Roger Marshall interview part III: Writing for television in America and the U.K., Euston Films and ‘The Sweeney’

 

 This article was first published on the (now defunct) University of Reading 'Spaces of Television' blog on 01 October 2012:

 Last February, I had the good fortune to interview one of the great screenwriters of British TV drama, Roger Marshall in his Richmond home. His extensive C.V. has included episodes of The Avengers, The Sweeney, The Professionals, two plays for Armchair Theatre, the serials Missing from Home, Traveling Man and Floodtide. He was also the creator of three series: Zodiac, Mitch and (with Anthony Marriot) Public Eye. In the final part of the interview, he discussed the early days of his screenwriting career in Hollywood and writing for Euston Films in the 1970s.

BS. I think that it’s true of many series of the sixties and seventies that they had a set number of three or four directors for a 13-part series. It seems to make a series feel more consistent when it had a fixed number of directors.

RM. Yes, if you’re doing 13 episodes and you’ve got 13 directors it would be ludicrous, wouldn’t it? Directors have a style, that’s absolutely true. When The Avengers started, long before I joined it, there were just two directors doing alternative episodes, and making bricks with absolutely no straw at all. Junk! But they still made it look good.

BS. You wrote for The Avengers in the film period, did you also write for the studio ones?

RM. Yes, I did both. The old tape ones, the studio ones with Honor Blackman, they had a lot of merit. When it went on to have all the advantages of film and Diana Rigg, etc, not everything was an improvement, I think. To start with, the idea was no longer fresh or novel. I can remember I was once in America and the family I lived with wrote to me when The Avengers was on, “It’s lovely to see your name, we love her but he’s far too old.” He’s still doing it now, fifty years later! American standards, American thoughts…

BS. I was interested to learn that you worked in American television when you were in your twenties before moving back to Britain.

RM. Yes. I was too young and too inexperienced to get the maximum benefit out of it. But it was at a time where if you wanted to work in film television in England everything had to be beholden to the Americans. So it seemed that the easiest thing to do was to go and get some experience there. Tough. It was probably useful in the end.

BS. Was the set-up of American television very different to how British television worked?

RM. Well, not that different. It was a producer working for a company. The ones that did Sea Hunt (Ziv Television Programs, 1958-61) were a company where I had a story editor I had met because he’d been working in England on a Harry Alan Towers thing called Dial 999 (ABC, 1958-59) which was pretty grim. But at least I’d got a good relationship with this story editor and he said, come over and try your luck with us, I’ll help. So I lived with his family for a while and it was one of those things that were probably more beneficial to be able to say over here that you’d been there, rather than to be asked, “What did you learn? Tell me ten things.” I can’t! But “You worked in Hollywood! Did you die?” “No, I managed to get the odd job”, so it was a plus.

BS. It’s remarkable historically when I read about that period how many people working in British television were Canadian.

RM. Well, Canada was the great place at that time, certainly. Everybody who was hitting the gong at Thames was from Canada. There was Sydney Newman, then his replacement Lloyd Shirley, and there were numerous directors working there who had worked for CBC. There’s a show on now on Sky, Law & Order, and one of the segments on that is produced by a guy who’s name I remember from Armchair Theatre (ABC/Thames, 1956-74). He must be as old as me, plus another ten years. They must have to wheel him in to the studio. Still, he’s still earning his corn.

BS. Something that’s striking about your career when you started in British television in the late fifties is that you seemed to work in both studio series like Emergency Ward Ten (ATV, 1957-67) as well as filmed adventure series such as William Tell (ITC, 1958-59).

RM. That was Lew Grade, at the bottom of the scale. The reason for that was that I started with a film company in Elstree, ABC, and my wife was then the secretary to a producer, Gordon Scott – a talentless Scot, of whom there were a lot – and he was a bit of a pig to work for, so she moved across the road to national as it was then to work for a producer, and it was really she who got me over from my little office in Elstree to working on William Tell. That led to The Invisible Man (ITP, 1958-59) and all of the things that they were making at the time.

BS. So were you working on Emergency Ward Ten and the adventure series simultaneously?

RM. Emergency Ward Ten came some years later. I’m positive about that because it was made in the same studios as William Tell, by which time that era had moved on and out. I worked on Ward Ten because I was asked to do so and it was a batch of steady work. I may have done as many as twenty episodes, it seemed rather a lot.

 While I was doing that I started to work on The Avengers. Then The Avengers offered me a contract to do three episodes on the condition that I stopped writing Ward Ten. Not that they had any obvious objection to Ward Ten, they knew I couldn’t do both at the same time. They were right, so I left.

BS. Soap writing does seem to have been a treadmill for writers. Not so much Coronation Street (Granada, 1960-) , but Crossroads (ATV, 1964-88) in particular.

RM. Crossroads was the depths.

BS. For professional reasons, I’ve been watching the surviving episodes in sequence, one a day. It’s interesting to see television drama of that period being achieved at a rudimentary level, and understanding the circumstances that made it so difficult to produce.

RM. I think that the scuttlebutt on Crossroads is that the head of the studio’s mistress was in the lead and that kept it going for no good reason. It was pretty rubbishy. I don’t think that anybody… I mean if you go back through the annals of Ward Ten you’ll find some amazing actors working in it – Albert Finney. Well, I don’t think that you’ll find an Albert Finney in Crossroads.

BS. The final thing that I’d like to ask about is Euston Films, because they had such a distinctive house style. Were they different to write for than other film series? I’m thinking of The Sweeney (Thames, 1974-78) in particular, but you can already see it starting in Special Branch (Thames, 1969-74).

RM. Yes, it just got so much better in The Sweeney than Special Branch. The material was better, the actors were better – I can’t remember now who was in Special Branch.

BS. George Sewell and Patrick Mower.

RM. Well, that says it all. When you’re working with John Thaw, then you’re working with the best. I think The Sweeney was great success because the crew were all film people, and they were all used to six weeks’ work/ six months out of work, and suddenly to get a solid block of work was exciting for all of them and they didn’t mind the fact it was midnight and they should be getting overtime. They were so keen and that spirit went right the way through, so for the four seasons that it was on it was very exciting television.

‘The Sweeney: Bad Apple’, 11 October 1976 (w. Roger Marshall, d. Douglas Camfield)

BS. It feels like guerilla filmmaking to me, just in finding these very real locations that you hadn’t seen before in those ITC series.

RM. Well, ITC just wasn’t real, was it? I mean, its very nice Roger Moore looking in the screen and smiling, but the acting level was way down. There was intensity with John and Dennis, which was great. I can remember seeing one particular episode with George Sweeney in (‘Taste of Fear’, 4 October 1976), and there were one or two scenes that David Wicks got him to do, and I was quite frightened, frankly. I remember saying to my wife, “Jesus Christ, if the IRA are watching this, our days are numbered!” Somebody fired a blank in the office, and the staff were all “Jesus Christ, I’m dead!” There was an excitement, which you don’t often get.

BS. The Sweeney is so extraordinarily diverse when you watch it in sequence, as well. It has this reputation in popular culture as what Tony Garnett called a ‘squealing tyres’ show, but when you see the episodes there’s a strong dialectic about the value of policing and what they should do.

RM. Yes. It was amazing. Because I can remember a review of one I wrote towards the end, and it said that it had a heavy left-wing bias – coming from me, that’s good! I couldn’t get arrested at the BBC. There was one famous occasion when somebody suggested me for a Play for Today (BBC, 1970-84) at the BBC and the answer came back, “We can’t use him, because he’s not political”

BS. Thank you, Ken Trodd!

RM. Thank you very much. Don’t call me. One-off plays, well they’re a thing of the past, aren’t they? Gone, sadly.

BS. You did a couple of Armchair Theatres.

RM. Yes, with John Thaw, funnily enough, which was a museum piece because he’s married to somebody in the play and they’ve got two children. And the two children who appear on the OB are our two children, both of them giving incredibly awful performances – at one point he seems to be obsessed with sniffing his thumb, which detracts from his acting, but John was his usual self, except he looks a bit young in it now. That was called Whatever Became of Me? which was a sort of phrase that you start to think of in your forties.

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

 

 

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

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

Douglas Camfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BS. What do you attribute its particular success to?

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

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

RM. Did your parents enjoy it?

BS. Yes, they watched it for six weeks!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BS. Because he produced the Brighton series as well –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roger Marshall interview Part I: ‘Public Eye’

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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