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)

Doctor Who: Warriors’ Gate (1981), Jean Cocteau and the realm of videographic fantasy

 

 

 This article was first published on the (now defunct) University of Reading 'Spaces of Television' blog on 06 September 2013:

 (Text of a paper given by Billy Smart at ‘Walking in Eternity’, University of Hertfordshire, 3 September 2013)

 What I’m going to do today is examine the spatial realisation of a fantastical world in the 1981 Doctor Who story, Warriors’ Gate, draw some conclusions as to how the story’s distinctive visual style is inextricable from its narrative form and consider how the drama shows and investigates fantasy itself.

 I’m going to do this in relation to the strong affinities between Warriors’ Gate and Jean Cocteau’s two films Orphee (1950) (a reimagining of the myth of Orpheus, the poet who travels to the underworld in order to rescue his wife Euridice from death) and – especially – La Belle et la Bête (1946), his telling of the beauty and the beast story. Commentary on Warriors’ Gate tends to mention the similarities of mise-en-scene and visual motifs between the films and the programme, but only ever in passing. What I want to do today is consider how these forties cinematic antecedents work in greater depth, and what they mean for the viewers’ understanding of the eighties television story.

 It’s my contention that the use of Cocteau motifs is ingrained in the narrative of Warriors’ Gate, and acts as something more significant towards our understanding of the story than a handful of convenient borrowed visual devices. Instead, the references are integral to the visual and philosophical construction of the world of Warriors’ Gate. Cocteau’s conception of film has been described as “cinematic poetry”. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson provide a useful definition of this poetic effect, describing Cocteau’s films as:

  [S]elf-consciously “poetic” works, seeking to create a marvelous world sealed off from ordinary reality and to convey imaginative truths through evocative symbols. (…) Cocteau conceived rich images that could be translated into many media, confirming his belief that the poet is not merely a writer but rather someone who creates magic through imaginative means. (2003: 380-1)

 Cocteau himself, a polymath who – as poet, novelist, dramatist, director, designer and artist – created both written and visual art, accepted this poetic conception of his films, finding and layering the rhymes that exist between diffuse images in his cinema, just as he did with words in his verse:

 [F]or me the image-making machine has been a means of saying things in visual terms instead of saying them with ink on paper. (1954)

 Creating a whole work from this approach required a “syntax”, obtained as much through the clash between images as the connection between them. Through adopting this discordant syntax (which lacked the sense of flow that appealed to movie critics) films could become ‘vehicles for thought’:

 My primary concern in a film is to prevent the images from flowing, to oppose them to each other, to anchor them and join them without destroying their relief. (1954)

 ‘Warrior’s Gate’, an exceptionally complex Doctor Who story with a narrative that is difficult to make linear sense of, operates through just such an unsettling syntax. Set in the negative space of E-space, as opposed to the positive universe of N-Space, the story concerns a slave ship, marooned in E-Space by time winds. The ship’s slaves, the Tharils, are a race of lion-people used as navigators by the slavers because of their extrasensory psychic powers.

 The Tharils lead the crews of the slave ship and TARDIS to a world behind a magical mirror, revealing that the lion-men were once the masters of their own kingdom, when they in turn enslaved humans.

 It is also the story in which the Doctor’s companion and fellow time lord, Romana, parts company with him, to live amongst the Tharils, taking K-9 with her.

 Set in a non-world of white empty voids, obviously artificial monochrome gardens, cobwebbed castles and magic portals, Warriors’ Gate is understood by the viewer through imagistic metaphor and associative logic, rather than through concrete and linear narrative.

 The story is structured through “overt poetry, where thematic associations link the very fabric of the world together as much as through scientific reason” (Sandifer, 2012).

  This non-linear storytelling has sometimes attracted hostility –  a typical review reading:

 [‘Warriors’ Gate’] is told in such a complex way that it fails totally to be comprehensible to anyone without a lot of time for the programme and access to a video recording. And there are more of them than there are of us. It may be a brilliant experimental television drama, but is unforgivable in its contempt for the family audience. (…) there’s so much to fathom out that even the Doctor is baffled until the very end.  (Owen, 1997: 21-2)

 Two early eighties TV innovations helped 1981 viewer understanding of the story, particularly amongst younger viewers – the home video recorder, which allowed stories to be immediately re-watched – ideal for finding sense in an allusive narrative – and the rapid growth of promotional music video, most famously David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’ (1980, d. David Bowie and David Mallet), bringing abstract videographic landscapes to everyday television, their visual ontology similar to that of Warriors’ Gate.

 The unconventional form of Warriors’ Gate can be in part attributed to the novice status of its production crew. It was 25 year-old Steven Gallagher’s first television script, having previously written science fiction for radio plays and his first novel. Gallagher’s initial script has been described by Script Editor Christopher Bidmead as being “a novel” rather than a work for TV, very long and primarily consisting of passages of description (Arnopp, 2009: 45-6). His aim was to write a strongly horror-based serial, since he disliked the “softer”, comical, approach to Doctor Who of recent years. He approached the task with the assumption that he was writing for three different audience constituencies: action and monsters for the children, mystery and imagination for the teenagers, and intellectual drama for the adults (Wiggins, 2009).

 Director Paul Joyce had previously only directed one television drama, a Play for Today for BBC Birmingham, and his inexperience of directing drama in the TV studio affected both the process of making Warriors’ Gate as well as the style and form of the programme. Joyce hoped to make the serial in a distinctively filmic style, setting up pre-production screenings of several films that he wanted to emulate, including Kiss Me Deadly, Dark Star and Cocteau’s Orphee and Testament d’Orphee. He used the TV Centre studio like a film studio, his working method being to shoot scenes twice and then edit them together in postproduction. This caused great delays and was unpopular with BBC Staff, with Joyce at one stage being sacked from the production, until it became apparent that no one else could comprehend his camera script and he was quickly reinstated. Production was also delayed by a walkout of staff when Joyce insisted on filming the studio lights “off the set”, a safety officer declaring a set unsafe and a strike by BBC carpenters. The drama required extensive work in postproduction (Pixley, 2002, Wiggins, 2009).

 Because of this preoccupation with film style, it had been assumed that the use of Coctovian motifs was a directorial decision on the part of Joyce, but Steve Gallagher has emphatically refuted this notion, to the extent of sending copies of his original draft script to writers who suggest this in print (Gallagher, 1994). Bearing this explicit authorial intent in mind, I suggest that the frequent use of Cocteau references in Warriors’ Gate acts as considerably more than as an act of homage, but as a visual code for understanding the story world of the drama. Gallagher uses the visual world of Cocteau as a template for achieving two essential concerns of Doctor Who –

 Firstly, to form impossible connections between parallel worlds and realities. This is a recurring feature in Doctor Who, not just the transitional space of the TARDIS itself, but parallel spaces within worlds themselves, that can often be formulated as representing dream or unconscious states for those who cross between them – for example, the virtual reality domain of the matrix (‘The Deadly Assassin’, 1976) or the Continual Event Transmuter machine that stores sections of planets on a series of slides (‘Nightmare of Eden’, 1979). To cross from one world to another requires either a process (e.g. being connected to a machine) or a physical portal (such as crossing into a screen).

 Gallagher took the idea from Orphee that mirrors are gateways into the other world.

 The Princess and other emissaries of Death travel through mirrors –

– as do the Tharils in Warriors’ Gate.

 The creation of trick effects for the mirror was much more complicated in Cocteau’s film studio, requiring false sets with elaborate carpentry. In contrast, BBC Television Centre Doctor Who production used an identical effect for all journeys through the mirror.

 Joyce wanted to recreate Cocteau’s most celebrated rippling effect for passing through the mirror, but the use of mercury was vetoed as being too impractical and dangerous.

 The mirror in Orphee is frequently shown to act as much as a barrier as a gateway.

 Orphée is eventually enabled to travel through the mirrors in part by putting on gloves (much as the Doctor’s hand becomes changed by the time winds); and in part by blocking out the concerns of our world, much as lead Tharil Biroc urges the Doctor and Romana to “Do nothing” to escape the slave ship. Ability to traverse the mirror in Warriors’ Gate is shown to be a process only allowed to those with telepathic sympathy; Tharils can pass through mirrors like doors, Time Lords and Ladies can learn the gift, but the frustrated slavers lack the wherewithal to pass through, as seen here as the Doctor looks through from the other side of the mirror.

 The mirror is not the only means of communication with the underworld that Warriors’ Gate shares with Orphee. Cryptic messages from the realm of death are transmitted by radio in the film –

– a device used in two settings in Warriors’ Gate. First the time-sensitive Tharils, and then Romana are wired up in the hope that they will receive messages from beyond the gateway, the headphone apparatus drawn from Orphee.

 And, like Orphee, the Doctor tinkers with cumbersome equipment to receive haltering, stentorian, instructions from the other side through the airwaves.

 The second lesson that Gallagher takes from Cocteau in order to create a strong Doctor Who story is the application of the topography of La Belle et la Bête to create an imaginative fantastical world, governed by its own rules and logic. From my own experience, the abiding memory of watching Doctor Who as a child was the powerful, immersive, sense of looking in on a fully realised fantastical world, with access limited to just a fleeting 25 minutes on Saturday afternoons in the autumn and winter. Popular memory tends to concentrate upon the fear felt by the infant viewer of Doctor Who, but there was also an equally strong aspect of fascination to childhood engagement with the programme.

 The various landscapes that Warriors’ Gate adopts from Belle et la Bête feel like a more fully-realised world than a collection of stages. The Doctor’s initial arrival at the castle acts as both a quotation from – and a discourse with – the moment in the film when Belle’s father arrives in the mansion of the beast. The BBC scene repeats the same apparatus and composition used by Cocteau –

– with the Doctor also responding to the room – with its candelabra, seemingly deserted table, and empty chair – from the same position, evoking a similar mood of exploration and unease.

 The beast’s castle is not, however, deserted, but populated by living statues!

 Similarly long-dormant, but still living, suits of armour populate the Tharil castle, Gallagher deriving child-pleasing monsters (the Gundun Warriors) and suspense from Cocteau’s imagery.

 

 In both scenes, the protagonist’s response to their alarming new surroundings is given an action through the prop of a goblet. In the film, the father takes a drink from a disembodied hand, considers, and then drinks from it.

 While the Doctor arights an upended goblet, an object that the (very attentive) viewer will eventually learn that he himself upset centuries before.

 While the castle room is a finely-realised interior set, ‘Warrior’s Gate’, like la Bête, presents the viewer with an impressive sense of the expansive topography of the beast’s magnificent home –

 

– surrounded by magical gardens

 

– an effect achieved by using detailed still photographs taken in the grounds of Powis Castle.

 The monochrome photography elevates the onscreen garden from a potentially flat green screen special effect into an otherworldly magical location

 

– where visitors lose their individual agency and can only follow the beast through warrens and mazes.

 The monochrome artificial effect is also used for the corridors of the Tharil kingdom, reconstituting Cocteau’s grand corridors –

– and allowing characters the space to move between foreground and background in magnificent rooms

 Sometimes Warriors’ Gate replicates the shot sequence of particular scenes from la Bête, the point of view shot through which the prone Belle first sees the beast –

– is also experienced by Romana and the viewer

– as, in turn,  is the beast’s point of view

 

 

 Perhaps the most significant visual quotation ‘Warrior’s Gate’ takes from la Bête is the hand-in-paw conjoining between Belle and the beast –

– being an action recreated by Time Lady and Tharil, signifying a point of tactile connection between two worlds of the story.

 It is when presented with this touching image of union between Noble Princess and Beast, that the fantastical fairy tale source of Warriors’ Gate is most apparent, but wholly consistent with the depiction of the Tharil kingdom throughout the story. Gallagher’s imaginative use of Cocteau’s imagery – and Joyce’s application of it – are consistent with Cocteau’s own rationale for telling fantastical stories on film, which calls for great precision and craft:

 [It is up to me] to avoid those impossibilities which are even more of a jolt in the midst of the improbable than in the midst of reality. For fantasy has its own laws which are like those of perspective. You may not bring what is distant into the foreground, or render fuzzily what is near. (1949)

 Cocteau’s introductory prologue to La Belle et la Bete can serve as well as a justification of the form and style ‘Warriors’ Gate’:

 The characters of this film obey the rule of fairy stories. Nothing surprises them in a world to which matters are admitted as normal of which the most insignificant would upset the mechanics of our world. (1946)      

 As much as any Doctor Who story, Warriors’ Gate works through paradoxes and confusions within and between space and time. As in Cocteau’s films, the unconventional visual aesthetic of the story means that it achieves this through poetic means. “Typically when we use the word “poetic” we really mean “lyrical,” that is, essentially working according to a non-narrative structure. Lyric poetry, contrasted with the narrative form of epic poetry, is a poetry based on the expression of emotions” (Sandifer, 2012). This lyrical storytelling acts as a boon to Warriors’ Gate, a story made during a particularly cerebral period of the show when, under the script editorship of Bidmead, it was reluctant to dramatize the emotional journeys of characters.

 Because Warriors’ Gate was not conceived as a standalone viewing experience, but as four 25-minute episodes of an on-going series watched on Saturday afternoons. As a segment of a continuing viewing experience, the story would always be best remembered for the departure of Romana. It is through the appropriation of Cocteau’s world that Romana’s story works on an associative level. As in La Belle et la Bête, a lion man takes a princess into his world. For all of the sophistication and elegance of the piece its most elemental narrative fascination is achieved through fairy tale. Although the verbal storytelling of Warriors’ Gate is opaque, the essential story is told through visual means.

 The celebrated words of the Princess to Orphee apply just as well to the viewer of Warriors’ Gate: “The point is not to understand, but to believe.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Arnopp, Jason, ‘Science Friction’, Doctor Who Magazine 407, 29 April 2009, pp. 42-7.

Bordwell, David & Thompson, Kristin: Film History: An Introduction (Second Edition): New York, McGraw Hill, 2003.

Cocteau, Jean, Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film: New York, Dover Publications Inc, [1949] 1986.

Cocteau, Jean, Cocteau and the Film: London, D.Dobson, 1954.

Gallagher, Steve, ‘Scripting ‘Warriors’ Gate’ – so what actually happened?’, In-Vision 54, November 1994.

Owen, David, ‘Doctor Who: The E-Space Trilogy’, Doctor Who Magazine 257, 22 October 1997, pp. 21-2.

Pixley, Andrew,  ‘Archive: Warriors’ Gate’, Doctor Who Magazine 315, 3rd April 2002.

Sandifer, Philip, ‘Going To Be Alone Again (Warrior’s Gate)’: http://www.philipsandifer.com/2012/02/going-to-be-alone-again-warriors-gate.html , 2012.

Wiggins, Martin, ‘Production Information’, Doctor Who: Warriors’ Gate: BBC DVD, 2009.

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.