Pinter at the BBC: What the Censor Sees.

“Two men intimidate another, breaking his glasses and verbally mocking him.” (‘Theatre Night: The Birthday Party’ BBC, 1987)

 This article was first published on the (now defunct) 'Harold Pinter: Histories & Legacies' blog on 28 January 2019:

 The long-awaited BFI DVD collection, Pinter at the BBC, is released today. Over five discs, the anthology includes 10 versions of Pinter plays made by the BBC between 1965-88. As all ten are new to any home video format, the release increases the amount of Pinter UK television material publicly available by 500%. In addition to the plays, the collection also includes a wealth of supplementary material – four of the animated sketches made by Potterton Productions (Pinter People 1969) and documentaries and interviews from both the BBC and BFI archives. Full details for the set are as follows:

 “Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it, but the search for it is compulsive”
Harold Pinter on receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005

Harold Pinter (1930-2008) was one of the most important and influential British playwrights of the last century. While best known for his work for the stage, this collection celebrates Pinter’s significant contribution to television. His work for the screen shares many of the qualities of that for the stage, from a fascination with the private roots of power and an abiding preoccupation with memory, to a belief in the agency of women. Featuring 10 previously unavailable plays made for the BBC between 1965 and 1988, and a dazzling array of British acting talent including Michael Gambon, Julie Walters, Leo McKern, Vivien Merchant, John Le Mesurier and Miranda Richardson.

The Plays:

• Tea Party (Charles Jarrott, 1965)
• A Slight Ache (Christopher Morahan, 1967)
• A Night Out (Christopher Morahan, 1967)
• The Basement (Charles Jarrott, 1967)
• Monologue (Christopher Morahan, 1972)
• Old Times (Christopher Morahan, 1975)
• The Hothouse (Harold Pinter, 1982)
• Landscape (Kenneth Ives, 1983)
• The Birthday Party (Kenneth Ives, 1987)
• Mountain Language (Harold Pinter, 1988)

Extras:

• Writers in Conversation: Harold Pinter (1984, 47 mins): an ICA interview with Harold Pinter by Benedict Nightingale;
• Pinter People (1969, 16 mins): a series of four animated films written by Harold Pinter;
• Face to Face: Harold Pinter (1997, 39 mins): Sir Jeremy Isaacs interviews Harold Pinter, who discusses the images and events which have inspired some of his most powerful dramas;
• Harold Pinter Guardian Interview (1996, 73 mins, audio only): an extensive interview recorded at the National Film Theatre;
• Illustrated booklet with new writing by Michael Billington, John Wyver, Billy Smart, Amanda Wrigley, David Rolinson and Lez Cooke, and full credits.

UK | 1965-1988 | black and white, and colour | 628 mins | English language with optional hard-of-hearing subtitles
original aspect ratio 1.33:1 | 5 x DVD9 | PAL | Dolby Digital 2.0 mono audio (192kbps)

© BBC 1965-1988. Distributed under licence from the British Broadcasting Corporation.

 Alongside of the incisive reviews of the set that are starting to appear online is one detailed critique that is likely to remain obscure. The British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) are obliged to publish Insight reports into every film that is commercially released, detailing the reasoning behind each certification decision that they make, and demonstrating that they have considered the potential effect of contentious material in every film. Nine of the ten films have been awarded 12 certificates, with the bloody Mountain Language (Certificate 15) being the exception. As the DVD release is the first time that the productions have ever come under the watch of an official censor, these verdicts are worth circulating further:

TEA PARTY is a drama in which a millionaire experiences health and psychological issues after marrying for the second time.

Sex

There are moderate sex references.

There is also mild bad language (‘bloody’, ‘hell’), dated racial terms (‘negros’), and scenes in which adults smoke cigarettes.

A NIGHT OUT is a British drama, from 1960 [sic], in which a young man’s mild temperament is pushed to breaking point by the people around him.

Language

A woman describes a man as ‘retarded’, although discriminatory language is not condoned. There is also use of mild bad language (‘bloody’).

Sex

It is implied a woman is a prostitute, and she begins to undress in front of a man although no strong nudity is seen. She also complains that other women are “loose”.

A man is accused of inappropriately touching a woman at a party, although no detail is seen. There is infrequent very mild violence as men push and shove in an argument, and as a man’s temper flares he threatens to hit a woman with a clock.

 

A SLIGHT ACHE is a drama in which a couple reluctantly invite an elderly match seller into their home.

Violence

A woman recalls being raped by a poacher. She does not go into explicit detail about the event but describes it as ‘a desperate struggle’. There are no visual references to the rape.

There is mild bad language (‘bloody’, ‘slut’).

 

THE BASEMENT is a British drama, from 1967, in which two friends compete over ownership of a small flat and the love of a younger woman.

Sex

A man watches a woman undress, although no strong nudity is seen on screen. In other scenes men and women are seen kissing and running their hands over each other with implied nudity, but there is no clear sexual activity.

There is brief mild violence, in which two men face off with broken bottles, and a man throws a marble at the head of another man.

 

MONOLOGUE is a 1973 British drama featuring a performance of a Harold Pinter monologue.

Discrimination

A man refers to a black woman using outdated and racist terminology including ‘black as the ace of spades’.

There is mild bad language (‘pissed off’, ‘bloody’, ‘crap’) in addition to infrequent mild sex references.

 

OLD TIMES is a dramatisation of a Harold Pinter play in which the conversations and reminiscences between three friends challenge their understanding of the origin and depth of their relationships.

Sex

Moderate sex references include repeated references to a man looking up a woman’s skirt and a woman stroking her breasts while making sensual noises.

Language

There is moderate bad language (‘bitch’).

 

THE HOTHOUSE is a dramatisation of a Harold Pinter play in which corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude cloud an investigation into murder and sexual assault at a secretive government sanatorium.

Violence

Moderate violence includes a man repeatedly punching another man in the abdomen, as well as references to people being stabbed and others being hanged and strangled during a massacre.

Threat

Moderate threat includes three men pulling bladed weapons on one another and a man clutching his head in pain when a powerful sound is played to him through headphones.

Language

There is moderate bad language (‘bitch’, ‘nigger’).

Sex

Moderate sex references include a man referring to “Men dipping their wicks” and cautioning subordinates to “Never ride barebacked”.

 

LANDSCAPE is a 1983 drama based on the Harold Pinter play.

Language

There is strong language (‘f**k’) as well as uses of ‘shit’, ‘piss’, ‘bloody’, ‘arse’, ‘bullshit’ and ‘bugger’.

Sex

There are moderate sex references when a man speaks about ‘having’ and ‘banging’ his wife.

 

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY is a British drama, from 1987, in which two sinister men arrive at a boarding house looking for a former musician.

Sex

A woman refers to a man using her. In another scene a man is seen trying to put his hand up a woman’s skirt.

Threat

Two men intimidate another, breaking his glasses and verbally mocking him. He is later seen struggling to speak and appears to be paralysed. A man is also caught lying on top of a clothed, semi-conscious woman, implying he may be trying to assault her.

Language is mild (‘bloody’, ‘shite’, ‘bastards’).

 

MOUNTAIN LANGUAGE is a television version of a short play by Harold Pinter, set in an unnamed totalitarian state, in which a mother and a wife make a visit to their respective son and husband who are in prison for dissent.

Language

There is strong language (‘f**k’), as well as milder bad language including uses of ‘bloody’, ‘shit’, ‘arse’ and ‘Jesus Christ’.

There are moments of moderate threat, as well as moderate injury on the hand of a woman who has been bitten by a dog and on the face of a prisoner who has been beaten by a guard, although both incidents occur offscreen. There are also moderate sex references.

 It is entertaining to speculate if it was the same viewer who watched all ten plays. If so, the quality of their description of each play fluctuates a bit. The reading of Disson’s “health and psychological issues” in Tea Party is as comically baffled as the description of Old Times is – for a one line précis – admirably acute.

 It is curiously instructive to read what is technically disturbing about the plays, and to then contrast that with what one personally finds unsettling about them. The distinction between threat and violence is pertinent to Pinter’s work, in which there is much of the one and relatively little of the other. When watching the stage it is generally the prospect of violence that unsettles rather than the actual enactment of violence (which often – for me, anyway – provokes distracting thoughts of ‘how are they doing that without actually hurting each other?). The BBFC monitors are especially primed to look out for violence that could be emulated at home, hence the concern about open blades, broken bottles and men throwing marbles at each other’s heads. Similarly, Pinter’s treatment of sex is largely technically unproblematic, as “no detail/ strong nudity is seen”.

 While it seems highly unlikely that anyone would chose to entertain a primary school age child by encouraging them to watch Pinter at the BBC, the possibility of the effect of watching it upon a minor automatically has to be considered in order to justify the awarding of a certificate, and all of these ten plays are adjudged to include language, actions or inferences that are actively unsuitable for minors.

Festival: The Life of Galileo (BBC, 1964)

 

 This article was first published on the (now defunct) University of Reading 'Spaces of Television' blog on 08 February 2014:

 Our ‘Dramatic Spaces: The Imaginative World of the TV Studio’ film season continues at BFI Southbank this afternoon with a screening of ‘The Life of Galileo’, a version of Brecht’s epic history, recorded in Television Centre for the BBC’s Festival series in 1964. Over the course of the season we will be writing short posts about each play shown, and would welcome thoughts and responses from those who attend the screenings.

 Charles Jarrott’s[i] Galileo exuded a confident sense of certainty about what could and could not be achieved in the BBC Television Centre studio, acknowledging that the production was studio-made through the inclusion of cameras and the production gallery in shot, an artistic decision that complicates the view of ‘as live’ studio television as being best suited for an “intimate” form of drama.

 British television of the late 1950s and early 1960s offered both bardic and dramatic forms of narrative for the viewer, bardic storytelling lying mainly in the realm of news and reporting, while television drama (especially the majority made in the studio, rather than on film) progressed in a sequential, ‘dramatic’, manner. The format of television news presented verbal information directly to the viewer through the newsreader’s narration, followed by filmed footage of the events, with an explanatory commentary on voice-over, sometimes followed by a correspondent explaining the significance of events in the studio. This structure allowed the viewer to understand news as occurring backwards and forwards in time, encouraging contemplative and dispassionate consideration through showing events in a temporal context of cause and possible effect rather than exclusively as dramatic occurrences in the present. The growth of television satire during this period also included bardic elements of narrative, such as Cy Grant’s regular ‘topical calypso’ on Tonight (BBC Television, 1957-65) and the use of sketch and monologue in That Was The Week That Was (BBC Television, 1962-3). Viewer response to Jarrott’s production of Galileo was as much conditioned by the conventions of television current affairs coverage as it was by television drama.

 Charles Jarrott’s production of Galileo fulfiled Brecht’s wish for broadcasting that affected the listener (or viewer) through presenting both imaginative insights into the life and scientific investigation of Galileo and a wider, more educative, insight into the running of institutions, culminating with the directorial imposition of footage of nuclear missiles at the end of the play. The production achieved this effect by adopting its form as much from factual and informative forms of television as from exclusively dramatic ones, unlike the one previous Brecht production on BBC Television, Rudolph Cartier’s Mother Courage (World Theatre, 1959), which is always clearly a television play.

 Jarrott’s production is unique among BBC television adaptations of Brecht in not disguising that it is a television programme. This is achieved through bookending the production with ‘documentary’ scenes set in the television studio. The adaptation starts by showing the studio gallery at work, with the opening music shown to be a disc being dubbed over the pictures. The studio floor is then shown to be an artificial place. It is displayed to its full extent; cameras are seen beyond the end of the flats of the scene, microphones above them, and the company milling about waiting for their cues, in costume but clearly not in character. The title placard does not fill the entire screen, but is framed by a boom operator. This presentation of the mechanics of production, in the form of cameras and microphones, makes Galileo a self-reflexive production, made manifest through its self-awareness as a work of art, and therefore a modernist production.

 Although this behind the scenes display is not continued into the actual scenes of the play, it still serves an important function in encouraging the viewer to accept Brechtian dramaturgy and illusion, establishing that the following story will work as a representation, rather than an attempt to imitate the reality of Galileo’s life. The convention of showing the mechanics of studio production surrounding performance had recent precedents in British television, with the satirical series That Was The Week That Was having presented the full extent of the studio with its cameras, microphones, and audience in its live transmissions, providing the domestic viewer with a greater sense of liveness and immediacy.  In particular, this introductory sequence helps to establish the convention of the narrator breaking through the fourth wall. Direct address to camera was an established convention in most forms of television in 1964, but rare and potentially disconcerting in drama. By establishing Galileo as a work of television, through showing the mechanics of the studio, Jarrott turned the figure of the narrator into a convention that the viewer might find acceptable, allowing the technique to be understood in terms of broadcasting, rather than as a theatrical tradition.[ii]

 An example of how the narrator served to mediate between the dramatic scene and the television camera occurs in the transition between Scenes Two and Three. The second scene of Galileo and the Doge is set in the public space of the harbour of Venice in front of a crowd. The final shot of this scene is shown on a television monitor, watched by the narrator, who then turns to the viewer to explain how this meeting affects the story of Galileo. This use of the monitor interprets Galileo’s audience with the Doge as reportage, presented to the viewer as a news item, which the narrator then elucidates to the viewer. Allowing the narrator to view events through a monitor encourages the audience to identify with him as an everyman figure, as he has witnessed events in exactly the same way that the domestic viewer has. The narrator also is integrated into the action by the use of disguises and costumes, adopting the role of a plausible bystander for every scene, by putting on a false moustache in scene four and wearing ecclesiastical robes in scenes with the cardinals. This integration into the worlds of each scene gives credence to the authority of the narrator as a witness to the events which he explains to the viewer, while also adding a sense of theatrical artifice and a comic register of role-playing to his instruction, making him both a part of, and detached from, the events depicted.[iii]

 A sense of the studio as being a space of representation, rather than replication, is followed through in the design of the production, where sets combine naturalistic and obviously artificial features. This convention is established in Scene One, where the placard that gives the title and date of the play then becomes a unit of the wall of Galileo’s home. Throughout the production this motif is continued, with banners forming components of otherwise naturalistic sets. These properties add a sense of the artifice of the performance, as well as serving an instructive purpose in illustrating the wider social world and conditions that affect each individual scene, for example blown up line drawings and woodcuts represent the buildings of the Vatican. This design, which only comprised a fraction of the set in each scene, did not appear jarring to viewers, as the completely artificial landscapes of Mother Courage had in 1959. [iv]

 The production ends with a further interpolation of the world of television on to the world of Galileo, with footage of a rocket and a series of stills of great scientists since Galileo’s time. The disruptive effect of this is different to that of the studio sequence at the beginning of the play. Where the purpose of the first scene appears to be largely aesthetic, establishing the conventions of the drama that will follow, showing the viewer that the play will not be a naturalistic attempt to replicate reality, the imposition of the rocket footage seems much more ideological in intent, forcing the viewer to draw parallels between Galileo and nuclear armament. This is perhaps the closest that this production gets to “Brechtian television” or agitational drama, through presenting the viewer with striking and unheralded juxtaposition. It is significant that this moment occurs after the seventeenth century story of the play had finished, and therefore appears as a coda rather than integrated into the main body of the play, where it would appear more disruptive. This ending of Galileo appears to have been the least popular aspect of Jarrott’s production with some viewers, the BBC’s audience reporting that:

‘The parallel need not have been drawn so obviously at the end’ ‘The play provided a complete set of judgements on morality and expediency without [the need for] added effects’ (BBC WAC VR/64/243)

 However, only a small minority of viewers reported these complaints, with some others considering “that these devices added to the impact of the play and heightened its scientific theme” (BBC WAC VR/64/243).

 The Life of Galileo was one of the most successful and well-received stage adaptations of the 1960s, and was chosen as one of the first BBC1 productions to be repeated on BBC2. Audience research for the production reveals a high level of enthusiasm, the reaction index of 78% far above the 58% recorded for Mother Courage five years earlier (BBC WAC VR/64/243). What is striking about the enthusiasm expressed towards Galileo in this audience research is the combination of intellectual stimulation and emotional engagement that viewers reported. Great approval was expressed towards the most naturalist elements of the production; historical detail and production values were felt to accentuate the story and the acting:

‘Costume plays with a factual background can generally be relied upon to provide good entertainment’ wrote an Architectural Assistant, and this example, it seemed, had been extremely successful in giving ‘reality and life to history’ (…) a production which drew the warmest praise on all counts – settings, costumes, make-up, camera-work – all were ‘quite marvellous’, it seemed, lavishly and imaginatively recreating the very essence of the period, and carrying the action along with such smooth dexterity that attention was firmly riveted from first to last. (BBC WAC VR/64/243)[v]

 The factor that raised the viewers’ approval in acclaiming this production as exceptional was found in Brecht’s dramaturgy, presenting Galileo with a sequence of dramatic dilemmas, and clearly placing them within a wider historical context. Through presenting these dilemmas within the television studio, mediated to the viewer through the contemporary figure of narrator-as-broadcaster, Charles Jarrott’s production gave the pay a particular, medium-specific, sense of immediacy and relevance. Viewers report having found the story of Galileo exceptionally gripping and significant, praising the production for its instructional qualities, and recommending its educational value:

‘It was like being transported back in time, and understanding all the difficulties of Galileo’s struggle against ignorance and power’ (…) The theme too, it was held, had all the elements of a good play – ‘the human struggle, the historical and scientific interest, the religious question and the present-day parallel’ (…) ‘it is such a pleasure to see a play with a real message and meaning’ (BBC WAC VR/64/243)

 Viewers reported a great sense of sympathy and affection towards Galileo, as well as admiration for Leo McKern’s performance, perhaps making him a more empathetic figure than the “untragic hero” of the epic drama suggested by Walter Benjamin:

Galileo was “presented as ‘a humorous, living, breathing, loving, enjoying human being’, who ‘became a real person, not just a name in a science text book’ (…) ‘The irony, the shades of meaning, the subtleties of character, the humanity of the man – so many facets to relish. It was delightful’ (BBC WAC VR/64/243)

 The Life of Galileo works as a fully realised Brechtian production, that not only used the conventions of studio camera movement and vision mixing to explain and illustrate the decisions made by characters and their place within a wider social structure, but also succeeded in placing these characters within a sustained bardic narrative. This bardic storytelling operated through the use of the guiding figure of the narrator, as well as through the integrated use of captions, monitors, sets that were clearly artificial and, in the sequence of nuclear missiles, the use of interpolated non-original footage. The production achieved an original Brechtian form that was unique to television, through not disguising the programme’s means of production: a television studio, with microphones and cameras.

 The undisguised artifice of Jarrott’s production assisted viewers’ ability to follow the story of Galileo and to draw conclusions from it. Encouraged by the confidence that they were being told a story, viewers felt permitted to empathise with the figure of Galileo, whilst being able to place his life within the context of the state of Rome in the seventeenth century. Jarrott’s adaptation managed to achieve this effect by following a model that derived as much from forms of television other than drama, such as news and commentary, an innovation distinct from the more abstract and less broadly social experimental studio tradition established by the Langham Group. This created a model for studio television that encouraged a drama that was ‘dramatic’ in Brechtian terms as opposed to the more realist model that ‘as live’ drama generally used. This rethinking of the studio and how it could be used for television narrative showed unexpected possibilities for taped ‘as live’ drama, capable of engaging and encouraging the curiosity of a broad television audience.

[i] Charles Jarrott (1927-2011), after starting his career as an actor, became one of the most respected and prolific directors of contemporary drama in British television in the 1960s, directing 34 separate Armchair Theatre (ABC/ Thames, 1956-74) productions between 1959 and 1969, as well as some controversial single plays for the BBC such as The Wednesday Play: Cock, Hen and Courting Pit (1966) and Harold Pinter’s Tea Party (1965) and The Basement (1968). Jarrott moved to Hollywood in 1969, winning a Golden Globe for his first film, Anne of the Thousand Days (1969).

[ii]Audience research appears to suggest that the use of a narrator was merely accepted, rather than embraced by Galileo’s otherwise enthusiastic audience (“I like a play to proceed without somebody telling you the story every few minutes”, BBC WAC VR/64/243), although the convention of narrator does appear to have been understood by the audience, rather than seen as confusing.

[iii] This narrative convention had also been recently used in the theatre in the role of ‘The Common Man’ in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, a highly successful and popular play.

[iv] See the BBC Audience Research Report for Mother Courage (BBC WAC VR/59/372)

[v] Such few adverse comments as can be found attack the play on the same terms, treating it as representative of television period costume drama per se: “I am completely at a loss why these plays are produced. I hope the actors got a kick out of it, dressing up like a lot of B.Fs. I endured it for an hour until I could cheerfully had shot the lot” (BBC WAC VR/64/243)

Darrol Blake Interview Part II: Directing for the BBC and Thames Television in the 1960s and 1970s

 

Untransmitted episode of ‘Doomwatch’ (BBC1, 1972)

 

 This article was first published on the (now defunct) University of Reading 'Spaces of Television' blog on 08 June 2013:

 In July 2011 Leah Panos and myself had the good fortune to interview veteran television director Darrol Blake in his Barnes Bridge home. In a career that spans fifty years, Darrol started as a Design Assistant at the BBC in the 1950s, going on to become a Production Designer and then direct for the BBC, before becoming a freelance director for both the BBC and a range of ITV companies from the 1970s onwards. In Part One of our interview Darrol talked about working as a designer at the BBC in the 1950s and 1960s, working on a diverse range of programmes made in several different studios. In Part Two he discusses his experiences as a director for the BBC and at Thames Television.

Directing for the BBC: 1960s

BS. Which jobs as a designer were you especially proud of?

DB. Perhaps Take a Sapphire. I did several things with Ned Sherrin, because what he wanted to do was musicals, and the fact that he directed Tonight and talks programmes was for money, what he was really doing was writing musicals with Caryl Brahms. After That Was The Week That Was Ned Sherrin could write his own ticket and he could use anyone in the Corporation who he liked to work on the show. So he was my patron. Somebody like Ned would actually see potential in somebody who was in an inferior position and would work to help them. I’d worked a bit on That Was The Week, did the whole of Not So Much A Programme, More A Way of Life, which was the Friday-Saturday-Sunday version of the satire bit, and then he said, “We’re doing these big one-off musicals in between series” and that was very enjoyable. We were walking down Lime Grove where his office was and he said, “Oh, I’ve asked for you for the autumn again” because the BBC were making him go around again with the satire bit, so I said, “Ugh! Not as designer, you haven’t” He said “Oh yes, you’re the one who wants to be a director. What do you know about it?” So a piece of paper went very high up the BBC and landed on Dick Levin’s desk and it said, “You will loan Darrol Blake to Ned Sherrin for six months’ attachment”. And I was directing the pilot of BBC-3, which was the third attempt at the satire bit. Ned wanted to call it Its All Been Done Before and we said, ‘No, I don’t think that’s a very good idea’. Because That Was The Week That Was had been called TW3 and because BBC2 had just started and because Ned was working virtually straight to the governors because it was such a hot potato it was like having his own channel so we called it BBC3. And people used to say, “Oh, I can’t get that” “No, its on BBC1” “But you said it was BBC-3” And that was patronage but thank God, because it got me out of the design department.

 But then I was away attached for six months and then I had to go back to the design department, and that awful man I pointed out, James Bould said, “We are short of designers! We are six short, come and be three of them!” And we decided to get married at this point and everyone in the department knew that I was getting married and I thought, ‘Oh I’d better put in for some leave’. And I wandered in to the design manager’s office, looked at the thing on the wall and there was a show for me to design about three days after I was due to get married. I said, ‘That is a joke isn’t it?’ ‘No’ so I went in to see James and he said, “Leave is a privilege, not a right!” “I’m getting married!” “Doesn’t affect me.” So, we had a weekend in a friend’s house in Surrey somewhere and I came back and sat there on a tiny design job in one of the smallest studios, Jury Room it was called, and my assistant could have done it, but he insisted I do it. So I got through the dress rehearsal and there was a fairly new director doing it. I said, “Are there any notes for me?” he said “no” and I thought “I’ll go to Venice, then”

BS. So how did you finally become a staff director?

DB. I was never a staff director. One – When Ned got me onto directing BBC-3 – which was an official attachment for six months – I was still under contract as a designer. I was only a year or at most 18 months into this three-year contract. So we’d been doing this show live for quite a while, six or eight weeks and of course Ken Tynan said that word, and the audience leapt up from about four or five million to nine million and there were questions in the house. And I suddenly thought, ‘I wonder if I’m due for an ERR?’ which was an extra responsibility reward, which in any part of the BBC if you were acting in a post above your station you got ERR, as I’d been directing a live show every week. So I went in to the AA, the admin assistant of the current affairs department who were producing it, I said who I was and what I was doing. He said, “I’ll look into it”, so I didn’t hear anything. Then I happened to see him in a corridor and he said, “God! You’re being paid far more as a designer than you would be as a PA director in telly current affairs – stay where you are!” Dick Levin was very good at both getting credits on screen and paying designers.

 Then I was ordered back into the design department for three months in 1966. The BBC decided to go around again with more BBC3 even though Ned had gone off to the movies, bought the entire team together without Ned and we were a riderless horse. The put a man in that had never previously done anything faster than one programme every nine months and he was a complete disaster, a nice man, very nice sense of humour, but not a clue. We were live every Saturday but he was still having postmortems about the previous show on the Tuesday. No! You should be commissioning writers to do material by then. So John Bird, John Fortune, John Wells and Eleanor Bron used to meet at my flat in Hampstead to decide what to do, and then we’d go into the office and tell him. It was awful. Finally, we went upstairs to Michael Peacock who was Controller of BBC1 at the time and said, “Take us off. Please!” He said, “No no no – give it till Christmas and I’ll find you another producer” So he gave us jolly Jack Gold, who was a wonderful bloke and had never worked in the studio before in his life, he made films and before that had been a film editor, he didn’t know anything about a live show. So it was again very much on my shoulders, with a wonderful floor manager and team and everything and John Wells, John Fortune, John Bird, Barry Humphries and Eleanor were a great gang. John Bird, particularly is such a good actor. He came and played a bishop for me in Emmerdale years later. But it was not a happy period; it was the fag end of the satire period.

BS. Was Alan Bennett still in it then? He was in some of them.

DB. No, Alan Bennett was only ever a guest in BBC-3. God, I’ll never forget it, he and John Bird were going to do a sketch about the various councils up and down the country commissioning art, statues and artworks to be in the front of their town halls and things, something like this. So they decided that they were going to play a sculptor and a town councilor in this sketch, but they wanted the base of a totally representational statue. So I got some eleven-foot legs made in jaboilite and a great big fake marble stock base commissioned on the Tuesday for the Saturday. This was all under way somewhere and we’d go to the office and improvise and set the sketch, when Alan Bennett suddenly came up to me in my office and said, “I can’t think of anything to do. I’m going to the dentist” and never came back. So John Bird and John Fortune improvised a sketch on the day, really around these eleven-foot legs with terrible puns like, “El Greco? Leonard Greco, he’s on his last legs” – that’s why I remember Alan Bennett. Another silly story is that he was born and grew up in Leeds just around the corner from where Anne [Cunningham, Blake’s wife] grew up and to her they were Bennett’s the Butchers, because his father was a butcher.

 One of the things that had happened in 1958 when I was assisting Natasha was the launch of Monitor, and what happened subsequently was that an entire department, Music and Arts, was created as the son and grandson of Monitor, and there were a load of producers around who specialized in music programmes and arts programmes about painters and writers. Humphrey Burton, who had been a production assistant on Monitor became head of Music and Arts while I had been doing all these satire things, and Music and Arts became a sort of indulgence corner where people would arrive and spend loads of money on fantastic films. And because I’d spent my life in the television studio up to that point I thought that I’d get out and learn how to make films. So I happened to see Humphrey Burton in the corridor one day and said, “I’d love to come and work for your department”. So he said, “Oh, great yeah okay. There’s an advertisement on the board at the moment for a producer. Oh, it’s closed – well, put in for it anyway” And I put in for it and got it without a board interview, which was unheard of because you always had to sit before a board which had got a Personnel person and a producer and a sort of Joker person from that department who wasn’t really involved with what they were doing who would actually trip you up if he or she could, four or five people usually.

 Suddenly I was in Arts Features. What had happened was that something called London Weekend Television had started and Humph had gone off to join them, so there were loads of people left in Arts Features to whom he’d promised this that and the other running around with no leadership. So they found someone new to be head of department, but they decided to have a weekly topical arts magazine, colour was looming, and a woman called Lorna Pegram – who’d been one of those women who’d let me direct back in the days when I’d been a designer for women’s programmes, a department that had subsequently been swept away because they’d decided that afternoon programmes should be properly financed – was now in that department as an editor of this new review. It was initially called Release and there were just a sort of job lot of us who had been promised the earth by Humphrey thrown onto this magazine programme. She and I got on terribly well and always had. I was one of the producers on it as well as director, and a man called Colin Nears who had been in schools television a lot was the other producer. And Gavin Millar, who is now a very distinguished drama director and loads of other people who have gone on to have extraordinary careers who were then quite young were all there, and we just endlessly made films and studio items for a topical arts magazine that was the first weekly show in colour. Before that I’d worked on Our World in 1967, the first ever satellite television programme.

BS. Was that the global live thing where The Beatles preformed ‘All You Need Is Love’?

DB. Yes, it was the first time that satellites were used to send pictures all around the world. I did three months on it and I was the director of all the bits in between the inserts from all of the other countries. There was a marvelous man called Noble Wilson who was directing in TC1 Gallery, I was in TC2 Gallery directing the TC1 floor, which had Bleriot’s plane and graphics and all sorts of things. It was the most extraordinary programme and it was a story in itself. That happened because a head of Science Features, Aubrey Singer, got this idea, went around the world twice. The first time nobody would talk to him, but in between he got The Beatles on board and then the whole world wanted to join in at that point and they were fighting to contribute to the programme. And so apparently while he was pulling the programme together he went to Michael Peacock and said, “Who’s your best studio director?” Michael Peacock told me, “I didn’t know what he meant. What does he mean? Who’s used to chaos? Ah yes, Darrol”

 So I was put forward as the studio director for this epic global production and it was absolutely fascinating. But the excitement of the two-hour transmission was just enormous and three months later we all gathered to watch a recording of the programme and it was the most boring programme that I’ve ever seen in my life. The excitement of actually doing it was extraordinary; babies were born on cue in Mexico and Denmark, people shot rapids, I cued a tram in Melbourne from *Television Centre when it was five in the morning there. Nowadays you’d just take it for granted, but getting pictures out of Australia for instance was quite something.

Directing for the BBC: 1970s

 It was from doing Our World and Release that I went freelance, because I still hadn’t finished the three years as a designer when I got this job as a producer at Arts features. After three years of that I think that I just asked to be released from my contract. And then Lorna got fired and at last I got transferred to drama series and did those Doomwatches and Onedin Lines.

 Even in the 1970s, we were still recording as live. When I was doing The Onedin Line, The Regiment, Doomwatch and all that stuff, you camera rehearsed for a day and a half, and then you taped everything for two and a half hours in the evening. It was like a weird cross between working in the theatre and making a B-movie. If it was a fifty-minuter you had two and a half hours. So you could stop the tape to change costumes or shift the cameras round or whatever, but nevertheless it was tight.

BS. We saw the banned episode of Doomwatch (‘Sex and Violence’, 1972) the other day. We were talking about the interpolated footage of the execution –

DB. I got that clip from 24 Hours, it had already been transmitted.

LP. So the programme’s banning can’t have been for that reason.

DB. Oh no, it was because the public standards committee in the drama was a parallel of something that was actually happening simultaneously with the Longford Committee on which Cliff Richard was the pop star, and Mary Whitehouse’s ‘Clean Up TV’. But we were due to go out before the real committee had actually reached their conclusion, and I think the BBC was just frightened of the moral majority.

 What happened was that was the end of my two years in drama series and I’d been doing virtually a show a month – at one point I was doing three shows at once, an Onedin Line, something on BBC2 called Shadow of the Tower and I was editing a Paul Temple. And at the end of the two years we borrowed a house in the south of France for a month, we couldn’t have afforded it, we had three children by then. When we came back I was out of work and it was the first time it had ever happened to me. To transfer from arts programmes to drama series I’d gone freelance so therefore I was hired show by show. But it just so happened that I’d managed to get a constant flow of work in BBC drama series.

 So when I came back from France I bought a Radio Times and ‘Sex and Violence’ wasn’t there. So I rang Terry Dudley, the producer, and he said, “Ahh… What made me think that I’d told you?” What happened was that the BBC had got cold feet about it and David Attenborough who was then Director of Television was consulted – he hated being in the office anyway, and wanted to go and run up trees and things – was in the office for a couple of days between trips and said, “Oh, pull it” so they did. Terry Dudley and the head of drama series were both already worried about it, because the words ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’ were on page one of the script, they were very nervous about it so when they were told to pull it they did. But I think they were more nervous about depicting Lord Longford and Mary Whitehouse. I don’t really know their reasoning, but foolishly the BBC put out a press statement saying that the current series of Doomwatch will be one episode short due to a substandard production. Stuart Douglass who wrote it got on his bike to Television Centre and said, “This is absolute rubbish!” Fortunately his mate, Keith Waterhouse who had a column in the Mirror, had been in the gallery when we recorded it and he took up the cudgels and it was in the Mirror. All of this I knew nothing about because I’d been away for a month. So finally the BBC were forced to put out another press release which said, “Contrary to what we said before, it was really a very good production but the subject is too contentious to be dealt with in 50 minutes, so we’re still not going to put it out”

BS. There’s an extraordinary thing on the tape that happens after the end credits – there’s about 80 seconds of unused footage of reaction shots of horrified responses in the screening room to witnessing the execution, so you could have transmitted the drama with just the soundtrack of the execution playing with that as the pictures.

DB. I forget where Huw Weldon was at this time, but he’d got very high up at the BBC and his great beef for many years was that the audience should know whether what they were seeing was real or acting, whether it’s a documentary or whether it’s a drama and if you try and blur the two – and of course there was a great move at the time towards doing docudramas – he didn’t like that at all. So that thinking was going on in the sixth floor a lot of the time.

BS. You were making several costume dramas at this time. Did they require a specific way of thinking or particular skills?

DB. No, not really. I’d always been interested in history and as a designer I was aware of costume and period architecture and stuff like that, and I was brought up on Gainsborough melodramas. No, whatever the scene, whether its 1978 or 1911 or 2020 you try to put together something which is believably of that period. So the people don’t clutch each other in 1911, I don’t know where you’ve picked it up but you have, you’re just aware of how people behaved in those days. But its absolutely dependent on what’s on the page, how persuasive and how authentic the writer has been. No, you attack any script with the same… forensic concentration!

LP. As a director, obviously all of your experiences in design would have helped in thinking about a certain way about how things look, but you’ve also talked about enjoying working with actors. So how did you divide your time between planning how things were going to work and planning shots and so on and focusing on performance?

DB. Well, you have a preparation period in which all that is done and I found that terribly easy. I know that there’s something wrong with a script if I’m not seeing pictures and hearing voices on the second reading. If its still not happening there then there’s something adrift, but normally even the first time that I read it, I can see where it is and even hear the voices. Particularly on a series or serial when it’s all pretty well pre-cast, so you can hear the voices of the characters. If you can’t, then there’s something wrong with the writing!

BS. There’s an interview with Douglas Camfield in Screen in 1970 where he talks about having an “inner eye” when he reads a script and bad television directors not having it and being able to tell which ones don’t.

DB. Oh right. It may be something to do with being a designer, but I can always see the show already.

BS. We were thinking when we were watching a few of your productions that you have a particularly sympathetic approach to the work of designers, in that you always show the set to its best advantage.

LP. Things just tended to look good! The stately home in Doctor Who (‘The Stones of Blood’, BBC1, 28 October – 18 November 1978) for instance.

BS. You were confident about using low lighting as well, which a lot of directors at that time weren’t.

DB. Yes, but you see one of the things that used to get up my nose when I was in the design department was – it didn’t always happen to me, because I counted a show as being a success because we put on the screen what the director and I had planned to do, and that to me was, ‘We got 90% there, okay he didn’t take this or that shot in the end, so we didn’t see that £100 thing’. But you’d see other designers at the next drawing table or whatever and you’d go on to watch their work having seen it in the studio and you couldn’t see anything, and surely the director should have told the designer that he was going to do it like that, so you could have done it in black drapes or whatever. But you’d get things like massive double-storied sets, which you then didn’t see. I have to reveal that my flat mate and best man was one Ridley Scott, and he would rush up a blind alley in everything he designed, and the director was always an idiot. I can remember that he used to sit up until five in the morning making these fantastically complicated models. I’ll never forget it; this was a Matt Monro Show in the television theatre for Yvonne Littlewood, a light entertainment director, nice lady. Rid designed this thing which was a giant spiral and what he actually used were paper doilies, so it was enormously intricate, and the scene boys hated him, they always hated his shows because they were such heavy going. And, I kid you not, that was all that you saw on Matt Monro was a close-up – that was predictably what you would see, just Matt Monro singing his little heart out. And that, to me, was a mistake between the two of them, Yvonne and Ridley.

BS. Another series that you worked on at this time was Paul Temple, which was groundbreaking in being a co-production with West Germany. Did that affect the way in which it was made?

DB. Oh yes, Taurus Film in Munich. Well, the film sequences were shot in 35mm, which was very grand, and the reason for that was the film, which normally would have been 16mm, played through the studio on tape and was then taken to Technicolour and put onto film because Taurus Film produced film series for the world. So therefore the degradation of the picture from 16mm to videotape back to film would have been awful, so it was shot on 35mm. The story that I did, which was set in Switzerland, was sent over to Munich with a German director who was doing one at the same time. His was set in Munich at the bierfest and he hired a couple of German actors and I hired one German girl, the other German actors were already resident in London. I went to St Moritz at the height of the season, paid for by Taurus Film, and Ros Drinkwater, who played Steve Temple, got I’ll in Munich, she’d done the Munich shoot and then collapsed with flu, so she couldn’t work in St Moritz. So Derrick Sherwin, the producer had his wife Jane out with him and she doubled for Ros in long shots, and we went on to have to do the dialogue scenes back in the studio with back projections. It was just ludicrous having spent all that money to have to do these scenes in Television Centre. Anyway, we were actually grinding away on a 35mm back projection plate of just the street.

BS. I’ve read you articulating your dislike of productions that combine film and studio scenes.

DB. Yes, piebald productions, that’s my phrase for it. It just so happened that that’s what one was pitched into when you got into drama in 1970. You did locations on 16mm and it was edited to within a hair’s breadth and musiced and effects put on, and then you cut to the studio and there’s a different sound and a totally different texture and usually not nearly as many cuts as there were in the film sequences. So I was always very careful to ensure that the same eye looked at the film location as looked at the studio, and try to sort of marry it together in that way. But film editors would still put, if you had shots of people in trainers running on grass, footsteps onto it.

BS. Something that I always find odd about how dramas were put together in this period was that your fortnight of rehearsal for the studio would be after you’d already shot the film. So actors would have to establish their interpretation of their characters before they’d rehearsed.

DB. Well, for the most part you were using series people, so the performance – such as it was – was established anyway. And if you had a big guest performer then very often they were entirely on film, or they were just seen arriving in a car or something so you’d have a chance to rehearse their interpretation in the studio, or sometimes you’d have to commit yourself on location. But watching other people’s shows I quite often spotted quite bizarre changes between location and studio, somebody in the studio would have a heavy Irish accent and no accent at all on location, and the length of their hair would change between location and studio.

Directing for Thames: 1970s

 But those two years at the beginning of the seventies was wonderful. I thoroughly enjoyed doing The Onedin Line, The Regiment and all those things, and then I went off to Thames for two years. I did three Armchair 30 plays for Joan Kemp-Welch, she was also producing Armchair Theatre. I was hoping to do one of those, but there were another shenanigans that got me out of that – she was told not to use me. I know why that was. It was a personality thing, I apparently got up somebody’s nose and therefore I was not to be trusted as a director. It was all very silly. But it was on the board – I had this Armchair Theatre. There was no script yet, but I’d got this date, and when you’re working as a freelance… And then I went in one day and my name wasn’t on the board, it had disappeared. She said, “Oh yes, we’ve lost the recording date” Two weeks later it was back on the board with Dougie Camfield directing it.

 I knew Dougie as a floor manager, of course. Back in the ghetto of the women’s programmes of the late fifties we did a serial called Perido Flight, which was a dramatization of a Victorian novel and he was the floor manager. And then we were directors in the same area. But he died far too young.

 You just don’t know about other directors, you see. There’s only one per show. You inherit an actor or two who’s just been in something wonderful from another director and you say, ‘How did you get on?’ I remember asking one about coming off Wuthering Heights that someone had done again and it was a terrible production and I said, ‘How did you get on with him, then?’ He said, ‘I don’t remember much about it, we played football most of the time’.

BS. When you were at Thames, you worked on the world’s least well-documented series, Harriet’s Back In Town. What on earth was it?

DB. Oh that was an afternoon series. What happened was that the production companies each produced a serial for the afternoons when ITV started daytime television in 1973. YTV produced Emmerdale Farm, Thames made Harriet’s Back In Town, Granada produced Crown Court. Each company produced something and they ran in seasons. Harriet’s Back In Town was about Pauline Yates as Harriet, who was divorced but still friendly with her ex-husband, and her next-door neighbours were in it. It was a very nice show to do; it was just quite a middle-class afternoon serial. It didn’t last, although they might even have done a year. Emmerdale succeeded and Crown Court went on – I did a few of those.

 That’s the reason why I didn’t get Armchair Theatre, I think. What happened was that in the run-up to me doing my episodes I’d go to watch the previous episodes being recorded, and I can remember going to this recording studio – I’d done about 84 Rainbows by then and other kids’ shows as well as the three plays for Joan – and I met a cameraman coming out. He said, “Oh, I can’t stay in there” I said, “What’s the matter?” He said, “there’s a man dying in there – I can’t watch it” And the guest lead, an actor named [Mr X.], was having an affair with Harriet and he couldn’t remember the lines. It was just an actor falling apart, which one has seen once or twice in one’s life and it’s not a pretty sight. He was having this terrible time and it was all around the building that [Mr. X] was a disaster. My episodes, which came up a couple of weeks later, were his exit, so I was ready for problems. I didn’t do anything about it, but I knew I was ready. We got to the read through and he went, “Mumble mumble mumble” So I thought, I’m going to have to do something about this now. So I thought that I’d take him to lunch, I went over and I said, “Where are we going for lunch?” and he said “We’re not going anywhere” And the way that he read his lines, the last person to have done that to me had most of his part cut, so I’m going to have to tell him. So we went to lunch separately and then came back to rehearse in the afternoon and suddenly the AFM put a note into my hand that said, “See Jackie at four o’clock” – Jacqueline Davis was the producer. I went in and she said, “How’s the day?” “Not the best of my professional career” – because he’d been very, very strange all day. And she was very buttoned-down, but suddenly it all came out and she said, “What I can’t stand is you rubbishing the show!” What? And this picture of me that [Mr. X] had given her – It turned out that she and [Mr. X] had had an affair in the past, so he’d gone running to her and said he’s useless. Because I’d started to say something to he and Pauline – Pauline was very sweet and was coping with him wonderfully – I started to say, in this style of thing, I was going to say something about the Woman’s Own style of story. And he started to shout at me “OH, TELL US ABOUT THE STYLE! WE’VE ONLY BEEN DOING THIS FOR EIGHT WEEKS, AND YOU COME HERE AND TELL US ABOUT THE STYLE ALL OF A SUDDEN!” That wasn’t what I was going to say; it would have been something quite different. I was gobsmacked. There were various other explosions like that during the day, and somehow he’d gone to the producer and he said that this incompetent fool from the BBC was ruining his life. No, he was ruining his life. And I’m sure that’s the reason why I didn’t get the Armchair Theatre, because Jacqueline Davis had the ear of the head of the department and Joan was persuaded not to use me. So some years later I was doing Crossroads, and guess who was in it? [Mr. X]. So that was an interesting meeting. We sort of tiptoed around each other, it was perfectly polite and he did actually learn the lines and hit his marks that time. Earlier on, he’d probably been in some private, or rather public, collapse. I suppose that I looked like somebody who he could trample all over and he did.

Darrol Blake Interview Part I: Designing for the BBC in the 1950s and 1960s

 

 

 This article was first published on the (now defunct) University of Reading 'Spaces of Television' blog on 08 June 2013:

 In July 2011 Leah Panos and myself had the good fortune to interview veteran television director Darrol Blake in his Barnes Bridge home. In a career that spans fifty years, Darrol started as a Design Assistant at the BBC in the 1950s, going on to become a Production Designer and then direct for the BBC, before becoming a freelance director for both the BBC and a range of ITV companies from the 1970s onwards. In the first part of our interview Darrol talks about working as a designer at the BBC in the 1950s and 1960s, working on a diverse range of programmes made in several different studios.

The 1950s

DB. The first programmes came from Lime Grove in 1950, but because it was a film studio and because it was the most bizarre building, when it was a film studio it had five sound stages – two on the fourth floor, would you believe? – a huge one and a sort of narrow one beside it on the first floor and a tiny one, that was the five studios. But there was no back lot or anything; houses, the Metropolitan Line tube and Shepherds Bush Market surrounded it. It was hemmed in. So there was no outdoor work in the film studios, or certainly not for us in the BBC. The massive studio with the huge tank in the middle was used as a scenery store by the BBC and was never used as a studio. So we had two studios up on the forth floor and this long narrow studio which was where we did the Quatermass serial in 1955, and this tiny studio in the side which was the children’s’ programmes place.

 The Shepherds Bush Empire around the corner was the conventional variety theatre where the stage was built out to take the cameras and things, and half of the stalls were covered over so that you could have an orchestra or other technicians. So half of the stalls, and of course the circle and upper circle, remained for the audience. So that worked for many years as a television studio theatre.

 The BBC acquired Riverside Studios in 1955, after it closed as a film studio in 1954. And they’d made some quite respectable films there, as they had done in Lime Grove. But the two tiny studios at Alexander Palace also still existed at this time, and by the time that I arrived there to work at the BBC it was only the News Division who were left there, and they didn’t move out until Television Centre was up and running.

 The access to the studios in Lime Grove was by giant goods lifts; one at the front and one at the back. So if you wanted to use anything like a car in the studio, you had to take it up to the fourth floor in one of these giant lifts. But Studio F, the big studio, was where they built sets, which they then took up in the lifts to the various studios. So Lime Grove was where the Television Service was, that and Alexandra Palace. Television Centre didn’t come on stream until 1960, once they were into recording things, but the majority of Lime Grove programming – drama talks and everything – was for live transmission.

BS. So, logistically, could several studios be used simultaneously for recording and transmission?

DB. Oh yes, but in the mid-fifties the majority was live. We transmitted Quatermass live from Studio G and I can remember working as [Production Designer] Stephen Taylor‘s assistant in the studio. There was a moment in the play where this rocket was fired off to another planet and there was a close up of a control panel. I was supposed to get the house electrician to wire it up so that when they fired it lit up, and there was a special close-up of this thing. And I got halfway home and I thought, “God, I’ve forgotten!” So I watched the thing in somebody else’s house and up came the shot and nothing happened and the show went on. It was live so you could do nothing about it. I don’t think that anybody even said anything; there was just a rather strange shot of some gear that didn’t light up… But that was life in those days – the fact that it was live concentrated your mind like nobody’s business. Actors were sick in the fire buckets and all sorts. But most actors were experienced in the theatre, so to break the programme up to record it in parts was strange to them. They were used to starting in the beginning and going right the way through, and the fact that the odd million or whatever were watching them they tried to disregard. But they had to do ridiculous things like change their costume on the run from set to set. My wife [Anne Cunningham] was in the original cast of Coronation Street, for instance, so they did one live followed by one recorded.

 So that conditioned the way that things were written, the way things were designed because obviously they all had to fit in the studio at the same time. Later on, when you got into recorded programmes you could put up a set and record absolutely everything in that set for six episodes or whatever in one block. When I got to Emmerdale Farm in 1977, it was established by then that you put up thepub set or the farm set and knocked off scenes for six episodes at a time. Most scenes were put in the farm kitchen so the cast ate huge meals. They’d have six breakfasts or six dinners and then break for lunch!

LP. In your early career as a design assistant and then a designer at the BBC, what was the process of assigning jobs? You mention that you worked on other formats like light entertainment. Were you just a drama designer or did you work across different genres?

DB. No, you always worked in different things, although some people specialized. The experienced senior designers got the big dramas to do, and there was a certain amount of patronage in that producers and directors would ask for specific designers because they liked working with them. That went on so they’d have to ring the design manager and book you. But I’d attached myself to Stephen Taylor who was a brilliant designer and died disgracefully young at 33, I’d worked with him and then went away to do National Service. I volunteered for Cyprus and Gibraltar and Singapore and all of the trouble spots of the time and I got sent to Epping – North Weald to be precise – at the other end of the Central Line. My work was extremely boring and I got on the tube and went back to Shepherds Bush or Riverside whenever Stephen had something interesting on the floor, so I’d get off and come and do a play with Eartha Kitt, say. The other guys in the huts were totally disbelieving that I was doing that, this spotty idiot. Dick Levin was head of the Design department at the time, he was a second father to me, but it was Roy Oxley, the assistant head who was a practicing designer who actually gave me the job in the print room. So the thing about National Service was that if you were employed before you went in the firm that employed you had to take you back once you’d finished. I’d hardly been away because I’d very often been in the studio with Stephen.

 When I came back Dick Levin had decided that the general standard of design in minor programmes – talks programmes and panel games and women’s programmes, there was a ghetto called women’s programmes in those days – was not very good, so he was going to bring somebody in. He brought in the woman who had been the Head of Display at Simpsons Department store, who knew nothing about scenery or faking anything, a Russian-Jewish woman called Natasha Kroll, she was going to be head of this little unit called Studio Design. After a couple of weeks of drawing for other people I was given to her. Sean Kenny, who went on to revolutionize theatre design later, a chap called Keith Parry and myself were Natasha’s assistants, and we did umpteen programmes, three or four a day. So I’d be trotting from Lime Grove to the theatre to Riverside. So for example on a Monday it was Panaorama, This Is Your Life and whatever women’s programmes were on. So This Is Your Life was invariably in the theatre, Panorama was usually in Lime Grove in either D or E on the fourth floor and the women’s programmes were mostly in Riverside so you had to nip down there as well. And that went on for year after year, and every now and then you’d get some money to redesign something, there’d be a new season of What’s My Line? I made a little corner for myself in women’s programmes and all these women who produced those shows – Lorna Pegram, Monica Sims, Beryl Radley, Joyce Bullen – knew I wanted to be a director, so they let me direct on several occasions. At the S.D.U. we had our own stores, we had our own stores of furniture and scenery and odds and ends, and so you’d mix and match all these wretched programmes all over the place. Natasha had no idea about scenery as such, she thought that if you wanted a brick wall you got a brickie in, so one was forever heading her off from disasters of various kinds. But she did have a selective eye – Wow! Thanks to her and her assistants we raised the level of the general look of programmes. This meant that I was running around from very epoch-making talks programmes to women’s programmes and panel games. From my initial work as a messenger boy, I’d got to know the studios like the back of my hand, which was vital later on. Because of this patch of three or four years I’d worked with many different production departments so I had friends dotted all over the place. When I actually transferred to being a director that was terribly useful because I was known around the place. So in a sense I was protected from the selection process in the design department at this stage.

 I was seventeen or eighteen, and I’d always wanted to be in this world. The fact that I was working in Lime Grove was quite extraordinary because my upbringing had been on those ridiculous Gainsborough films, so I was in my element, even though Natasha Kroll was a very hard taskmistress. I remember one day I was working on some science programme and the director was an idiot. He wanted to have a piece of string tied up in the gantry and tied to a brick on the floor and he was going to pan down this and he wanted it backed. So I said, we’ll put a backcloth or a cyclorama round it. So he said, yes is that all you can do, and I said, you do realize that if you pan down a string against a plain background, it won’t look as though anything is moving? And he couldn’t understand that, he couldn’t grasp the fact that a piece of string will be a static image. It was this day, I remember, and I must have been doing something else for women’s programmes in another studio. I got back to the office and she said, “How was it?” So I said, “Oh, it’s one of those days, Natasha, when you think that life owes you something better” And she said, “Life owes you nothing” That was the tenor of the relationship. I was only a spotty kid, but nonetheless those lines sort of stay with you.

 After a few years Natasha said to Dick Levin, “Oh Dick, I do a play. I got bored with all this stuff, all this situation!” and the BBC were about to do The Lower Depths, the Gorky play.

BS. They recently rediscovered a print of that in the Library of Congress.

DB. Have they? Wow! Directed by Michael Elliott. So Sean and I assisted her and she really had no idea what she was doing. It was a joy for me to go with her to the meetings with Michael Elliott, whom I learned an awful lot from. That was live from Studio D on the forth floor on Lime Grove. I’ll never forget it. He had a Mole Crane, which was an enormous thing for that studio, and we designed a complete box set with bits of it that you could take away and there were traps that the cameras could look through. Michael started the play with this Mole Crane, its cable carefully wound round, inside the set looking back at a table. And there was a tin cup and he wanted a cockroach under this cup, and they were going to pick up the cup and the camera would pull out of this box set and then the thing would be shut. So when it got to the night it had all worked perfectly in the dress rehearsal. And apparently there’s the opening shot of the tin cup on the table in close-up and he said, “Is the cockroach there?” They said, “yes”, he said, “Show me!” so they lifted the cup – Shoosh! The cockroach jumped – and they were on the air! So the pictures faded up, the title over it, somebody picks up the cup and you get a pointless shot of somebody picking a cup up. That was a very memorable production because they used actors who were appearing in the West End. It was live on a Sunday night, of course, they would camera rehearse on the Saturday morning, and for the continued rehearsal when they had gone off to do their matinee and evening performances other actors would come in and stand in for them.

 That would have been early in 1958 and something else that happened at the same time was a programme called Monitor, which was a great discovery and success, and Natasha was particularly fond of doing that. Every now and again she got bored – “Oh, I bored!” – so either I, or one of the other assistants, would do it and work with idiots like Ken Russell. Well, he’s not an idiot but just – impossible. He rang me up one day and we were filming on the next day on Stage 2 at Ealing and he wanted a big roller-skating rink. So I said, ‘okay’, put the phone down and went to the scene dock and I said to dear Fred Lister who was the clerk down there, “What have you got that’s big?” Because we had a number of stock sets – the Tudor set, the Georgian set, or whatever, which were used in bits. He said, “Well, the Tudor set’s in…” But it was set in the twenties, when there was a great Tudor and Jacobean revival in decoration going on. So, guess what, we had a Tudor roller-skating rink, with lots of balloons and streamers and goodness knows what and people in twenties costume. It looked okay, I suppose.

LP. When Television Centre opened in 1960 –

DB. That was the date of the first programme to be made there. It didn’t open then. It was already there when I joined in 1953, in the sense that the scenery block was built and the Design Department were already in there with quite a few production personnel in there. The central doughnut was sort of marked out, but most of the site was still the ruin of the 1906 White City Exhibition. So there were great moldering pavilions and a huge empty steel tank, which had been a lake, and gradually that was replaced with the Television Centre. But people say that it opened in 1960 – it was the first transmission in 1960.

LP. But were you still based mainly at Lime Grove before 1960, or did you work on site?

DB. I was only in Lime Grove as a messenger boy in 1953, and when I got the job in the design department from 1954, I was in the Television Centre, and was there forever.

LP. So did being in Television Centre change the whole process of design and the way in which you went about it?

DB. Well, studios got bigger. I wish that I could remember when it was that things started to be recorded, but it was during my years of National Service in about 1956 and 57. When I came back we were still doing a hell of a lot of live stuff, but plays were being recorded by then. But you couldn’t cut the tape, because the tape was then useless – it cost £80 to cut the tape. Of course, electronic editing came in much later on so nothing got cut. Drama was editable in theory in the 1950s, but they still tried not to have to edit the tape.

The 1960s

LP. I was really intrigued to read you say in an interview that you had a role in designing the Blue Peter cyclorama.

DB. Yes, that’s another claim to fame. When I came out of the S.D.U. one of the things that designers did for three or four months at a time as part of the cycle was Blue Peter. And a rather extraordinary girl preceded me on it, Julia Trevelyan Oman It was her that cut the ship out of Perspex and put it at the back of the set, and that and something else that she designed, it all blew off the lorry. And she asked to be taken off the programme in the end because it was apparently disaster after disaster.

 So I was put on to it in 1962 alongside Edward Barnes who was the studio director at the time and a new girl called Biddy Baxter who had just come in as producer. And this was the middle of a season, so there was no money or man-hours, man-hours being workshop time. Prior to that, they’d had little box sets for the make, the animals and the other features, with a gap in the middle for the ship. So I just swept away all the box sets and put the cyclorama, which was there anyway, it was a standard thing in the studio, and I used some bits and pieces from the S.D.U. stock that weren’t being used anymore – the unit must have been disbanded by then – and I put up some shelves and some rostrums with rough matting on top for the animals and that was it. And Valerie Singleton, the new girl, and Christopher Trace were the presenters, and it must have included the Christmas edition because I remember hiring a sleigh from Pinewood with pantomime ponies drawing it, presumably with a man holding them and Chris and Val sitting in the sleigh with presents and things. And we had no money or man-hours or anything, but what we used to do in those days was ‘X’ things. In other words, if you saw something that you like in The Black and White Minstrel Show or the Sunday play or whatever, you’d issue a WVO – Works Variation Order – which said ‘Such and such a property to be ‘X’d for Blue Peter’ So I’d spotted some marvelous cane arches in The Black and White Minstrel Show. So I put them up in Riverside 1 so that they were self-supporting, covered them in p-lights as they were called in those days, fairy lights, and the sleigh drove down through these lights and came up to the camera and the show started. It happened like that on the air. On the dress rehearsal the sleigh came through the arches and something sticking out of the sleigh caught one of the arches and the whole thing went “Draaag! Clumph!”, a wonderful moment, and that was it. And forty years later they were still using the same set, basically, it got more and more glamorous. It was something that I’d sort of learned on This Is Your Life, really because you just never knew what you were going to be asked to do, and there was no money and there were no man-hours. So you had to have something that could disappear, in order to have a completely empty studio to put the Band of the Lifeguards or 500 kids singing carols into. You just took the shelves away and there was room for them.

BS. And that set still gives the viewer a sense of home, being centered on their sofa and shelves and ornaments.

DB. Oh yes, I didn’t give them any sofas, but that must have come later. It was imbued into us by Natasha Kroll that it’s got to look good, you don’t want to make them comfortable. She didn’t actually say that, but I can remember doing Sportsview and the producers always wanted comfortable armchairs to do interviews in, but we never gave them that.

LP. That reminds me of how all of the guests on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross would always complain about how uncomfortable the couch was.

DB. Yes, eventually things went the other way and all chat shows ended up with sofas, but the desk for the presenter to hide behind was always there in the early days.

BS. At what point were you promoted in the Design department?

DB. That’s a sticky subject. Because I was on my own in the studios all the time when I worked for the S.D.U, I was already in fact a designer although I wasn’t administering thousands of pounds as a designer. Doing three or fours shows a day was effectively my training scheme as a director. You sat with good bad and indifferent directors, and you saw how not to treat people and you saw how to do it properly. I never went on the BBC training course; my training was being a designer sitting on a chair behind the directors. When I came out of the S.D.U. I was given this patch of designing for shows like Blue Peter and it was still fairly minor stuff. But it was a BBC rule that you could act for five months in an elevated position, but if you acted for six months then they had to pay you. So you were always stopped after five months of acting as a designer, so you went back to working on the drawing board or doing minor things. This was called acting up – you were only given attachments to other departments. This acting up did enable you to be able to apply for a designer’s job with some backing when one came up on the board. I’d applied two or three times for an official job and was passed over. By the time that I got a designer’s job – you know how the tectonic plates move in these big organizations – they were getting towards not having a huge staff and putting people on contract. So I had a three-year contract as a designer. I didn’t go freelance until 1970, and that was to get from Arts and Features to Drama, just at the time that my twins were born. But I wish that I’d done it about five years before, because thanks to Ned Sherrin I was directing the Saturday evening satire show, and I was a sort of name then. I’d been headhunted by ATV, but decided not to take it up.

 Dick Levin had the idea that we were working as ‘taxi’ designers. ‘What does that mean, Dick?’ He said, “well, you know, we’re chugging along and somebody falls ill and we get another taxi driver designer off the rank and you go in and do it” And you got big plays that way – I got several big plays because people had fallen ill or fallen out with the director. One that I took over, August for the People, I’ll never forget it.

BS. Is this the one that wasn’t transmitted?

DB. You’re right and I know the reason! Marilyn Roberts Taylor was allocated to this play and she was very grand and swishy with what she designed and the thing took place in a vast stately home with the public visiting. So there were vast columns, it was a big set in TV Centre, and when I got to the studio – because I took it over quite late – there were huge gaps. I said to the scene boys, “What goes there?” and they didn’t know. I looked at the plans and they were no help, so I got some huge tapestries and covered up the gaps, and I spent my life persuading the standby painter and the standby carpenter to do things. That was something that I learned from Stephen – he used to spend all of his money and man-hours on one set and the rest you’d sort of fake up in the studio, he was very naughty like that. I shall never forget it, Eric Portman, a big movie star of the time, was playing the lead. I think it was one of the first plays ever to have five days in the studio because it was a long play. It was a stage play and they were going to do the whole damn thing. Brenda De Banzi was playing his wife, and she kept flirting with the camera crews and the prop boys and she was a lady of advanced years. And she was sort of pathetic really, because there was all this sort of girlish giggling and flirting going on with the camera crews and they were all going, [sotto voce] “God…” I’d watched the dress rehearsal and then went home – I didn’t stay for the recording because there was nothing I could do. I came in the next day to do something else and I met the callboy outside dressing room number 1 in Television Centre and I said, “How did it go?” He said, “You hadn’t heard?” “No” “We didn’t do it” So I said, “What do you mean?” “Well, I went to Eric Portman’s dressing room [knock knock] ‘Mr. Portman? We’re ready to record. [knock knock] Mr. Portman?’ ‘I can’t! [groans] I can’t!” He was exhausted, he couldn’t do it, and so they didn’t! Brenda Di Banzi was packed and out of the door in about five minutes flat.

BS. That production got as far as being announced in the Radio Times.

DB. Oh yes, well it would do because in those days recording dates were quite close to transmission.

BS. How did a commission normally work for a drama designer? How much advance warning were you given for a series episode or a big play?

DB. About two or three months ahead you would know that you were doing a play, and then your work would depend upon the availability of a script. It was called projected arrangements, and when I was with Natasha it was my job to keep the projected arrangements up to date, because we were doing so many shows that it was our bible and you’d have revisions come around so you’d tear off one arrangement and stick the new sheet in and all the rest of it. I’d underline in red the shows that we were responsible for and there was a lot of red underlining in those days. Then you’d discover what the name of the show was and who the director was and you’d wait to be summoned by the director who was the director and producer in the early days – later on there were producers of strands of plays or series and individual directors. Very often the scripts were late so you’d get a briefing, we’ll get you the script as soon as we can. When you got the script you’d see that it’s a pub and two cars in the studio, or it’s somebody’s tenth floor flat if you were doing Z-Cars or Dixon of Dock Green – Dixon of Stock Green as it used to be called by designers.

LP. Did you ever work on Z-Cars?

DB. No, I did draw one up, working with a designer called Barry Newbery and something weird happened. I did the working drawings for the workshops and the studio plan, which is what the assistant did. And somehow – I was blamed for it, I know, but I don’t know how it happened – I think when the lighting guy did his plan to trace his lighting plot he somehow got it so it slid off my plan, because all the lights were hung two feet out of position. So the sets were put up to my plan and the lights were for a different calculation. I got the blame for it, because I drew the studio plan, but since I was first and he then followed it, I don’t see how its possible that I was at fault. But this is crucial; because the director was one Julia Smith and many years later I was not hired for Eastenders until after she’d left as producer. It’s the sort of thing that people remember: I certainly remember about people who have let me down in that context.

 So, the designer would have to read the script before you went to see the director, but sometimes the script was late so you just got a briefing and would have to read the script later. And you would design what you thought the thing should look like, because you’d have to take into account how much money and how much workshop time you’d got. You’d then book all the stock scenery downstairs in the basement and then take the notional plan to the director and he would either agree straight away or say well, ‘I can’t actually get back far enough to do the wide shot on the pub set because you’ve got her kitchen in the way’, so you’d shift it, but usually it would be, ‘Yeah, great, okay’ and you’d go ahead. And then they would go into rehearsal out in the Acton Hilton and the AFM would mark the sets that you had designed with tape out on the floor and very often they’d misread them. I can remember designing The World of Wooster with Ian Carmichael and Dennis Price, directed by Michael Mills, another force to be reckoned with. I went out to rehearsal on one of these episodes – it was for the tech run with the crew and the designer – and I said, “Michael, why are they playing that scene up the chimney?” “What?” “Well, the two boys are standing over there in the chimney” He said, “Oh, it looked like an arch on the plan” They didn’t bother to look at the elevations.