Beyond the Fourth Wall: Experiments in TV Drama: David Bowie in Baal (BBC, 1982)

 

 

 This article was first published on the (now defunct) University of Reading 'Spaces of Television' blog on 02 November 2012:

 Alan Clarke’s television production of Bertolt Brecht’s play Baal (BBC1, 2 March 1982) is being screened as part of the ‘Beyond the Fourth Wall: Experiments in TV Drama’ season at BFI Southbank on Friday 30 November. Booking details can be found here. Billy Smart, author of ‘Brechtian Television: Theatricality and Adaptation of the Stage Play’, considers the unique style and qualities of this production:

The play

 Baal was Brecht’s earliest play, written in 1918 as a student diatribe against Hanns Johst’s expressionist piece The Lonely One. Satirising Johst’s tale of an unacknowledged artist who redeems his dissolute lifestyle and dies at peace with the world, Brecht created in Baal a monster of sensuality and self-gratification, a ribald, drunken strolling player named after a bestial pagan deity. Despite his repulsive appearance and egocentric amorality Baal is irresistible to women, which makes him envied, admired and despised by men. He seduces every girl who comes his way before abandoning them to pregnancy or suicide, and finally murders his best friend, goes on the run and dies alone in a woodcutter’s cottage.

 (Pegg, 2002, pp. 461-2)

The 1982 production

 Because it was made in 1981, the technical opportunities and mode of production available for Baal’s director, Alan Clarke, were more flexible than those used by previous directors of Brecht’s plays for the BBC, Rudolph Cartier (World Theatre: Mother Courage and her Children, 1959) and Charles Jarrott (Festival: The Life of Galileo, 1964). Clarke had the opportunity to re-edit the piece extensively in post-production, as had become customary in the production of studio television drama (Jacobs, 2000, p. 24), an innovation that might encourage the creation of the “Brechtian television” that had been called for by John McGrath, Ken Loach and others in the 1960s. Clarke’s production achieves its Brechtian distancing effect through montage and editing in places, but is also committed to the perceived virtues of ‘as live’ recording, featuring long scenes of continuous performance unfolding. However these long scenes are shot in a completely different way to Charles Jarrott’s intimate directorial style in Galileo, and show how the ‘as live’ studio mode of production could be used to create a mood of objectivity and detachment on the part of the viewer, instead of being used to create empathy.

 The role of Baal required a charismatic performer who could sing, and who was prepared to play an unattractive character. Clarke’s initial preference for the role was Steven Berkoff, but he was persuaded out of the choice because Berkoff would present too unambiguous a sense of social origin for Baal (Kelly, 1998, p. 138). Instead, David Bowie was chosen, whose singing, background in mime[1] and ability to adopt the role of outlandish and outsider characters made him well qualified to fulfil these criteria. Having a major international star in the production undoubtedly changed the circumstances of its marketing and reception, the play being billed as David Bowie in ‘Baal’. This promotion of star over play[2] led to questioning of the BBC’s values in several quarters (Sunday Times review 7 March 1982, quoted in Pegg, 2002 p.463, Gardner and Wyver, 1983, p. 126). Bowie also capitalised on the production by releasing an EP of re-recordings of the five songs featured[3]

 The inclusion of David Bowie altered perceptions of the play, and probably helped to militate against it being seen as a mainstream television production. Although David Bowie was a hugely famous performer by 1981, he was still largely perceived as a cult figure, rather than as a popular entertainer[4] or as a conventional actor, his two major roles previously having been as an extraterrestrial in The Man Who Fell To Earth (dir. Nick Roeg, 1975) and as the deformed Elephant Man on Broadway (1980). This meant that unlike Mother Courage (with Flora Robson) or Galileo (Leo McKern), Baal was a production whose casting worked differently for two different sets of viewers; a pop audience, and a general one.

 Bowie’s participation in the production was due as much to the status of Alan Clarke as to that of the play, Bowie having seen Clarke’s 1979 film version of Scum and responded with enthusiasm (Fenwick, 1982, p. 7). Clarke occupied a difficult position within the hierarchy of the BBC by 1981, as being one of the most prestigious and talented directors working for the Corporation, but also one of the most contentious, this difficult relationship between director and institution having reached a critical point with the decision of Alistair Milne, the BBC’s director General, not to screen Clarke’s original television film of Scum in 1977, ostensibly on the grounds of excessive violence and presenting an exaggerated picture of the failings of the borstal system (Kelly, 1998, 103-5). After this incident, Clarke’s work for television became more uncompromising and nihilistic, culminating in the exceptionally violent and bleak television films of Elephant (BBC2, 1988) and The Firm (BBC2, 1989)

 Clarke’s production can be seen as the second part of a pair of complementary works, following on from his 1978 Play Of The Month BBC1 production of Georg Buchner’s 1835 early modernist play Danton’s Death. Both plays share a similarity of style and theme; written by very young authors, they present a bitter view of human existence as being a struggle to preserve the life force, in Buchner in the dialectic of revolutionary principle that results in Robespierre staying alive at the expense of Danton, and in Brecht, through Baal’s amoral use of others for his own gratification, particularly women. The depiction of this struggle can give both plays a harsh, cold, feel for the viewer, and the two plays are possibly the most scabrous, bleak and cruel theatrical adaptations ever transmitted on BBC1[5].

 Clarke’s production of Danton’s Death accentuates this mood by using the studio of Television Centre One in a way unlike almost any other drama, using design, groupings and camera technique to emphasize its artifice and great scale. The production was shot on long lenses, in a way common in film but rarely used in television, breaking away from the familiar visual grammar of “zoom lenses and it’s all close-ups, mid-shots, one-shots” (Stuart Walker, the production’s designer, in Kelly (ed.), 1998, p. 110). With the use of narrow lenses, the cameras were never closer to the actors than fifteen yards away, changing the nature of performance, and the extent to which it was mediated by the director, with actors less aware of which camera they were performing to, and crew on the studio floor uncertain as to what Clarke was shooting unless they were looking at monitors (Kelly, 1998, p.110). The play’s producer, David Jones, described the effect of this process as achieving “a cool, detached feel” (Kelly, 1998, p. 110)

 This sense of detachment was augmented by the production’s design, which attempted to give definition to the large-scale scenes enacted by the use of bright chiaroscuro lighting, concentrating on whites, greys and blacks, with very little primary colour (often used for tricolour flags), which created a sense of defined and shaded outlines for both performers and sets that recreated the effect of eighteenth century engravings (Kelly, 1998, p. 110). For his production of Baal, Clarke continued to use the methods of direction and design that he had innovated in Danton’s Death.

Play of the Month: Danton’s Death (BBC, 1978)

 The source play Baal has as much dissimilarity of form and structure with Mother Courage and Galileo as it shares with them, especially in the 1918 first draft version (unpublished in English translation[6]) that Clarke chose to use. The play contains a multiplicity of scenes of varying length (unlike the 12 scenes of Mother Courage or the 15 of Galileo). The nineteen year old Brecht created a world which is more defined by a sense of non-realism than his later works, where, although scenes may be parodic or melodramatic in register, they are based around realistic situations of human power relationships (for example, Mother Courage’s bartering or the aged Galileo’s feigning of senility may require levels of theatricality that would be improbable if applied in real life, but the intention of Mother Courage and Galileo in acting in such a manner is established to the audience as being real).

 The story of Baal operates on a much more mythic level than those of Mother Courage and Galileo. While their journeys are defined by the need for money, patronage or safety, Baal’s actions are defined by a more abstract life-spirit. Speirs (1987, p. 18) suggests that the play should be seen as a realisation of the struggle between Eros (life) and Thanatos (death) through the actions and figure of Baal. Baal is much closer to the bardic tradition of epic theatre than Brecht’s later plays in realising this struggle through poetic language that contains a complex series of codes dramatised through imagery, not incident; Baal continually talks of either trees (functioning as symbols of life), rivers (which function as symbols of life’s transience and the force of death) and, especially, the sky (the changing colours of which indicate the ever-changing fortunes and circumstances of life) (Speirs, 1987, p.18, Pegg, 2002, p. 462).

 To realise this poetic sense of life-essence, Baal is a play which is realised through an expressionist realisation of the stage, which is intended to function not as a realistic representation of the world, but as a spiritual or intellectual space, reflecting Baal’s own thoughts and reflections. The play’s rapid sequence of short scenes required a sparse and flexible stage layout, realised in its 1923 Leipzig premiere through the use of a cyclorama (curved backdrop), a design used again by Brecht for Mother Courage. Where the two plays differ is that Mother Courage is a play entirely set in exteriors (battlefields and camps), while Baal is largely set in interiors (dining rooms, attics and inns), leading towards scenes of Baal’s flight and death in the forest. While a theatrical audience are aware of the representative space of the stage, a television audience are more familiar with naturalistic staging, from the great majority of television drama.

 Clarke staged the play by using very large, representative sets shot through narrow lenses for the interior scenes, with entirely non-representative tunnels of gauze for the countryside (Kelly, 1998, p. 138). The juxtaposition between these two settings is less jarring than might be expected, due to the blurred sense of reality in the interior scenes. Speirs suggests that a Baal’s essence is communicated through the imagaristic language of Baal “making the surface of social relationships transparent, revealing the mythical conflict underlying it” (1987, p.18). Clarke’s use of the television studio, and design aesthetic, accentuates this sense of non-realism. The large sets are detailed, highlighting shade and shadow, and convincing, but are also disconcertingly expansive. Baal’s attic is first shown to the viewer[7] in an extensive wide shot that shows it to be on the scale of a warehouse, rather than a garret.

 While this view allows the viewer to take in the scale of detail of such a large space, it also serves to alienate them from the human situation of the characters, dwarfed by their surroundings. Clarke’s long lens shooting of interiors also works to highlight the story’s mythic properties in the first scene, where Baal disrupts a bourgeois party held in his honour by a rich patron, Mech, by seducing his wife. The scale of the dining room allows the viewer to observe the full figurative movements of both Baal and Emilie, and to give the figure of Emilie a great symbolic weight in the composition of the entire scene, by making her pale dress the only point of light in a dingy room.

 The lighting is also made deliberately artificial and theatrical at points in the production, noticeably when  a curtain is opened and the studio lights bounce up, quite deliberately, a second later, or when Baal switches the stage lights off to sing.

 The distancing effect of the near-continual use of long shot is well illustrated by the climax of the scene[8] backstage at ‘The Night Cloud’, the club where Baal has scandalised and excited his audience by performing a salacious song[9] on stage with his lover Sophie. The chaotic and confused reaction to this performance is shown through the room becoming crowded with various nightclub figures (dwarfs, showgirls, drinkers, the club owner, a drug addict) each responding volubly to the event in a series of monologues that express their own concerns. Clarke’s decision to show this scene in long shot discourages the viewer from forming any understanding of the individual motivations of these characters, but to follow the chain of events in the room instead.[10]

 The structure of Baal operates around a more confused chronology than that of Mother Courage or Galileo. Whilst the scenes of Baal’s life are presented chronologically they are broken and framed by the narration of Baal himself, each scene being heralded by a chorus of ‘Baal’s Hymn’, in which Baal refers to himself in the third person, singing in the past tense about the events which the viewer is about to see. This device confuses notions of past and present and their understanding of Baal as a character for the viewer, emphasizing both the intensity of his experiences that are enacted, and his detachment from them as a poet. Each scene is also given a title through a caption (such as “Baal abandons the mother of his unborn child”).

 Advances in studio technology meant that Clarke had opportunities to realise this narrative that would not have been available before the introduction of sophisticated post-production. Few of the songs in Rudolph Cartier’s 1959 production of Mother Courage are used because they would have to be separately recorded and orchestrated in a sound studio and then mimed in an ‘as live’ production, an effect liable to be unconvincing (the two songs which are used being shot in filmed inserts, where shots could be pieced together in the cutting studio). Clarke could record all of the verses of ‘Baal’s Hymn’ in one session, and then interpolate them into the recording of the play. These scenes were recorded of David Bowie against a red background, addressing the viewer directly by looking into camera (the only times that Baal does this in the production), accompanying himself on banjo[11]. Whenever the song is sung, the screen is split into two halves, the other half displaying a picture of the sky or a forest, sometimes overlaid with a caption.

 The split screen effect becomes more prevalent in the later, exterior scenes of the play. With the studio representing a forest through tunnels of gauze, a sense of location is provided only through the dialogue in the live action half on the right of the screen and the symbol on the left. The effect is not dissimilar to the picture behind a newsreader during a bulletin, acting as an aide-memoir to the viewer of where the action is taking place, but the repetition of the same unremarkable pictures means that the poetic imagery in the dialogue has to do most of the work in engaging the viewer’s imaginative powers. A similar effect is achieved during the only other song of the five in the production to be sung by Bowie separately to camera, rather than performed as part of the diegetic action of a scene, ‘The Drowned Girl’, where the right hand side of the screen is filled with a freeze-frame of the face of Johanna (Tracy Childs) underwater.

 The boldest use of postproduction technology occurs in the scenes in the forest, where Baal’s dialogues with his friend Ekhart (Jonathan Kent) are conducted entirely on the march, with the two men performing their dialogue while “repeatedly walking towards the camera, cutting back to the start of an identical shot each time they reach it” (Pegg, 2002, p. 463).

 The effect of this is to concentrate the viewer’s understanding of space and time, making how and where the dialogue is supposed to follow uncertain, and to accentuate the physicality of the act of marching and how the two men respond to each other. This is a form of montage, but one specific to the conditions of a television studio draped with gauze. In a filmic location treatment of the same idea, the background and lighting would be liable to have changed from shot to shot, giving an idea of the men’s progress through the forest space.

 Clarke’s production had the misfortune to be scheduled against another high-profile stage adaptation on ITV, John Mortimer’s A Voyage Round My Father (Thames, 1982), starring Laurence Olivier and Alan Bates. The aesthetic of this production[12] is almost a parallel opposite of Baal, being shot on location on film, telling a linear story through the familiar convention of voice-over, and being reliant upon the star personae and charm of the leads to create a sense of empathy on the part of the viewer. Critics made unfavourable comparisons between the two productions, most emphatically Hilary Kingsley in the Daily Mirror:

 It seems daft to say we had a contest between Lord Olivier, our greatest living actor, and David Bowie, professional weirdo, rock idol and actor on TV last night. (…) Baal was a total flop. I cannot believe even the most besotted of David Bowie’s fans could have tolerated more than a few moments of it. The hero, a tramp-poet haunting German society in 1912, was rotten in every sense – a drunk, a slob, a know-all, a seducer, a murderer, who apparently decomposed before our eyes. That the BBC could spend a small fortune on this repulsive and rightly ignored tableau is a cause for top level concern

(Kingsley, Daily Mirror, 3 March 1982, quoted in Pegg, 2002, p. 463)

 Clarke’s use of the studio and casting had proved effective in creating an alienating and objective understanding of Baal on the part of the viewer, though this uncompromising, highly stylised reading also resulted in a sense of hostility and bafflement towards the play on the part of some viewers and critics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bowie, David, Baal’s Hymn (EP), RCA (RCA BOW 11), 1982.

Brecht, Bertolt, Plays I, London: Methuen, 1970.

Brunsdon, Charlotte, ‘Problems with Quality’, Screen, 31/1, 1990, pp 67-90.

Fenwick, Henry, ‘The man who fell for Brecht’, Radio Times, 27 February 1982, pp 6-7.

Gardner, C. & Wyver, John, ‘The Single Play: An Afterword’, Screen, 24/4-5, 1983, pp. 125-30.

Kelly, Richard (ed.), Alan Clarke, London: Faber, 1998.

Pegg, Nicholas, The Complete David Bowie, London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2002

Speirs, Ronald, Bertolt Brecht, London: Macmillan, 1987.

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[1] He had recently completed a six month Broadway run of The Elephant Man. Clarke’s preference for long shots and crowded groupings suited a performer with a background in physical theatre.

[2] See, for example, the Radio Times publicity for the play, with Bowie on the cover and accompanying feature ‘The man who fell for Brecht’ (Fenwick, 1982) concentrating on Bowie’s domestic life.

[3] The unmelodic nature of the music meant that this was only a minor hit, reaching number 29 in the singles chart.

[4] This perception changes in 1983, with Bowie’s album Let’s Dance and its attendant singles, which were not associated with the creation of an outlandish persona as previous stages of Bowie’s career had been, and which formed the most commercially successful period of his pop career, attracting a wider audience than previously. Also in 1983, the film Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (dir. Nagisa Oshima, 1983) presented Bowie for the first time in a leading role in a comparatively conventional film.

[5] See BBC WAC R9/152 (VR/78/209) for viewers’ complaints about the coarse and depressing nature of Danton’s Death.

[6] Because of this, where I have referred to scenes, they are taken from Peter Tegel’s translation of the 1922 production (in Brecht, 1970)

[7] In Scene 4(i) of the 1922 version (Brecht, 1970, p. 17)

[8] Scene 7 in the 1922 version (Brecht, 1970, pp 27-9)

[9] Called ‘The Dirty Song’ on the Baal’s Hymn EP (Bowie, 1982)

[10] For an example of adverse viewer reaction to this technique, Joan Bakewell’s review of Danton’s Death in the Times (24 April 1978) suggests that having to watch multiple groupings in shadowy lighting is confusing and hard to follow.

[11] The onscreen music for ‘Baal’s Hymn’ is extremely rudimentary, as Bowie could not play the instrument (Kelly, 1998, p. 138)

[12] A Voyage Round My Father fulfils all of Charlotte Brunsdon’s (1990) signifiers of quality; a literary source, “the best of British acting”, money spent and a clear sense of Englishness that could be exported. Baal fulfils only some of these criteria, and less overtly.

The Cherry Orchard (BBC, 1981)

 

 

 This article was first published on the (now defunct) University of Reading 'Spaces of Television' blog on 28 October 2012:

 Although only a handful of stage adaptations for British television were ever made on location on outside broadcast (OB), the technologies and working practices could also be used inside, as well as away from, the studio. This unusual method of production was utilized in a BBC version of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard  broadcast on 12 October 1981. Although the production is anomalous, it is worth considering in depth, as it shows a radically different approach to the television adaptation, especially in relation to the potential of the studio as a space for performance and representation, and how the genre might have developed differently in the 1980s.

 The play came to be shot in such unorthodox circumstances due to the determination of Richard Eyre, a staff producer (and occasional director) for the BBC’s Play For Today (BBC1, 1970-84), to mount the play. Eyre did not have a background in television, but as a theatre director, most recently as Artistic Director of the Nottingham Playhouse, where his productions of new plays by Howard Brenton, Trevor Griffiths and David Hare had attracted much attention and comment. As these writers all had concurrent careers as television and stage playwrights, Eyre was considered to be suitably qualified to produce the BBC’s most high-profile series of original television plays, despite the move across media[1]. As part of his first season at Play For Today, Eyre directed an adaptation of Griffiths’ 1975 stage play Comedians (25 October 1979) one of the directorial successes of his period at Nottingham Playhouse.

 Keen to continue this collaboration between director and writer, Eyre and Griffiths looked to produce an adaptation of their 1977 Nottingham Chekhov adaptation, which only ran for four weeks, for the wider television audience. Because of the play’s non-contemporary origin, it lay beyond the remit of Play For Today, and slots could not be found for recording at the BBC, the established Play of the Month (BBC1, 1965-83) and the BBC Television Shakespeare (BBC2, 1978-85) series taking precedence. A year later, the play was recorded under a slot booked for Play For Today (although not transmitted under that title), with the concomitant smaller budget and time available for a contemporary single play (Poole and Wyver, 1984, pp. 155-6). Consequently, the play was shot with two cameras on OB equipment. This different approach gives The Cherry Orchard a very different feel to any other adaptation, a flexibility of camera movement that creates more tightly arranged, and more choreographed, scenes than were made with mixing between multiple cameras.

 Eyre was pleased with the different working practices created by the OB conditions, chiming with experience and thoughts about television narrative through shooting Play For Today productions on film, and a scepticism about conventional videotaped studio drama, with its lack of opportunity for precise cutting (Poole and Wyver, 1984, p156). The more limited camera resources would mean that The Cherry Orchard would have to be meticulously planned out in advance. Poole and Wyver explain the process;

 Restricted studio time would still remain a central problem but with full rehearsal and detailed preparation, the project did seem feasible. With the committed co-operation of [senior cameraman] Geoff Feld and lighting designer Howard King, the technique was made to work. Each shot was framed and lit individually, mostly using just a single camera, and these brief sequences were then edited together in the post-production process.

 (Poole and Wyver, 1984, p.157)

 This description gives a slightly misleading impression of how the narrative of The Cherry Orchard is arranged. Instead of a mosaic of brief fragments, most shots are actually very long and uninterrupted, with occasional cutaways of close-ups of faces in reaction or speaking. These lengthy shots are unlike previous studio productions in part because the lightness and mobility of the OB equipment allowed for cameras to operate within a four walled set, as in the first act where the camera moves into the house through the door and then follows events by crossing into the main room. This sense of the interiors of the house as being an actual lived space is augmented by the different texture of the OB videotape stock, which has a softer grain than conventional studio videotape, feeling more like 16 millimeter film, and therefore bearing close affinities to the viewer’s expectations of filmed drama. Although the sense of vividness and contrast of familiar VT[2] is then sacrificed, the lighting in The Cherry Orchard is softer than in other adaptations, the use of white light streaming in through windows in acts one and four, and candlelight in act three, creating a sense of reality and actuality of location for the viewer, a useful emphasis in a play about the sale of a property[3].

 Eyre saw his production as a recovery of the television adaptation from years of accreted standard practice, this recovery being a direct parallel with Griffiths’ recovery of Chekhov’s text, both reinventions challenging established notions of how adaptation could be achieved. Griffiths saw The Cherry Orchard as conventionally realized, as a play that could only be read through by the viewer to a series of meanings and intentions counter to the plays accrued cultural status as a study of whimsy, poignancy, eccentricity and theatricality, to reveal a concrete study in materialism, class, property and the means of production (Griffiths, 1989, p.2)[4], this reading supported by Raymond Williams’ analysis of conventional staging of Chekhov being seen by audiences as supporting a view of “how life is” naturalist presentation of reality creating an ideological structure of feeling (Williams, 1973, p.109);

 I did Cherry Orchard because I felt that its meanings had been seriously betrayed, almost consciously betrayed, over forty or fifty years of theatre practice in this country.

(Griffiths, speaking in Gilbert, 1981)

 With this intention, Griffiths reworked the play in two ways. The first way was through a reduction of exposition, informed by seventy-three subsequent years of cinematic storytelling after Chekhov wrote The Cherry Orchard, allowing characters to explain their feelings though fractured half-expressed thoughts rather than in formal sentences (Allen, 1993, p. 161), an approach that is supported in the television version by Eyre’s ability to use cinematic close-ups of characters in reflection, allowing the viewer a sense of insight into the characters’ interior lives.

Harriet Walter as Varya in Act Four of The Cherry Orchard (1981)

 The second reworking was in adjusting the hierarchical structure of the play’s casting, Eyre emphasizing in rehearsal that The Cherry Orchard depicted the spectrum of society in twelve characters of equal importance (Allen 1993, p. 156, Poole and Wyver, 1984, p.155). This intention can perhaps be made clearer in a television staging of a play than in a theatrical one due to the director’s control over the selection of shots that the viewer sees. Eyre’s Cherry Orchard is a production that emphasizes the collective to a degree that is unusual, an effect achieved through long takes of long shots of multiple characters entering and exiting rooms and interacting. Within this structure that emphasizes the company in most shots, the filmic editing into the action of infrequent close-ups then bears much more weight, and appears to carry more directorial intention, than in a conventional camera rhythm of establishing shots, two shots, reaction shots, etc. The two characters whom this technique most accentuates in Eyre’s production are Lopakhin the buyer of the estate, and Trofimov, the marginalized student with radical sympathies, both of whom are essential to a materialist interpretation of the play. The close ups of both character’s reactions, especially to Madame Ranevsky, allows the viewer to develop understanding into these character’s situations and their feelings towards others, and militates against the tradition of cruder portrayals of them as, respectively brutish interloper and student layabout.

 This emphasis upon the collective affects the way that actors’ performances are read by the viewer of The Cherry Orchard, and the long continuous takes mean that more subtle nuances and gestures of individual performers can be submerged in this production. Actors were unfamiliar with Eyre’s methods, and felt that details of performances were lost with the absence of conventional multi-camera studio close-ups. In the scene in act one where Madame Ravansky receives and tears up a letter from a lover in Paris, Judi Dench added the detail of her gathering up the scraps of paper and putting them in her handbag to keep, an incident which is undetectable to all but the most attentive viewer of this production (Amory, 1981, p.25). Griffith’s intention for the adaptation was to avoid the potential for “operatic” characterization, as realized in long solo performances of angry or longing speeches that direct the viewer’s attention towards the performance at the expense of the society, a tendency that is further discouraged by Eyre’s camera technique, but this approach also makes the depiction of very subtle, close up, acting quite difficult to achieve at times.

 The 1981 production of The Cherry Orchard has a specific place in the canon of the stage adaptation, not just because of its anomalous production practices. Through using the play to explore a particular materialist thesis it demonstrated how the adaptation could be used to a specific aim while remaining faithful to the source text[5]. Aesthetically, through its more solid sense of location, muted colour and lighting and precise directorial arrangement of shots, Eyre’s Cherry Orchard feels less rooted to its time than most other stage adaptations of the period, while still being made in the television studio. The use of lightweight cameras and cinematic editing gives the production strong affinities with contemporary television drama production, showing how the genre of stage adaptation might be developed in the present day.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, David, ‘’The Cherry Orchard’: a new English version by Trevor Griffiths’, in Chekhov on the British Stage (ed. Miles, Patrick), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 156-168.

Amory, Mark, ‘The Axeman Cometh’, Radio Times, 10-16 October 1981, pp. 23-5.

Chekhov, Anton, The Cherry Orchard (trans. Griffiths, Trevor), London: Faber & Faber, 1989.

Elsom, John (ed), Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary?. London: Routledge, 1989.

Gilbert, W. Stephen, ‘Closed Circuits’ in The Guardian, 17 October 1981.

Griffiths, Trevor, ‘Preface’, in The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov, Anton, trans. Griffiths, Trevor), London, Faber & Faber, 1989, pp. 1-3.

Poole, Mike & Wyver, John, Powerplays: Trevor Griffiths in Television, London: BFI, 1984.

Sutton, Shaun, The Largest Theatre In The World, London: BBC 1982.

Williams, Raymond, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, London: Pelican, 1973.

Willis, Susan. The BBC Shakespeare Plays. London: Chapel Hill, 1991.

Wyver, John, ‘How “the Best Play of the Twentieth Century” Took To The Air’, City Limits, 9-15 October 1981, pp. 50-3.

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[1] This move between theatre and television production can also be seen in David Jones’ move from the Royal Shakespeare Company to BBC producer of Play of The Month in 1977.

[2] See Don Taylor, ‘Pure Imagination, Poetry’s Lyricism, Titian’s Colours: Whatever Happened to the Single Play on British TV?’, New Statesman, 6 March 1998, pp.38-9. for a defence of the unique aesthetic qualities of videotape.

[3] This softness of definition also assists the realization of the exterior act two of Eyre’s production, shown here in a hazy, impressionistic wash of sandy earth colour merging into the blue of the horizon, avoiding the habitual problem of the sharp definition of the studio camera and very specific design appearing very artificial to the viewer (for example, in Ibsen’s The Lady From The Sea, BBC2, 5 March 1974)

[4] The codification of this materialist reading in part due to Chekhov’s working under conditions of theatrical censorship (Allen 1993, p.158)

[5] Griffiths justified the prevalent practice of adaptation in television drama with reference to Brecht’s career being based around the reinvention of existing stories, every reinterpretation creating a different ideological result unique to its adaptor (Gilbert,1981).

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/ ]

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

 

Guy Verney directs Alfred Burke on location

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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