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)

Hunters Walk: Local Knowledge (1973): Representing rape in the studio police drama

 

 

 This article was first published on the (now defunct) University of Reading 'Spaces of Television' blog on 01 October 2013:

(Text of a paper given by Billy Smart at the University of Glamorgan ATRiuM in Cardiff – twice! – at ‘Spaces of Television: The Performance of Television Space’ on Friday 20 April 2012 and ‘Cops on the Box: Crime Drama on UK TV Screens’ on Friday 15 March 2013.)

 What I’m going to do today is to reconsider the form that most British television drama took between the 1960s and the 1980s – programmes that were shot in the television studio on multiple cameras, recorded onto videotape, and that used pre-filmed inserts for exterior scenes. I shall attempt this through identifying particular qualities inherent to studio drama, suggesting that there were types of story that could be told especially well in this form.

 I shall illustrate this by showing how studio drama told stories through visual details of performance as much as it did through dialogue, exploring this idea through investigating how popular police dramas used rape storylines, showing ways in which the effects of rape were conveyed to the viewer through the non-verbal means of looks and gestures.

 Discussion of studio drama has often been predicated around the form’s perceived similarity to the theatre, particularly the naturalist theatre of the 19th century onwards. An early, notorious, declaration of this idea was Troy Kennedy Martin’s 1964 article, provocatively titled ‘Nats Go Home’. For Kennedy Martin studio television drama was inherently naturalist and that was a bad thing, giving primacy to verbal storytelling over visual storytelling. In ‘nat’ drama, the nature of characters and their relationships, abstract themes and ideas were all revealed through dialogue.

 Kennedy Martin was emphatic in this belief:

 Despite what everyone may say to the contrary, naturalism is not a visual form. The bulk of the dramatic information rests on the dialogue and the visuals do nothing but supplement it. (Kennedy Martin, 1964, p. 27)

 I’d like to suggest that this was a mistaken assertion. Although the programme around which I’m basing my case, Hunters Walk (ITV, ATV, 1973-76), was unquestionably a ‘nat’ drama and not a place to see experimental and nonlinear storytelling, it – and other such programmes – could achieve their dramatic effect through visual means – glance, gesture and inference.

 Hunters Walk was overseen by Ted Willis, the creator of Dixon of Dock Green (BBC, 1955-76), and bore some affinity to that series, in presenting stories about the crew of one police station, but in this case in a small provincial town (‘Broadstone’, filmed in Rushden, Northamptonshire) rather than London, and scheduled to be watched by a nighttime adult ITV audience, rather than an early-evening family BBC1 audience. It’s a good example of what Brett Mills calls “invisible television” (2011), series that are highly popular (every episode of Hunters Walk was in the Top 20 programmes for its week, and it achieved ratings of up to 16.6 million (Gambaccini & Taylor, 1993)), but which fail to gain the critical or academic attention generally awarded either to quality programmes or shows with cult status – Dennis Potter or Doctor Who. Its also literally invisible television for the most part, as only ten of the 39 episodes survive, and five of those – including the edition that I discuss here – only exist on rather muffled black-and-white 16mm prints, rather than the sharp colour videotape image that viewers would have seen in 1973.

 Of all of the major crimes that police have to deal with, rape was the one least often depicted in police dramas between the sixties and the eighties. I’ve only managed to find four storylines explicitly concerned with the investigation of rape (Hunters Walk: Local Knowledge, ITV, ATV, 11 June 1973; The Gentle Touch: Decoy, ITV, LWT, 12 September 1980, Juliet Bravo: Misunderstandings, BBC1, 27 November 1982, The Bill: With Friends Like That…?, ITV, Thames, 27 January 1986). There are very sound reasons why police series avoided rape plots, making the rare occasions when they were attempted of particular interest.

 I’ve identified three particular potential problems for rape storylines in police drama;

▪   Content: rape is a disturbing crime to contemplate, and not one that could be depicted. Police dramas could show an armed robbery, but they couldn’t show a rape happening onscreen. Dramatising a crime of a sexual nature ran the risk of either being too shockingly graphic for viewers to be prepared to watch, or too circumspect to be convincing drama.

▪   Tone: rape storylines ran a risk of appearing titillating or salacious. This is certainly a trap that ‘Decoy’, the episode of The Gentle Touch, falls into, in which the glamorous female detective goes undercover as a sexy barmaid who puts herself in positions of danger likely to draw out the rapist, having to be rescued by her male colleagues.

▪   Responsibility: a considered rape storyline can only be pretty depressing. If an armed robber is caught at the end of an episode, the viewer can presume that they will go on to be tried and sentenced, allowing their victims to start to recover. But if a rapist is caught, then the prospect of the case going to trial is traumatic to imagine.

 The episode of Hunters Walk that I’m discussing (‘Local Knowledge’ w. Richard Harris, d. Ron Francis) avoids the first two of these pitfalls. The third potential problem – responsibly representing the effects of rape – is an insurmountable one, but the programme makes the grim repercussions of being a rape victim the source of its drama.

‘Hunters Walk: Local Knowledge’ (ITV, ATV, 11 June 1973)

 ‘Local Knowledge’ has a retrospective dramatic structure, starting with the police arriving at the scene of the alleged crime, therefore placing the viewer in the same position as the policeman, having to judge the veracity of the crime and the reliability of the victim from the evidence that they are given. The episode has two concurrent plots, each told in a different narrative mode; the detective work conducted by the police, led by Sergeant Smith (Ewan Hooper).

and what happens to the victim, Christine Lewis (Frances White)

 The detection plot conforms to Kennedy Martin’s definition of ‘nat’ drama, through being constructed verbally. The police make sense of the case through language, conducting oral interviews and taking written statements from the witness, victim and suspect, and through discussions amongst each other and with professionals – in one dialectical scene Sergeant Smith goes through the wording of a medical report with a doctor (Dennis Chinnery), discussing its possible interpretation in a courtroom. The vital clue that leads to the suspect’s arrest is also verbal – before the attack he uses the expression “iron bridge” to Mrs. Lewis, rather than “railway bridge”, revealing that he must be a local man, the ‘Local Knowledge’ of the title.

 By contrast, Christine’s story is largely silent and conveyed through gesture and expression. I was reading a memoir by the feminist writer Kate Millett while I was thinking about this episode, and was struck by this passage:

How strange the dynamic of persons, their emanations, the effects of their mere movements or expressions. How more powerful and definitive finally than words. (Millet, 1977, p. 155)

which describes how the viewer is made to understand the victim’s story in this episode.

 ‘Local Knowledge’ achieves much of its dramatic effect through the presentation of small visual details, something that the multi-camera form of studio drama was particularly well suited to do without disrupting the flow of continuous performance within a scene. To give examples of how this works, we see; Sergeant Smith’s wife (Ruth Madoc) deciding to chain her front door when her husband leaves in the night to investigate a complaint of rape;

 Mrs. Lewis’ Mother-in-law noticing that Christine isn’t wearing her wedding ring while she sleeps;

 Christine leaving her food uneaten;

and the Mother-in-Law almost holding Christine’s hand, but then deciding not to.

 Such attention to detail primes the viewer of Hunters Walk to be attentive to the nuances of characters’ physical movements and facial expressions, such as in this brief scene of Christine waiting at the police station

 (Clip 1: One minute: Christine is brought into the Police Station and briefly waits for Sgt. Smith to be able to see her. The Desk Sergeant (Davyd Harries) asks her if she wants a cup of tea, which she declines. Once sat, Christine is seen in a large close-up. Shots of her are alternated with shots of three policemen reacting to her presence. The scene ends with a lingering shot of the Desk Sergeant watching her go.)

 In plot terms, there’s no need for this scene to be in the programme, yet it clearly isn’t padding and is doing something dramatically, in giving the viewer a greater understanding of Christine’s character and situation by showing a sequence of looks from the various policemen and her responses to them. To articulate what is being conveyed visually through the facial expressions in this scene, which places great confidence in actors’ ability to convey subtle changes of thought; every time that a policeman looks at Christine, she responds acknowledging their attention, realizes that they are looking at her in a different way than in ordinary social interaction, and the change in her expression registers this realization with discomfort. Because the scene is recorded in continuous time, creating a lifelike sense of hesitancy and awkwardness in the characters’ movements – these aren’t perfectly composed shots – this mood of displacement and unease is accentuated. What is least significant in this scene is the dialogue.

 This way of presenting Christine, as a woman who is aware that she is being looked at, is repeated throughout the episode in various forms, whether by her neighbours in the street –

  – Or by her husband at home, in awkward scenes that make full use of the extent of the set of the room, with the husband not only looking at his wife with an expression of trepidation, but wary of even getting too close to her.

 Domestic scenes with the husband show him reluctant to make eye contact with his wife, only able to fleetingly look at her before having to leave the house.

 Having established the motif of the look, the episode then uses it to convey the various forms that Christine’s ostracism takes, inviting the viewer to register the different types of look and to form associations between them, as in this scene of Christine being taken home.

(Clip 2: 40 seconds: Exterior of Christine arriving outside her home in a police car, expressions of two female neighbours, close-up of Christine’s face. Interior of waiting husband (Ian Thompson) looking out of window. Christine arrives indoors, husband looks at her with an uncertain expression, crash zoom on Christine’s face. Christine runs to husband, embraces him and sobs, observed from the staircase by her mother-in-law (Hazel Bainbridge) in silhouette, who then turns away.)

 This scene shows three different types of look in immediate succession; the neighbours’ hostility;

the husband’s hesitancy;

and, shown in a rather sinister Hitchcockian way, the mother-in-law’s disapproval, where the viewer doesn’t even have to see her face to be aware of the look –

  

Again, the dialogue is insignificant.

 Only once in the episode is the convention of the look reversed, and Christine presented with her own opportunity to look and to judge. In a scene when the two plots of the drama come together, Christine identifies her assailant – the police arrange for her to wait outside the suspect’s workplace and pick him out. However, in order to be able to prove in court that Mrs. Lewis has recognized her assailant herself and not been led towards her decision, she has to be alone when she identifies him, sat inside a car and alerting the police by switching on the headlights.

 So at the one moment when Christine is presented with the power to look herself, she is also presented as an isolated figure.

 Christine’s final scene in the episode works retrospectively, finally giving the character voice to reflect on her treatment since the attack –

(Clip 3: Two minutes: Scene of Mr and Mrs Lewis in their living room. Husband drinks and makes half-hearted sympathetic conversation. Christine tells him that he is looking at her with “That look – the same as the others.” The husband then complains that everyone will be looking at both of them with the same look from now on, as he was the husband who let his wife be raped. Christine asks him if he has any idea what it feels like to be raped, and her husband complains that everybody always knew that she was the type and he’s going to be a laughing-stock from now on.)

 This remarkably bleak and upsetting concluding scene makes explicit verbally what that has been implicit visually for the preceding fifty minutes, the notion of “the look”. Mrs. Lewis will be fated to remain an object of unwelcome fascination for as long as she stays in Broadstone, as a “two-headed monster” to be looked at, but not to be seen as a person.

 That the drama ends in this way, with a verbal articulation of visual ideas, might seem on the face of it to support Kennedy-Martin’s contention, but my interpretation of how the episode functions dramatically is different. The programme has placed great trust in the viewer’s patience and intelligence in being able to follow a visual idea for fifty minutes without it having been signposted or made explicit, a dramaturgical decision unlikely to be made in a present-day equivalent to Hunters Walk. The programme has presented a character’s situation through showing, not telling.

 So, to conclude, I hope that I’ve demonstrated how the narrative of studio drama could be communicated as much through visual nuances of performance as it was through dialogue, and I want to suggest that we should think of the studio form of drama as much in terms of the possibilities that it offered for storytelling, as its limitations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gambaccini, Paul and Taylor, Rod, Television’s Greatest Hits: Every hit television programme since 1960, London: Network Books, 1993.

Kennedy Martin, Troy, ‘Nats Go Home’, Encore, 48, 1964, pp.21-33.

Millet, Kate, Sita, London: Virago Press, 1977.

Mills, Brett (2011) ‘Invisible Television: The Television Programmes No-one Talks About Even Though Lots of People Watch Them’, Critical Studies in Television, 5 (1), 2011.

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.