen for quite long periods while storylines float around the others, Transmitting three days a week doesn’t mean that more story-lines can be crammed into any one episode. They will simply pass through the programme, and be used up, more speedily.” (Podmore & Reece, 1990: 178)

 Although extra characters and storylines were added to fill the 25 minutes additional airtime (and make full use of the dramatic opportunities created by increased availability of location recording) without increasing the workload of performers, there still remained only seven days a week to produce three episodes of Coronation Street in and recording schedules changed accordingly.

 A typical 1980s production week allocated all location filming (mostly of Street exteriors) to Monday mornings, followed by rehearsals for blocking in the afternoon. Tuesday rehearsals concentrated on performance and interpretation, with actors expected to be off script by final rehearsals on Wednesday morning. The full cast attended the Wednesday afternoon technical run, performed in front of the full crew (formed of technical supervisors, camera and sound operators, production assistants, ASMs, wardrobe, make-up and others). Any extra outdoor filming required was completed on Thursday morning, with studio recording starting at 2.30 p.m. and continuing over Friday when it had to be completed by 6.30 p.m. in order to be edited and dubbed over the weekend (Podmore & Reece 1990: 169-73)

 In order to incorporate the extra episode, the 1990 working week was extended by a day, with outside location recording on Sunday, Street exteriors on Monday, rehearsals on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, technical run on Wednesday afternoon, with studio lighting set up overnight on Wednesday in preparation for two full days of studio recording between 9.00 a.m. and 6.30 p.m. on Thursday and Friday (Kay 1991: 62-3). Although (less) time for rehearsals was still kept, by the end of the decade (after the addition of a fourth Sunday episode in 1996) formal rehearsals had been abandoned, with location recording from Sunday to Monday or Tuesday followed by three days in the studio from Wednesday to Friday, with pre-shooting of complex sequences weeks in advance of their place in the recording rota becoming common practice (Hanson & Kingston 1999: 76-7).

 This article considers the implications of these changes through textual analysis. How was the tenor and tone of the series affected by the new modes and forms of production? And how was the way that Coronation Street functioned (and was understood by viewers) as a drama altered by greater scope of location, more characters, new houses and twice as much airtime?

Comparative analysis of the topography of Coronation Street in January 1979 and January 1991

 The ten episodes of Coronation Street broadcast in January 1979 operate around a limited number of interior studio locations, all permanent standing sets at Granada Studios. Events are shown in five houses (numbers 1,5, 9, 11 and 13) and four businesses (The Rovers Return, Dawson’s Café, Corner Shop and Kabin newsagent) located either on or adjacent to Coronation Street. Only one other interior studio location is shown, Baldwin’s Casuals, a clothing factory run by and employing many of the programme’s regular characters, formed onscreen of two rooms, a sewing room and adjoining Manager’s Office. Across these nine buildings, events are shown in 14 rooms.

 Apart from Coronation Street itself, exterior filming is highly limited, with ‘Greater Weatherfield’ confined to a nightclub doorway on New Year’s Day and the exterior of a block of Council flats Deirdre Langton plans to move into. One episode (#1878) features no filmed inserts whatsoever.

 Only one other interior location is used in that month’s run, an unnamed supermarket in Victoria Street featuring as site for a comic storyline in which Suzie Birchall falsely claims to have won an upmarket job as a perfume demonstrator while actually working as a sausage chef. With this plot only running for two episodes (#1879 and #1880) it could only have been practicable and affordable to film these scenes on location, rather than to construct a supermarket set in Granada’s studios. As realised on screen, the effect of recording these sequences on film serves to separate them from the rest of the programme, giving them a different feel and effect. While the convention of 16mm filmed inserts is easy to adjust to when watching exterior scenes (our perception of lighting and acoustics is very different when we step outdoors in real life), the effect is different for the viewer when filmed footage is used for interior scenes, turning the supermarket into a location, visually comprehended as being an other place, as opposed to another place, with different conditions and expectations to studio interiors.

#1879 (22 January 1979) Suzie Birchall looks for work in a Weatherfield supermarket.

 This sense of apartness work in favour of the supermarket plot within the wider dramatic narrative of that month’s Coronation Street. The viewer’s emotional interest in Suzie Birchall’s downfall is reliant upon the possibility of the character being found out and humiliatingly exposed (as inevitably happens when Suzie is seen by gossip Hilda Ogden). When Suzie Birchall’s job is presented in a different, filmic, visual register to the rest of Coronation Street then the prospect of the familiar Coronation Street world encroaching upon her new existence carries a particular disruptive force for the viewer. The sense of mild disjuncture picked up by the viewer in rare sequences like this supermarket storyline worked largely because of the exceptionalism of such locations in the programme at the time, when the wider world of  ‘Greater Weatherfield’ was rarely visited.

 By the 13 episodes of January 1991 the terrain covered by Coronation Street has greatly expanded, with scenes in eight houses (1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10a, 13 and 15a) and five businesses (The Rovers Return, corner shop, Kabin, Casey’s Garage and Dawson’s – now renamed Jim’s – Cafe) on or adjacent to the Street. Across these 12 buildings, events are shown in 20 rooms.

 The most striking difference between 1979 and 1991 is that flexible location recording now means that much more of the drama occurs away from the street. In addition to many unidentified road and street exteriors, scenes routinely occur in ‘other’ pubs or homes of characters’ girlfriends away from the Street. The relative speed with which location recording could be set up meant that relatively brief scenes requiring outside locations could be shown from multiple perspectives; for example, an argument in a branch of the ‘Wetherfield & General Building Society’ (Episode 3181, 30 January) happening in two rooms of the building. Scenes even happen in Lancashire places identified as beyond Weatherfield (a pub on the A69, a Manchester department store) without being presented as exceptional occurrences.

 A major change in the topography of the series is found in the types of workplaces regularly featured. Much of the action is now located in Bettabuys Supermarket, a business which employs (at both junior managerial and more menial levels) several of the Street’s residents, as well as introducing a raft of new semi-regular characters, most notoriously manager Reg Holdsworth, who tends to dominate many viewers’ early ‘90s memories of Coronation Street. Unlike the studio-based Baldwin’s Casuals, Bettabuys was shot on location in a real supermarket, creating a very different sense of workplace to those previously shown in Coronation Street. Where events in Baldwin’s Casuals were confined to the factory floor and manager’s office, action in Bettabuys over the month extends over seven locations; shop floor, manager’s office, canteen, corridors, loading bay, storeroom and ladies’ lavatories.

 This range of spaces increases dramatic possibilities for workplace scenes, creating many more opportunities for characters to be seen by, react to, and gossip about, each other. Every room carries different specific social rituals and expectations, that can be observed or disrupted by the people in it; it is taboo for workers to make scenes in front of customers on the shop floor, the canteen between shifts is a better place and time to discuss personal matters, the lavatory is the safest place to retreat to when upset but is also a location where an enemy or boss may overhear you, and so forth. New opportunities created by OB recording for regular settings like Bettabuys maintained the sense of familiarity that viewers had previously found in locations such as Baldwin’s Casuals, but now placed them in the type of verisimiliar ‘outside world’ location previously only seen infrequently and fleetingly in the Street, as in the Suzie Birchall supermarket story of 1979.

Episode 2956 (27 July 1989)

 An early example of the opportunities that OB location recording created for Coronation Street to tell familiar stories in unfamiliar ways can be found in this episode, written by Paul Abbott. The philandering Mike Baldwin plot is a very typical one (“Mike admits to Alma that he took Dawn out. Alma tells him she loves him but he tells her he’s not after love”), but the scene is located in a beer garden (The Crooked Billet) in a previously-unseen canal-side district of ‘Greater Weatherfield’. The scene is shown through a simple camera set up, with an establishing shot of the leafy sunny pub followed by alternating close-ups of Mike and Alma.

 The unfamiliarity and attractiveness of the location raises the dramatic stakes of the scene. Because Mike has taken Alma to a higher class of venue the insensitivity of his actions are made to seem more jarring, and accentuate Alma’s display of disappointment and hurt. What is striking about how this section functions within the dramatic context of the episode’s narrative is that it is an unexceptional, rather brief, dialogue scene of only 80 seconds. Such a scene could not have been attempted under the recording conditions of 1979, where the difficulty and expense of recording in outside locations meant that those few settings that were used had to be dramatically imperative to the story told, as in the supermarket plot. In preceding years, such a scene would of necessity have to be set in a permanent location such as the Rovers or the cafe.

 The quick and economic nature of OB recording can also be seen in this episode in a short 40-second sequence in which Alma’s friend Audrey consoles her on a walk in an unnamed park.

 The open location, away from home and workplace interiors, allows characters to be reflective about their situation, while also creating a specific sensation of summertime for the viewer, the means to evoke a sense of the passing seasons being something largely missing previously in Coronation Street.

Multi-camera, single camera and editing.

 Although there was no one identifiable moment of change in studio recording practice equivalent to the switch to OB exteriors in 1988, incremental changes in the style and form of studio interiors created by changes to camera and editing technology continually occurred during the 1990s. Although studio interiors were recorded on three cameras throughout the 1990s, the introduction of Avid editing technology enabled much easier, and more frequent, post-production of these scenes (Hanson and Kingston, 1999: 100-1). At the same time, changes in camera technology allowed for more sophisticated focusing and higher definition images to be used than before. Here I compare an instance when the tried-and-trusted multi-camera technique inhibited a scene from being fully dramatically realized, with an early use of higher-definition single camera recording in Coronation Street.

Episode 3920 (11 October 1995)

 During the three-episode period of the 1990s, the pattern of shooting Coronation Street’s studio interiors required recording up to thirty scenes with three cameras in a day and a half, the director having marked around 400 separate shots on the camera script to be followed during recording, with familiar recognized patterns of camera movement and mixing often regularly used (Kay, 1991: 63). Ostensibly, this episode’s final section should have been ideally suited for recording under such well-established conditions. The scene, an important part of the plot that leads to the exit of one of the programme’s longest running and best-loved figures, Bet Gilroy (nee Lynch) shows a climatic argument and irrevocable falling-out between old friends, material seemingly meat and drink to Coronation Street. Bet has been presented with the opportunity to buy the property and licence of the Rovers Return, which she has previously managed as landlady. Lacking sufficient solo funds for the venture, she believes that her old friend Rita Sullivan will offer finance for the pair to go into managerial partnership together.

 The confrontation, shot on two cameras, in the Kabin newsagent revolves around a very simple rise-and-fall reversal of Bet’s expectations. Rita and Mavis Wilton are working behind the counter when Bet arrives brandishing a bottle of champagne, having secured a reduced price for the pub from the brewery. When Rita tells Bet that she won’t go through with the venture a furious row ensues, with Bet leaving the shop.

 This story is presented in very simple visual terms with, once their conversation has started, action confined to a sequence of alternating close-ups of Bet and Rita, book-ended by before-and-after mid-shots of Bet entering the Kabin doorway in triumph and departing in high dudgeon. This clarity of presentation accentuates the combative rhythms of the argument, allowing the viewer to observe the ‘hit’ of reaction to every truth-telling insult (“It was Len’s cash what got you started! But for him, you’d be a clapped-out chorus girl!” “Better than a clapped out barmaid!”) and experience the considerable pleasure of watching the teeth-bearing, gimlet-eyed, fury of two elaborately-coiffured and made-up women in their fifties and sixties in close-up detail.

  

 

Unfortunately, this two camera switching also serves to limit the scene from achieving its full dramatic potential. The third woman present during the confrontation, Mavis, ends up being neglected by the camera, leaving her contributions to the scene marginal and incoherent, a blurry and muffled presence in the corner of the frame, briefly hinted at in a momentary sideways glance from Julie Goodyear. Mavis’ contribution to the scene is hard to discern when first watched, and it is only once seen several times (a luxury unavailable to the original viewer) that one can establish precisely what happens to her: she becomes discomfited by the scene, mumbles a suggestion that Bet and Rita might have their discussion somewhere else and, despite being on duty in the shop, walks out in embarrassment. This strand of the story is overlooked in the presentation of the scene, with Mavis seen only as a fluttering hand behind Rita and as the back of a head that momentarily passes in front of Bet.

 It is instructive to imagine how this scene might be viewed if performed on a theatrical stage, where an audience would be just as aware of the presence of Mavis as of Bet and Rita, and potentially in sympathy with her: not knowing how to respond when other people are arguing can be as dramatically interesting a situation as an argument itself. Although the possibilities offered by greater use of single-camera technology and the ability to edit in separately-recorded shots would not necessarily alleviate the dramatic faults of this scene (and editing-in separately recorded shots might run the risk of diluting the rhythm of the argument), it would mean that the problem of Mavis’ invisibility during the scene might at least have been more systematically considered before transmission.

Episode 3417 (29 July 1992)

 In contrast, this episode (directed by Brian Mills) provides an extremely early example of single camera recording and extensive postproduction for studio scenes in Coronation Street. This stylistic experimentation appears to have been born of necessity, with one comic storyline (Rovers landlord Alec Gilroy’s purchase of a rare Mexican mouse-eating spider, which then escapes during a kitchen inspection from an environmental health officer) impossible to record under conventional conditions, with the spider’s performance having to be shot in separate cutaways.

 The directorial style necessitated by the nature of the kitchen scenes, which present details and features of the room in close up detail and precise definition, carries over onto other interiors throughout the episode, in which the misfortunes of Ivy Brennan form a tragic counterbalance to the comic story of the spider. Having had his foot amputated after crashing his taxi (in a suicide attempt after Julie broke off their affair), Don is discharged from hospital, but refuses to return to Ivy. Ivy’s vigil of waiting is presented through concentration upon objects in the foreground (a vase of fresh flowers, a silent telephone and a bottle of sherry) while Ivy’s own movements and conversations with her daughter-in-law, Gail, occur in blurred focus in the background of the frame. The striking effect of this unconventional filming demands the viewer’s full attention and, unlike the misdirected “snooping on Don Brennan from the back garden” instance, serves an intentional storytelling purpose. Concentrating upon the objects handled, rather than the woman handling them, encourages empathy with Ivy’s agitation and disconnected state of mind, and is the closest that Coronation Street comes to a point of view shot in this period.

 Where this new technique perhaps proves counterproductive is in its jarring ontological unfamiliarity. Were such visual devices used in a one-off ITV drama in 1992 their principle effect upon the viewer would be to offer narrative clarity, but, because they were used in Coronation Street in 1992, a programme that had accrued a familiar visual style through 32 years of studio practice, the direction draws attention to itself as much as to the story, the unfamiliar style distracting the viewer’s attention away from Ivy’s plight as much as it does to illuminate it. 

  The scene’s style can be described as directorially prescriptive, putting little trust in viewers’ imaginative ability to appreciate nuances of character revealed through the detail of actors’ performances, a traditional Coronation Street strength. When seen from a present-day perspective, the episode (which experiments with sound as well as vision, continuing the soundtrack of one scene over the visuals of the next) appears out-of-time, placing the world of 1992 into the television style of about ten years later.

Plot inflation.

 The 1990s broadcasting environment in which Coronation Street operated was a more crowded and competitive field than that of previous decades. As well as the efforts of rival serials Eastenders, Brookside and Emmerdale (Emmerdale Farm until 1989, ITV, Yorkshire Television 1972-, since 1988 broadcast nationwide in an evening slot and continuously throughout the year), television ratings had been falling since the mass availability of the video recorder in the 1980s, and were further challenged by the introduction of U.K. satellite and cable broadcasting in 1989. With soap operas attracting a regular audience to their host channels, all four serials increased output in the 1980s and 1990s, Emmerdale being the last to introduce a third episode in 1997. The increased amount of airtime needing to be filled, combined with the pressure to keep series discussed in the press, has lead to the growth period of soap operas during the 1990s being characterized as a time of greatly increased sensationalism in storylines. Jimmy McGovern (who had written one episode of Coronation Street in 1990), identified and mistrusted this trend:

Inflation has set in. The Street used to be immune to it but even there writers are losing faith in actors, and the actors are losing faith in the characters. So people have to place great faith in the stories. But that’s when inflation sets in because one story has to top another. (In Jeffries: 2000, 170-1)

 To suggest that Coronation Street had somehow avoided sensational storylines before the late 1980s would be a misrepresentation. The recurrent need, faced by all continuous series, to write actors out necessitates the regular recurrence of partners walking out of relationships and sudden deaths and, although the Street didn’t suffer its first murder until the shooting of Ernest Bishop in 1978, its unfortunate residents had already experienced many shocking demises; crushed by van, suicide, or electrocution by faulty hairdryer. Nor had it avoided spectacular disasters, enduring a train crash in 1967 and a lorry crash in 1979. The particular change to Coronation Street in the 1990s lay in the form that such occurrences took, as well as the frequency with which they happened. Previous shocking events, such as Minnie Caldwell being held at gunpoint (1970), or Deidre Langton being sexually assaulted (1977), had always occurred in the familiar location of Coronation Street itself, with the sense of community that viewers derived from the setting helping to make such exceptional storylines disruptive and memorable, encouraging empathetic feeling for regular characters who had become victims.

 An early example of how the presentation of potentially sensational violent events in Coronation Street was changing is the end (a week after the wedding) of Mike Baldwin’s second marriage (#3251, 12 July 1991). When Jackie, a wealthy widow, discovers the full extent that Mike has attempted to defraud her through matrimony, she threatens him with a loaded shotgun when he arrives home. Although this violent scene would be always freighted with the problem of basic implausibility wherever it was set, the unfamiliar ‘Greater Weatherfield’ location of Elmsgate Gardens handicaps its ontological integration into the imaginative world of Coronation Street. The location (a real house, not a studio set) has only been previously seen in a handful of episodes and carries few emotional associations for the viewer, so such a violent event carries less in the way of disruptive force for the viewer than it otherwise could: people might do such things all the time in Elmsgate Gardens, for all that the regular viewer knows. When such sensational events happen away from the understood community of Coronation Street, audiences can view them as separate from other incidents in the programme, and they come to carry less of an emotive pull.

Episode 4179 (18 April 1997)

 By 1997, spectacular and shocking events had become almost commonplace in the now four-times weekly Coronation Street, realised on such a grand scale as to make makes the gun-toting Jackie Baldwin sequence of six years earlier appear brief and underplayed in comparison. Advances in PSC (Portable Single Camera) technology and a more flexible recording schedule allowing greater leeway for storylines to be shot out of sequence made it more possible to mount ambitious scenes on a scale rarely previously attempted.

 The events of this hour-long special (double-length editions were an innovation first introduced in 1995), present a good example of this in practice. The episode concentrates upon the actions of a crazed Don Brennan, who has contrived a vendetta against Mike Baldwin and recently set fire to his factory. He picks Alma (now Mike’s third wife) up in his (unlicensed) taxi one night, drives past her requested stop, locks her in, and refuses to let her leave. At a deserted quayside, Alma tries to call for help on the taxi radio, which Don then rips out and destroys. After Don hits her Alma breaks free, but Don chases her in the car and forces her back into the cab. He drives the taxi straight into the River Irwell at the Quays, with them both inside it.

 This lurid storyline comprised the most elaborate and technically demanding sequence yet attempted in Coronation Street, requiring five separate 12-hour night shoots involving trained stunt people and underwater filming, a process compared by Coronation Street’s producer to making a James Bond film (Hanson and Kingston, 1999: 94-5). The use of PSC editing does give the story a cinematic feel, facilitating extreme close-ups of Brennan’s eyes reflected in the rear-view mirror, quick editing of spectacular dangerous driving, shots rotating around the ragged couple on the deserted quayside, POV shots of the driver stalking his quarry, and so forth.

 The same token that makes this storyline spectacular also makes its integration into the world of Coronation Street problematic. The Don and Alma plot forms 15 separate sections within the episode, some of these very brief. Each time that the action returns from the frightening wastelands of Greater Weatherfield back to the Street, the viewer is forced to readjust to a different, ontologically familiar, world. Although this juxtaposition of Rovers Return and terrifying Quayside ordeal is freighted with dramatic ironies it tends to dominate the overall narrative of the episode and means that more subdued plots, such as the recently widowed Mavis’ grief, are given less room to establish themselves than might otherwise be the case. While it was impressive that Coronation Street was capable of achieving a convincing thriller kidnap plot in 1997, similar plots could be seen in other drama programmes at the time, and such stories prevented Coronation Street from creating distinctive drama unique to itself.

 The place of this story within the wider narrative of 1997 Coronation Street also demonstrates the questionable sustainability of a series in thrall to plot inflation. Kidnapping Alma (following on from setting fire to Baldwin’s factory) wasn’t the climax of Don’s irrational behaviour, which eventually arrived six months later when, having been interrupted while attempting to club Mike to death, Don died, while attempting to run Mike over, in an explosive car crash (#4278, 8 October 1997). Spectacularly violent events risk becoming less of a talking point once they become regular occurrences.

Conclusion

 This article has demonstrated that two concurrent changes that Coronation Street underwent at the end of the 1980s (greater and more extensive location recording and the introduction of a third episode) radically affected the form that the programme took, and how viewers understood it.

The greater amount of airtime to fill encouraged the creation of more sensational and protracted storylines. In the 1990s, the world of Coronation Street expanded beyond the immediate confines of the Street into ‘Greater Weatherfield’, a place that bore more visual similarities to the wider world, but which undermined the emotional and imaginative ties that viewers had formed with the familiar Street itself.

POSTSCRIPT (2 October 2013).

 Some enjoyably trenchant comments about plot inflation from Christine Geraghty are included in an article about the crisis in British soap operas by Stuart Jeffries in today’s Guardian:

Of course, soaps have hardly been popular because they have their finger on the pulse of the nation. In their heyday, they were immersive experiences that took their own sweet time developing stories and characters, and thereby made themselves convincing and seductive to mass audiences. “People witter on about The Wire and Mad Men,” says soap opera specialist Professor Christine Geraghty of the University of Glasgow. “It drives me mad. British soaps were doing those complicated multi-layered narratives long before HBO was invented. Soaps used to have the confidence to let very little happen sometimes.”

Soaps, then, were like Greek drama. What was important was not splashy plot twists – be it car crash, baby swap, lesbian snog or corpse under the patio – but how characters processed such incidents through the medium of gossip. “They don’t have the confidence to do that now,” says Geraghty. “There’s a relentless intensity of plotting that makes soaps often seem daft.” Why are they doing that? “Because the big stories capture the intermittent viewer, often at the expense of the regular viewer. The logic is that the more stories you have and the bigger they are, the better you compete with other formats. But that relentlessness eats up people and stories in an effort to counteract what’s going on elsewhere in TV. The risk is they look soulless and cynical. It’s also a vexed question as to whether those big stories help ratings in the long run.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hanson, David and Kingston, Jo. Coronation St.: Access All Areas. London: Andre Deutsch, 1999.

Jeffries, Stuart. Mrs Slocombe’s Pussy: Growing Up in Front of the Telly. London: Flamingo, 2000.

Kay, Graeme. Life in the Street: Coronation Street Past and Present. London: Boxtree, 1991.

Kibble-White, Jack. ‘Everyday Folk and Inflation’, ( http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/?page_id=276 ), 2000.

Little, Daran. 40 Years of Coronation Street. London: Andre Deutsch, 2000.

Podmore, Bill and Reece, Peter. Coronation Street: The Inside Story. London: Macdonald, 1990.