Coppers & Spies Revisited
Continuing with the re-written versions of the original Coppers and Spies blog posts published on the MovieMail site in 2014. Each part contains additional research material and information on the various crime and spy adventure series the original blog series covered, timed to celebrate Network's highly-anticipated release of The Professionals in high-definition last March.

2: Kinky Boots and Z-Victor 2: From The Avengers to Z Cars

George Dixon had been on his beat for five years in Dixon of Dock Green when ABC’s canny producer Sydney Newman created Police Surgeon in 1960. A short-lived star vehicle for actor Ian Hendry, it featured the moral and ethical dilemmas faced by Dr Geoffrey Brent as he assisted the London Metropolitan Police with Bayswater’s dysfunctional families, disreputable landlords, delinquents and petty criminals.

Created, written and initially produced by Julian Bond, many of the scripts had been written in collaboration with J.J. Bernard, the pseudonym of a real police surgeon. When he raised certain contractual issues, Newman cancelled the half-hour drama after 13 episodes. It had also not fulfilled a brief from ABC’s chief executive Howard Thomas for Newman to develop an adventure series similar to Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, featuring retired private detective Nick Charles and his wealthy wife Nora.

While the ‘police in the community’ theme of Dixon developed into the realism of Z Cars, Newman asked producer Leonard White to take elements of Police Surgeon and create an entirely new crime drama for his star Hendry, inspired by Hitchcock’s thriller North By Northwest (1959) and Fleming’s Bond books, and based on nothing more than a title…The Avengers. Police Surgeon’s successor ushered in a very different crime fighting partnership.

Iconic bowler, brolly and sharp tailored suits

Writer Brian Clemens, who had worked on Danger Man (which we will return to in due course) in 1960, was given the task of making the title a reality. Hendry became Dr. David Keel and was joined by actor Patrick Macnee as John Steed, an undercover spy to whom Keel turned for help after his fiancée was murdered by heroin smugglers in the opening episode ‘Hot Snow’. When Hendry left during a prolonged Equity strike, Macnee’s Steed took centre stage and The Avengers reinvented itself.

Steed’s raincoat and trilby uniform were replaced with his iconic bowler, brolly and mod-trad Edwardian suits. Keel’s dialogue was transfered to Honor Blackman’s self-assured, leather outfitted anthropologist Dr Cathy Gale, the first of Steed’s strong, independent female partners. Newman saw Gale as a mix of Grace Kelly and noted ethnographer Margaret Mead. Dave Rogers summarised her as ‘a 1960s version of Shaw’s emancipated young woman providing the conscience in combat with Steed’s contemporary Chocolate Soldier.’

The sexual tension between Steed and Cathy flavoured the rapidly changing series. Gritty stories about London’s criminal underworld gave way to Cold War thrillers and yarns featuring the occult, advanced computers and unbreakable ceramics, deadly viruses, industrial saboteurs, technological espionage and political assassinations.

The Avengers continued to self-consciously explore the gender play, fashion and materialism of a changing post-war society especially when the series, produced jointly by Clemens and Albert Fennell, moved onto film in 1965 and introduced Steed’s new foil, Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel.

Publicist Marie Donaldson was apparently responsible for her name, summarising her qualities and shortening ‘Man Appeal’ to ‘M Appeal’ in a press release. The widow of test pilot Peter Peel and daughter of industrialist Sir John Knight, she was an adventurous, intelligent and sexually confident woman capable of fending off assailants with her karate skills.

Steed and Emma were kept busy thwarting malcontent scientists, autocrats, astronomers, executives, aristocrats, ministers and dilettante playboys sidelined by the modernisation of Britain. The series cherry-picked from various genres, playfully wove them together using exaggerated colour, stylised fashion and production design and a self-awareness about the relationship between the television audience and the programme itself.

Stories such as ‘Epic’, ‘Escape in Time’ and ‘Something Nasty in the Nursery’ saw a pop-art style married to increasingly surreal narratives, commenting on the nature of storytelling and film-making, at a time when London was regarded as the epicentre of the 1960s explosion of pop, architecture, fashion and design.

Michael Bracewell summarised this construction of an England of the imagination as one ‘in which the underworld of crime, the underground of popular culture and the hidden precincts of Cold War paranoia were compressed into a Looking Glass world where nothing - to satirical ends or not - was ever quite as it seemed.’ Science fiction, fantasy and the psychedelic increasingly infiltrated the format as flirtatious Emma Peel handed over to ingénue agent Tara King, played by Linda Thorson.

Women as independent protagonists

Thorson was initially promoted as a Shirley Maclaine type and producer John Bryce, who had replaced Clemens and Fennell, was under instructions to return the series to a more grounded style. Rookie agent Tara King was less stylised than predecessors Emma and Cathy and wore fashions of the moment. There was a suggestion of a more human, rounded 'May to December' relationship between Tara and Steed.

However, Bryce struggled with the production schedule and Thorson was deemed too young and inexperienced. Clemens and Fennell returned to overhaul the series, developing Tara King’s character and introducing support in the form of Steed and Tara’s boss, Mother, played by Patrick Newell. Mother’s presence increased the bizarre humour and, in inimitable style, episodes embraced noir, Victorian horror and spoofs of hard-boiled spy fiction.

Made in colour, financed by American network ABC to the tune of $2 million, The Avengers was one of the first British series aired in US prime time. Despite achieving some of its highest ratings in the UK, the Thorson series faltered in the US ratings, a casualty of its scheduling against Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. ABC pulled the plug and, financially unviable, The Avengers concluded in May 1969 just as the tensions pulling apart Britain’s economy, which had led the consumerist boom associated with the series, became all-too apparent with its steep decline.

As well as influencing many 60s spy adventure series, returning as The New Avengers in 1975 and a forgettable 1998 film, The Avengers lasting impact was placing women, as independent protagonists, at the heart of a genre dominated by masculine discourse. While Cathy Gale and Emma Peel were perhaps hostages to male fantasies, they did anticipate the women-centred police procedurals and adventure dramas of the 1980s and beyond.

‘It was obvious that the police were not coping’

With the crime rate soaring, public safety a major concern and policing high on the political agenda in the 1960s, the ‘cosy’ world of the BBC’s Dixon of Dock Green, which had been running since 1955, looked static and remote. Developments in documentary-drama and the assimilation of social realism into television saw a new drama series address these issues.

Debuting in January 1962, Z Cars was also the BBC’s response to a serious ratings challenge from ITV. It was inspired by the memoirs of Liverpool police officer Bill Prendergast, a regular consultant on BBC programmes, and writer Troy Kennedy Martin listening to police radio chatter as he convalesced from mumps. Overhearing “incidents where it was obvious that the police were not coping”, he took ideas for a crime drama to Elwyn Jones at the BBC Documentary Department.

Jones was considering a new police series after positive reactions to Gilchrist Calder and Colin Morris’s documentary Who, Me?, about police interrogation methods, from a group of Lancashire policemen. Jones then sent Kennedy Martin and fellow writer Allan Prior to research Lancashire County Police’s ‘crime car’ policing, live in the community and develop scripts from case material supplied by them and Prendergast.

Producer-director John McGrath then assembled the cast and “spent a clear week with them discussing the complete social background of every character” and was determined that “not one of those blokes would say a line without knowing why he was saying it.” He also insisted they visit policemen at home and get to understand their work and family life.

Joseph Brady, who played PC Jock Weir, reflected: “Police are human beings. They don’t spend all their time saying don’t - as we found out in our filming in the North of England. They look after old widows and children - but if it comes to a scrap they get steamed in.” Joining him in the series were Brian Blessed, Colin Welland and James Ellis as PCs ‘Fancy’ Smith, David Graham and Bert Lynch. Along with their bosses, tough DCI Charles Barlow and bad-tempered DS John Watt memorably brought to life by Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor, they became household names.

Set in the fictional Liverpool district of Newtown, Z Cars injected pace into the police procedural and developed its documentary style from recording live in studio using six cameras, a dozen sets, film inserts and back projections. Employing over 250 changes of shot per episode fulfilled director McGrath’s aim, “of giving television some of the speed, the pace of film… where people cut, cut, cut...”
 
Group producer Robert Barr, the documentarian responsible for Pilgrim Street and War On Crime, was often at loggerheads with Kennedy Martin. “One of the qualities of Z Cars comes from a constant war between me, who wants it to be documentary, and Troy, who wants to write fiction.” Elwyn Jones would also tear up scripts during rehearsals, dropping characters and scenes, and leave Kennedy Martin to rewrite the episode.

Provocative stories about delinquency, domestic violence and racism

Documentary-dramas Tearaway, Who, Me?, and Jacks and Knaves, made by the Calder and Morris team, influenced Z Cars’ depiction of police officers, criminals and their victims and its use of housing estate locations, vernacular speech and class authenticity. This also reflected the emerging British social realist cinema’s focus on the human foibles and weaknesses of the rootless, displaced and dispossessed in society.

However, Z Cars’ realistic portrait of policemen as gamblers, drinkers and wife-beaters enraged Lancashire’s Chief Constable Colonel Eric St Johnston. He complained to the Home Office, drove to London and begged Controller of Television Stuart Hood to abandon the series. The credit thanking Lancashire County Police for their support was withdrawn. Despite mixed reactions from police, public and press, Z Cars’ high viewing figures ensured the extension of its initial run from 13 to 31 episodes.

Kennedy Martin and McGrath left the series, feeling it had abandoned character in favour of story and shifted emphasis from social issues to the personal problems of police officers. Attempts to include strong female characters foundered too. With the focus firmly on male characters, radio operator Katie Hoskins, played by Virginia Stride, was written out of the first series.

Writer John Hopkins, a prolific contributor to the series who became its new story editor, offered, “Z Cars is like a serial rather than a series. Each story is progressive; there’s a growth in the characters.” Under his influence, it delivered provocative stories about delinquency, domestic violence and racism and provided early opportunities for directors Ken Loach and Ridley Scott and writer Alan Plater.

The series’ live format ended in 1965. It returned as a twice-weekly drama in 1967, updated with Panda Cars and pocket radios, and produced by Colin Morris, who made the innovative docu-dramas with Gilchrist Calder that anticipated Z Cars’ creation. The characters of Barlow and Watt transferred to Elwyn Jones’ regional crime squad sequel Softly, Softly, which became Softly, Softly: Taskforce in 1969.

Barlow’s popularity generated another spin-off in 1971, Barlow At Large and he was reunited with Watt for 1973’s fascinating, experimental six-part Jack The Ripper series, where they reopened and analysed the notorious case. They unpacked other famous unsolved crimes in 1976’s Second Verdict and Watt made his final appearance in the last Z Cars episode in 1978. By then Z Cars and its spin-offs had, together with Dixon of Dock Green, run on the BBC for 16 years.

Over on ITV in 1975, Troy Kennedy Martin’s brother Ian transformed the police drama with The Sweeney, a fast-paced, hard-hitting series featuring Inspector Jack Regan of the Metropolitan Police’s elite Flying Squad. The representation of the British policeman altered from Z Cars’ flawed but committed pillar of the community to The Sweeney’s unorthodox outsider consorting with villains to secure an arrest. Yet, as Rebecca Feasey observed, even if both shows were aesthetically poles apart Regan’s innate ‘honesty, incorruptibility and fairness harks back to the core values of those earlier productions’ like Z Cars.

Bibliography:

• Blake, Philip, ‘Z Cars, Wednesday preview,’ in Radio Times, (BBC, 3 September 1964).
• Bracewell, Michael, England is Mine: Pop Life in Albion From Wilde to Goldie, (Flamingo, 2009)
• Chapman, James, Saints & Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s (I.B.Tauris, 2002).
• Cooke, Lez, ‘‘It was political’: John McGrath and Radical Television Drama’ in Journal of British Cinema and Television (Volume 10, Issue 1, Edinburgh University Press, January 2013).
• Cornell, Paul, Day, Martin and Topping, Keith, The Guinness Book of Classic British TV (2nd Edition, Guinness Publishing, 1996).
• Feasey, Rebecca, Masculinity And Popular Television (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
• Leishmann, Frank, ‘From Dock Green to Life on Mars: Continuity and Change in TV Copland,’ inaugural lecture at University of Gloucestershire on 7 May 2008 (The Cyder Press, 2008).
• Lewis, Peter, ‘Z Cars’ in Contrast: The Television Quarterly, (Vol.1, No.4, British Film Institute, Summer 1962).
• Miller, Toby, The Avengers (BFI Publishing, 1997).
• Robert Reiner, ‘The Dialectics of Dixon: The Changing Image of the TV Cop’, in Mike Stephens and Saul Becker (eds), Police Force, Police Service (MacMillan, 1994)
• Rogers, Dave, The Ultimate Avengers (Boxtree/Channel 4, 1995).
• Rolinson, David, ‘The Blue Lamp to The Black and Blue Lamp: The police in TV Drama’, 24 April 2011, British Television Drama (2009), available at http://www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk/?p=1429, accessed 3 March 2014.
• Rose, David E., ‘Softly Softly: the work of the Regional Crime Squads is the subject of this new detection series which features some of the characters from Z Cars,’ in Radio Times, (BBC,1 January 1966).
• Sydney-Smith, Susan, Beyond Dixon Of Dock Green: Early British Police Series (I.B.Tauris, 2002).
• ‘Z Cars,’ interview with John Hopkins, in Radio Times, (BBC, 5 September 1963).
• ‘Z Cars: Elwyn Jones, Head of Drama Series, introduces the hundredth edition,’ in Radio Times, (BBC, 27 February 1964).
• ‘Z Cars,’ interview with Stratford Johns, in Radio Times, (BBC, 5 March 1964).
• ‘Z Cars: Back as a twice weekly serial,’ in Radio Times, (BBC, 2 March 1967).  

Last time: Fabian of the Yard and Dixon of Dock Green
Next time: ITC and The Prisoner

In the pantheon of celebrated Sherlock Holmes adaptations there is one BBC television series that tends to get overlooked. In 1965 the BBC produced a series of faithful adaptations of 13 Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories starring Douglas Wilmer and Nigel Stock. The series is perhaps unfairly eclipsed by the colour series made by the BBC two years later starring Peter Cushing, fewer episodes of which survive, and the Granada series that consumed much of the 1980s and 1990s and the energies of actor Jeremy Brett.

However, you can judge Wilmer's and Stock's celebrated interpretations for yourselves when the BFI release the remaining episodes of Sherlock Holmes on a 4-DVD set this month. Previously available as a Region 1 set, this new release features commentaries, interviews and using the remaining archive footage, the reconstruction of two episodes.

Before and since Holmes has been reinterpreted many times on radio, film and television with the latest incarnations being the Guy Ritchie action films, the contemporary restaging of the characters and stories in Steven Moffat's hugely successful Sherlock and the CBS police procedural Elementary featuring Jonny Lee Miller. Holmes and Watson are a very prolific presence among the roll call of iconic British literary myths - including King Arthur, Robin Hood, Dracula - that have continued into the 21st Century, joining modern legends such as James Bond, Harry Potter and the Doctor.

Adapting the Holmes canon was not a new undertaking for the BBC. It had broadcast a six-episode Sherlock Holmes series in 1951, starring Alan Wheatley, and a series of radio adaptations with Carleton Hobbs in the lead role that spanned 80 episodes between 1952 and 1969. Bringing Holmes back to BBC television originated from staff director Vere Lorrimer's approach to Head of Light Entertainment Tom Sloan.

Sloan discovered, rather remarkably, that the rights from the Conan Doyle estate were available and, by sheer coincidence, when he suggested a Holmes series to Head of Drama Sydney Newman, Newman revealed a Sherlock Holmes story was due to be included in a series of one-off drama pilots called Detective. (1) As the Radio Times of May 14 1964 exclaimed, 'No series with a title like Detective could possibly afford to ignore the father of all fictional detectives - the man with the deer-stalker and the 9.25 pipe, the Sage of Baker Street - Sherlock Holmes himself.'(2)

Newman's motive for producing Detective was to find a replacement for the highly successful Maigret series, starring Rupert Davies, which had concluded a run of 53 episodes in December 1963. Detective's most successful try-outs would be considered for a full series and, underlining the Maigret connection, were each introduced by Davies 'in character' as Maigret.

'I decided I would paint him warts and all'

Prior to Detective's production in late 1963 and early 1964, the BBC had secured the options on five Holmes stories and 'The Speckled Band', transmitted 18 May 1964, was chosen to represent the detective in the anthology. Newman and his producer David Goddard recruited Robin Midgley to direct and Giles Cooper as scriptwriter. Midgley had previous form, having produced and directed many of the Holmes radio adaptations featuring Carleton Hobbs, and Cooper had adapted the Maigret stories for television. (3)

Newman determined that each of the Detective instalments would be headed by a star actor and producer Goddard contracted established stage and screen actor Douglas Wilmer to play Holmes in 'The Speckled Band' with a view that he would continue in any series that developed from the pilot. Wilmer was described by the Radio Times as, 'a Conan Doyle enthusiast who has coveted the part since the start of his acting career' and who bore 'an uncanny physical resemblance to Holmes as drawn by Sydney Paget to illustrate the original Strand Magazine stories.'(4)

Wilmer had featured on the big screen in historical epics Cleopatra (1963) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) but had also carved out a successful radio and television career. He was familiar with the Conan Doyle stories and, as he later expounded in his biography, felt that previous interpretations of the character had never fully embraced the darker side of Holmes: 'I decided I would paint him warts and all. He was a towering and commanding figure, often forbidding and silent. Such men cast great shadows. They can be intimidating and inspire fear.' However, Wilmer also acknowledged that, even though he thought the scripts should mention it, in 1964 the viewing public was not ready for a television series to describe 'anything so utterly depraved as a cocaine habit .'(5)

Joining Wilmer to play the redoubtable Dr John Watson was Nigel Stock, a recognisable British character actor fresh from supporting roles in Brighton Rock (1947), The Dam Busters (1955), The Battle of the River Plate (1956 with Wilmer), Victim (1961) and The Great Escape (1963). Stock managed to imbue Watson with many of the qualities of Doyle's 'old campaigner' and offered something of an antidote to the buffoonish Watson, despite the appeal of Nigel Bruce's performance, seen opposite Basil Rathbone's Holmes in the film series of the 1930s and 1940s.

Anthony Read, who adapted 'The Red Headed League' and took over as script editor on the series in September 1964, further underlined to writer Duncan Ross, who had submitted what would be an unused adaptation of 'The Sussex Vampire' that he should: 'keep away from the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce interpretations which we firmly eschew.'(6)

Wilmer and Stock's immediate rapport with the characters, the atmospheric location filming in Dorking and BBC Birmingham's economic but effective studio production derived a suitably Gothic melodrama from Conan Doyle's story. A highlight of the pilot is the encounter between Holmes and poker-bending Dr Grimesby Roylott, featuring a volcanic performance from Felix Felton. Under Midgley's direction, Felton had previously appeared in a radio adaptation of the story with Liane Aukin as the heroine Helen Stoner. She also reprised her role in the television version.

'The Speckled Band' was a notable success with viewers and the BBC optioned eight further Conan Doyle stories for the series that followed in 1965. However, negotiations with the Conan Doyle estate now came with an added pressure. They wanted to see the BBC make the series on film and, enthusiastic about Holmes's export potential, enter a co-production deal with an American network, and thus have a greater say in the selection of cast and crew.

The BBC were not keen as a significant financial outlay would be required to shoot on film and complete the series before any guarantee of a sale and they rejected the idea that an American network should therefore be allowed to interfere with what original script editor John Gould saw as a quintessentially English series. (7)

Another issue, which would gradually have a significant impact on the writing of the series and Wilmer's decision not to continue when the BBC commissioned a second series, were the negotiations over rehearsal time, scripts and directors. The BBC originally agreed to Wilmer's request for scripts to arrive three weeks in advance of production and that the series would be handled by a small group of directors to maintain quality and style, including the pilot's Robin Midgley. (8)

... he 'had not the smallest intention of appearing in such drivel'

Sherlock Holmes's 12 episodes were eventually made with the standard studio VT and location film inserts, although as restoration expert Peter Crocker explains in the notes accompanying this DVD set, the 405-line VT recordings were transferred to 35mm for editing and broadcast.

The adaptations were divvied out to several writers, including Giles Cooper, Clifford Witting, Jan Read, Vincent Tilsley, Nicholas Palmer and Anthony Read (Read took over from original script editor John Gould and inherited a pile of scripts that would need revising or rejecting). Midgley was not amongst the directors hired to make the episodes and Wilmer was somewhat aggrieved that many of the episodes were handed to inexperienced youngsters.

Jan Read's 'The Man With The Twisted Lip' commenced production in September 1964 with location filming in Wapping and studio recording at Television Centre. With production continuing on 'The Abbey Grange' in October, Anthony Read had to completely rewrite the script for 'The Red Headed League' two days prior to its November studio recording when Harry Green's version was rejected. Indeed, Wilmer recalled the problems with the script in Stage Whispers and told the BBC he 'had not the smallest intention of appearing in such drivel.' He strongly recommended the script editor simply 'have a good look at Doyle and just copy out the excellent dialogue, as written.'(9)

Further scripting problems affected 'The Devil's Foot'. Wilmer observed that Giles Cooper's script ran short of the 50 minute slot by some significant margin and he and Stock had to write additional material at the last minute. 'The Devil's Foot' boasted some excellent location filming in Cornwall, undertaken in December 1964, and the Radio Times recalled Nigel Stock entertaining the cast and crew with a bagpipe recital beneath Wilmer's bedroom window. (10)

The series opening episode, 'The Illustrious Client' was also completed in December and was the first episode to use the Baker Street exterior set specially built at Ealing Studios. Filming and recording continued into January and February 1965 on 'Charles Augustus Milverton' and 'The Copper Beeches' - where director Gareth Davies had to track down an Old English Mastiff to perform as the guard dog of the house and discovered there were only six of the breed left in the UK. (11)The week prior to the 20 February transmission date of the series heralded a press launch at the Sherlock Holmes pub.

As the series began on BBC One, the rest of Sherlock Holmes continued to be recorded through to April 1965, concluding with 'The Bruce-Partington Plans', 'The Retired Colourman' (negotiations with Boris Karloff to guest star as Barker unfortunately came to nothing) and 'The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax'. The latter's Swiss setting was provided by some extensive location filming in the French town of Montreuil-sur-Mer. (12)

'The Illustrious Client', boasting a Radio Times cover, received some mixed reviews. While the Sherlock Holmes Society of London praised the adaptation and Wilmer's and Stock's performances, the BBC's Director of Television Kenneth Adam informed Sydney Newman that the BBC Board and the Director General were disappointed that the episode had not lived up to the promise of the pilot.

The format of the series, established so effectively in 'The Speckled Band', is certainly consolidated by 'The Illustrious Client'. Two very broad performances from guest stars Peter Wyngarde, providing a ripe German accent as the serial womaniser Baron Gruner, and Rosemary Leach, plunging into Cockney melodrama as the vengeance seeking Kitty Winter, tend to dominate over the quieter, subtler work from Wilmer and Stock.

Far better is 'The Devil's Foot', despite the scripting problems, and it expands the series out of the often poky studio settings with its Cornwall location filming. Patrick Troughton is also a highlight as the poisoner Mortimer Tregennis hoist by his own petard by the scheming Dr. Sterndale. It's also here that Wilmer's adjustments to his performance as Holmes begin to emerge. He had rewatched his performance in 'The Speckled Band' and told the Radio Times in April 1965: 'when I saw it again five months later I thought my portrait of Holmes was incomplete and in places inaccurate; too smooth, urbane and civilised. I've realised that he is a much more primitive person, more savage and ruthless.'(13)

Stock's chemistry with Wilmer isn't quite as well developed as the later relationship between him and Peter Cushing in 1968's colour series but as the series progresses both actors refine and define their characters. Their portrayals are appealing but very self-contained. Stock's Watson certainly paved the way for the excellent work that David Burke (who makes an early television appearance in 'The Beryl Coronet') and Edward Hardwicke would put into their portrayals of Watson in the Granada series. Wilmer offers a definitive portrayal of Holmes for the times, which now provides an antithesis to Jeremy Brett's own brilliant but often extravagant embellishments.

The series is blessed with further outstanding guest roles. Patrick Wymark and Suzanne Neve are perfect casting in 'The Copper Beeches'. Wymark encapsulates Jephro Rucastle's snarling but suave cruelty as he forces Neve's Violet Hunter to stand in as his imprisoned daughter Alice. He uses her to convince the man watching from the road Alice is no longer interested in seeing him and to prevent the couple from benefiting from her mother's will. Tucked away in the episode are lovely turns from Michael Robbins as the drunken servant Toller and horror icon-to-be Sheila Keith as employment agency owner Miss Stoper. 

Sadly, only the final reel of 'The Abbey Grange' remains in the archive (and this wasn't presented on the previous Region 1 DVD of the Wilmer series) and the first 25 minutes of the adaptation are here represented by Douglas Wilmer reading the opening half of the story to camera. What we do eventually see is a well made, atmospheric adaptation with Nyree Dawn Porter effulgent as the tormented Lady Brackenstall desperately waiting for lover Captain Croker to rescue her from a violent husband.

As played by the hawkish Peter Madden, Inspector Lestrade makes the first of six appearances in the series with Giles Cooper's adaptation of 'The Six Napoleons'. It's notable how elements of light comedy flavour this, 'The Red Headed League' and 'The Retired Colourman.' In Cooper's version of the former James Bree provides a very appealing performance as Dr. Barnicot, the Napoleon enthusiast whose destroyed plaster bust of the French Emperor provides the catalyst to Holmes' investigations.

Wilmer did not return when a second series option was taken up.

'The Man With The Twisted Lip' establishes the series proper. It's an evocative and effective adaptation and Anton Rodgers provides a suitably sympathetic performance as business debtor turned beggar Neville St. Clair. There's some splendid location filming in Wapping photographed by Dick Bush, one of the best film cameramen working at the BBC at the time.

However, viewers were more concerned about the correct depiction of an opium den, according to the Radio Times letters page, than what was then the common practice of asking a Caucasian actor (in this instance Danish-English Olaf Pooley) to 'black up' and play ethnic stereotypes like the Lascar.

The series' growing confidence can also be seen in 'The Beryl Coronet' in which Leonard Sachs's (familiar to viewers as the tongue twisting MC of The Good Old Days) banker Alexander Holder, safe-keeping a beryl-encrusted crown, falls victim to David Burke's unscrupulous villain George Burnwell.

Another incomplete episode in the archives is 'The Bruce-Partington Plans'. The first 25 minutes of the episode exist and are here supplemented by surviving audio and the shooting script. It works very well and the engrossing adaptation features a smashing performance from Derek Francis as Holmes' brother Mycroft and well-known television character actors John Woodnutt, Gordon Gostelow and Allan Cuthbertson add quality to director Shaun Sutton's ensemble casting. A shame we can only see half of it.

'Charles Augustus Milverton' is dominated by Barry Jones' turn as the 'most dangerous man in London', the reptilian master blackmailer Milverton. He's definitely the highlight, as is Stephanie Bidmead as Lady Farningham, a former victim who is observed seeking her violent revenge by Holmes and Watson while they are breaking into Milverton's safe to destroy the blackmailer's evidence.

In the last act, there's also some lovely comedy between Watson, Holmes and Inspector Lestrade when Holmes acknowledges that Lestrade's description of one of the 'burglars' seen trespassing on Milverton's estate matches that of Watson. Stock's comedy timing and reaction is particularly satisfying. 

The series concludes with two fine episodes, 'The Retired Colourman' and 'The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax' both of which benefit from excellent location filming. One of the best of the series, 'The Retired Colourman' features the legendary Maurice Denham as the supremely grumpy miser Josiah Amberley and the story refreshingly provides Stock with an opportunity to shine as Watson. The last episode of the series is also not without a superb supporting cast, including Ronald Radd, Joss Ackland and Roger Delgado, here playing the hotel manager Moser.

Sadly, Wilmer did not return when a second series option was taken up, a decision buoyed by a successful repeat run of the first series in summer 1966. Although Head of Series Andrew Osborn asked Wilmer to return, the actor declined.

His experience of the production treadmill on the first series, the fact that some of his demands had not been met about script availability and director approval and the BBC's decision to cut the production time for each episode of the next series down to ten days, and thus reduce the rehearsal time, had all left him rather unimpressed.

In Stage Whispers, he recalls that John Neville (a fine Holmes in the 1965 film A Study in Terror) and Eric Porter were approached to co-star with Nigel Stock before the BBC settled on Peter Cushing (having played Holmes in Hammer's Gothic take on The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1959) to bring Doyle's anti-hero to colour television in 1967. But that's another story...

For now, Holmes purists can return to these episodes. They are an interesting counterpoint to the Granada series of the 1980s, where money was clearly lavished on sets and location work and many liberties were taken in stretching stories out, and their pace is probably best described as very genteel in comparison to contemporary television but these faithful, if rather economic, adaptations are worth viewing for the Wilmer and Stock interpretations of the Doyle characters. There is also a generous selection of extra features to complete a very welcome DVD release.

Special Features
Commentaries
Toby Hadoke moderates five audio commentaries: with director Peter Sasdy on 'The Illustrious Client', Douglas Wilmer on 'The Devil's Foot' and 'Charles Augustus Milverton', director Peter Cregeen on 'The Abbey Grange', and actors Trevor Martin and David Andrews on 'The Red Headed League'.
Alternative Spanish audio presentation of The Speckled Band
The Spanish export version, entitled 'La banda de lunares', if you are so inclined.
Alternative title sequence for The Illustrious Client
Apparently Peter Wyngarde requested his name to be included in the title sequence when the series was sold abroad, feeling he should share and benefit from equal billing with Wilmer and Stock.
The Abbey Grange episode partial reconstruction
Of the two 25-minute film reels only the second survives and here 95-year-old Douglas Wilmer reads the opening half of the story to accompany the surviving footage.
The Bruce-Partington Plans episode partial reconstruction
The first reel exists of the episode and the remainder of the episode is represented by an audio recording mixed with extracts from the shooting script.
Douglas Wilmer...on Television (22 mins)
A convivial conversation with Wilmer in which he discusses his casting as Holmes and his determination to play him as an unsympathetic, vain and dangerous character. He recalls various aspects of the pilot and series, from snake wrangling in 'The Speckled Band', his desire to see its director Robin Midgely continue directing the series, to the work of Shaun Sutton compared to the many 'pup' directors on the series and the uneven quality of the scripts.

Nigel Stock is fondly remembered by Wilmer as a loyal support during a time when Wilmer was very unhappy with the production of the series and he amusingly recounts the arguments with Patrick Troughton about Catholicism and working with other guest actors such as Joss Ackland.

Wilmer then reflects on his days at RADA and the Old Vic and his debut at the BBC, working with Rudolph Cartier, making 1958's The Diary of Samuel Pepys, acting with Nigel 'Tom' Kneale, and the Royal Court and film versions of One Way Pendulum. The interview brings us up to date with his recent cameo in the Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss series Sherlock.

Sherlock Holmes
BBC 1964-1965
BFI Cat No. BFIV2040 / Cert 12 / Monochrome / English language with optional hard of hearing subtitles / 650 mins approx / Original broadcast aspect ratio 1.33:1 / 4 x DVD9 / PAL / Dolby Digital 1.0 mono audio (192bps)

(1) Alan Barnes, Sherlock Holmes - The Complete Film and TV History
(2) 'Detective - The Speckled Band', Radio Times May 14 1964
(3) Alan Barnes, Sherlock Holmes - The Complete Film and TV History 
(4) 'Sherlock Holmes', Radio Times February 18 1965
(5) Douglas Wilmer, Stage Whispers - The Memoirs
(6) Alan Barnes, Sherlock Holmes - The Complete Film and TV History 
(7) Ibid
(8) Douglas Wilmer, Stage Whispers - The Memoirs
(9) Ibid
(10) 'Dr. Watson Takes Over', Radio Times April 29 1965
(11) 'The Copper Beeches', Radio Times March 4 1965
(12) Alan Barnes, Sherlock Holmes - The Complete Film and TV History
(13) 'Douglas Wilmer as Holmes', Radio Times April 8 1965

Coppers & Spies Revisited
Continuing with the re-written versions of the original Coppers and Spies blog posts published on the MovieMail site in 2014. Each part contains additional research material and information on the various crime and spy adventure series the original blog series covered, timed to celebrate Network's highly-anticipated release of The Professionals in high-definition last March.

3: We Want Information - ITC and The Prisoner

Mention the acronym ITC to a certain generation and it conjures up memorable images: Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds machines, Roger Moore and his saintly halo, Number Six being menaced by a huge white balloon and Jason King’s outré wardrobe. Formed in 1954 by Charleston champion and talent agent Lew Grade, Incorporated Television Company was a subsidiary of ITV franchise ATV and first made an impact in the 1950s with filmed period adventure series featuring Robin Hood, William Tell and Sir Lancelot.

Grade was ‘a shrewd judge of public taste’ and financed dramas and light entertainment series with an emphasis on mass popular appeal. 1955’s The Adventures of Robin Hood demonstrated his prowess for securing co-production deals and ensuring sales of British made television to the major US networks. It paved the way for the international success of Gerry Anderson’s puppet and live action series and ITC’s cult spy and crime adventure dramas of the 1960s.

ITC’s major advantage was to shoot on film rather than record on tape, the industry standard adopted at the time by the BBC and other ITV commercial franchises. High quality, export-ready filmed productions shot on location and in technically sophisticated British film studios were more appealing to the lucrative US television market. ITC eventually generated $100 million for the UK economy and received a Queen’s Award for Export.

The company became synonymous with its crime adventure series, beginning in the 1960s with Danger Man, The Saint, The Baron, Man In A Suitcase, The Prisoner, The Champions,Department S, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and ending in the 1970s with The Persuaders! and Jason King.

All predominantly featured male secret agents, freelance troubleshooters, private investigators and amateur sleuths and embellished this male dominance with an emphasis on style, production values and Britishness. Each series also had an iconic title sequence, often designed by Chambers and Partners, and memorable theme music composed by the likes of Edwin Astley, Tony Hatch, Ron Grainer or John Barry.

Beneath the surface of what could now be viewed as conservative, misogynist and sexist male stereotypes lay Grade’s willingness to support the ‘questioning of taken-for-granted assumptions.’ This is perhaps best showcased by The Prisoner’s unique perspective on the genre, as a disquieting alter ego to the equally playful The Avengers, and the fantasy elements that delineated the formats of The Champions and Randall and Hopkirk. Jason King was itself, perhaps unintentionally, a satirical view of the format and one constructed entirely from the clichés of the ITC back catalogue.

These programmes consolidated ITC’s export drive in the 1960s and on the back of this it promoted a wide range of male heroic types. Although they offered various performances of masculinity, which expressed certain changes in attitudes and values during the explosion of British popular culture in that decade, these series globalised the crime and action genre and created heroes with transnational appeal.


Jet-set lifestyles

Danger Man and The Saint, broadcast from 1960 and 1962 respectively, began the cycle and were influenced by international crime-fighting series of the late 1950s such as The Third Man, Interpol Calling and The Four Just Men and pre-war fictional gentleman adventurers like Richard Hannay and Bulldog Drummond. Both series initially attempted a level of realism before they reflected the arrival of pop aesthetics and fantasy celebrated in rival series like The Avengers.

Danger Man’s origins are credited to Ralph Smart, who had produced, directed and written on The Adventures Of Robin Hood, Interpol Calling and The Invisible Man for ITC. When Grade commissioned him to create a new series, Smart first had a number of meetings with Bond creator Ian Fleming with a view to bringing Bond to television but Fleming had already sold the rights to Eon.

Smart developed a pitch for a series called Lone Wolf. It was an espionage thriller with a cool, no nonsense central character sorting out the assignments Interpol and the CIA wouldn’t touch. With writer Ian Stuart Black's input the original pitch made the character of John Drake an American (probably with a view to selling the series to the US market) working for NATO.

Grade commissioned the pilot Smart co-wrote with Brian Clemens, who would shortly afterwards pen the opening episode of The Avengers. Patrick McGoohan was cast in the role of Drake after Smart saw him in a 1958 Play Of The Week television production, ‘The Big Knife’. McGoohan’s star was in the ascendancy and, as he started filming the first series of 39 half hours of Danger Man, he picked up an award for his role in ‘The Greatest Man In The World’ a 1959 play in ITV's Armchair Theatre.

McGoohan demanded changes to the lead character before he would commit to the series. He was unhappy with the pilot's depiction of Drake as a man of violence and a womaniser. Gradually, as the series progressed McGoohan transformed him into a man who rarely carried a gun, treated women with utmost respect and only resorted to fisticuffs when necessary. Drake was a deeply moral man who often questioned the unforgiving nature of his profession.

Before the cinematic Bond became notorious for his use of gadgets, Drake was already making ingenious use of tie-pin cameras, dart-firing umbrellas and electric shavers with built in recorders. When he was offered the role of James Bond in Dr. No at the end of Danger Man’s first series, McGoohan turned it down, citing the dubious morals of the character and the poor script as his reasons.

Three years elapsed before Danger Man returned for a second series, during which McGoohan pursued a film career. ITC scored another hit with The Saint and the spy adventure genre was popularised by the success of the first two James Bond films. These factors initiated the return of John Drake and Sidney Cole took over as producer for a further 32 hour-long episodes. Filming commenced in March 1964 and the second series was transmitted just before the Christmas release of Goldfinger, the Bond film that firmly established the iconic franchise. 

The second series saw some changes. Drake now worked for a branch of the British Secret Service, M.9 and as Ralph Smart explained in the ITC press book: “John Drake is now less cold, clinical and perfect. He is less infallible. He behaves more humanely. He makes mistakes. And he is altogether more likeable.” The glossy aesthetics of the Bond films were also of greater influence. Drake was shown using more gadgets and, importantly, employing them while dressed in clothes created by the Fashion House Group of London. Yet, just as Danger Man increasingly represented the cultural and consumerist values of the decade, the series maintained its realistic approach to global politics, the Cold War and Britain’s role in international security.

Joining Cole as story-editor at the end of the third series in early 1966 was ex-journalist George Markstein. Markstein was a major influence on the genre and worked with McGoohan again, later joined Thames Television as story editor on Special Branch and Callan, oversaw the development of The Sweeney at Euston Films and provided the original storyline for Who Dares Wins, the SAS embassy siege film starring Lewis Collins.

Being one of ITC’s most successful exports, preparations were made to move Danger Man from black and white into colour for its fourth series. However, McGoohan was tired of the role and concerned the series was becoming repetitive. He was keen to develop a new project. In April 1966, after Danger Man had filmed two final episodes in colour, ITC announced the end of the series. McGoohan had already secured backing from Grade for a new series, created in partnership with Markstein and second-unit director David Tomblin, called The Prisoner.

Meanwhile, suave playboy Simon Templar of The Saint and based on the Leslie Charteris character introduced in 1929’s novel Meet The Tiger, set the tone on television for self-made amateur investigators living the jet-set lifestyle. Charteris’s Templar, a gentleman outlaw and crime-fighting crusader, has enjoyed an extended life in novels, magazine stories, radio, cinema and television adaptations since the 1930s.

Charteris eventually sold the television rights to producers Monty Berman and Robert S. Baker. ITC financed the series and production commenced in June 1962. Originally, Grade wanted Patrick McGoohan to play Simon Templar when Danger Man went on hiatus after its first series in 1961 but Baker felt McGoohan did not have the romantic style or tongue-in-cheek panache the role demanded. Leading man of ITV’s Ivanhoe series, Roger Moore, was cast and for millions of viewers came to embody the charismatic, debonair Templar.

A glossy, cosmopolitan adventure series which ‘elaborated a male fantasy of luxury and laid back cool’, it successfully ran for 118 episodes over seven years and sold to over 80 countries. It epitomised ITC’s production and sales ethos - particularly when the series moved into colour in 1966 - and through the figure of the immaculately tailored and coiffed Moore, it projected ‘a form of masculine identity that embraced a credo of affluent pleasure, narcissistic style and personal ‘liberation’ through consumption.’

Baker revised the format when he worked with producer Monty Berman on The Baron, featuring high life antiques dealer, part-time British intelligence operative John Mannering, and on The Persuaders!, the ultimate expression of these playboy investigator tropes. Simon Templar also reappeared, unchanged save for Ian Ogilvy replacing Moore, in Baker’s 1978 series Return of the Saint.

Clearly targeted at an international audience, The Persuaders! was co-produced for ITC by Baker, Johnny Goodman and star Roger Moore through their own Tribune Entertainment subsidiary. They deliberately secured an American co-star to appeal to the US networks and Hollywood star Tony Curtis played rough diamond Danny Wilde as the foil, in the series' double act, to the sophisticated Brett Sinclair played by Moore.

The series was a mixture of private investigation caper and spy thriller and was driven by the abrasive relationship between Wilde and Sinclair whose ‘form of friendly rivalry, light-hearted banter and constant oneupmanship’ dominated the narratives. It reflected the penchant in the 1970s for male buddy relationships in films and television, echoing the success of films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the partnership between that film’s stars Robert Redford and Paul Newman.

The Persuaders! consolidated its globetrotting credentials by consciously eschewing ITC’s standard use of stock footage to represent international locations in favour of actually filming the series on location in France and Italy. However, despite its lavish overtures to a male lifestyle fantasy and success in the UK and Europe, it failed to set the US market alight.

Performances of masculinity

When McGoohan ceased being John Drake, former CIA agent Sam McGill firmly occupied the realist male hero mode (Texan method actor Richard Bradford insisted upon this approach) in Man In A Suitcase, co-created by writers Dennis Spooner and Richard Harris and produced by Sidney Cole.

Like The Baron, its American leading man diluted ITC’s inherent Britishness and injected a dose of cynical, macho, no-nonsense virility. McGill was a hard-boiled Chandler-esque figure who openly criticised the establishment, shed light on the ills of post-colonialism and offered ‘a distinctly jaundiced view of ‘Swinging London’.’

Spooner’s work with The Baron’s producer Monty Berman led to the formation of Scoton, a partnership that had a major influence on the development of ITC’s adventure series. In The Champions, Department S, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and Jason King, all created and produced by Scoton, realism was eclipsed by science fiction, fantasy and comic elements.

For instance, The Champions featured three secret agents whose abilities were augmented by telepathy, precognition, super hearing and strength through an encounter with a mystical Tibetan civilisation and, in the dark but whimsical Randall and Hopkirk, one of the private investigators was a ghost.

While The Champions’ themes tapped into the Western vogue for joining the so called ‘hippy trail’ search for Eastern enlightenment in the late 1960s, its agents were fighting its very antithesis. Like all of their series produced within the confines of the Pinewood, Elstree and Borehamwood studios, ITC ensured their three ‘super heroes’ defeated communist threats from East Germany, Cuba, China and Russia and their modus operandi was to protect international security rather than a specific threat to Britain.

Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) was initially something of a departure for ITC. Originally a vehicle considered for comedian Dave Allen, the series begins as a whimsical, supernatural fantasy but jettisons these elements in favour of seedy crime narratives.

Unlike many of the other ITC series in which the protagonists spend their time jetting around the world (mainly through the use of the aforementioned stock footage), Jeff Randall and Marty Hopkirk (the dead detective resurrected as a ghost) are more or less confined to the grubbier back streets and domestic fringes of London. The only exception was the studio recreation of Monte Carlo for the highly amusing episode 'The Ghost Who Saved the Bank at Monte Carlo'.

Becoming a mythology of conspicuous affluence and style, with stories forged in the ‘white heat of the scientific and technological revolution’, ITC crime and spy adventure also offered various performances of masculinity that spanned stoic Drake, gentlemanly flâneur Templar, hardnosed ex-CIA agent McGill and, by 1971, author Jason King, a character who redefined the male mystique.

Appearing in Department S before headlining his own series, the foppish aesthete Jason King was a crime writer much happier to raise a glass of champagne than throw a knockout punch. King, played by Peter Wyngarde, took conspicuous affluence, style and notions of class to such exaggerated and contradictory levels in Jason King that his masculinity seemed to exist on the nexus of heterosexual and homosexual codifications.

The hero in King’s novels was Mark Caine, a Bondian alter ego whose exploits were self-reflexively interchangeable with King’s own reluctant investigations of international crime. As Andy Medhurst noted: ‘this particular fop is also a stud, with women both on-screen in the episodes and off-screen in the audience finding King a sexual magnet of immense and irresistible proportions.’ While the series originally made King and Wyngarde into ‘a byword for potent heterosexuality’, seen in hindsight it provokes multiple, complex readings about gender, style and masculinity.

Jason King may have mocked ITC’s macho clichés and stereotypes but its female characters were little more than window dressing. Scoton’s formula of teaming two men with one woman offered some progress but the equality of Steed and his female partners in The Avengers rarely troubled ITC’s male dominated world of spies and agents. Agent Sharron Macready in The Champions and Department S’s computer expert Annabelle Hurst were the closest ITC got to depicting emancipated female heroes.

The surveillance society

McGoohan, having left Danger Man, created The Prisoner for ITC. It began in 1966 with a pitch to Lew Grade, including George Markstein’s 60-page treatment, art director Jack Shampan’s sketches and McGoohan’s photographs of the Italianate North Wales village of Portmeirion. It ended in winter 1968 with McGoohan hurriedly editing ‘Fall Out’, his stream of consciousness finale, two weeks before transmission.

‘Fall Out’, the final episode of The Prisoner, left millions of viewers puzzled and angry when it was transmitted on 2nd February 1968. After 17 episodes, it was not the conclusion they expected to McGoohan’s latest series.

Markstein’s original treatment incorporated his knowledge of Inverlair Lodge in Scotland where, during the Second World War, British Intelligence ‘managed’ recalcitrant agents, and his reflections on McGoohan’s resignation from Danger Man. The Prisoner was, for him, a continuation of Drake’s story. For McGoohan it was increasingly an expression of his own socio-political concerns. Markstein, unhappy with this direction, left in March 1967 when production concluded on the first thirteen episodes.

Expressing McGoohan’s own liberal but conflicted political awareness in a decade of radical social transformation and counter-cultural dissent, The Prisoner commented on and reused the formulaic tropes of the series he had just resigned from. It transformed them into a prescient, allegorical treatise on the surveillance society and the democratic state’s mission to coerce individuals into conformity.

A hyperbolised, satirical version of many ITC spy adventure series, using the era’s pop iconography to startling and memorable effect, The Prisoner was unique. Its central, unnamed anti-hero, Number Six, battled to retain his identity and sanity in a mysterious Village where ‘retired' former agents were controlled with drugs and brainwashed to extract the valuable information in their heads.

The parochial, cheery, mock-Italian Village, an analogue of Markstein’s Inverlair Lodge and Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the global village created by advances in communication technology, belied its totalitarian purpose. The Prisoner was not only about Number Six’s desperate attempt to escape incarceration but also his Kafka-esque journey to expose Number One, the anonymous power controlling the Village. The series concluded pessimistically as Number Six discovered he was Number One and ‘we all eventually join the enemy against ourselves’ in the battle between the individual and authority.

Subverting the James Bond conventions used in the episode, 'Fall Out' defied audience expectation the series would reveal the Village’s diabolical mastermind in its subterranean depths. Having escaped, Number Six returned home where, symbolically, his front door opened automatically with an electronic hum as the door to his Village cottage once did. McGoohan therefore intimated that, no matter how hard we try, we can never escape from the Village, or from ourselves. It was ultimately a rather conservative, pessimistic conclusion.

The Prisoner, a costly gamble on McGoohan’s concept by Lew Grade’s ITC, seemed to say freedom is elusive, resignation and rebellion are futile and conformity is inescapable but, like the decade from which it emerged, it continues to defy convention and to this day remains radical, enigmatic and thought provoking.

Bibliography

• Chapman, James, Saints & Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s (I.B.Tauris, 2002).
• Cornell, Paul, Day, Martin and Topping, Keith, The Guinness Book of Classic British TV (2nd Edition, Guinness Publishing, 1996).
• Courtman, Matthew, ‘The Beginning’, ‘The Basics’, ‘John Drake’ and ‘The Turning Point’, The Danger Man Website (2001) available at http://www.danger-man.co.uk/ accessed July 2014.
• Fairclough, Robert, The Prisoner: The official companion to the classic TV series (Carlton Books, 2002).
• Feasey, Rebecca, Masculinity And Popular Television (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
• Langley, Roger (ed), ‘Who Is Danger Man?’ in Danger Man Magazine, (Six of One, Issue 1, September 1984).
• Medhurst, Andy, ‘King and queen: interpreting sexual identity in Jason King,’ in Osgerby, Bill and Gough-Yates, Anna (eds), Action TV: Tough Guys, Smooth Operators and Foxy Chicks, (Routledge, 2001).
• Osgerby, Bill, ‘“So you’re the famous Simon Templar”: The Saint, masculinity and consumption in the early 1960s,’ in Osgerby, Bill and Gough-Yates, Anna (eds), Action TV: Tough Guys, Smooth Operators and Foxy Chicks, (Routledge, 2001).
• Pixley, Andrew, The Prisoner: A complete production guide (Network, 2007)
• Rodley, Chris, ‘Degree Absolute: The production, destruction and afterlife of The Prisoner,’ in Primetime (Volume 1, Number 3, WTVA, March-May 1982)
• Tibballs, Geoff, Randall & Hopkirk Deceased, (Boxtree/ITC 1994).

Next time: Callan and Public Eye
Last time: The Avengers and Z Cars
Previously: Fabian of the Yard and Dixon of Dock Green

If you're expecting some huge revelations about Verity Lambert's tenure as producer of Doctor Who in Richard Marson's new book Drama and Delight - The Life and Times of Verity Lambert then you'll probably be disappointed.

As the author emphatically declares, Verity Lambert was so much more than the first producer of the legendary science fiction series, a fitting accolade in and of itself. Marson therefore traces her early upbringing, schooling and employment as a secretary at ITV before her move to the BBC and her continuing success as a producer and executive with London Weekend and Thames Television, Euston Films, Thorn-EMI and finally her own production company Cinema Verity.

Just as the book essays her professional triumphs and disasters in the entertainment industry, producing a wonderful boardroom drama about the comings and goings of working at the BBC or ITV with plenty of anecdotes from friends and colleagues, so it also charts the choppy waters of her personal life and both the delight and disappointment she found in her friendships and relationships. You certainly get the sense that Verity enjoyed a challenge, dealing with rival producers or difficult writers or juggling a career with marriage, Great Danes and volatile friendships.

As the television industry changed, from the technical and production developments at BBC and ITV to the launch of Channel Four and to the impact of John Birt's much criticised 'producer choice' at the BBC that ushered in the rise of the independent sector, Marson shows Verity taking on these upheavals with determination. The climate for making good drama radically alters between the 1960s and the 1990s but this woman always seemed to be in the thick of it, maintaining the quality of her productions until her demise.


Initially, the introduction of the book feels a little bit uncomfortable. While it sets the stage for the exploits of 'Hurricane Verity' (as she was known) it seems to end with a bit of a demolition job on Jessica Raine's portrayal of Verity in Mark Gatiss'An Adventure in Space and Time, the film that dramatised the troubled birth of Doctor Who in 2013.

Raine's performance is demoted to one which has 'no presence' compared to the firebrand that, quite rightly, Marson then goes on to profile and offers as proof that the version of Verity Lambert we saw on screen didn't quite live up to her inspiration. It's a shame this contrast has to be brokered by various colleagues of Verity Lambert being rather unfair to Jessica Raine but pulling no punches is the thrust of Marson's book and opinions from Verity's fellow travellers are honest and direct. Much like the revered producer herself.

... her ongoing and remarkable ability to manage a crisis

The book briefly traces her childhood and teenage years up to 1955 when at the age of sixteen she left Roedean, the girls school with which she was often associated in various press profiles. She took her six O Levels, her Jewish faith and her sense of being an outsider with her to pursue her education on a six-month course at the University of Paris (not the Sorbonne as often originally attributed), much to her father's relief.

There's a sense here that Verity embraced her own independence and did things very much her own way despite an unimpressive academic record. Her achievements in the entertainment industry and the energy behind them indicate she was always determined to make up for this deficiency. Her Doctor of Laws honorary degree from the University of Strathclyde in 1988 must have gone a long way to repairing that old wound.

After typing up menus for a hotel restaurant and several secretarial jobs, she worked in the Granada Television press office, acquiring the job after her father, who knew the chief executives Sidney and Cecil Bernstein, put a word in the appropriate ears.

Eventually sacked from Granada, she also ended an engagement, much to her father's dismay, and instead transferred her considerable efforts into securing a job at ABC television. It was here that her potential was recognised and Marson describes her progress through the corridors of ABC, including a riveting recollection of the production of the Armchair Theatre nuclear holocaust play 'Underground' (transmitted live 30 November 1958) directed by Canadian Ted Kotcheff at their Didsbury studios in Manchester.

This was clearly Verity's baptism by fire in television production and it is evocatively retold by the play's director Kotcheff and one of the actors, Peter Bowles. Taking the directorial reigns on a live production, when actor Gareth Jones had just collapsed and died, showed her ongoing and remarkable ability to manage a crisis - something she would tenaciously apply again and again to rescuing scripts, editing and producing television and films. While she was in a relationship with Kotcheff, the book suggesting both Verity and Ted regretted it never achieved its true potential, she was also introduced to ABC's wunderkind Head of Drama Sydney Newman.

She would eventually follow Newman to the BBC but prior to this she spent a formative year in New York working as a secretary with noted television producer David Susskind. There's an indication that Susskind had an influence on Verity's career development and she returned to England and ABC determined to be a television director. She had so impressed Newman with her 'piss and vinegar' attitude that, after he had been poached by the BBC, he rang her up and asked her to produce Doctor Who (after failing to persuade Don Taylor, Shaun Sutton or Richard Bates to take on the task).

... her choice of William Hartnell for the role was 'fucking awful' 

Marson's book spends some time unpicking the professional relationship between Verity and Sydney Newman against a background of gossip about whether they actually had a physical relationship. Director Herbert Wise claims they did and the book emphasises that, in the context of the times, it was common place for women to do so in order to move up the career ladder. As to whether this 'casting couch' principle was the origin of her eventual promotion by Newman to producer at the BBC remains unclear and even on her death bed, Verity categorically refuted the suggestion.

Doctor Who's creation and production certainly ruffled feathers at the BBC when its female producer entered a battle of wills with designer Peter Brachacki over the design of the TARDIS set and with original director Rex Tucker about casting the significant role of the Doctor. Herbert Wise, not one to mince words it seems, also believed her choice of William Hartnell for the role was 'fucking awful' even though she transformed him into an early television star. She also had something of a difficult relationship with director Richard Martin. His opinion of Terry Nation's scripting efforts is as equally disparaging as Wise's is of Hartnell.

The familiar tales of Newman making her and director Waris Hussein (a fellow outsider), remount the pilot, his rejection of the Daleks as bug-eyed monsters, and the troubles with the outmoded production environment of Lime Grove studios have passed into legend. Marson captures the cut and thrust of these pioneering days of television and its inherent prejudice and snobbery. Verity's determination to make Doctor Who work enshrined her attitudes about shattering the glass ceiling that prevented many minorities and women from progressing in the business.

After Doctor Who, this attitude saw her through something of a roller coaster ride through the mixed fortunes of working at the BBC and ITV and film production at Thorn-EMI. Her hopes of getting a Sexton Blake series off the ground were stymied by Newman's request she take the reigns on a new soap to replace Compact (BBC, 1962-65). The short lived 199 Park Lane (BBC 1965) - so terrible she demanded her name be removed from the credits - eventually led to her producing the first eight episodes of Colin Morris and Anthony Coburns's twice-weekly drama serial The Newcomers (BBC, 1965-69) which reunited her with director Waris Hussein.

There is a fascinating account of the shambolic production of Adam Adamant Lives! (BBC, 1966-67) and Verity's crisis of confidence about its scripts and direction. She was also very unhappy about the lack of promotion and inconsistent scheduling of the second series.

Marson deftly interweaves the problems with Adam Adamant Lives! with Verity's relationship with gay director David Sullivan Proudfoot. One of many close friendships she formed with gay men during her career, there was talk of an engagement with Proudfoot. However, this never transpired and it seems he sought some security with her at a time when being openly gay was difficult.

She continued to work at the BBC on the 1968 revival of the anthology series Detective, which introduced her to a different calibre of writers, including Hugh Whitmore, and she formed a very strong friendship and working relationship with a young (and gay) script-editor Andrew Brown.

He first worked with her on W. Somerset Maugham (BBC, 1968-70), a series of the writer's plays that consolidated Verity's determination to work with the best writers and directors, with adaptations by Simon Raven, John Bowen, Simon Gray and Julian Mitchell and directed by Moira Armstrong, James Cellan Jones, Michael Lindsay-Hogg and Christopher Morahan. Despite the series winning BAFTA awards, the BBC did not renew her contract in 1970 and London Weekend Television eventually gained the benefit of her hard working, no nonsense attitude and production experience.

'She could taste what was wrong with a script' 

She made her mark with the fondly remembered Budgie (LWT, 1971-72), created by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall and starring Adam Faith and Ian Cuthbertson. Again she was working with good writers and directors and hired Mike Newell, Jim Goddard and Lindsay-Hogg to helm the series about a charming Cockney ex-con's involvement in rash, money-making schemes. The chapter on Budgie is very insightful about the casting and creation of the series. It also introduces another writer who would regularly work with her, Douglas Livingstone. Here, Livingstone indicates Verity's acumen for good taste: 'It was in every aspect of her life. Food, wine, furniture and particularly scripts. She could taste what was wrong with a script and, in my case, she was never mistaken.'

Production on Budgie ushered in a new man in her life, film maker Colin Bucksey who had ambitions of his own in the business and was ten years younger than the 35-year-old Verity. A holiday in Portugal brought them together and, despite her friends' disapproval and prejudice, their relationship endured and after marrying Verity, Bucksey carved out a very successful career as a director on his own terms.

She then made a brief return to the BBC to make Shoulder to Shoulder (BBC, 1974) and in 1975 worked at Thames on The Naked Civil Servant, both landmark dramas for very different reasons. Six 75-minute plays, Shoulder to Shoulder offered her an opportunity to channel many of her personal ambitions and feelings as a creative woman into an inspiring drama about suffrage which chimed with the rise of feminism in the early 1970s.

A fascinating account is provided of the production, writing and casting of the series and shows Verity trying to please her partners in the production, Georgia Brown and Midge Mackenzie, despite the latter being determined that men should not be involved in the series at all according to Waris Hussein, and fulfilling the practicalities of production and scripting. Marson never lets us lose sight of her personal triumphs and disasters and tragically 1974 is also marked by her first encounter with the cancer that would ultimately cut short her life five days before her 72nd birthday in 2007.

Her career at Thames and later with its subsidiary Euston Films provides an amazing roll-call of some of the best British television ever made. The aforementioned The Naked Civil Servant, Philip Mackie's highly regarded dramatisation of the life of Quentin Crisp, 'one of the stately homos of England', was a project she championed after it was turned down by the BBC. She empathised with Crisp's outsider status and battle for recognition and equality.

She also confidently supported Trevor Griffiths when he pitched political drama Bill Brand (Thames, 1976) and worked again with Andrew Brown on the development of Howard Schuman's Rock Follies (Thames, 1976-77), a wonderfully experimental, award-winning musical drama that stretched the stylistic possibilities of studio production, and on the award-winning royal drama Edward and Mrs Simpson (Thames, 1978).

The success of Rock Follies would, however, be tinged with bitterness when the originators of the idea for the series successfully sued her and Thames. Similarly, after 'poaching'Rumpole of the Bailey (Thames, 1978-92) from its producer Irene Shubik, she was caught up in the unfortunate recriminations when the BAFTA jury of 1991 chaired by Shubik awarded Best Drama Serial to Prime Suspect rather than, as the industry had expected, Verity's production of Alan Bleasdale's G.B.H. These are great stories about the internecine workings of show business and they elevate this book from being merely recollections about Verity's work on Doctor Who and offer a personal view of the changing fortunes of British television and those working in the industry.

Working with Johnny Goodman, Linda Agran and Lynda la Plante at Euston was clearly fruitful for Verity. Minder (1979-94), Quatermass (1979), Danger UXB (1979), Fox (1980), Reilly: Ace of Spies (1983) and Widows (1983) all provide testimony she was a shrewd judge of quality and talent. A groundbreaking and challenging project was 1981's The Flame Trees of Thika, a seven-episode adaptation of writer Elspeth Huxley's book about her childhood in Kenya. There were the ones that got away too. She had within her sights the original scripts The Paddy Factor and A Thoroughly Filthy Fellow but uncharacteristically she passed on these and under other producers they were transformed into the films The Long Good Friday (1980) and Scandal (1989).

As a counter to this extremely fruitful career then perhaps the period at Thorn-EMI as a film executive rather than a television producer was evidently less successful. She clearly struggled to adapt to a very different development and production ethos and only Dreamchild (1985) and Clockwise (1986) emerged as critical successes from the handful of films she produced, including 1985's ill-feted Morons From Outer Space. She brokered a deal with Cannon, the new owners of Thorn-EMI, and as an independent producer in 1988 put all her energies into producing A Cry In The Dark, an adaptation of John Bryson's book about the infamous Michael and Lindy Chamberlain 'dingo baby' case in Australia.

The focus on A Cry in the Dark also emphasises how passionately she felt about Australia, the love of the country and the friendships she had made there. However, this also coincided with the breakdown of her marriage to Colin Bucksey which ended in divorce in 1984 and the damaging court case over the ownership of the idea for Rock Follies. But if there is one thing patently clear from the book, Verity always reappraised her life and career and simply got back into the fray. Out of the disappointments of working at Thorn-EMI, she had set up her own independent company Cinema Verity and would provide the BBC with sit-coms May to December (1989-94) and So Haunt Me (1992-94) and Channel Four with 1991's critically acclaimed Alan Bleasdale drama G.B.H.

'The only real failure that she had. And my God, was that a failure...' 

Her greatest gamble and one that also damaged her reputation was Cinema Verity's co-production with the BBC of soap Eldorado (1992-3). Marson's sympathetic appreciation of the disastrous production of the soap about ex-pats living in Spain provides further incentive to read this book.

From the clashes with formidable BBC producer Julia Smith, the debacles over casting inexperienced actors, the problems with the sets built in Coín, to the impossible transmission deadlines and script-editor Tony Holland's disappearing acts, Eldorado was clearly a project where Verity, also dealing with the harrowing and impending death of her friend Andrew Brown, took her hands off the steering wheel. Director Herbert Wise, one never to disappoint with his brutal honesty, offers: 'The only real failure that she had. And my God, was that a failure...'

And yet, she emerged from the aftermath and carried on. In her last decade, she produced She's Out! (ITV, 1995), a sequel to Widows, Douglas Livingstone's adaptation of Elizabeth Jane Howard's 'The Cazalet Chronicles' as The Cazalets (BBC, 2001) and, from its second series onwards, David Renwick's Jonathan Creek (BBC, 1997-) and his comedy-drama Love Soup (BBC, 2005-8). It was during the production of Love Soup that it became clear she was gravely ill after the cancer she defeated in the 1970s had returned in 2005. The book concludes with a deeply touching and emotional recollection from writer David Renwick, featuring pages from his diaries that chronicle her last days and her funeral in December 2007.

Richard Marson is to be commended for fashioning a gripping memoir of this woman's life and career, mapping the highs and lows with candid detail and providing us with a picture of a private but joyful individual who never suffered fools gladly but could also recognise and embrace similar strengths of character in those she would come to regard as friends.

Beyond this the book provides an individual and tangible history of television and Verity's role in shaping it, from its haphazard, adrenaline fueled 'live' days in Manchester studios to multi-million pound filmed productions that demonstrated the real scope, relevance and power of British television drama.

Drama and Delight: The Life of Verity Lambert
Richard Marson
Miwk Publishing
April 2015
379pp
Selection of black and white and colour plates
ISBN: 978-1-908630-33-X (Hardback edition)
ISBN: 978-1-908630-33-9 (Softback edition)

Coppers & Spies Revisited
Continuing with the re-written versions of the original Coppers and Spies blog posts published on the MovieMail site in 2014. Each part contains additional research material and information on the various crime and spy adventure series the original blog series covered, timed to celebrate Network's highly-anticipated release of The Professionals in high-definition last March.

4: A Man Alone - Callan and Public Eye

In February 1967 ABC transmitted an Armchair Theatre play entitled ‘A Magnum For Schneider’ and introduced viewers to writer James Mitchell’s volatile, ill-natured and cynical spy David Callan. Disgraced from the Section, an anonymous branch of the British security services run by a boss code-named Hunter, he was recruited again to eliminate Schneider, a gunrunner posing as a German businessman.

Mitchell embarked late on a successful career as a novelist in 1957. Previously a teacher, actor, civil servant, shipyard worker, barman, officer cadet and travel courier, he claimed, “Even the idea of writing fiction didn’t occur to me till I was over 30.” In 1960 Sydney Newman, Head of Drama at ABC, asked him to adapt his novel A Way Back, about a former Communist blackmailed to steal the blueprints of a new bomb, into a play ‘A Flight From Treason’ for Armchair Mystery Theatre.

Birth of an existential hero

Mitchell, a full-time writer in 1965, sold the script for Callan’s debut, ‘A Magnum For Schneider’, to BBC’s Detective but it languished unproduced. He bought the play back and offered it to Armchair Theatre story editor Terence Feely. Feely saw its potential and, with producer Leonard White and casting director Dodo Watts, considered actors for the key roles of reluctant spy Callan, his antagonistic boss Hunter and the informant with the personal hygiene problem, Lonely.

White’s casting suggestion for Callan was Edward Woodward. Woodward was impressed with the script, personally delivered to him by Watts, and cancelled his family holiday to play the role. He drove his wife and children to Devon but then immediately returned to London by train to attend his first rehearsal in the part.

Watts also admired actor, former shipyard worker and stand up comedian Russell Hunter for his Shakespearian talents and recommended him for Lonely. Played by a series of actors, like the ever-changing Number 2 in The Prisoner, the character of Hunter was first realised by White’s choice Ronald Radd and joining him in the play was Peter Bowles as his bright but sadistic young acolyte Toby Meres.

Sensing ABC was looking for a replacement for Redcap, the series about military police starring John Thaw, Feely worked with Mitchell and paid him £150 to develop a series pitch for Brian Tesler, Director of Programmes, and Lloyd Shirley, Controller of Drama, at ABC. In December 1966, on the strength of ‘Schneider’ and the pitch, they commissioned six episodes of what would become Callan before the play’s transmission.

In Callan’s world, the pitch offered, ‘the reality doesn’t come from atomic fountain pens or poisoned wall-paper: it comes from people. And some of them are very ordinary people, caught up in extraordinary situations.’ This was the antithesis of the onscreen escapades of James Bond and John Steed. Callan was a killer vulnerable to mixing the personal with the professional in a series that embraced the gritty, unglamorous twilight world of Len Deighton and John le Carre’s spy fiction.

Speaking to the TV Times in 1972, Mitchell indicated Callan possibly originated in a Spaniard, Paco, he encountered while teaching English in Spain during the 1950s: "He spied, I learned later, against the regime in Spain. There was no doubt in his mind that the revolution would come, and when it did, everyone had to be ready, with weapons,training, information. And information meant spies like Paco. He had contacts everywhere, even in the police."


Hunter and the hunted

Woodward, Radd and Hunter returned for the series but the part of Toby Meres was re-cast. Jeremy Lloyd was chosen to replace Bowles as Meres but was dropped in favour of Anthony Valentine. Jack Trombey’s lugubrious theme music also established the tone of the series and it augmented a memorable title sequence featuring a swinging light bulb extinguished by a gunshot.

Over four series of Callan, made by ABC and its ITV franchise replacement Thames, Hunter was played variously by Radd, Michael Goodliffe, Derek Bond and William Squire and his agents used any means necessary to maintain the balance of Cold War power, tangling with war crimes, germ warfare, rogue diplomats and politicians, assassins and defectors.

Callan’s hobby, tabletop war re-enactments, became a recurring symbol of his internal conflicts and his relationship with Lonely reflected the self-loathing and remorse when his assignments for Hunter corrupted innocent lives. Raymond Williams, writing in The Listener, described this as ‘an overwhelming, inescapable but unaccepted alienation’ in which the conflicted, contemptuous Callan is trapped.

After ‘Death Of A Hunter’ was shown in 1969, Thames’ switchboard was jammed with calls from viewers concerned about Callan’s demise. Brainwashed by the KGB, Callan killed Hunter but was then shot down by Meres. Planned as the final episode, producer-director Reg Collin taped two different endings, one open-ended and one where Callan was killed. Thames opted for the former and a year later brought the series back in colour.

Callan gained a new partner in the arrogant Cross, played by Patrick Mower. Hunter’s boss, the enigmatic but powerful Bishop, became a regular character and one episode explored the background of Hunter’s secretary Liz. Later, Callan briefly became the new Hunter, placed under different pressures and making decisions to kill people from behind a desk rather than out in the field.

After Callan ended in May 1972, a 1974 cinema adaptation of ‘A Magnum For Schneider’ followed and Mitchell developed the character in a series of novels and short stories. For ATV’s somewhat lacklustre single play, 1981’s ‘Wet Job’, Callan was brought out of retirement by the Section’s latest Hunter to target a man writing a tell-all book about the Department, naming Callan as a killer.

The series influenced later espionage dramas The XYY Man and The Sandbaggers. Woodward established an accomplished film career with The Wicker Man and Breaker Morant. In 1977, as journalist Jim Kyle, he also battled against a totalitarian state in the BBC’s dystopian drama 1990. He returned to the crime adventure TV genre in 1985 for his award-winning role of anti-hero Robert McCall, a part first offered to Martin Shaw of The Professionals, in the popular The Equalizer.

Marvin to Marker

Callan also matched the psychological realism of its fellow ABC series, Public Eye. Commencing in 1965, it featured an equally conflicted hero in private inquiry agent Frank Marker. Six guineas a day plus expenses saw Frank locate missing persons, gather evidence for divorce cases, clash with blackmailers and pimps and save the gullible from the seedier realms of the criminal underworld.

Created by Roger Marshall and Anthony Marriott, Public Eye embraced hardboiled realism and eschewed the increasing fantasy of The Avengers. In 1962, Marshall’s initial idea for a drama about an inquiry agent, possibly played by Donald Pleasance, was elaborated on when Marriott told him about Chalky White, an inquiry agent he had just interviewed for the BBC.

White, his approach and his cases informed their series pitch to George Kerr, ABC’s Head of Drama. A sceptical Kerr was persuaded by White’s anecdotes and, in the wake of restructuring The Avengers as an all-film series, he considered it a suitable project for former Avengers alumni John Bryce and Richard Bates to produce. Bates became story-editor on the series developed from Marshall and Marriott’s pitch and named it The Public Eye.

Don Leaver, an established director on Police Surgeon, The Avengers and Out of This World, worked with Bates on Marshall’s pilot episode ‘Dig You Later’ and produced nine of the first series’ episodes. An untransmitted version of the pilot, with Marker looking for a police inspector’s missing daughter, was recorded at ABC’s Manchester studios in June 1964. A series was swiftly commissioned and the pilot was re-recorded when full production began in September.

Alfred Burke was cast as Frank Marvin, the down-at-heel inquiry agent whose name was inspired by legendary actor Lee Marvin, star of the US police series M Squad then being shown on ITV. Chosen by Leaver and casting director Dodo Watts, Burke was a successful stage and television actor and had recently appeared in No Hiding Place, The Saint, Armchair Theatre, The Human Jungle and Z Cars.

Marshall explained, “The reason Alfie was chosen for the part is that he doesn’t look like a private detective. If you saw him in a pub or a supermarket, you wouldn’t single him out for attention. He’s just another face in the crowd.” Burke immediately empathised with the pilot script but ironically, thinking the name Marvin was too American, changed it to Marker.

He understood the character perfectly and told TV Times: “Marker doesn't want anything, except to be left alone.” A loner often exploited and manipulated by his clients, his ‘cynical incorruptibility’ in dealing with debt recovery, con men, failed marriages, missing girls, blackmail and theft was first established in the retitled Public Eye on 23 January 1965.

The second series of Public Eye, commissioned by Drama Supervisor Lloyd Shirley on Bates’ recommendation, took advantage of mobile Outside Broadcast facilities to extend studio bound drama with more location recording. Marker’s trawl through organised and disorganised crime took him, the series’ mournful Robert Earley theme music, filing cabinet, instant coffee, mug and typewriter from London to Birmingham.

ABC’s Manchester based OB facilities shot location inserts for Public Eye around Birmingham city centre while the interiors were taped in ABC’s Teddington studios. Producer Richard Bates handed over to Michael Chapman for the third series and during its production the Independent Television Authority’s franchise renewal of 1967 merged ABC and Associated Rediffusion to create Thames Television.

Many series were inherited by Thames, including Callan, Public Eye, variety show Opportunity Knocks and drama anthology Armchair Theatre. However, when Thames started broadcasting in July 1968, it was uncertain they would continue with Public Eye when the third series came to a close.

On parole in Brighton

Marker’s sympathies with the underdog eventually saw him fall foul of the law in the third series’ final episode. He was arrested for receiving stolen goods and sent to Winston Green Prison. The public reaction was immediate and in letters and phone calls they demanded to know Marker’s fate. At Thames, Lloyd Shirley prompted Roger Marshall to devise Public Eye’s return. He pitched a series of seven, self-penned episodes that formed a chronicle of Marker’s post-prison rehabilitation in Brighton.

Prolific director Kim Mills, who had helmed episodes of Public Eye, Armchair Theatre, The Avengers and produced The Mind of Mr J.G. Reeder, oversaw series four’s complex psychological examination of Marker as an ex-con, on probation, putting his life back together and holding down a regular job. Marshall also developed Marker’s relationship with his sympathetic Brighton landlady, the widowed Mrs Mortimer played by Pauline Delany, to support this new dynamic.

The fourth episode ‘My Life's My Own’ was also provided with a prequel, a year later, in the 1970 Armchair Theatre play ‘Wednesday's Child’, and was a rare and early depiction of a lesbian relationship on television. Mills also oversaw the transition from monochrome to colour and ‘A Fixed Address’, the concluding episode of series four made in 1969, was test recorded in colour.

The next three series, produced by Robert Love and Michael Chapman and with Marker’s inquiry agency now based in Windsor and Chertsey, introduced supporting characters like authority figure DI Percy Firbank of the local CID and fellow private agent Ron Gash. Both revealed new facets to Marker that enhanced Burke’s sublime performance as the ordinary man trying to “put things right when it’s all gone wrong.”

Dodgy housekeepers, thieves, inept builders, a horse-doping racket and blackmailers all kept Marker occupied until the series ended after 87 episodes in April 1975. Marker was still charging the same fee in his shabby Chertsey office, one the Daily Mirror described as ‘cheap pegboard painted bilious green’. The series won the ratings challenge from the BBC’s Churchill’s People and coped with Kojak’s move into opposition when the former lost viewers in droves.

Public Eye was also a contemporary to Special Branch and, similarly, Thames wanted it to continue in 1976 by transforming it into an all-film series made by their subsidiary Euston Films. This was dropped in favour of remounting Van der Valk but Roger Marshall was offered an option to revive Public Eye again in 1978 when The Sweeney had concluded. However, Marshall’s enthusiasm was cooled by Alfred Burke’s low opinion of Euston’s energetic style, one he felt was inappropriate for the introspective Public Eye. Marker was left walking the streets in his crumpled white raincoat.

Bibliography:

• Chapman, James, Saints & Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s (I.B.Tauris, 2002).
• Cornell, Paul, Day, Martin and Topping, Keith, The Guinness Book of Classic British TV (2nd Edition, Guinness Publishing, 1996).
• Goodman, Anthony and Perry, Julian, ‘Callan – The Series’, ‘The Idea’, ‘The Characters’, ‘The Stories’, Callan (1999) available at http://www.digitaltapestries.com/callan/, accessed between February and July 2014.
• Mitchell, James, ‘The contented saint with a killer’s grace’, in TV Times (IPC, 25 March 1972)
• Pixley, Andrew, Public Eye: Six Guineas A Day, Plus Expenses (Network, 2012).
• Williams, Raymond, Raymond Williams on Television: Selected Writings (Routledge, 2013)

Last time: ITC and The Prisoner
Previously: The Avengers and Z Cars
Originally: Fabian of the Yard and Dixon of Dock Green

Coppers & Spies Revisited
Continuing with the re-written versions of the original Coppers and Spies blog posts published on the MovieMail site in 2014. Each part contains additional research material and information on the various crime and spy adventure series the original blog series covered, timed to celebrate Network's highly-anticipated release of The Professionals in high-definition last March.

5: Jack or Knave - From Special Branch to The Sweeney

Euston Films, the subsidiary of Thames Television founded in 1971 by executives Lloyd Shirley (Controller of Drama), George Taylor (Head of Film Facilities) and Brian Tesler (Director of Programmes), set out to make television faster and cheaper. It swapped studio taping for lighter film cameras, ten-day turnarounds with minimal rehearsal, non-union crews, and all-location filming. Affectionately described by the crew of The Sweeney as the ‘kick, bollock and scramble’ approach, Euston’s operation transformed television drama in the 1970s.

Prior to Euston’s formation, directors Jim Goddard and Terry Green and writer Trevor Preston had already proposed to ABC the creation of a small group to produce work on 16mm film, a gauge normally used to film inserts on location for video taped drama but not considered as a format for an entire drama's production.

Over at Thames Television George Taylor also believed there was potential to make drama on film rather than tape. The first production to test the water was director Mike Hodges’ all-16mm shoot on Preston’s 1968 children’s drama The Tyrant King. Hodges had worked with Preston, Goddard and Green on ABC’s arts documentary series Tempo and their influence on Euston’s drama output would be significant.

Shirley, impressed by Hodges’ work, commissioned him to direct two filmed television plays, ‘Suspect’ and ‘Rumour’, for the ITV Playhouse strand in late 1969. Their success convinced Shirley, Taylor and Tesler that moving to film not only made economic sense but also shifted drama towards greater realism and authenticity. The challenge for Euston was to make a complete series on film using freelance crew and equipment. 

Retooling Special Branch

To put this into practice Thames’ crime drama Special Branch underwent an overhaul. Edited by former journalist, script editor of Danger Man and The Prisoner George Markstein, it featured a British police unit, affiliated to the Metropolitan London Police and responsible for national security. Markstein ruled out consultation with the real Special Branch due to the secret nature of its work and asked his writers to use their common sense and available research.

He observed, “I regard fussy authenticity as questionable… I am against expert advisers. They tend to concentrate on small, unimportant details so that their ex-colleagues in the police won’t criticise them.” Writers such as Preston, Roger Marshall and Peter Hill, a former detective in Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad, brought their considerable knowledge and experience to the series.

The series, first made in 1969 and 1970 with the standard mix of tape and film inserts, focused on cat and mouse Cold War espionage, featuring various threats to international security from terrorists, dissident students, assassins and Russian diplomats. Markstein was concerned with Special Branch’s efforts to “prevent the erosion of freedom” and felt the series was a reflection of current news headlines. Lead actor Derren Nesbitt made such an impact as DI Jordan he was guest of honour at a Special Branch dinner. Dubbed the ‘copper with a kipper tie’ by TV Times, he was the dandyish foil to co-star Wensley Pithey’s supremely grouchy DS Eden.

In 1973 Special Branch’s third series switched to shooting on 16mm film and utilised direct sound recording. Actors George Sewell and Patrick Mower, playing the harder, cynical duo of DIs Craven and Haggerty, replaced the original leads. The stories gained a grittier, realistic patina, more socio-political insights and showcased the ambiguous relationship between police and villains.

Producer Ted Childs recalled the changes to the series, “… Although I felt that Special Branch as a television film format left something to be desired, I learnt a great deal. I brought in directors I’d worked with, some with a documentary background, and really what we tried to do was incorporate the ‘wobbly-scope’ techniques of 16mm documentary film-making into a drama situation.”

The move onto film did not go smoothly. Opposed to Euston operating as a freelance film unit, the Film Production Branch of technicians’ union the ACTT disrupted filming of Special Branch, concerned that television’s move into film production would exacerbate the collapse of the UK’s old film studio system. This dispute was a catalyst to policy reform but union issues about television film production affected Van der Valk in 1976 when it graduated from taped studio production at Thames to an all-film series made by Euston.

Simultaneously writer Ian Kennedy-Martin, who had written for The Troubleshooters, Hadleigh, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, The Onedin Line, story edited Redcap and created Parkin's Patch, was discussing a new police drama with Thames. Parkin's Patch was ostensibly a variation of the Dixon of Dock Green and Z Cars community policing theme. This early Yorkshire Television drama transmitted in 1969, was, no surprises given the theme, the brainchild of Elwyn Jones (see the Coppers and Spies entry on Z Cars).

Again, the series recruited an 'expert' on the unit beat policing of the time in the form of Yorkshire copper Detective Chief Superintendent Arnold Robinson. This policing, which had influenced the development of Z Cars and Softly, Softly Task Force, was distinguished by the introduction of technological changes such as patrol cars, two way radios and the introduction of intelligence-led policing where constables were briefed about crime trends and wanted suspects.

Jones recruited a number of writers from his previous police dramas, including Robert Barr, Allan Prior and Ian Kennedy-Martin. Ian also persuaded his brother Troy to contribute to the series. To describe it today as the precursor to Heartbeat is to do it some disservice and, while it didn't quite qualify as some halfway house between Softly Softly, Special Branch and The Sweeney, there were some fine episodes directed by the likes of Michael Apted and Stephen Frears and the contributions from Ian and Troy Kennedy Martin were particularly noteworthy.

Euston was open about being not particularly fond of Special Branch, despite its popularity, and Ian Kennedy-Martin, who thought it was unrepresentative of crime and policing in 1970s London, was asked to devise its replacement. He was inspired by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Robert Mark's attempts to clean up a seriously corrupted Scotland Yard with his new department A10. The Flying Squad had cultivated unsavoury connections with criminals and Mark wanted to oust corrupt officers and ensure working with informants was legitimate. Several scandals about bribery, evidence planting and corruption broke before 1978’s internal investigation, Operation Countryman.

After police officer Dave Wilson introduced him to the internecine worlds of Flying Squad coppers and East End villains, Kennedy-Martin developed a script titled McLean. Featuring a tough, alcoholic police officer drowning in bureaucracy, criminals and informants, he retitled it Reganand wanted actor John Thaw, a good friend since working together on Redcap, for the lead.

A not so Flying start

However, during Regan’s production Kennedy-Martin had a major disagreement with Childs and its original director, Douglas Camfield, over their changes to his script. He was also unhappy about Euston’s management of writers and how his honest depiction of the Flying Squad was being diluted in the name of entertainment. He soon left the production after negotiating a severance deal.

Director Tom Clegg replaced Camfield and cast the key characters. Clegg originally preferred Stanley Baker for DI Jack Regan but changed his mind when Kennedy-Martin arranged for him to meet John Thaw. Having worked with him on Special Branch, Clegg cast Dennis Waterman as DS George Carter. Respected character actor Garfield Morgan was signed as Regan’s bureaucratic boss DCI Frank Haskins, originally named Thomas Laker in Ted Childs’ writers’ brief.

Euston, confident about Regan’s success, started production on The Sweeney under the working title of The Outcasts before the play’s June 1974 Armchair Cinema transmission. Like Special Branch, it was filmed at Colet Court’s old Hammersmith school buildings (where Montgomery planned the D-Day landings) and used local London locations. Made by a committed cast and crew on tight budgets and deadlines, The Sweeney, with its iconic titles developed by director Terry Green and pounding Harry South theme, debuted January 1975.

Troy Kennedy Martin, co-creator of Z Cars, joined core writers Trevor Preston, Ranald Graham and Roger Marshall to develop his brother Ian’s format for The Sweeney. The series was a study of cynical police officers, a witty, acerbic view of their criminal nemeses and an unflattering exposé of modern policing. Its tough world and ambiguous characters were a far cry from Dixon of Dock Green and Z Cars.

Although, like The Professionals, it has been somewhat eclipsed by the Comic Strip’s metafictional parodies, nostalgic references in a Nissan Almera ad and ironic reconstruction in BBC series Life On Mars, The Sweeney’s original appeal lay in the realistic relationships between the criminals and the Regan-Carter-Haskins trio and the keenly felt deleterious effects of the job on their life-work balance. The post-modern accrual of unreconstructed masculinity, the reshaping of its music, fashion sense and production modes does not diminish The Sweeney's core appeal - characters.

Regan, smoking and drinking himself to death, separated from his wife and child. Eventually, Carter’s wife Alison was murdered and Doreen Haskins suffered a breakdown. Women were victims in this violent, corrupted male dominated world and female officers were conspicuous by their absence. Equally, stories did not ignore the traumatised relatives and innocent victims of the criminal classes.

The hierarchies between villains, henchmen, informants and sympathetic police officers provided structure. Villains evading capture, failed operations and lapses of judgement were a backdrop to Regan’s clashes with Haskins and A10 over their demands for his accountability and fierce criticism of his old school policing methods.

Before the third series went into production Euston made a spin-off cinema film in partnership with EMI. David Wicks, who directed Sweeney! in the spring of 1976, compared the film to William Friedkin’s gritty 1971 police thriller The French Connection, which had partly inspired Childs, Lloyd and Shirley to set up The Sweeney in 1973. Writer Ranald Graham had the daunting prospect of transferring the series to the big screen and his script referenced 1973’s oil crisis and featured corrupt deals between UK government officials and multinational oil cartel OPEC.

The film was such a success EMI bankrolled a sequel, Sweeney 2, made in 1977 prior to filming on the final Thames series. Troy Kennedy Martin provided a script that, in spirit, was much closer to its television inspiration. The plot focused on armed robbers abandoning a seedy, economically depressed Britain for the sunny bolthole of Malta, reflecting Troy's cult caper film The Italian Job (1969) and anticipating films such as The Long Good Friday (1980) and Sexy Beast (2000).

More humour, best defined by the Morecambe and Wise escapades in the episode ‘Hearts and Minds’, was incorporated into the last series of The Sweeney but there was a very tangible sense Regan’s fall from grace was imminent and Carter had become as disenchanted as his ‘guv’. In the final episode ‘Jack or Knave’ a weary Regan, cleared of bribery charges but bitterly disillusioned with his job, climbed into a taxi and disappeared into the traffic, his resignation an acknowledgement perhaps of the public perception of the police’s tarnished reputation in 1978.

From Regan to Morse

The Sweeney influenced The Professionals and the less successful Target, one of the BBC’s first attempts at all-film crime drama series. Starring Patrick Mower, it endured a difficult production journey, hastily reformatted from a gentler, character-based drama, created by Roger Marshall and intended for actor Colin Blakely, into a hardnosed, humourless, violent series. 

Many of The Sweeney’s writers and crew worked on Target, including director David Wickes who helped its BBC film unit overcome some familiar union restrictive practices. Despite toning down violence for the second series, Target’s unsympathetic characters misfired with viewers. Writer Robert Banks Stewart’s redevelopment of Target’s third series was dropped in favour of his pitch for Shoestring.

G.F. Newman’s controversial Law & Order plays, transmitted in April 1978, went where The Sweeney feared to tread. They were an excoriating view of the judicial system from the viewpoints of the police, the criminal, the barrister and the prisoner. Their bleak, low-key, documentary realism, based on stories told to Newman by detectives, criminals and lawyers, generated a debate about the format of drama, whether such realism blurred the line between fiction and fact, and how this reflected the BBC's public service remit.

According to Newman, at a time when Thatcher was championing a new law and order agenda, uncomfortable questions about the terrible state of the criminal justice system were asked in the House of Commons and pressure applied to the BBC not to repeat or sell the series again (BBC Four did eventually repeat it and it was released on DVD in 2008).

In order to distance the plays from The Sweeney and The Professionals, producer Tony Garnett emphasised "we knew we didn't want to do a squealing tyres show" and Law and Order eschewed, as Charlotte Brunsdon notes, the social aspect of previous police dramas and preferred to unpack, with forensic detail, the operations of the police and the criminal justice system in relation to one criminal's life and his involvement in a crime. The central character of Detective Inspector Fred Pyall (a remarkable performance from Derek Martin) was seen as simply one amongst many individuals who brutally twisted the system in their favour.

However Regan’s bitterness, the conservatism of The Professionals and the corruption of Newman’s DI Pyall were juxtaposed with the BBC’s likeable Eddie Shoestring, Jim Bergerac and Euston’s own replacement Minder, Leon Griffiths’ light-hearted crime drama starring Dennis Waterman and George Cole. Ian Kennedy-Martin developed the genre further with The Chinese Detective, dealing with institutional racism, and Juliet Bravo, a revival of the community policing of Z Cars.

Like The Gentle Touch, the latter’s strong, sympathetic female police officer was placed at the centre of a male dominated profession. Indeed Stephanie Turner, who played Inspector Jean Darblay in the first three series of Juliet Bravo, indicated she had auditioned for the lead in The Gentle Touch. She saw Jean as "a career policewoman - fair, honest and with good humour. It was unusual to have this woman in authority, because previous TV police dramas were male dominated."

Both Juliet Bravo and The Gentle Touch attempted to overturn gender stereotypes and reflect the popularity of American series such as Cagney and Lacey. Juliet Bravo was also seen by the BBC as an antidote to the excessive violence of previous police dramas. These were dramas of social and cultural transition and yet were instrumental in pioneering the depiction of female police officers that would eventually lead to the critically acclaimed Prime Suspect.

Colliding together the worlds of Dixon of Dock Green and The Sweeney, Arthur Ellis also explored the changes in policing and on screen dramatisations since the 1950s in his 1988 Screenplay‘The Black and Blue Lamp’. Ellis’s observations paralleled John Thaw’s transformation from Regan into Morse in 1987. Inspector Morse’s contemporary ‘heritage’ setting of Oxford was in vast contrast to The Sweeney’s gritty London. Yet, Morse and Regan were not dissimilar in melancholic temperament and no-nonsense attitude and, as Charlotte Brunsdon observed, ‘the two series share the invocation of what is presented as an old-fashioned integrity.’

Bibliography:

• Alvarado, Manuel, and Stewart, John, Made For Television: Euston Films Limited (BFI Publishing / Thames Television, 1985).
• Brunsdon, Charlotte, ‘Structure of anxiety: recent British television crime fiction,’ in Screen (Volume 39, Issue 3, Oxford Journals, Autumn 1998).
• Brunsdon, Charlotte, Law and Order, BFI TV Classics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
• Cornell, Paul, Day, Martin and Topping, Keith, The Guinness Book of Classic British TV (2nd Edition, Guinness Publishing, 1996).
• Fairclough, Robert and Kenwood, Mike, Sweeney! The Official Companion (Reynolds & Hearn, 2002).
• Feasey, Rebecca, Masculinity And Popular Television (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
• Gilbert, Pat, Shut It! The Inside Story of The Sweeney (Aurum Press, 2010).
• Hill, Peter, ‘Murder was my business,’ in TV Times, (IPC, 17 October 1970).
• Leishmann, Frank, ‘From Dock Green to Life on Mars: Continuity and Change in TV Copland,’ inaugural lecture at University of Gloucestershire on 7 May 2008 (The Cyder Press, 2008). 
• Padman, Tony, 'Whatever Happened to Juliet Bravo's Stephanie Turner?' interview in Daily Express (16 March 2013)
• Potter, John Deane, ‘Why they invented the copper with a kipper tie,’ in TV Times, (IPC, 8 August 1970).
• Robert Reiner, ‘The Dialectics of Dixon: The Changing Image of the TV Cop’, in Mike Stephens and Saul Becker (eds), Police Force, Police Service (MacMillan, 1994)
• Rolinson, David, ‘The ‘Appening: Parkin’s Patch (1969-70)’ 31 December 2012, British Television Drama (2009), available at http://www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk/?p=3250
• Rolinson, David, ‘The Blue Lamp to The Black and Blue Lamp: The police in TV Drama’, 24 April 2011, British Television Drama (2009), available at http://www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk/?p=1429, accessed 3 March 2014.

Earlier: Callan and Public Eye
Last time: ITC and The Prisoner
Previously: The Avengers and Z Cars
Originally: Fabian of the Yard and Dixon of Dock Green

Coppers & Spies Revisited
This entry concludes the re-written versions of the original Coppers and Spies blog posts published on the MovieMail site in 2014. Each part contains additional research material and information on the various crime and spy adventure series the original blog series covered, timed to celebrate Network's highly-anticipated release of The Professionals in high-definition last March.

I hope you enjoy this final post.

6: Beyond the police - From The Professionals to Life on Mars

Creator of The Professionals, writer-producer-director Brian Clemens, boasted a six-decade career making iconic crime and adventure drama. In the 1950s, as staff writer, he scripted many half-hour crime series for the Danzigers production company. He wrote the pilot episode for Danger Man in 1960 and a year later provided the same for The Avengers, the series with which he is forever associated.

While he and producer Albert Fennell oversaw ABC television’s international success with John Steed and Emma Peel in The Avengers, Clemens also contributed to ITC’s The Baron, The Champions and Man in a Suitcase. He created ATV’s anthology series Thriller and, with Fennell, revived The Avengers in 1976 as The New Avengers.

As the second series of The New Avengers completed filming in October 1977 it was clear to Clemens that his co-production company The Avengers (Film and TV) Enterprises Ltd, formed with Fennell and composer Laurie Johnson, was running into financial difficulties. After French finance failed to materialise, the final three episodes of the series were cancelled and the prospect of making a third series evaporated. Four episodes, then being completed in Canada, provided an underwhelming coda to a troubled production.

Recruiting The Professionals

During this unsettled period the managing director of London Weekend Television, Brian Tesler, approached Clemens and Fennell to pitch ideas for a rival drama to Thames Television's hugely successful The Sweeney, made by Euston Films. Clemens devised The A Squad about a fictional British law enforcement agency - CI5 - operating ‘beyond the police’ and ordered by the Home Secretary to combat specific crimes by any means necessary. An elite unit led by the uncompromising George Cowley, two of his top operatives were William Bodie, an ex-paratrooper, mercenary and SAS sergeant, and former detective constable Ray Doyle.

Clemens and Fennell created a subsidiary company, Avengers Mark 1 Productions, and hired director Sidney Hayers, often behind the camera on The Avengers, ITC's The Persuaders! and The New Avengers, to produce the first series of The Professionals. Echoing The Sweeney's use of a former school as an independent production base, Mark 1 established their operations at Harefield Grove, an estate just outside Pinewood Studios. Its grounds and buildings offered filming locations, offices and editing facilities and kept production costs manageable.

Original casting was not without its problems. Clive Revill was offered the role of Cowley but his unavailability eventually took Fennell to Gordon Jackson, an example of casting against type after his success as the buttoned up butler Hudson in Upstairs Downstairs.

A number of British actors were tested for Bodie and Doyle, including Oliver Tobias, Ken Hutchinson and Simon Oates. Jon Finch successfully tested for and accepted the role of Doyle but changed his mind about playing the character. Martin Shaw, best known to audiences for appearances in popular series such as Coronation Street, Doctor in the House, Helen: A Woman of Today, Z Cars, Villains and The Duchess of Duke Street, tested at the same time and was second choice.

Anthony Andrews was signed as Bodie, but as filming commenced it was evident his chemistry with Shaw failed to deliver the required relationship between Bodie and Doyle. Lewis Collins, contracted to play a minor role in the first episode, was then approached about replacing Andrews. Shaw and Collins were wary of each other after appearing together and not quite hitting it off in 'Obsession', an episode of The New Avengers, but the producers believed their off screen animosity had potential for the on screen partnership. The two actors developed their characters and, in the process, became good friends.

The emphasis in The Professionals was on action. Tesler admired how Euston had used hand held cameras, location filming and pacy editing to transform crime dramas such as Special Branch and The Sweeney. After completing the final series of The Sweeney in 1978, many members of Euston’s crew were hired by LWT for The Professionals’ second series, produced by Raymond Menmuir. Filming on 35mm switched to 16mm to allow for the use of lighter, more portable cameras on London locations and production moved to Lee International Studios.

Facing the critics

These changes brought a welcome sense of realism to a series that clocked up 57 episodes between 1977 and 1981. Hugely popular as it was, The Professionals was criticised as a brash, violent, reactionary hybrid of recent crime adventure and police dramas, one decorated with the conspicuous consumerism of the latest fashions and cars. An unsubtle extension of The Sweeney and its BBC clone Target, it eschewed the charm and sophistication of The Avengers and the secret agent travelogue tourism of the ITC days.

Mary Whitehouse vilified it as ‘violent, uncouth and unsavoury’ and LWT withdrew ‘Klansmen’, the last episode of the first series from British screens for not entirely clear reasons other than citing its discomfort about a story that, rather crudely, exposed Bodie’s racism. This signalled the series’ emergence during a period of social and political upheaval, its characters and format both reflecting and contradicting these changes.

Permissive, misogynistic and pathologically insolent, Bodie and Doyle maintained a macho fantasy just as ‘traditional’ masculinity itself was undergoing a major reconfiguration via feminist and queer critiques. Indeed the ‘rough’ and ‘sensitive’ of the Bodie and Doyle pairing played into a homoerotic re-coding of the relationship, something not lost on both the Comic Strip’s own satire of the series in 1984, The Bullshitters, and female writers who erotically reinterpreted this bond in stories produced for fan communities in the 1980s.

Perhaps responding to Martin Shaw's own disenchantment with the role, Clemens and his writing team attempted to deflect the pervasive hypermasculinity of the series with the more sensitive characterisation of Doyle. Gradually, and particularly when Raymond Menmuir took over as producer, there was an effort to inject more characterisation into the three leads and develop a sense of realism to some of the storylines.

It was not entirely successful and The Professionals always seemed to sit uneasily between the glamorous and stereotypical machismo of Starsky and Hutch and the grittier world of its predecessor The Sweeney or spy thrillers such as Callan. Menmuir took a less fascistic tone with the series' depiction of the extreme methods employed by CI5 to deal with terrorist plots, assassinations, police corruption, miscarriages of justice, inner city racism and drug smuggling. 

If The Sweeney exposed the tensions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ policing during the 1970s, with Inspector Jack Regan symbolising these painful changes, The Professionals offered tough remedies for a dysfunctional Britain perceived as ‘the sick man of Europe’. Occasionally this 'fight fire with fire' attitude was leavened with stories that attempted to question or expose CI5’s morality as it defended the British way of life and Cowley himself often spoke up for civil rights.

The Professionals was a power fantasy mirroring the harder law and order agenda of a newly elected centre right Conservative government under Thatcher. Britain experienced IRA bombings, the Iranian Embassy siege, the Falklands and the Operation Countryman investigation into police corruption while The Professionals was on air. To emphasise this connection TV Times promoted The Professionals with a sobering article about its inspiration, the real trouble-shooters of the SAS and the Metropolitan Police Special Patrol Group whose single aim was ‘to crush terrorism’.

However, the BBC eventually challenged Bodie and Doyle’s violent escapism with Shoestring, a drama about a sensitive private investigator recovering from a nervous breakdown. Layers of characterisation replaced kicking down doors and impressive ratings saw off ITV’s competitive scheduling of The Professionals fourth season. The ITV strike of 1979, which caused financial problems for LWT, also disrupted the transmission and production of the series.

Life after The Professionals

The SAS affected Collins’ subsequent career after the series finished in 1981. While Shaw successfully returned to the stage in Alan Bleasdale’s acclaimed ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ in the mid-1980s and has since enjoyed a stable television career, Collins enlisted with the Territorials, gained the coveted Red Beret and joined the Parachute Regiment.

He applied to the SAS, passed the initial selection stages but was rejected because senior officers believed his public profile made him a security risk. Ironically, he then played SAS Captain Peter Skellen in the film Who Dares Wins. Made by former Professionals alumni Ian Sharp and Raymond Menmuir, and inspired by the SAS assault of the Iranian Embassy in 1980, it emulated the hawkishness of the series. Collins was briefly considered as a possible James Bond in 1982 but producer Albert Broccoli thought him ‘too aggressive’.

After The Professionals the crime adventure format endured with Dempsey and Makepeace and C.A.T.S Eyes but police procedurals and private investigators dominated television during the 1980s and 1990s.

It was a sign fictional representations of crime and security were reflecting the shift in crime control attitudes and equal opportunities within the occupational culture of policing. Prime Suspect and Between the Lines became the template for realistic explorations of operational issues, police corruption and institutional sexism and racism.

The 1990s saw a revival, by dint of baby boomer nostalgia, of the crime adventure genre. The Saint and The Avengers underwent dubious, uninspiring Hollywood film adaptations and the BBC produced a short-lived return of the quirky detective series, Randall and Hopkirk. After satellite channel Granada Plus achieved high ratings with their re-screening of The Professionals and the series was fondly referenced in an ad for the Nissan Almera in 1997, David Wickes, who directed episodes of the series, and creator Brian Clemens felt it was ripe for a return.

However, they struggled to sell the independently financed series to terrestrial broadcasters. Despite expanding the format of the series to encompass global terrorism and international crime, audiences did not embrace CI5 - The Professionals and UK investor and broadcaster Sky One heavily cut episodes for violent content. A mooted second series was cancelled.

In 2002 Spooks, a BBC drama firmly set in the post-9/11 global terrorism age and branded ‘MI5 not 9 – 5’, debuted. A fast paced thriller intertwining the personal lives of agents with the unrelenting ‘war on terror’ it echoed Wickes’ and Clemens’ attempts to globalise and update their franchise. Unlike The Professionals and the glossy ITC spy series of the 1960s, Spooks determined to depict male heroes making difficult choices between domestic responsibilities and maintaining the secret state. As an index of their millennial masculine insecurities, male characters sacrificed their personal lives for the public good.

These developments in crime adventure and police dramas connect with issues raised by Arthur Ellis’s 1988 play The Black And Blue Lamp. It wittily unpacked the changing television depictions of community policing and modern crime control and examined the darker side of public perceptions of crime professionals. Ellis’s deconstruction of the nostalgic but illusory yearning for a more direct way of tackling crime would be influential on Life on Mars, a series conceived in 1998 but not produced and broadcast until 2006.

Life on Mars, and its sequel Ashes to Ashes, interrogated the questionable, fictionalised views of crime and police via its unreconstructed central male character Gene Hunt. Television depictions of the police were, it suggested, nostalgic, memorialised constructions belonging to a television afterlife.

Hunt symbolised our desire to constantly resurrect and reinstate the ideal crime fighter on television, where such figures help us reconceptualise the past and render order in a chaotic modern world. A post-credits shot of George Dixon in the final episode of Ashes to Ashes, a policeman shot dead in The Blue Lamp but revived for the eponymous television series, visually acknowledged Ellis’s theme and Gene Hunt’s origins.

Bibliography:

• Alvarado, Manuel, and Stewart, John, Made For Television: Euston Films Limited (BFI Publishing / Thames Television, 1985).
• Brunsdon, Charlotte, ‘Structure of anxiety: recent British television crime fiction,’ in Screen (Volume 39, Issue 3, Oxford Journals, Autumn 1998).
• Chapman, James, Saints & Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s (I.B.Tauris, 2002).
• Cornell, Paul, Day, Martin and Topping, Keith, The Guinness Book of Classic British TV (2nd Edition, Guinness Publishing, 1996).
• Feasey, Rebecca, Masculinity And Popular Television (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
• Hunt, Leon, ‘“Drop everything… including your pants!”: The Professionals and ‘hard’ action TV,’ in Osgerby, Bill and Gough-Yates, Anna (eds), Action TV: Tough Guys, Smooth Operators and Foxy Chicks, (Routledge, 2001).
• Leishmann, Frank, ‘From Dock Green to Life on Mars: Continuity and Change in TV Copland,’ inaugural lecture at University of Gloucestershire on 7 May 2008 (The Cyder Press, 2008). 
• Mason, Bernard, ‘The quiet killers who wage war on terror,’ in TV Times, (IPC, 28 January 1978).
• Matthews, Dave, ‘Modus Operandi’, ‘Headquarters’, ‘Episode Guide’, ‘Lewis Collins’, The Authorised Guide to The Professionals (1996), available at http://www.mark-1.co.uk, accessed between February and June 2014.
• Robert Reiner, ‘The Dialectics of Dixon: The Changing Image of the TV Cop’, in Mike Stephens and Saul Becker (eds), Police Force, Police Service (MacMillan, 1994)
• Rogers, Dave, The Ultimate Avengers (Boxtree/Channel 4, 1995). 
• Rolinson, David, ‘The Blue Lamp to The Black and Blue Lamp: The police in TV Drama’, 24 April 2011, British Television Drama (2009), available at http://www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk/?p=1429, accessed 3 March 2014.  

Penultimately: The Sweeney
Earlier: Callan and Public Eye
Last time: ITC and The Prisoner
Previously: The Avengers and Z Cars
Originally: Fabian of the Yard and Dixon of Dock Green

After successfully adapting the three Quatermass television stories of the 1950s and with the box office tills ringing from the well-received cinema version of Quatermass and the Pit(1967), Hammer Films approached creator-writer Nigel 'Tom' Kneale for an original film script featuring the titular scientist with a view to continuing the franchise.

The studio announced another film but nothing developed beyond an outline and preliminary discussions with Kneale. Hammer had faced delays getting Quatermass and the Pit to the screen after their partnership with Columbia faltered and it was perhaps disinterest from distributors, Hammer's struggle to adapt to changing audience tastes and the slow decline of the industry as a whole that stalled their fourth Quatermass outing.

Kneale remained busy. His relationship with the BBC strengthened in the late 1960s and early 1970s and he succeeded in getting several key plays to the screen in this period. This was after he had refused overtures from the BBC to contribute a one-off drama to their Theatre 625 strand on BBC2. He felt he had never really been properly recompensed for the Quatermass serials he had made in the 1950s, something he made quite clear to the BBC's Director General Hugh Carleton Greene. A one off payment was duly agreed and Kneale undertook his new assignment. This would become 1968's celebrated play about television's Orwellian future potential, The Year of the Sex Olympics. (1)

He followed this with 1970's 'Wine of India' for The Wednesday Play, which centred on a 100-year old couple who must make plans for their funeral in a future where advances in medicine have resulted in a need for population control and where those reaching the age of 100 must submit to a government controlled euthanasia program. He contributed 'The Chopper' to Out of the Unknown in 1971, a ghost story about a dead motorcyclist haunting his wrecked machine, and followed this in 1972 with The Stone Tape, in which scientists researching new recording technologies at an old mansion investigate a haunting.

Weeks prior to the excellent audience and critical reception for The Stone Tape BBC Head of Drama Ronnie Marsh commissioned Kneale to write a new four part Quatermass serial in November 1972 known then as Quatermass IV. Work commenced under the aegis of Dixon of Dock Green's producer Joe Waters with some preliminary visual effects filming at the BBC's Ealing Television Film Studios. Ealing had previous form for Quatermass, filmed inserts of the pit containing the Martian spacecraft had been shot there in 1959 for the television version of Quatermass and the Pit. (2)

While Kneale completed re-writes with Joe Waters, BBC effects men Bernard Wilkie, Ian Scoones and Rhys Jones set up production at Ealing in June 1973. Linking two stages - 3A and 3B - to provide a longer line of sight they completed test filming of the Soviet-American space station featured in Kneale's new story and carried out tests using the foreground miniatures process. This combined models of the station and miniature astronaut figures with filmed live action of actors costumed as astronauts climbing over black covered rostra and ladders. (3)

An early intention had been for the BBC to make the series as a co-production, mirroring the funding partnership formed with 20th Century Fox to produce the Colditz series in 1972. Waters had even mooted which composers he might opt for - Malcolm Williamson or Joseph Horowitz perhaps - but there were growing concerns about the mounting costs for the four part series. With the production already spiraling toward a budget of £200,000, the BBC rejected the further expense of building a studio or location based version of Stonehenge and cancelled the project after they were refused permission to film on location at the ancient site. (4)

As Kneale reflected in 1979, "I had lightly written in Stonehenge because my last visit to it had seemed to make it very possible. What I hadn't realised was that, in the interim, it had become Big Business and the place was like a factory with tourists there from dawn to dusk. It was the pride of the Department of the Environment and they weren't going to let anyone go near it."(5)

Although the BBC held the rights to Kneale's scripts until 1975 the option to produce Quatermass IV was never taken up. Kneale was commissioned to include a new play he had developed with director Michael Elliott, 'Cracks', for the next series of Play for Today but it also remained unproduced after some disagreements with producer Irene Shubik. Shubik had, coincidentally, asked Kneale for a new Quatermass story for her Out of the Unknown anthology's first series back in 1965. His last work for the BBC was a modern version of 'Jack and the Beanstalk' he contributed to Innes Lloyd's anthology Bedtime Stories in 1974. (6)

ITV franchise ATV came calling and Kneale commenced a similarly frustrating relationship with commercial television. It was one that would, ironically, bring about the return of Quatermass.Kneale's evocative 1975 play about witchcraft, Murrain, inspired ATV to commission his anthology series Beasts in 1976 but he was bitterly disappointed when the company cancelled his play about Manx slavery, Crow, due to cost reasons.

"...a fantastically interesting idea, something that would be really good to do."

Enter producer Verity Lambert, then an executive at Thames Television but now given the responsibility for its Euston Films subsidiary, bringing its input under the overall remit of Thames' drama production. As Euston's new chief executive, with a very different outlook from its previous executives Lloyd Shirley and George Taylor, she hired Linda Agran as script executive and Johnny Goodman as executive in charge of production to work with her and producer Ted Childs. She immediately started looking for projects that would expand Euston's portfolio. (7) 

Lambert had already locked horns with Kneale on a 1965 edition of Late Night Line-Up when he had criticised her for frightening children with Doctor Who, of which she had been producer from 1963.

This didn't deter her when the Quatermass IV scripts duly arrived from Kneale's agent in 1978: "I just thought it was a fantastically interesting idea, something that would be really good to do."(8) Hammer's Michael Carreras must have been having similar thoughts about the prestige of Quatermass IV and was pipped at the post by Euston in securing the scripts for his now ailing film company.

When Lambert rescued Jack Gold's troubled television film The Sailor's Return, she believed one way of potentially recouping the production costs, having struck a co-production deal with National Film Finance Corporation, would be to then release the film theatrically prior to its television broadcast. Negotiations prevented this at the time but when Quatermass went into production she was determined to similarly amortise its hefty £1.2 million budget.

She set Kneale the task of re-shaping his scripts as four episodes filmed on 35mm to be broadcast on ITV and as a separate, shorter 100-minute version intended for theatrical distribution in America and Europe as The Quatermass Conclusion. As Kneale told John Fleming in 1979, "but that was as far as one could guess. Because, as none of it had been shot, one couldn't tell what would work out best; some things paid off better than we'd ever thought."(9)

"I think it was the most expensive thing we had attempted at Euston Films at that point. And we felt the only way we could justify the expense was to make sure we could re-edit it into a film which could possibly have theatrical release," Lambert recalled. Childs simply saw it as a way for Lambert and Agran to put their own stamp on Euston and move the company away from its association with drama such as The Sweeney. (10)  Euston's May 1977 announcement of the production also anticipated the popularity of screen science fiction and fantasy that would grow after the release of Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

The major change that Kneale made to his script was to re-locate the climactic sequence of the third episode, originally the budget-busting scenes at Stonehenge that scuppered the BBC production, to the more accessible and affordable Wembley Stadium. A thirteen week shoot around London, Hertfordshire and near Pinewood Studios commenced on 26th August 1978 under the auspices of director Piers Haggard.

Haggard was an experienced film and television director, and had recently received high praise for his work on the celebrated BBC Dennis Potter drama Pennies From Heaven (its first episode was broadcast 7th March that year). Prior to this he notched up numerous television credits on series such as Callan, Man At The Top, Public Eye as well as single plays in the ITV Playhouse, The Wednesday Play, Thirty Minute Theatre and Armchair Theatre strands. Among his first film credits was the highly regarded horror film Blood on Satan's Claw (1971).

He came recommended to Verity Lambert by agent Jenne Casarotto, who had originally sent her the Quatermass IV scripts. Lambert had already worked with Haggard on 'The House of Men', a Catherine Cookson play within the anthology strand Romance she produced for Thames Television in 1977. With Quatermass Haggard recalled: "I had some meetings with her. I've always liked science fiction and there were ideas in it - it was ambitious and well-budgeted. The fact that this particular script had been around for a while was manifest because it was about a hippy movement which he'd spotted as current a few years earlier."(11)

To give the series and film some clout internationally, Euston approached Sir John Mills to play the aged Bernard Quatermass. Mills was reluctant to take the role but was persuaded by his wife. Kneale wasn't entirely happy with the casting either: "He didn't have the authority for Quatermass... I think he was very uneasy because it wasn't the sort of thing he had made his name with. He didn't reckon science fiction was his thing."(12)

The demands of filming for Mills were reported in TV Times. It took an hour for the make-up artists to prepare Bernard Quatermass for the scenes shot at Wembley Stadium for the alien attack. Mills claimed: "I'd have preferred a supporter's scarf and a rattle but they insisted on painting me with a gallon of glue and covering me in chalk and powder. I could hardly walk when they'd finished but I think that the stiffness of the suit helped me portray a man who had just witnessed the extinction of thousands of his fellow beings."(13)

Mills was joined by Simon MacCorkindale and Barbara Kellerman playing the astronomer Joe Kapp and his wife Clare. MacCorkindale had previously worked on Kneale's terrifying 'Baby', one of the best of ATV's Beasts anthology and had carved out a respectable television acting career with roles in Hawkeye The Pathfinder, Sutherland's Law, I Claudius, Jesus of Nazareth and Within These Walls. Kellerman was recently known for her role as Delly Lomas in Wilfred Greatorex's dystopian political drama 1990. Kneale was just as disparaging about their casting, lamenting that Kellerman "just smiled all the time" and that MacCorkindale "should never have been cast as the last, rational, intelligent man in the world. We had him in Beasts playing an idiot and he was very good at that."(14)

Bond producer Cubby Broccoli probably spent more on cigars every week.

Whereas The Sweeney had operated from its base at Colet Court, using standing sets for the Flying Squad's offices, and filmed other interiors and exteriors largely on location in London, Quatermass was, as noted by producer Norton Knatchbull, Euston's first 'art department' production. This meant that production designer Arnold Chapkis was responsible for building many sets from scratch, including an 18th Century observatory and its accompanying impressive radio telescope dishes, the various stone circles erected in the surrounding countryside and dressing Wembley Stadium with crystalised bodies, chalk dust and smoke for the climactic scenes depicting the alien harvest of the gathered Planet People. (15)

Interiors and exteriors were also filmed and some post-production completed at Harefield Grove Farm and Harefield Hall, a small studio complex near Pinewood that had been home to the first season of The Professionals in 1977. (16) Visual effects for the American-Soviet space station link up and the space shuttle sequences were completed at the Battersea studios of Clearwater Films, a company established by former Gerry Anderson alumni Ken Turner and David Mitton in the mid-1970s. Mitton was originally a member of Derek Meddings' effects team working on Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Joe 90 and UFO.

Johnny Goodman joked about the budget for the effects being so low that Bond producer Cubby Broccoli probably spent more on cigars every week. (17) However, Clearwater gained a reputation for stop-motion animation that would lead to a successful period co-producing ITV's Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends television series until the company's closure in 1990.

Kneale was impressed with the scale of the production and briefly visited the shoot, acknowledging the effort Haggard and the crew were expending on the series: "They shot it in mid-summer 1978, a hot, hot year. I found them all practically stripped down to their boots on the lot, shooting under fierce sun. It wasn't easy. I think Piers was very ready for a rest at the end of it but he got through it all right."(18)

Shooting completed in December 1978 with a number of bridging shots that would be important when it came to editing the four episodes down, covering the removal of certain sections of the narrative to create the 100-minute feature version of the series, The Quatermass Conclusion. With editing, post syncing, scoring and effects completed, Quatermass was ready for transmission by February 1979. Euston and Thames' promotion for the series began in the summer, promising its arrival on screens in September.

However, a national ITV technicians' strike in August 1979 blacked out the entire network for 75 days in support of the electricians' industrial action at Thames Television, taken after rejecting a pay increase and then being given an ultimatum by management to return to work or risk losing their jobs. As the strike dragged on, Euston completed the remaining work on The Quatermass Conclusion and prepared it for its theatrical debut in Europe. When ITV returned to the air on 24 October 1979, 'Ringstone Round', the first episode of the much delayed Quatermass was broadcast at 9.00pm.

By November The Quatermass Conclusion had premiered, with Kneale and lead actor MacCorkindale present, at the 9th Annual Festival of Fantastic Cinema and Science Fiction in Paris. There was little interest from American distributors and the film had a limited release in North America the following Spring.

The press and audience reaction to Quatermass was rather mixed at the time. Many wondered what had happened to the bullish Quatermass they'd seen in the 1950s and 1960s. The simple truth was that the character was older and Kneale used this to reflect back his generation's bewilderment at the declining social mores of the 1960s and the harsher realities of the 1970s. He was certainly forthright about the subject: "One of the more horrific and offensive things I found about the '60s was the 'let it all hang out' business. Inhibitions are like the bones in a creature, and if you pull the bones out all you're left with is a floppy jelly."(19)

Kneale's concerns, about the generation gap, the population explosion, old age and euthanasia and the impact of the end of Empire, the continuation of the Cold War and intractable economic recession, all fed into Quatermass. "As I had done with Quatermass II, I looked at the alarming aspects of contemporary trends. Since then we'd seen 'flower power' and hippies, so all I did was bring them into the story."(20)

Kneale was also of the pre-baby boomer era where the concept of the teenager had not existed and in maturity he had become wary of the youth sub-cultures that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s and the counter-culture of the 1970s.

The hippy became his folk-devil in Quatermass, with the Planet People cult analogous to the demonised youth movements that allegedly contributed to the collapse of morality, law and order and social stability in the post-war generation. In 1979, this perspective in Quatermass seemed out-of-step, perhaps a symptom of the long delays to the project since it was originally written in 1972, and Britain was by then already a post-punk nation on the brink of a significant shift to the political right. 

"It’s the only show that anybody watches anymore. Don’t they realise?" 

In Quatermass, the retired Professor returns to London to participate in a television programme celebrating a joint American-Soviet space project, but also looking for his lost granddaughter. He finds a society on the brink of collapse, the city a battleground for gangs, patrolled by a privatised police force and weakened by power cuts (an ironic touch given the fact that the series was delayed by a strike that knocked ITV off the air).

The ITV strike seemed to foreshadow, as Dave Rolinson and Nick Cooper noted, that in Quatermass "the state of television is symptomatic of society’s decline" and Kneale "uses television as a framing device, with an alienated Quatermass seeing many events only through screens." The series opens with Quatermass denouncing the American-Soviet spacelab on air and hijacking the broadcast to appeal for help finding his granddaughter Hettie. It is also a moment where Kneale reiterates the importance of reclaiming humanity in the midst of chaos: "that's all I'm interested in now - a human face."

Later, Kneale invokes Swiftian satire when Quatermass returns to the TV studio and halts the transmission of the soft porn 'Titupy Bumpity' entertainment show, as prescient a sequence about lowest common denominator broadcasting as the exploration of state regulated reality television in The Year of the Sex Olympics. (21) This is helped immeasurably by choreographer Tudor Davies' performance as the camp, neurotic television director aggrieved that his show has been dragged off the air: "It’s the only show that anybody watches anymore. Don’t they realise?"

Mark Duguid also connected the wrecked future Britain of Quatermass with events closer to home in 1978-79 and "the 'Winter of Discontent', in which Britain was crippled by strikes and power cuts, rubbish was piled high in the streets, and unemployment reached levels not seen since the 1930s (with worse yet to come)."(22)

Kneale elaborated on his 'state of the nation' depiction of Britain in the TV Times: "There are some clues already in the most obvious place: the streets. Pavements littered with rubbish. Walls painted with angry graffiti. Belfast, black with smoke and rage. Gang fights. Worst of all, the mindless violence."(23)

The opening episodes of Quatermass are full of often prescient details that relay his vision of "the Great Urban Collapse". He was in good company because a great deal of British science fiction television of the time - Doomwatch, The Changes and Survivors - was exploring and depicting the symptoms of British decline. 

Indeed, producer Ted Childs picked up on this: "I was impressed by the prophetic elements he'd included. We had to acquire vans and Landrovers to serve as police vehicles, and adapted them with moveable grills fitted over the windows - now a standard fitting on much police transport. Similarly the police armour evolved as per Tom's text which we now see all too frequently on our streets."(24)

Kneale's prescience could also be applied to the promise of North Sea Oil as the salve to all of Britain's ills so enthusiastically promoted by government in the late 1970s. Quatermass suggests it would be a promise never kept as Quatermass and Joe Kapp drive away from London through an abandoned refinery. What was "going to put everything right" clearly hasn't in this Britain of the near-future and any oil wealth generated seems long since squandered.

Many commentators noted that when Thatcher came to power in May 1979 she oversaw a boom in revenue from oil production. Yet, Britain's infrastructure crumbled when, as Guy Lodge pointed out in 2013, "Thatcher missed a trick in not diverting some of the proceeds of oil revenue into an oil fund, like Norway and others did. Instead she used the lot to support current spending, including covering the costs of large-scale industrial restructuring and funding expensive tax cuts to woo middle England". (25)

The counter-culture is represented on the one hand by the Planet People, a mass youth movement and messianic cult seemingly brainwashed to believe that they will be transported away from this dystopian Britain to a utopian life on another planet, and on the other by violent gangs - the Badders and Blue Brigades - as an extemporisation of the nationalist-separatist and urban terrorisms of the period.

When Quatermass is set upon by well spoken Badder gang members Kneale wryly reflects the notion that in the 1970s "the German RAF (aka Baader Meinhof) and Italian Red Brigades were exclusively composed of middle-class terrorists who had dropped out of high schools or universities" and that many affluent young people from West Europe were attracted to the ideologies of radical groups because they felt powerless. (26)

Dave Rolinson and Nick Cooper also tie the anger and frustrations of the youth cults in Quatermass to "the neotribalism of early-1970s football hooliganism" and this is given a further twist by not only setting the climax of episode three at Wembley Stadium but also in Quatermass's conversation with Kapp as they drive past the Stadium in episode one where the role of the Stadium is described as a 'killing ground', an area used for the containment of malcontent youth in televised fights. (27)

The gangs and the Planet People seem to be an extension of the violent 'racial' purges seen in the climax of Quatermass and the Pit and the notion of violent spectacle as entertainment resurfacing from the concerns about reality television in The Year of the Sex Olympics and a restatement of themes about teenage suicides in 1965's unproduced The Big, Big Giggle.

The depiction of The Planet People disappointed Kneale: "I wanted them to be more crazy, aggressive, dangerous and out of control but as they came across in the film they were rather pretty and harmless, a bit like the flower people. I'd imagined a sort of cross between super-punks and whirling dervishes; people who had been driven mad by the gods who were to destroy them..." (28) However, further connections can be made today through Quatermass beyond the simple premise they were a representation of the hippy generation.

What were anachronisms in Quatermass suddenly resonate again as Gavin Burrows suggests. The battles between the Planet People and the police at the stone circle "strangely foreshadow the conflicts over Stonehenge in the late Eighties. The Stonehenge Festival had begun in 1972, but was then a small affair known only in marginal and counter-cultural circles. It wasn’t propelled into the popular consciousness until it was banned with the ensuing ‘Battle of the Beanfield’ in 1985 - six years after transmission." There is also, as Burrows notes, an analogue between the Planet People and the same decade's depictions of 'new age' travellers, ravers, and environmental protestors. (29)

"Old magic"

As the Planet People gather at stone circles, Quatermass is asked to comment from the sidelines on TV as the Soviets and Americans plough their resources into a space station project. Disaster strikes as the station and its astronauts are destroyed by an unknown force and simultaneously, hundreds of youths are vapourised by an intense beam striking the Earth. Quatermass takes shelter with astronomer Joe Kapp and his young family and as more and more youths are slaughtered by the extraterrestrial force, he returns to London hoping to find a solution. The answer lies in an extraordinary community of old people, living in a car scrapyard, who rescue him from a gang attack.

It is this older generation, and their rigid application of science and knowledge as elders and betters, who must now prevail and preserve the younger. This aspect of the story was much more than a sideswipe at the hippy generation. As Kneale himself put it: "The theme I was trying to express was a last ditch use of logic and dwindling technological resources against suicidal mysticism, and the idea of the old trying to redress the balance of the young - to save the young, a nice paradoxical, ironical idea, a sort of inversion of the '60s..."(30)

The character of Joe Kapp provides something of a devil's advocate between these two view points as a rational scientist in the mold of Quatermass but also as a man connected, albeit fleetingly at the start of the story, to his Jewish faith, to an ancient belief system. At first, as a scientist, he rejects their irrational beliefs but as events unfold he begins to doubt the evidence of his eyes.

Kapp slowly begins to understand that his own lapsed belief occupies the same spectrum where the Planet People believe in an extraterrestrial utopia. Religious faith and ritual is another facet to Quatermass that seems to get somewhat overlooked. It's clearly an element that director Piers Haggard picked up on, overlaying orthodox faiths (both religious and technological) with the "old magic" practiced by the processions of Planet People.

Mystical indoctrination was a theme he exploited well in the folk horror of Blood on Satan's Claw and its marriage to the British countryside and pre-industrial folklore is continued here. The Planet People converge on the stone circles in the story through their interaction with ley lines, connecting to sacred sites beneath the ground using the plumb bob as a symbol of their anti-rationalist, pre-industrial belief system.

Quatermass, written in 1972, also now appears to be following on the coattails (rather being the actual coat) of a particular period when there was a huge revival of the occult through popular culture in the 1970s. There was a growing counter-cultural interest in alternative faiths and religions as orthodox beliefs struggled to survive the secularism that dominated the 1960s. Everything Atlantean and Crowleyan was popular and was reflected in books, films, music, comics and television of the time.

In particular, Tom Lethbridge, an academic, archaeologist and honorary Keeper of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, was a memorable figure in the world of parapsychology in the 1960s and 1970s, and Kneale would have picked up on his notoriety after he had postulated the Stone Tape theory in 1961. This suggested ghostly hauntings were as a result of emotional and traumatic events stored or recorded in the environment. His successful use of the pendulum bob for dowsing and divination and adherence to the von Däniken theory that extraterrestrials visited the Earth and affected man's evolution must also have informed Kneale's depiction of the Planet People.

The plumb bob is in fact the equivalent of Kapp's telescopes, scientific instruments firmly planted in this green and pleasant land, that he uses to trace the skies in search of the unknowable extraterrestrial. Kapp's wife is also an archaeologist, unearthing a prehistoric Beaker folk grave in the grounds of the estate, gaining an intimate relationship with the land and the basic technology ancient communities used.

Kneale forges connections across time, through various periods of pre-industrial development (folk belief in ley lines, the Beaker folk building Ringstone Round as a prototype of Stonehenge, old Jewish faith) to the industrial and scientific developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Kapp's observatory was built then). Kapp and Quatermass are, like M.R James's antiquarians, setting out to rediscover the true function of myth and folklore in a world that has long abandoned them. (31) The ancient lore, in a typical inversion of Kneale's and with shades of Quatermass and the Pit, is revealed as markers of an advanced technology belonging to a long distant alien race.

The older Quatermass attempts to understand the Planet People after he and Joe meet a group of them when they first escape from the chaos of London. The procession of Planet People, much like the similar pagan congregations in both Blood on Satan's Claw and The Wicker Man, is framed against or enclosed within the rural landscape.

As Derek Johnston notes, folk horror often uses landscape as a return to "the 'hippy' ideals of reverence of nature, sexual openness, rejection of the military industrial complex and its influence on society." Kneale, as with many other proponents of folk horror, warns that this has its consequences, a punishment if you will. Maintaining his conservative stance, he also shows the Planet People as dangerously violent when they attack a farm in search of food. (32)

The Planet People accompany their tracing across the landscape with a chant of "ley" or "leh" - a prayer for the mystical traces beneath the ground and a call to the extraterrestrial force. Clare's rarely used Jewish prayers and candle ritual are reinstalled when she is traumatised after witnessing their wholesale slaughter at Ringstone Round and the lapsed Joe also returns to the ritual when his wife and children are incinerated. This aspect of the story may have been influenced by Kneale's wife Judith Kerr, a German Jew who escaped from Berlin and the Nazis after her father Alfred had openly criticised them.

Holocaust iconography is also present: several characters express their revulsion when they realise, in the aftermath of the human harvesting at the stone circles and Wembley, the air they breathe is full of ashes composed of human remains or the rubble they stand in is powdered human flesh and bone. Even the Nazi purges are brought to mind as Quatermass drives past a stall piled high with books in a ramshackle London market, a sign exclaiming: 'Guaranteed to burn well'.

Rituals of faith that bind together families and communities run through Quatermass - whether their members are young or old, rational or superstitious. The nursery rhymes that Kapp's children recite become a rallying cry for the gangs converging on the "sacred turf" of Wembley Stadium while Quatermass assembles a group of scientists and associates from the older generation to analyse the attacks after he realises they are immune. Joe Kapp tries to recall his family through the candle ceremony of his Jewish background.

The "old magic" then is also the community of knowledge that Quatermass gathers together, finding a solution with the science of the establishment rejected by the Planet People and that they replaced with a return to Dark Ages superstition, a realm where you must "stop trying to know things". This is Kneale at his most reactionary, where his own faith in the institutions that saw Britain through the Second World War - the research scientists, the code breakers, the army, the police, the government - will eventually be seen to bring an uncontrolled younger generation to heel.

As Peter Hutchings suggests, the Quatermass stories all seem to "show Britain still bound to the experience of the Second World War... as a pervasive ideal of national identity... and the function of the aliens is to reveal and clarify something that is already there, with their subsequent destruction a means of dealing, if only temporarily, with internal social tensions."(33)

The binding together of the two generations only comes at the end when Quatermass lures the alien force to Kapp's observatory with a manufactured human pheromone, a honey trap to deter it with the simultaneous detonation of a nuclear device. His missing granddaughter Hettie emerges from the Planet People gathering to help him, in the throes of a heart attack, to set the device off. The nuclear device is the ultimate symbol of the post Second World War generation's transition into modernity. It ended that conflict but it also was the catalyst for the emergence and domination of the superpowers that Quatermass blames for Britain's economic and social collapse.

Quatermass teems with great ideas and the sum of the individual parts are as good as anything Kneale produced at the time, albeit they are a more reactionary, conservative expression of those ideas. However, beyond the discovery of the alien's purpose the story loses focus. Even Kneale acknowledged this: "I was never really happy with a lot of it in fact I was never really happy with my original idea. The setting, the country fallen into social disaster, was hugely interesting to write and go into detail about but the force from outer space was really a bit ordinary and once it was revealed what it was it could not carry any further surprises or interest. All you had left then was how they'd try to deal with it." (34)

Mills, MacCorkindale and Kellerman may have come in for some opprobrium from Kneale but their performances are certainly the least embarrassing ones. Mills is rather good, humanising Quatermass and distinctively performing the character's development from concerned old man to reinvigorated, rational scientist. MacCorkindale is affecting as a father suffering the loss of wife and children and doubting his own rationality and beliefs.

Kellerman is fine given she had the thankless task of portraying Joe Kapp's slightly neurotic and paranoid wife. Margaret Tyzack is great as District Commissioner Annie Morgan, a relic of Empire nostalgically recalling bobbies on the beat and minding your Ps and Qs. The worst offenders are probably Brewster Mason as Quatermass' Russian colleague Gurov, a performance which simply relies on stereotype and the rather overwrought tone used by Tony Sibbald as Chuck Marshall, the American television anchor and astronaut.

Haggard directs effectively if not as pacily as the material might demand and, as suggested, he manages to provide some startling contrasts between a derelict London and the rolling countryside. His sense of scale is rewarding, giving Quatermass an epic quality, ensuring the substantial budget is on screen when it comes to the set pieces at Ringstone Round and Wembley. He understands Kneale's concepts and ensures they are clearly presented. Whereas the four part series has its longeurs, The Quatermass Conclusion is tighter but removes a huge chunk of material relevant to Kneale's major theme about old age in the scenes where Quatermass is cared for by the scrapyard community. There are other, smaller moments that the feature version elects to trim or remove that make the series more satisfying as a viewing experience.

About the restoration
Quatermass has never looked better. Network have done a splendid job in returning to the 35mm film elements for their presentation. The four episodes, which all come complete with the ad-bumpers, are full of detail and depth with consistently good rendering of colour and contrast. There is plenty of fine detail in faces, costumes and settings and, as it should be, film grain is present. There are a few instances were the picture becomes a little soft but for the most part this is a long awaited, very accomplished high definition picture upgrade.

The 106 minute The Quatermass Conclusion is presented in the theatrical aspect of 1.78:1 and therefore the picture crops some information at the top and bottom of the screen but gains slightly at the sides. Again, it has been restored and while it may be slightly softer in detail on occasions, it looks very good.

Special Features
Sadly, not much to get excited about on this release. Creating value added material is expensive but for an interesting title from such an undervalued writer this release could have at least ported over the Sci-Fi Channel interview with Kneale that made it onto the previous Clear Vision DVD release.
5.1 mix for episodic version
For the purists there is the original mono but Network also provide this serviceable 5.1 mix.
Music-only tracks for all four episodes
An option to hear Marc Wilkinson and Nic Rowley's doom laden electronic score.
Episode recaps
The original 'story so far' sequences that accompanied the television transmissions (Episode 2's recap is mute) (4:26)
Textless titles
Mute opening titles (1:59) and end titles for The Quatermass Conclusion (2:53)
Trailer
Mute trailer for The Quatermass Conclusion (4:33)
Image Gallery
Good selection of colour and black and white publicity materials including some behind the scenes shots.
Booklet by TV historian Andrew Pixley
This wasn't made available for review but no doubt it is up to Andrew's usual standard.

Quatermass / The Quatermass Conclusion
Thames Television / Euston Films 1979
4 episodes (210 mins approx)
Transmitted 24 October to 14 November 1979
Theatrical version (106 mins) 
European theatrical premiere November 1979
Network Blu Ray 7958026 & DVD 7954328 / Region B & Region 2 / Released 27 July 2015 / Subtitles: English / Sound: Mono and 5.1 - English / 1.33:1 (four episodes) 1.78:1 (feature version) / Colour / Classification:15

Bibliography:

(1) Andy Murray, Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale (Headpress, 2006)
(2) Andrew Pixley, The Quatermass Collection Viewing Notes (BBC DVD 1478, 2005)
(3) Mat Irvine & Mike Tucker, 'Quatermass' in BBC VFX - The Story of the BBC Visual Effects Department (Aurum Press, 2010)
(4) Andrew Pixley, Fantasy Flashback: Quatermass in TV Zone No 161 (Visual Imagination, 2003)
(5) John Fleming, The Starburst Interview: Nigel Kneale in Starburst No.16 (Marvel Comics, 1979)
(6) Andy Murray, Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale (Headpress, 2006)
(7) Richard Marson, Drama and Delight, The Life of Verity Lambert (Miwk Publishing, 2015)
(8) Andy Murray, Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale (Headpress, 2006)
(9) John Fleming, The Starburst Interview: Nigel Kneale in Starburst No.16 (Marvel Comics, 1979)
(10) Manuel Alvarado & John Stewart, Made for Television: Euston Films Limited (BFI, 1985)
(11) Richard Marson, Drama and Delight, The Life of Verity Lambert (Miwk Publishing, 2015)
(12) Andy Murray, Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale (Headpress, 2006)
(13) Inside Television, TV Times (IPC, 27 October 1979)
(14) Andy Murray, Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale (Headpress, 2006)
(15) Andrew Pixley, Fantasy Flashback: Quatermass in TV Zone No 161 (Visual Imagination, 2003) and Ian Garrard & Richard Houldsworth, Fantasy Flashback: Quatermass in TV Zone No.15 (Visual Imagination, 1990)
(16) Andrew Pixley, Fantasy Flashback: Quatermass in TV Zone No 161 (Visual Imagination, 2003)
(17) Ian Garrard & Richard Houldsworth, Fantasy Flashback: Quatermass in TV Zone No.15 (Visual Imagination, 1990)
(18) Andy Murray, Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale (Headpress, 2006)
(19) Jonathan Rigby, Ancient Fears: The Film & Television Nightmares of Nigel Kneale in Starburst No 265 (Visual Imagination, 2000)
(20) Marcus Hearn, Rocket Man in Hammer Horror No.7 (Marvel, September 1995)
(21) David Rolinson and Nick Cooper, Bring Something Back: The Strange Career of Professor Bernard Quatermass in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Taylor & Francis, Autumn 2002)
(22) Mark Duiguid, Quatermass (1979) BFI Screenonline http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/442672/ Accessed 25/07/15
(23) Nigel Kneale, Quatermass: on the streets of fear when the world falls apart, TV Times (IPC, 27 October 1979)
(24) Andy Murray, Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale (Headpress, 2006)
(25) Guy Lodge, 'Thatcher and North Sea oil – a failure to invest in Britain’s future', Newstatesman, April 2013, http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/04/thatcher-and-north-sea-oil-%E2%80%93-failure-invest-britain%E2%80%99s-future Accessed 23/07/15
(26) Building Terrorism Resistant Communities: Together Against Terrorism (IOS Press, 2009)
(27) David Rolinson and Nick Cooper, Bring Something Back: The Strange Career of Professor Bernard Quatermass in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Taylor & Francis, Autumn 2002)
(28) Julian Petley, The Quatermass Conclusion, in Primetime No.9 (WTVA, Winter 1984/5)
(29) Gavin Burrows, Quatermass IV, October 2014, http://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/quatermass-iv-1979.html Accessed 23/07/15
(30) Julian Petley, The Quatermass Conclusion, in Primetime No.9 (WTVA, Winter 1984/5)
(31) Derek Johnston, Time and Identity in Folk Horror, paper presented at A Fiend in the Furrows, Queen's University Belfast, 19 September 2014
(32) Ibid
(33) Peter Hutchings, 'We're the Martians now': British sf invasion fantasies of the 1950s and 1960s in British Science Fiction Cinema (Routledge, 1999)
(34) Julian Petley, The Quatermass Conclusion, in Primetime No.9 (WTVA, Winter 1984/5)

Released on Blu-Ray and DVD on Monday 17 August by Network Distributing, Wolcott hails from 1981, a groundbreaking drama made by the ITC subsidiary Black Lion Films for ATV. Broadcast from the 13 to 15 January 1981, it was the first example of a prime time mini-series stripped over three nights in the ITV schedule.The episodes have now been newly transferred into HD from the original film elements for this long overdue release.

Most importantly, it was the first British crime drama with a black actor playing the lead role and it did not shy away from depicting the corruption and villainy in both the black and white communities. Played with great power and charisma by George William Harris, Wolcott is a man in the middle, facing hostility both from the community he polices and his colleagues in the Force. His investigations into the fatal stabbing of an old woman and a journalist soon uncover a brutal drug war being fought between criminal gangs.

Co-writer Patrick Carroll notes: "At the inception of the project there were no black officers in the Met C.I.D.  By the time the programme aired we were told that there were three, all of whom were involved in undercover work relating to drug dealing." The series' unflinching and controversial approach to race and policing at the time captured something of the deprivation, distrust of the police and authority, and inequalities of the period that culminated in the inner city riots in Brixton, Birmingham and Liverpool.

Wolcott made for uncomfortable viewing judging by the mixed critical reaction at the time but it gained impressive viewing figures of 13 million. ATV lost its franchise to Central in the summer of 1981, and when producers Barry Hanson and Jacky Stoller approached Central "with a view to developing a follow-up series they were told that, despite the original serial’s impressive viewing figures, the project was simply too much of a political hot potato.  When Barry and Jacky brought their proposal to the BBC they were given much the same answer."

Even though its blunt style, language and violence echoed The Sweeney and Law and Order (a series the writers of Wolcott much admired), the series was beautifully shot on location in Hackney by acclaimed Oscar winning cinematographer Roger Deakins, perhaps acknowledging the quality of the glossier dramas produced in the US and with a view to the export potential ITC may have had in mind. This shifts the look of the series away from the grainy, harsher mise-en-scène of filmed British crime dramas of the period.

The cast also includes an early appearance by Hugh Quarshie, as a youth worker in conflict with his friend who is now a police officer, and straight roles for Rik Mayall, as a racist policeman, Alexei Sayle as a Socialist Worker orator and Keith Allen as the National Front yob heckling him on the street. There are also appearances from the late, great Warren Clarke as an East End villain and Christopher Ellison, foreshadowing his role as DI Burnside in The Bill, as a corrupt detective. The inclusion of American actor Christine Lahti and playwright Howard Schuman also upped the export potential of the proposed series which sadly did not materialise.

Despite Wolcott's mixed reception, and that it has never been repeated or released commercially, writer Patrick Carroll acknowledges that "other critics and commentators approved of the show, recognizing it as gripping, pacey popular television, and as an honest attempt to place the police drama genre in a relatively unexplored context."

Many thanks to the following sources:
Sergio Angelini - BFI Screenonline: Wolcott http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/536787/ (accessed 11/08/2015)
Patrick Carroll: Wolcott Revisited http://www.patrickcarroll.co.uk/?p=117 (accessed 11/08/2015)

Newly transferred into HD from the original film elements for this much awaited release, a copy of Wolcott on Blu-Ray is up for grabs in our latest competition.


Cathode Ray Tube has one Blu-Ray copy of Wolcott to give away to one lucky winner courtesy of Network Distributing. Simply answer the question below and submit your entry via email.

• - This competition is open to residents of the UK only but not to employees of Network Distributing or their agents. 


• - Entries must be received by midnight GMT on Sunday 16 August 2015.
  


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• - The winner will be the first entry with the correct answer drawn at random.


• - The winner will be contacted by email and their details will be forwarded to Network Distributing. The Blu-Ray will be sent to the winner by Network after the competition closes.


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Question: Barry Hanson is also well known as the producer of another film project funded by ITC's subsidiary Black Lion Films, eventually rescued and released by Hand Made Films in 1980. What was the title of the film?

Email your answer to the question above, with your name and address, and we'll enter you into the prize draw.

Good luck!

Soldier And Me, Granada's 1974 BAFTA award-winning children's drama, comes to DVD this month courtesy of Network.

The nine half-hour episodes, broadcast in a Sunday tea-time slot between 15 September and 10 November 1974, were made by producer Brian Armstrong and directed byCarol Wilks, both formerly producer and researcher respectively on Granada's hard-hitting documentary strand World in Action.

Soldier and Me was an adaptation by writer David Line of his own best selling book 'Run For Your Life', originally published by Jonathan Cape in 1966. Line was the pseudonym of thriller writer Lionel Davidson.

As Jake Kerridge noted Davidson, born in Hull in 1922 and who died in 2009, was perhaps the last of the great adventure writers of the 1950s and 1960s, casting his unwitting heroes in the tradition of the ripping yarns spun by writers such as John Buchan. He was referred to as "today’s Rider Haggard" by Daphne du Maurier and his early novel 'The Rose of Tibet' was praised by Graham Greene as a "genuine adventure story."(1)

Davidson's career as a writer started with him as an office boy opening the post at The Spectator (it published his first story when he was 15 after he smuggled one of his own pieces into the submissions he forwarded to the literary editor), writing syndicated features for children and an agony column and, after the Second World War, working at Fleet Street's Keystone press agency. As a freelance writer he travelled to Czechoslovakia in 1947, smuggling himself aboard a lorry deporting Slovaks from Hungary back to Czechoslovakia as per Stalin's diktat for Eastern Europe. (2)

By 1955, he was the fiction editor of short story and serial magazine John Bull and his first novel, 'The Night of Wenceslas' in 1960, was a Gold Dagger thriller award winner and was inspired by his experiences in Czechoslovakia. The rights to the book were sold to British producer Betty Box who transformed it into a limp comedy Hot Enough for June (1964). Dirk Bogarde turned down the lead role but was instructed by his agent to take it because he needed the money. He played the innocent British writer Nicholas Whistler who becomes embroiled with agents in Czechoslovakia after inadvertently 'spying' for British Intelligence while employed as a trainee executive for a glass company. Davidson's brush with the film world was financially lucrative but creatively not an entirely successful one.

'... this may reflect his own position as something of an outsider in English society'

Two further Gold dagger awards were bestowed upon 'A Long Way to Shiloh' (1966) and 'The Chelsea Murders' (1978). The former novel, a thriller dealing with the race between a Professor of Languages, Caspar Laing, the Israelis and Jordanians to locate a holy relic in the burning Negev desert signalled a growing preoccupation with his Jewish heritage and he moved to Israel with his family in 1968. After a decade he returned to Britain to publish 'The Chelsea Murders' and a final novel, the highly praised 'Kolymsky Heights', in 1994.

As Michael Carlson noted in his 2009 obituary for the writer: "Davidson's novels generally involved multiple protagonists working together for different reasons, with hidden motives and potential betrayal at their core. Some of this may reflect his own position as something of an outsider in English society."(3)

'Run for Your Life', a novel for teenagers published in 1966, seemed to reflect this too and returned to his experiences in Czechoslovakia for its post-Hungarian revolution tale of two boys, one a refugee, who uncover a plot to murder dissidents in London. The murderers give chase and follow the two boys from their escape on a Liverpool Street train across the wintry landscape of the Norfolk fens. When Granada producer Brian Armstrong decided to adapt the book, he suggested updating the background to post-1968 Prague Spring, after the Soviets invaded to halt the democratic liberal reforms proposed by First Secretary Alexander Dubček.

Educated at Heaton Grammar school and Wadham College, Oxford, Brian Armstrong joined Granada in 1958 as an assistant transmission controller. He became a researcher, writer and producer, and between 1963 and 1969 worked on The World Tomorrow, World in Action as well as Nice Time, Cinema and All Our Yesterdays. He eventually went on to produce Coronation Street and became Head of Comedy at Granada. 

Clearly, the changes he suggested to Lionel Davidson when it came to adapting his own book for television had been born out of Armstrong's own near-death experiences in Prague making a film, without the Russian's knowledge, for the World in Action team in 1968. Talking to the TV Times, he recalled filming in Prague and turning to see a Russian soldier taking aim at his bead: "Looking back, I remember not being frightened, just embarrassed, like a naughty school-boy who'd been caught breaking school rules. As I moved, he followed my head with his rifle. Then, for no apparent reason, he lowered it and turned away. I'll never know why."(4)

The difficulties of reporting from Czechoslovakia were not without their humorous side: "I had thought I might have to appear on Intervision with a live, to-camera report - so I borrowed a little number from Granada's wardrobe department before I left Manchester. I had been in the middle of mayhem for three days when the phone rang in my hotel room. It was a call from Granada. It was May, Head of Wardrobe: "Can I have Albert Tatlock's best jacket back immediately?"(5)

Carol Wilks, who directed Soldier and Me, came from a similar background. She joined Granada on a production training course after graduating from Bristol University and became a researcher on drama and on World in Action. She researched, produced and directed a number of documentaries, completed Granada's directors' course and also worked on Coronation Street. In 1970, she directed The Sinners, a drama set in Ireland and produced by Brian Armstrong. She continued to direct for ITV and BBC, helming episodes of Grange Hill, Hazell, The XYY Man, Juliet Bravo, Emmerdale Farm and Strangers before moving on to produce The Bill and Heartbeat.

To play the two juvenile leads, Jim Woolcott and Pavel Szolda (nicknamed 'Soldier' and hence the title of the series), Granada cast two newcomers to television. Gerry Sundquist, who was born in Manchester and grew up in Chorlton, caught the acting bug at primary school and developed his interest at the Stretford Children's Theatre while attending Grammar School in Wythenshawe. He left school at 16 to work the night shift at the Kellogg's factory in Old Trafford but soon headed for London to pursue his acting career. (6)

After a supporting role in Crown Court, Soldier and Me was Sundquist's professional television breakthrough and his success as Jim Woolcott lead to another children's drama, The Siege of Golden Hill and an episode of Space: 1999. Film roles in The Black Panther (1977) and Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979)and a number of theatre productions swiftly followed, including a memorable appearance in 'Equus' at the National Theatre in 1976. He met and fell in love with Nastassja Kinski when they were filming Passion Flower Hotel in 1978.

He continued to make television appearances, best remembered for his roles in The Mallens and Barry Letts' 1981 BBC adaptation of Great Expectations. However, his career and personal life collapsed in the late 1980s and it took a number of years, with support from his family, for him to recover from heroin addiction and resume his career. He returned to television in an episode of The Bill in 1992 but his career never recovered and it was his last appearance as an actor. Tragically in 1993, at the age of 37, he committed suicide by jumping in front of a train. (7)

His co-star Richard Willis, like Gerry and many other young male actors of the period, became a familiar face in children's television drama. His role as Pavel 'Soldier' Szolda came at a time when Willis' career was taking off. He was fifteen when he played Pavel and had just completed two West End appearances, as East in the musical 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' and as Tom (chosen from 2000 hopefuls) in 'The Water Babies', co-starring with musical legend Jessie Matthews.

From there, he secured a role in the ill feted Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan film Ghost in the Noonday Sun (1973). Even though Willis got on very well with him, Sellers lost confidence in the film and, after the director refused his request to shut the film down, he set out to deliberately scupper the production. It was never released theatrically. (8)

Willis notched up many television appearances after Soldier and Me, including a co-starring role as Tozo in Thames' wonderful Aztec drama The Feathered Serpent and roles in the naval science fiction thriller The Doombolt Chase and ITV's A Bunch of Fives. He is also remembered for his appearance in Doctor Who as Varsh, Adric's brother, in 'Full Circle'. He subsequently moved to America and successfully tours in theatre there to this day.

'I latched on to Gerry at the audition. I knew instinctively he was going to get the part.'

In an interview with Look-In about Soldier and Me both actors described how they were chosen for the roles. Willis said, "I auditioned through my agent. The auditioning went on for a couple of months, from early February to the end of March, when I went for a screen test and got the part of Soldier."

Sundquist explained his casting: "The actual part came through an amateur theatre company that I'm with in Manchester, 'cos they'd been looking round for the right character and hadn't managed to find him, so they came along to our company, and I in turn went along for an audition, and then back for the screen test, where I first met Richard. About a fortnight later, I heard I'd got the part of Jim."(9)

Many years later, on his personal blog Willis reflected on the series: "The story revolved around a 12 year old Czech boy in glasses and short trousers Szolda and his reluctant Manchester friend, played by a newcomer, Gerry Sundquist. I hated my character's short trousers, his short haircut and his ugly glasses. But I was immediately at home in his inner life - the awkward outcast, Szolda. I latched on to Gerry at the audition. I knew instinctively he was going to get the part. We became good friends."(10)

The setting of the novel - London and Norfolk - was also changed to Stockport and the Lake District. As Armstrong indicated at the time: "We've altered the setting from a white Christmas in East Anglia to Spring in the Lake District, because you can't rely on snow when you're filming. We've also changed the title to Soldier and Me - that was the book's title in America, where it was a best-seller."(11)

The arduous shoot took a twenty-five strong crew four months to film in the Spring of 1974. Granada had scored some success with filmed children's drama made by producer Peter Plummer in the much admired and deeply strange The Owl Service, adapted by Alan Garner from his own book and shot in April 1969, and The Intruder, adapted by Plummer and Mervyn Haisman from John Rowe Townsend's novel in 1972.

Together with Soldier and Me, they indicated the shift towards a contemporary milieu in children's drama and, beyond the fantastical and supernatural, a search for realism in counterpoint to the period adaptations of classic texts that had become the stock in trade during the 1960s. Armstrong confirmed the series would be "Gritty... [and] we're opting for rugged realism." (12)

The opening titles certainlydenote this difference immediately - Derek Hilton's pulsing funk soundtrack plays over stylised silhouettes of the two main characters running toward the camera. This is abruptly intercut with action scenes from the series featuring guns being fired and cocked, Pavel leaping off a wall, close ups of the sleazy looking villains, car chases, kidnapping and then the two main characters rolling down a hillside straight into the camera. Everything signifies 'action'.

However, Soldier and Me's opening episode 'Conspiracy' is dominated by its school setting and spends most of its running time establishing the social background of Jim Woolcott and Pavel Szolda, beginning with the two main characters becoming friends after Jim recuses Pavel from his bullying class mates.

Jim is a senior boy and Pavel, grateful for his help, clearly sees him as a protective older brother. Wilks uses the camera subjectively too and we often see events from Pavel's point of view, especially during the opening sequence with the bullies. 

Much to Richard Willis' annoyance at the time Pavel is the only boy in the school who does wear short trousers. It singles out his immaturity (in contrast to Sundquist's Jim who smokes and moans about Pavel's attentions) and that he comes from a low wage family who can't buy him long trousers. His status is as 'other', an outsider who must be bullied because he's "a little dark skinny kid with glasses." Outsiderdom, cultural difference and bullying would have been familiar scenarios through 1970s children's fiction such as Rumer Godden's 'The Didakoi' and Susan Hill's 'I'm The King of the Castle'.

The other striking thing is that the social and cultural aspects of this setting are narrated in voice over, mainly by Gerry Sundquist. He relates not only the background details of working class life in the back streets of Stockport, in familiar narrow back alleys that have long since gone, but also his and Pavel's status at school and home.

This inner monologue tells us about Pavel's Czech refugee and one-parent family status before the boys' partnership is established and Jim nicknames him 'Soldier'. Willis' Czech accent was given some authenticity by fellow cast member Milos Kireck, an actor-director in Prague until 1968, and here playing the gang boss who orders his henchmen to execute a dissident. "He 'Czechs' my dialogue, so to speak," joked Willis, at the time. (13)

"Stockport's answer to Einstein"

The school milieu depicts the recognisable allegiances (Jim's concern is that his friendship with the kid 'Soldier' will jeopardise his status and he won't be asked by his friend Ron Nixon on holiday to Cumberland) and tropes of the day (Richard Wilson's drama teacher Dr Nixon is spot on). Some of it is reminiscent of Ken Loach's observational approach in Kes (1970). According to the TV Times, "Armstrong was so meticulous in his pursuit of authenticity that he was to be seen skulking around school playgrounds, picking up ideas for the most up-to-date junior expletives for inclusion in the script." (14)

Only when Pavel visits the library ("Stockport's answer to Einstein" as Jim sneers in voice over) does the thriller element start to develop. Director Carol Wilks makes this the centre piece of the episode, her camera roving through the bookshelves while two Czech executioners (Greasy and Smiler played by Richard Ireson and Constantin de Goguel) plot their forthcoming murder over the newspapers as their victim, a crippled old man (Armitage Ware), arrives to the noisy tapping of his stick.

Here, both Pavel and Jim relate to the viewer their thoughts and observations about the encounter in the library through a running commentary that Wilks then extends into a scene after school where Pavel is relating all this to a disbelieving Jim. The police aren't exactly impressed either and dismiss the story.

His holiday plans scuppered, there's an amusing scene where Jim ends up working in a dress shop full of customers "grabbing stuff like they were going out of fashion." The uneasy friendship threatens to dissolve when Pavel insists they break into a school where the villains are due to carry out their execution. However, as Jim again acknowledges in voice over, Pavel "had this knack of getting you to do things you didn't want to know about really."

Episode two, 'The House of Secrets' concentrates entirely on the thriller element. Shot at night, Wilks uses the location and school interiors to generate a great deal of claustrophobic tension and introduces some stylish touches. Low angle shots, expressionistic lighting and Jim's inner monologue describing his fears provide a suitable ambience as Jim and Pavel struggle to find a place to hide as the executioners arrive and they witness the murder of the disabled old man. The meeting becomes a bleak interrogation scene as the heavily breathing old man struggles up the stairs and meets his fate. It has an uncompromising, gritty edge to it that would not be out of place in more adult dramas of the time.

The interrogation descends into chaos when the old man is shot after he denies betraying the list of Czechs read out to him. Some rapidly cut sequences punctuate the murder, Jim and Pavel's dash from their hiding place and the chase through the house as they attempt to escape. There's a montage that's particularly accomplished: as Jim and Pavel are pursued Wilks drops in a series of effective, silent shots: a close up of a broken plaster bust, the old man's hand, a head and shoulders shot of one of the Czech executioners and a final close up of the old man's head slumped on a desk.

These are aesthetics that mix the dispassionate realism of the documentary (the way the interrogation is set up looks like something from World in Action) with the stylistic qualities of film noir - strange angles, chiaroscuro lighting, uncanny sound and distorted narrative through editing and voice over. The climax develops as an unresolved conspiracy and paranoia narrative when the police arrive after Jim and Pavel alert them to the shooting and find the old man is apparently alive and well in his own home.

This twist in the narrative reflects contemporaneous political thrillers (ironically Jim is seen readying Frederick Forsyth's 'The Day of the Jackal' at the breakfast table) and the tone shifts when the boys are confronted by the old man who Pavel now realises is one of the Czech gang in disguise (Derrick O'Connor in an early role, playing a character credited as 'Driver', and who would pop up in a vast amount of British television crime dramas including The Sweeney, The XYY Man, Out and Fox during the rest of the decade) as a set up to fool the police.

The comic potential of the 'odd couple' relationship between Pavel and Jim is exploited in episode three 'Alibi' with some simple physical comedy: Jim smuggles toast out to Pavel who has been squeezed into a dustbin to hide him from Jim's suspicious mum and, later, they both hide in the discarded remains of farm produce on the back of a lorry and make fools of themselves with several train commuters.

'Could we have a shot of you looking as if you are in pain, please?'

Now under the watchful eyes of the gang and pursued by Smiler (a wonderfully sinister turn from Constantin de Goguel sporting a deformed lip), the friendship begins to disintegrate. However, after Smiler chases them through Stockport cemetery on a very small motorbike, Jim realises that Pavel's suggestion to go on the run to get to Nixon's farm in Cumberland isn't so ridiculous. The boys are then chased through the centre of Stockport (Market Place, the market hall and market are very recognisable as is the now demolished Portwood cooling tower).

This opens the drama up from the confined and claustrophobic opening episodes and affords Wilks an opportunity to tighten the pace and throw in some more physical comedy as market stalls and shoppers go flying in all directions and there's some great visual incongruity as a cascade of displaced oranges tumble down a street as Pavel and Jim make their escape.

Armstrong underlined this approach in TV Times: "We've tried to inject realism into the proceedings by filming many of the chases in live locations - like Stockport market in full swing - and by adding a wry, mature humour. This comes in the narration by Jim, constantly bemoaning the fact that he is saddled with little 'Soldier'." (15)

The chase is a central trope of the espionage adventure thriller and of children's literature and Line uses this to shape the psychological progression of his two characters. Thrown together, they must make sense of the chaos let loose in their normal urban surroundings, a stressful situation that forces them to grow up, and they must team up and seek a solution. Jim's inner monologue therefore is useful in making the connection between what the reader feels emotionally in the book to what is translated into action on screen.

There is a tense game of cat and mouse on the train journey they take to Carlisle, offset by some further comedy featuring Coronation Street's Fred Feast as a friendly drunk, which reaches a climax when the only way to escape from Smiler's clutches is to risk jumping off the moving train.

As Willis noted this was frowned upon by parents watching at the time: "We caused some controversy because the opening titles involved us jumping from a moving train - a stunt that we did ourselves. A warning had to be given before the programme telling the kids watching about the danger of jumping from trains."(16)

Stunts and physical hardships were clearly a badge of honour for both actors, as they told Look-In in 1974 where Sundquist described the perils of location shooting: "Jumping from a wall on one occasion I snapped the ligaments in an ankle. That was the day a Press photographer came and asked me, while I was lying in agony in the back of a Land-Rover: 'Could we have a shot of you looking as if you are in pain, please?' That didn't please me too much."

Of the second episode 'House of Secrets' he remembered: "Another time I was trying to lock a door which wouldn't, while there were two villains on the other side who were trying to kick it down. They managed that... and as it landed, it banged me in the eye and knocked me out cold."(17)

Willis, struggling to keep his dignity in those short trousers throughout the shoot, added: "For one scene we were told to row across one of the deepest lakes in England, in the Lake District, which was pretty rough at the time. I wouldn't have fancied a dip in that water. Still, we pulled through, and the scene was a success."(18)

Their escapades and injuries falling off a bicycle, with Willis sat on the crossbar, during filming for 'Cross Country' were also reported by the TV Times. Mindful of children possibly copying the stunts this piece came with a warning that "ill-used and ill-kept bikes can be a real danger. Children should be made fully aware of their responsibilities when on the road." Strangely, while publicising the national Cycling Proficiency Scheme the TV Times made no mention of falling foul of Czech villains with guns, jumping off trains or near drowning in lakes.  (19)

Landscape replaces the urban, market town milieu of Stockport and Jim and Pavel are reduced to tiny figures stumbling across the quarries and fells of the Lake District while the villains continue their pursuit and eventually lodge at Eskdale (breakfasting at the King George Inn). Clearly, Sundquist and Willis suffered for their art as they - not their stunt doubles - can be seen climbing over sheer drops, scaling fences, navigating streams and rowing across lakes. 

Ray Goode, one of Granada's top lighting cameramen who would go on to BAFTA success with Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel in the Crown, wonderfully captures the bleak beauty of the area and his stunning views from the hills of Scafell above Wastwater, a three mile long lake, bring a real sense of scale to the chase in 'Cross Country' and 'Alone'.

One of the advantages of regional television's contribution to children's drama was to bring regional identities and culture to the screen and Soldier and Me makes a virtue of its stunning locations. By the sametoken the series not only took viewers beyond the towns and cities and into the countryside - just as Line had originally taken his characters out of London and into the Norfolk fens in 'Run For Your Life' - but it also expresses something of Pavel's struggle to integrate into urban life in Northern England and places Jim's Mancunian accent at the heart of the drama through his voice overs.

In a sense rurality is used to indicate class and social mobility. Great British character actor Jack Woolgar appears as a gruff, shotgun wielding irate chicken farmer. He's fondly remembered for Doctor Who'The Web of Fear' and his regular role as diamond-in-the-rough Carney in Crossroads among a string of character roles in most of major drama series of the 1960s and 1970s. Lancashire actor Harry Markham also appears as a well-meaning farmer who believes the Czech gang's story the two boys have absconded from a reform school.

Markham appeared in key British films of the 1960s and 1970s such as A Kind of Loving (1962), This Sporting Life (1963), Kes (1969) and was a television regular, popping up in A Family at War, Follyfoot, Sam, Village Hall, Survivors, Crown Court, and as Handel Gartside he took Minnie Caldwell away from Coronation Street. Two Alan Bennett plays at the end of the 1970s All Day On The Sands and Sunset Across the Bay sealed his reputation as a warm, sensitive actor.

It's worth comparing Woolgar and Markham's performances - connoted as working class characters through accent, appearance and surroundings - to that of Richard Wilson as Dr. Nixon. Nixon resolves the crisis in the last two episodes and is clearly an educated, middle class man situated in the markedly more affluent looking farmhouse he uses for his holidays. Rurality encompasses social and spatial differences in the story and the countryside is presented as both idyllic and threatening from the various perspective of the farmers, Dr. Nixon, Jim and Soldier.  

The climax of the story is gripping, returning to the espionage tropes of the opening episodes and extinguishing the bright daylight scenes in the Lake District with cramped, low angle point of view shots from Jim and Pavel, tied and gagged in a car, directed at their mysterious abductors. The final episodes 'Trapped' and 'No Escape' also reveal a different interpretation of what we know thus far about the gang. There are some interesting moral complexities layered into the conclusion, underlining an aspect of Lionel Davidson's thrillers, where his "speciality is showing what it feels like for peaceable men to make their first forays into violence." (20)

This transforms the resolution to the standard chase narrative in Soldier and Me into a meditation on ideology, morality and violence that makes Jim pause for thought in the final episode. Jim and Pavel's experiences in the wilderness cast a shadow over the celebratory appreciation of the landscape in 'No Escape'. Much of this is reflected in the value of the bond between them, strengthened through adversity and tenacity over the course of the series, one far stronger than the fair-weather friendship that Ron Nixon attempts to court in the final scene.

Sundquist and Willis are remarkably good at capturing this and their performances, accompanied by the realism injected into the script by Armstrong, Wilks and Davidson's literary double David Line, help create a sympathetic, realistic double act, depicting a friendship put under immense physical strain but one that ultimately embraces difference and otherness. 

Special Features
Sadly, not much additional content to speak of.  
Gallery 
A selection of colour stills from the Rex Features ITV archive 
Booklet
Featuring Richard Willis' personal reminiscences of making the series. This wasn't made available for review.

Soldier and Me
Granada Television Production 1974
9 episodes (216 mins approx)
Transmitted 15 September to 11 November 1974
Network DVD 7954354 / Region 2 / Released 17 August 2015 / Subtitles: None / Sound: Mono - English / 1.33:1 / Colour / Classification: PG

Bibliography
(1) Jake Kerridge, 'Lionel Davidson, the best spy novelist you might never have read' in The Telegraph 07/03/2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11451620/Lionel-Davidson-the-best-spy-novelist-you-might-never-have-read.html (accessed 12/08/2015)
(2) Dennis Barker, 'Lionel Davidson obituary' in The Guardian 02/11/2009, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/nov/02/lionel-davidson-obituary (accessed 12/08/2015)
(3) Michael Carlson, 'Lionel Davidson: Crime and thriller writer celebrated for his intricate plots and tongue-in-cheek humour' in The Independent 02/11/2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/lionel-davidson-crime-and-thriller-writer-celebrated-for-his-intricate-plots-and-tongueincheek-humour-1832168.html (accessed 12/08/2015)
(4) Brian Armstrong interview 'We'll be seeing some tough times on Sundays' in Stewpot Calling, TV Times 14/09/1974. 
(5) Brian Armstrong, 'A base occupation' in Granada Television: The First Generation (Manchester University Press, 2003)
(6) Matt Finnegan, 'Magical fable that masks a tragedy' in Manchester Evening News 03/11/1997 http://www.britmovie.co.uk/forums/actors-actresses/89861-gerry-sundquist-15.html (accessed 12/08/2015)
(7) Ibid
(8) Richard Willis, Strolling Player An English/American actor's search for character, in 'Beauty, Certainty and Quiet Kind' 12/04/2007. http://richactor.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/beauty-certainty-and-quiet-kind.html (accessed 12/08/2015)
(9) Richard Tippett, 'Soldier and Me' interviews with Richard Willis and Gerry Sundquist, Look-In 26/10/1974.
(10) Richard Willis, Strolling Player An English/American actor's search for character, in'Beauty, Certainty and Quiet Kind' 12/04/2007. http://richactor.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/beauty-certainty-and-quiet-kind.html (accessed 12/08/2015)
(11) Brian Armstrong interview 'We'll be seeing some tough times on Sundays' in Stewpot Calling, TV Times 14/09/1974. 
(12) Ibid
(13) Ibid
(14) Ibid
(15) Ibid
(16) Richard Willis, Strolling Player An English/American actor's search for character, in'Beauty, Certainty and Quiet Kind' 12/04/2007. http://richactor.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/beauty-certainty-and-quiet-kind.html (accessed 12/08/2015)
(17) Richard Tippett, 'Soldier and Me' interviews with Richard Willis and Gerry Sundquist, Look-In 26/10/1974.
(18) Ibid
(19) 'Two into one may be fun but no copying please! in TV Times 12/10/1974
(20) Jake Kerridge, 'Lionel Davidson, the best spy novelist you might never have read' in The Telegraph 07/03/2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11451620/Lionel-Davidson-the-best-spy-novelist-you-might-never-have-read.html (accessed 12/08/2015)

Arrow Films turn their attention to Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce this week, releasing the lively, over-ambitious science fiction romp in a features-packed Blu-Ray edition. It also includes both the theatrical and the longer international versions of the film.

Lifeforce was one of the biggest film productions made at Elstree during a period when the British film industry was still in the doldrums. Since the Tory election victory of 1979 already declining film production was hit even harder by new legislation. During the mid-1970s British production seemed focused on low budget exploitation films, big screen outings for television comedies or prestigious period and literary adaptations. The technical expertise of British studios was, however, in huge demand internationally and was boosted significantly after the enormous success of Star Wars (1977).

Yet, fewer British films were made in 1980 and 1981 in any year since 1914 and the incoming government cut off various funding arrangements that industry relied upon, tightening up tax regulations, suspending the quota system and abolishing both the Eady Levy and the National Film Finance Corporation as part of 1985's Film Act. British films continued to decline during the second half of the 1980s with only 30 home-grown productions made in 1989.

Rank and EMI gradually withdrew from film production and a group of smaller, independent companies, including Goldcrest, Handmade and Channel 4 were left with the difficulty of trying to raise funding for their productions in the UK. Into this depressing situation arrived the Cannon Group. Founded in 1967 by Dennis Friedland and Chris Dewey, Cannon had produced a string of low budget films, usually within a budget of $300,000 per film. They also co-produced and distributed a number of films for the US market, notably Michael Reeves'The Sorcerers (1967), The Beast in the Cellar (1970) and Piers Haggard's Blood on Satan's Claw (1971).

In 1979 financial troubles saw the company sold for $500,000 to Israeli cousins Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus. Golan and Globus, known as the 'Go-Go boys' in Hollywood, established a business model for the company where the pre-selling of films generated cash flow. They were able to develop a slate of films which already had recouped their budgets before the cameras even started turning. Pre-selling rights to television, cable and the rapidly expanding home video market of the 1980s covered costs. Marketing was their key to producing profitable, low budget exploitation films. Even Roger Corman dubbed Golan as 'the master of the pre-sell on the international market'. (1)

Although mainly remembered for their slew of exploitation films, including the Death Wish sequels and the oeuvre of Chuck Norris (a seven-year deal valued at $21 million), they did expand their output to include musicals, comedies, science fiction and art house movies. Their push to break out of the exploitation market included the production of such high-brow fare as John Cassavetes'Love Streams (1984) and Godard's King Lear (1987).

They were not only active in production, but also in distribution and exhibition, including a lucrative deal with MGM/UA. Supported by Credit Lyonnais, they bought distributors, independent production companies, back catalogues and cinema chains in the US, Netherlands, Italy and Germany. By 1982 they had 20 films in production and at their peak, in 1986, they had 43 films on a slate which easily embarrassed any major Hollywood studio. 

In 1982, Cannon bought Classic, the UK's third biggest chain of cinemas, for £7 million and thus acquired 67 cinemas and 130 screens rebranded as Cannon-Classic. They then consolidated this by buying the 37 cinemas of the Star circuit in 1985. This made the Cannon Group the second biggest on the exhibition circuit and in 1986 they added the ABC chain and Elstree Studios to their portfolio when they bought Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment for £175 million. At this point they had a 40% share of the market. By the time Cannon Films had released Lifeforce in 1985, they were at the height of their endeavours in the beleaguered British film industry.

Lifeforce originated in a 1976 novel by Colin Wilson, The Space Vampires. According to Wilson's autobiography Dreaming to Some Purpose, the story was inspired by a dream he had about a fifty mile long spaceship 'full of holes made by space debris'. Describing it as 'Dracula's castle in the sky' he fashioned this idea into a book in which an exploratory space vessel from the late 21st century, the Hermes, discovers the wreck and recovers three bodies, one female and two males. The three humanoids are a variation on the theme of psychic vampires, beings who can control or drain the life force from their victims. (2)

Captain Carlsen, the book's main protagonist, joins forces with Dr Hans Fallada, a scientist researching energy vampirism and longevity, to recapture the female vampire when she escapes. They discover the aliens can transfer from one body to another as a form of energy vampirism and come to understand that this potential exists in humans as a parallel between vampirism, sexual fetishism and criminality. Wilson himself believed the novel was an exploration of the sexual impulse, 'that sex is somehow an exchange of vital energies.'

'Instead of blood, these vampires feed on energy.'

In May 1981, Wilson was approached by Cannon, who had optioned the rights to The Space Vampires in 1979, and was paid $13,000 as the company had decided to take up the option, adapt the book and proceed into production of the film. Over the next five years, Cannon wrestled with the development of the script. Their screenplay adaptation was written by Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby after the book was recommended to director Tobe Hooper and he was asked to make the film by Golan and Globus.

O'Bannon, a science fiction and horror enthusiast, had met Jakoby while studying at USC Film School and where, with John Carpenter, O'Bannon had written, shot and edited their student film Dark Star (1974). He then worked on the animation effects for Star Wars (1977) and was hired by Alejandro Jodorowsky to supervise visual effects for his production of Dune. When this production collapsed, O'Bannon slept on his friend Ron Shussett's couch and between them they crafted the screenplay for what would eventually become Ridley Scott's Alien (1979).

After writing some of the segments - 'Soft Landing' and 'B-17' for the Canadian animation feature Heavy Metal (1981), O'Bannon and Jakoby collaborated on the script for Blue Thunder (1983). Their experience on the John Badham film, about a Los Angeles helicopter surveillance team, was a portent of things to come as the political tone of their thriller was jettisoned in favour of wisecracks provided by another script writer, Dean Reisner. Jakoby explained further: 'Badham saw the chase and the film as a comic strip for a 12-year old. We saw it as a life-and-death shoot-out with professional military hardware over a major metropolitan city. It was intended to be serious, not jocular.'(3)

O'Bannon and Jakoby continued as creative consultants on the spin-off TV show of Blue Thunder (ABC, 1984) but it was an unhappy experience. Before they completed the screenplay of Lifeforce, Jakoby then made several polishes to the screenplay of Stewart Raffill's The Philadelphia Experiment (1984) and O'Bannon stepped in as director of Return of the Living Dead (1985) after original director Hooper had declined and instead signed on the dotted line with Cannon to direct Lifeforce, then still known as The Space Vampires, as part of a lucrative three-picture deal with the company.

Jakoby recalled that, over several years since the optioning of the book, eight different drafts of the Lifeforce script existed. All 'were atrocious to varying degrees' and adapting the novel had proved difficult. The film differs from the book in many ways. At Hooper's suggestion, the setting was changed to modern day and incorporated the 1986 flyby of Halley's comet as a sub-plot. The character of SAS Colonel Caine is also much more prominent. The vampires reflect certain traditional legends and the turning of their victims is depicted as an out-of-control contagion in the film rather than the more spiritual expression of the book.

'It turned out to be an interesting script. Lifeforce deals with a variation of the vampire theme, as did Wilson's novel. Instead of blood, these vampires feed on energy. We treat vampirism in this film as a disease - a contagious disease - rather than focus on the poor guy up all night trying to get his fix before the sun rises. We treat it as a social contagion which spreads rapidly and becomes quite horrifying,' Jakoby explained shortly after the film's release. (4)

Lifeforce, for which filming began on 2 February 1984, was an immense, sprawling production helmed by Hooper. In the ten years since his dramatic horror film debut with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974, Hooper's career seemed to always take two steps back after each step forward.

Eaten Alive (1975) was considered a failure in trying to recapture elements of his debut and Hooper moved briefly and quite successfully into television to direct the mini-series of Stephen King's Salem's Lot (CBS/Warner 1979) where, as he told Cinefantastique at the time, his approach was very different from the visceral style of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: 'This film is very spooky - it suggests things and always has the overtone of the grave. It affects you differently than my other horror films. It's more soft-shelled.'

While Salem's Lot, which was granted a European theatrical release, had provided Hooper with some kudos The Funhouse (1981), a combination of slasher flick and classic monster movie, didn't really generate a lasting appeal with the horror film audience and was allegedly a troubled production with differences between Hooper and the producers. His biggest box office success followed with Poltergeist (1982), produced by Steven Spielberg. It was, again, not a pleasant experience for Hooper. He clashed with Spielberg and, while rumours abounded that Spielberg actually took directorial control of the film, Hooper denied that he was ever usurped from the director's seat.

Hooper was allowed free reign with Lifeforce and the $25 million dollar film occupied him for a very long and complex six-month shoot. As the production began script writers Michael Armstrong and Olaf Pooley were brought on board and worked closely with many of the art and effects departments. Armstrong was 'scripting what was being come up with or conceived by these storyboard artists. Particularly in the area effecting the special effects because when I read the script... it was very loosely written and hadn't been broken down in actual cinematic terms for storyboarding.'(5)

The story now saw the crew of space shuttle Churchill discover an alien craft in the corona of Halley's comet, retrieve the bodies of the three vampires and attempt to bring them back to Earth. When contact is lost, the shuttle is found by a rescue mission. The crew are dead, the vehicle burnt out and the three vampires are brought to the European Space Research Centre, where they are examined and analysed by a team of scientists led by Dr. Leonard Bukovski (Michael Gothard) and Dr. Hans Fallada (Frank Finlay). Meanwhile, a survivor of the Churchill's mission, Colonel Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback) arrives on Earth in an escape pod.

Debriefed in London, Carlsen explains the nature of the vampires and his efforts, by setting the ship on fire, to prevent them from reaching Earth. Their ability to drain the lifeforce of their victims initiates a plague across London and as chaos reigns he, Fallada and SAS Colonel Colin Caine (Peter Firth) discover that the vampires are channelling this accumulated energy back to their ship as the population of London are transformed into zombies. However, Carlsen has become obsessed with the female vampire and her nature seems to tap into something deep inside his psyche,

Original casting announcements in 1983 suggested John Gielgud, Klaus Kinski and Olivia Hussey were playing the leads. Gielgud was apparently the first choice for the role of Dr. Armstrong, the director of a psychiatric hospital and in whose body the female alien has hidden. Patrick Stewart was offered the part after Gielgud departed over a salary disagreement and other actors, including Harry Andrews and Tom Baker, had been considered for the role.

... the make up and hairdressing department had to trim down May's pubic hair in fear of inciting the censor's wrath

Kinski was originally offered the role of Hans Fallada and Hussey rejected the film, on the basis it would require too much nudity, when she thought she was being asked to play the female vampire. She was the original choice for Ellen Donaldson, Armstrong's psychiatric nurse, eventually placed by Nancy Paul.

The casting of Peter Firth as Colonel Caine was, according to certain sources, settled after the first choice of Anthony Hopkins, then Terence Stamp and Michael Caine all proved unavailable. Michael Gothard, who was cast as Bukovski, had also tested for the role of Caine. The role of the Home Secretary Percy Heseltine was accepted by Aubrey Morris after Ronald Lacey rejected it because of the demands of the complex make up effects.

For the lead role of Tom Carlsen, Hooper sent the script to actor Steve Railsback. 'Toby and I are from Texas and we had known each other for nine years. We had always wanted to work together but it had just never worked out - I was always doing something when one of his projects came up before this one. Then I got this script Space Vampires from my agent. He told me Tobe was directing and that he needed an answer in a couple of days. I read it once, wasn't sure about it, so read it again. It seemed like a commercial venture that could make a good picture as well. So, I said yes.'(6)

Railsback, a method actor trained in the Lee Strasberg Actors Studio, was probably best known at the time for his stunning work in Tom Gries' TV movie Helter Skelter (ABC, 1976), playing Charles Manson, and for his role as Cameron, a Vietnam veteran on the run from the police who stumbles onto the set of a film production in Richard Rush's brilliant The Stunt Man (1980).

Perhaps the most striking performer to grace the film, and certainly the centre of its appeal for a great percent of the male audience, was that provided by 18 year-old French actress and ballet dancer Mathilda May. She spent most of the film naked as the female vampire and was cast after Hooper discovered the English actors he called upon refused to play the part naked. Make up artist Sandra Exelby offers some amusing anecdotes on the disc's documentary about the impact May's scenes had on the crew and technicians and how the make up and hairdressing department had to trim down May's pubic hair in fear of inciting the censor's wrath.

The schedule on the film was extended due to the complex nature of the visual effects and prosthetics, supervised by Nick Maley, with Hooper often calling upon producer Michael Kagan to give him more time to complete certain sequences. Many of the delays were incurred by visual effects tests carried out by John Dykstra at Apogee where the production would have to wait for footage to come back from California to determine if it was usable or if it required Hooper to reshoot scenes. The opening sequence of the Churchill's exploration of the alien ship also required time-consuming set ups on the Elstree sets using actors in flying harnesses to simulate weightlessness.

Golan and Globus would often take completed footage and use it to promote the film and raise more money in pre-sales as the budget escalated. They and distributor Tri Star eventually decided that the title Space Vampires was too close to Cannon's exploitation roots (reminding them perhaps of Mario Bava's similarly themed Italian science fiction film Planet of the Vampires), and considered a change of title to the more sober Lifeforce would improve the film's box office appeal.

However, when Hooper presented them with his 128 minute original cut Golan and Globus took the film out of Hooper's control and, as sound designer Vernon Messenger attests in the documentary accompanying this release, 'hacked' it down to a 101 minute version. This played in the US without sections of the superb Henry Mancini score because by the time the longer version had been edited and scored Mancini had already moved on to his next job. Michael Kamen was hurriedly brought in by Cannon to re-score the re-edited sections of the film. The full Mancini score only appeared in the 116 minute cut which opened in the UK and across Europe.

As Mancini told Randall Larsen: 'I scored to the full length picture, but when it was finished the distributors from America got in with their axes. The original first twenty minutes of the film were like a ballet to me - that’s one of the reasons I was so interested in doing the film - and it was just beautiful. There were some lovely effects. But the picture ran two hours and five or ten minutes, and the distributors here got into it and started truncating. They eliminated almost all of the beginning.'(7)

However, this was all to no avail. Lifeforce opened to lukewarm reviews and weak box office. This, coupled with an investigation into Cannon's financial irregularities, signalled their demise. Janet Maslin, in the New York Times, described the resulting film as 'nonetheless sterile. And Mr. Hooper, despite "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" to his credit, doesn't even make it scary'.

Author Colin Wilson, in his autobiography, was equally disappointed and memorably reflected that 'John Fowles had once told me the film of The Magus was the worst movie ever made. After seeing Lifeforce I sent him a postcard telling him I had gone one better.'(8) Writers Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby 'were very unhappy with Lifeforce and that bothered Tobe' and yet Hooper remained defensive and suggested to Lee Goldberg in 1986: 'If 27 minutes has not been cut and it had remained Space Vampires, you would have seen the movie in a whole different light.'(9)

And seeing Lifeforce in a whole different light is now perhaps Arrow's intention with this release of the restored film. Hooper's film rather tenaciously wears its influences on its sleeve but, as the bizarre story unfolds, its often bombastic energy is appealing and, forgive the allusion, infectious. The epic scenes of London under attack from a zombie population nod back to Hammer's Quatermass and the Pit (1967) and Hooper openly acknowledged that Lifeforce was his 70mm Hammer film. There are also touches of Italian exploitation films in some of the vivid colour schemes of blue and red, reminding the viewer of Mario Bava or Dario Argento.

Although many have compared Lifeforce to the Quatermass films, Hooper's film doesn't quite emulate Nigel Kneale's transposition of mythology, superstition, witchcraft and ghosts onto a modern, rationalist world, although it does offer a refreshing angle on vampire mythology. It actually touches base significantly with the dystopian science fiction cinema of the 1950s, the disaster genre of the 1970s and parallels the traumatic disruption of human identity present in Alien (1979) and John Carpenter's remake of The Thing (1982)

The opening sequence of the Churchill's discovery of the alien ship in the tail of the comet and the subsequent exploration of its interior owes a great deal to Ridley Scott's film, particularly the sexual symbolism of the alien ship being penetrated by human explorers. Figures are seen entering a phallic object and finding access to the interior through womb like structures as the crew of the Nostromo were similarly subjected to H. R. Giger's deeply disturbing bio-mechnical expressions of the subconscious.

Even in the exploration of the inner chambers there is a deep contrast between vampiric forms and humanoid beauty, the bestial and the angelic. The beautiful humanoids encased in their glass coffins are surrounded by the dessicated bodies of huge bat creatures, a nod to the classical form of the vampire as well as an indication of the humanoids' true form. Stacey Abbott sees their intent to drain the human race of its lifeforce, rather than blood, as the film's 'reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century equation of vampirism with sexually transmitted disease through the language of science than simply sex.'(10)

'... the masturbatory fantasy of being in love with such a 'creature''

While the glass coffins are seemingly cellular repositories containing the queen and her concubines, their clinical appearance anticipates the way bodies and diseases are catalogued and examined by science in the film. Corpses are constantly seen in hi-tech medical facilities and the naked vampires are also starkly contained within such scientific establishments until they become active and so explosive they can literally shatter the very buildings, and the forms of medical, military and legal power, that attempt to secure them.

If Alien was a nightmare predicated on the penetration and alteration of the human body and the strange reformulations that could occur when rapacious alien DNA combines with human physical frailty, then Lifeforce seems to be a response to the chaos of the neoliberal agenda's acute fear of sexually transmitted diseases, and with the 1980s in mind, specifically its reaction to AIDS. In essence, Lifeforce is about bodies and sexuality freed from repression and allowed to develop impulsively. Human beings diminish or explode, their urges and desires become unfettered as the vampires spread this contagion across London.

At the heart of the film is a male horror of rampant female power and sexuality. Mathilda May's exploitation as an attractive and nubile young woman may well smack of a certain misogyny in the film but she is also rather a blatant symbol of what Hooper, O'Bannon and Jakoby are trying to say about male fear of the female other. For Colin Wilson, the novel was more about the ability to harness the sexual impulse as an evolutionary, perhaps spiritual force. Here, the idea of the unstoppable, alien woman is a throwback to 1950s exploitation science fiction such as Devil Girl From Mars (1954) or Fire Maidens From Outer Space (1954) where women both threaten and feed the fantasies of men.

Peter Wright aligns Lifeforce within a sub-genre of British horror films such as Inseminoid (1981) and Xtro (1982) where alien intrusion is codified as a conservative reaction to women, reproduction and patriarchal fantasy. He sees the Space Girl - this is how the Mathilda May character is credited in the film - as a figure who confidently rejects the male, middle class values of Britain. The theme of alien intrusion and reproduction reflects her attack on repression and conservatism, with the result that 'Lifeforce shows England threatened not by alien manifestations alone but by the collapse of English reserve into unbridled debauchery.'(11) The writhing vampire bodies and hoardes of zombies in the film, many of them depicted on the brink of sexual frustration as they seek to suck dry the populace, all suggest the energies of one vast orgasm are being gathered into space courtesy of John Dykstra's optical effects. 

The naked space girl is thus confronted by a cohort of respected British thespians - Frank Finlay, Patrick Stewart, Michael Gothard, Aubrey Morris and Peter Firth - as representations of male English class and power. It's interesting to note that the American character of Carlsen is the one male figure to become obsessed by the female vampire, is seduced by her and develops a deeper understanding of her purpose before joining her in an afterlife in the stars.

Peter Wright also acknowledges that Carlsen, instead of aligning himself to the conservative ranks of the scientific-military-industrial complex, is subjugated by her as his fantasy, by 'love on a level you'd never know'. Hooper fashions this as a morality tale, 'alerting men to the dangers inherent not only in loving a sexually liberated, self-reliant woman but in the masturbatory fantasy of being in love with such a 'creature'.'(12)

The film's narrative is therefore concerned with restoring the symbolic order and rejecting the aberrant sexuality the space vampires have activated in humans. Attraction between vampire and human is fluid and polymorphic, often includes same-sex encounters and kisses between withered vampire creatures and the male characters in the film. This polymorphism achieves some bizarre expressions in the film. In one scene there is a kiss between a possessed Dr. Armstrong and the film's conflicted hero Tom Carlsen, who hallucinates and sees Armstrong's features momentarily transmogrified into those of the female vampire.

John Kenneth Muir sees this and a sequence where an emaciated male vampire wakes on an operating table and seduces a male doctor as indicative of a homosexual undercurrent in the film and Stacey Abbott's view that 'transference of the disease of vampirism through same-sex contact' operates as an AIDS metaphor in Lifeforce. (13) However, the perversity of the contagion in the film is of an equal opportunities nature. A nurse is possessed by the female vampire and her masochistic tendencies are brought to the surface when Carlsen violently beats her to elicit information from her in a rather disturbing scene in the film. As he does this, Peter Firth's character, Caine, indulges in a spot of voyeurism and it seems relishes the show of violence.

Religious iconography, a major element of vampire narratives, appears in a dream sequence we share with Carlen where the female vampire seduces him in what looks like a crypt adorned with rows of cruciforms. It's a foreshadowing of the film's ultimate pronouncement on the perils of promiscuity as the showdown between Caine, Carlsen and the vampire woman 'climaxes' in the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral. Here, vampire mythology meshes with the film's images of penetration as first Caine despatches one of the reconstituted male vampires with an ancient sword left behind by Dr. Fallada - proudly gifted by the Ashmolean Museum to one Captain Leigh John Masters. The sword reveals the true vampire form of a giant bat creature.

Carlsen also impales himself and the woman on this sword, clearly the symbolic piece of ancient iron used to ward off evil. The result is that Carlsen and the woman ascend into heaven in a bizarre form of redemption, his obsession labeled by her as being the 'feminine in your mind'. He is part of the alien along with all the other souls sucked dry from the city. Apparently, and according to her, 'the web of destiny carries your blood and soul back to the genesis of my lifeform' and they return to a ship tumescent with life energy as it sets course for Halley's comet.

Lifeforce equates the sex drive - the libidinous - with the death drive and the diseased, and as a film that emerged during the panic about AIDS, especially in the paranoia and fear of the Reagan era, this seems fitting. Fallada's own research in the film is connected with death - 'Well, I'm fascinated by death itself. What happens as we die, when we die. What happens after we die.' The orgasm and the throes of death are seemingly interchangeable in the conservative world of Lifeforce where some men particularly resist an acknowledgement of both. Tim Dean suggests that 'the greatest psychic horror of AIDS for a society that always segregates and shifts death elsewhere lies in how AIDS intertwines life with death - and with what is generally assumed to be the lifeforce: the sex drive.'(14)

This drive is rendered in the spectacular optical effects created by Dykstra, which were probably state of the art at the time, and the climax of the film contains a mix of practical effects, lighting and opticals which demonstrate Hooper's skill at controlling the film. Some of the animatronics, particularly for the re-animated corpses, are now unintentionally amusing and the make-up effects, inspired by the likes of An American Werewolf in London (1981) and Michael Jackson's Thriller, are not as sophisticated as the prosthetics work of today. However, they add a charm to a film made long before the advent of wall-to-wall CGI and it's a pleasure to know most effects were realised physically with models, matte paintings and motion-control or practically on huge sets.

The film is helped immeasurably by Mancini's driving score. The title music is glorious and the electronic tonalities of the opening sequences, with the Churchill finding the alien ship, work very effectively to generate a foreboding mood. That mood gives way to the film's sense of escalating chaos as the contagion takes hold and the space sequences are replaced with a taut Earth-bound thriller and, by the film's conclusion, a fully fledged depiction of a city plunged into Hell as cars crash, buses and buildings burn and the streets fill with zombies and explosions. Hooper seems to glorify in this material and it offers an epic scale in counterpoint to some rather odd, often hilariously misjudged performances and dialogue earlier in the film.

Lifeforce is the grandest of exploitation films and it is a pity that distributor Tri-Star did its utmost to distance itself from the director's intentions and spirit. The international version is certainly the more coherent of the two available and despite Don Jakoby's claim that the film was pulled in several directions by director, writers and producers and ended up as 'a film experience, which is, at times, a little out of sync', it is still a delightfully barmy one.

(1) Stephen Prince, A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980-1989
(2) Colin Wilson, Dreaming to Some Purpose
(3) Edward Gross, Interview with Don Jakoby, Starlog, Issue 99, October 1985
(4) Ibid
(5) Michael Armstrong in 'Cannon Fodder - The Making of Lifeforce' documentary, Lifeforce Blu-Ray, Arrow Films
(6) Marc Weinberg, Interview with Steve Railsback, Starlog, Issue 97, August 1985
(7) Randall Larsen, Interview with Henry Mancini, CinemaScore #15, 1987
(8) Colin Wilson, Dreaming to Some Purpose
(9) Lee Goldberg, Interview with Toby Hooper, Starlog, Issue 108, July 1986
(10) Stacey Abbott, Celluloid Vampires: Life After Death in the Modern World 
(11) Peter Wright 'The British post-Alien intrusion film' in British Science Fiction Cinema.
(12) Ibid
(13) John Kenneth Muir, 'Lifeforce' in Horror Films of the 1980s.
(14) Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality

About the transfer
Considering the film is effects heavy and contains an abundance of blue screen, mattes and optical effects, the 1080p transfer expertly manages the telltale degrading of picture quality which can result from such work. Quality does dip depending on how much effects wok is present and therefore the image is occasionally slightly softer and grainier. Some blue screen and matte work is now painfully obvious but this was in the days before CGI and can be forgiven. Overall though this is a detailed image with excellent colour fidelity. Blues, reds and greens are particularly vibrant and Alan Hume's cinematography really benefits from this restoration and transfer. There is good detail in faces, clothes and sets, some solid contrast and black levels. Sound is robust and uses the 5.1 stage admirably with great effects and clear dialogue. Mancini's score also sounds terrific. A highly enjoyable viewing experience.

Special Features
Three commentaries
Audio commentary with Tobe Hooper, moderated by filmmaker Tim Sullivan; Audio commentary with Academy Award-winning visual effects artist Douglas Smith, moderated by filmmaker and scholar Howard S. Berger and Audio commentary with make-up effects artist Nick Maley, moderated by filmmaker Michael Felsher. With these three commentaries you get plenty of detail about the making of the film, reflections on the shoot from Hooper and a career profile from Nick Maley. All worth listening to.
Steve Railsback: Carlsen's Curse (7:07)
Short interview with Railsback who chats about his background and work, how he came to star in Lifeforce after previously meeting Tobe Hooper on the set of Helter Skelter, remembers those much maligned flying harnesses, a screen kiss with Patrick Stewart and working with Mathilda May.
Tobe Hooper: Space Vampires in London (09:58)
The spirit of it was 'space vampires' according to Hooper and despite the meddling with the title. He describes his meeting with Golan and how he was introduced to Wilson's book The Space Vampires. He recalls how easy it was working with Cannon, the hiring of Dan O'Bannon, prepping the film and working with production designer John Graysmark. And, of course, the flying effects and Mathilda May's arrival after 50 screen tests and a conspiracy among unionised German actresses. 
Cannon Fodder - The Making of Lifeforce (1:10:02)
A comprehensive and warts and all look at the making of the film with producer Michael Kagan, writer Michael Armstrong, director Tobe Hooper, editor John Grover, prosthetics designer John Schoonraad, art department folk Tom Adams and Roger Stewart, make-up artist Sandra Exelby, actors Aubrey Morris and Nicholas Ball and sound designer Vernon Messenger. It's a tale of drugs, cigars, Dr Peppers, pubic hair, sound effects in space, condoms, phallic spaceships and flying harnesses.
Dangerous Beauty - Mathilda May (15:16)
A brief interview with May who recalls her casting and arrival in London at Elstree Studios to make Lifeforce. She has fond memories of working with Hooper and 'delicious' actors such as Railsback and Frank Finlay and recalls a particularly arduous eight-hour shoot on her birthday.
Tristar Trailer (1:28)
A very Alien-esque styled trailer with an especially earnest American voice over.
Cannon Trailer (2:02)
'In the tail of Halley's comet, there's something wrong'. And only Frank Finlay could get away with: 'That girl is no girl, she's totally alien to this planet and our life form. And totally dangerous.'
Reversible sleeve
Featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Gary Pullin
Collector’s booklet
Featuring new writing on the film by science fiction expert Bill Warren, a new interview with Oscar-winning visual effects artist John Dykstra by Calum Waddell, illustrated with original archive stills and posters.

Lifeforce
Golan-Globus Productions / Easedram Limited / London-Cannon Films 1985
Cert: 18
Arrow Films / Catalogue Number: FCD837 / Released 14 October 2013 / Region B Blu-ray / Feature aspect ratio: 2.35:1 / High definition digital transfer of the film in 1080p, transferred from original elements by MGM with supervision by director Tobe Hooper / Colour / Optional uncompressed 2.0 Stereo PCM and 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio Surround Sound / Isolated Music and Effects Sound Track / Optional English SDH subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing. International Version Running Time: 116 minutes; Theatrical Version Running Time: 101 minutes.

John Bowen's Robin Redbreast (BBC1, TX: 10/12/1970) a television play transmitted within the Play for Today strand, gets a very welcome release on DVD this week. It's among a raft of releases, of television and cinema, to accompany the BFI's 'Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film' season.
 
At the age of four and a half the play's author John Bowen was sent home, from his birthplace of Calcutta, back to England and reluctantly was placed in the care of his aunts. After serving in the Indian Army from 1943-47, he read Modern History at Oxford and then spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar in the USA. During the 1950s he was variously assistant editor of The Sketch, copywriter at J Walter Thompson and head of the copy department at S.T. Garland Advertising before embarking on a career as a novelist.

In the late 1950s through to the mid-1960s he produced a series of novels which crystalised many of the themes and ideas which then carried through into his success as a playwright and a television writer. Bowen summarised his work thus: 'My plays, like my novels, are distinguished by a general preoccupation with myth, and mainly with one particular myth, the Bacchae, which in my reading represents the conflict between the Apollonian and Dionysiac ways of living more than the mere tearing to pieces of a Sacred King. This theme, the fight in every human being and between beings themselves, rationality against instinct, is to be found somewhere in almost everything I've written.'(1)

His novel Storyboard, published in 1960, was clearly inspired by his time working in journalism and advertising and exposed the power of corporations to corrupt those leading them. 1962's The Birdcage tells of the collapse of the relationship between a successful couple Peter Ash and Norah Palmer. Peter is the host of an arts series and Norah is the Script Editor for the Drama Department of a commercial television company.



The Birdcage's depiction of the media socialite milieu would find itself mirrored some ten years later in his television play Robin Redbreast in which the character of Norah Palmer returns and is seen first in context with her London friends and then isolated in a rural community. As John Williams notes in his article on Robin Redbreast about Norah's relationship with her London friends: 'Bowen portrays these characters with a cool eye, and indeed in The Birdcage and others, seems to be mocking the characters’ pretensions to living a life that is free of emotional turbulence'. (2)

'There is a constant war between reasonable man and instinctive man' 

Williams also sees parallels between certain characters and themes in After the Rain, Bowen's novel published in 1958. The book chronicles the survival efforts of a group of people after a second Flood. The survivors are enmeshed in a situation where 'the mythological merges with the futuristic and a primitive theocracy is generated by necessity'. (3) Their leader Arthur Renshaw is elevated to godhood and manipulates the others with his brand of religion which ultimately leads to his downfall after he demands the sacrifice of the first baby born. 

After the Rain specifically has its characters consider the value of myth - the death of the god and the rebirth of society - and Bowen's work has 'a concern with archetypical patterns of behaviour (therefore with myth). There is a constant war between reasonable man and instinctive man. There is the pessimistic discovery that Bloomsbury values don't work, but that there seem to be no others worth holding.'(4)

The conflict between rationality and instinct and the myth of the Bacchae also figured significantly in his play The Disorderly Women (1969) which transposed the narrative of Euripedes' play to present day and 'showed the Dionysiac out-of-mind and out-of body experiences of the characters as being drug induced'(5) as an analogue to the period's many varieties of modern ecstatic cult including drug culture, rock music, sex and violence.

Writing about The Disorderly Women, Bowen said: 'I have attempted to make explicit what may be implicit in Euripides' play, that the myth of the Bacchae is primarily about the fight between Apollo and Dionysus, in which Dionysus wins. Put this to someone born after 1945, and he may tell you, 'Quite right. Dionysus ought to win. Instinctive behaviour is what life is for'. If my 1969 self were to return to 1945, it could only say 'I have seen the future and it doesn’t work'. The Disorderly Women is, then, a work of pessimism'. (6) Robin Redbreast can also be seen as a fight between the rationalist Norah Palmer character, who betrays a conflicted, alarming sense of self-delusion and an instinctual urge to survive, and the subversive, non-rationalist behaviour of the villagers.

Invited by the BBC to create a children's series ('a thinking lad's Biggles' is how he later described it) Garry Halliday (BBC, 1959-1962) in collaboration with Jeremy Bullimore, Bowen's attentions turned toward television plays, series and serials. He became a script consultant at Associated Television between 1958 and 1960 and undertook several commissions, with The Holiday Abroad and The Essay Prize (both ATV, 1960), The Candidate and The Jackpot Question (both ATV, 1961) all exploring themes of disillusionment and self-deception which would permeate much of his later television work, including Robin Redbreast.

He contributed six instalments to ITV Play of the Week (1955-67) including an adaptation of Dumas''The Corsican Brothers', wrote episodes of The Power Game (ATV, 1965-1969), and an adaptation of J Sheridan Le Fanu's short story 'The Room in the Dragon Volant' for Mystery and Imagination (ABC, 1966-1970). His telefantasy credentials were further enhanced with seven episodes of Wilfred Greatorex's near-future dystopian British political thriller The Guardians(LWT, 1971), his adaptation of M.R. James''The Treasure of Abbot Thomas' for A Ghost Story at Christmas (BBC, 1972), 'A Woman Sobbing' for Innes Lloyd's celebrated supernatural anthology series Dead of Night (BBC, 1973) and another slice of the supernatural for Christmas, The Ice House (BBC, 1978). In the same year he would also write the first serial 'Rachel in Danger' for ITV's Armchair Thriller (1978-1980). 

Two further entries for Play for Today included 'The Emergency Channel' (BBC, 1973) and the intriguing 'A Photograph' in 1977. The latter sees a suave Radio 3 radio presenter (John Stride) plunged into a mystery after being sent a photograph of two young women in front of a gypsy caravan. The suggestion that he has had an affair with these women sends his wife spiraling into a depression driven by an obsession to solve the puzzle of the anonymous photograph. Its continuity with Robin Redbreast is underlined by the presence of sinister matriarchal figure Mrs Vigo, once again played by Freda Bamford.

Robin Redbreast was written specifically with actress Anna Cropper in mind after she had worked in several of Bowen's plays - Little Boxes at the Hampstead Theatre in 1968 and Waiting Room at the Soho Theatre in 1970. Director James MacTaggart and producer Graeme MacDonald were asked to see Waiting Room at Bowen's suggestion during the casting of the television play and Cropper was then offered the role of Norah Palmer.

Bowen's purchase of a dilapidated farmhouse, sat on a hill between Banbury and Stratford-on-Avon and where he still lives, not only provided the play's location filming but actual incidents from Bowen's early residence there, including an encounter with a schoolmaster looking for 'sherds' in his garden, finding a half marble and observing a local gamekeeper practising his karate.

Many elements in Robin Redbreast were also influenced by the reporting of a murder in Lower Quinton in Warwickshire. In February 1945, 74-year old farm labourer Charles Walton was discovered in a field with (allegedly) a cross carved onto his chest. The autopsy revealed his trachea had been cut with a slash hook, his body impaled into the soil by his own pitchfork and he had been clubbed over the head with his walking stick. He was apparently a 'friendly man, who could reputedly charm animals with his voice and knew many old rural ways and tales.'(7)

The case gained considerable notoriety because rumours circulated that he had been killed in a pagan blood sacrifice or as part of a witchcraft ceremony. Chief Inspector Robert Fabian (whose memoirs inspired the BBC's Fabian of the Yard series) never solved the case and in his reports at the time made no mention of paganism or witchcraft. Yet, 25 years later in his book The Anatomy of Crime he did offer: 'I advise anybody who is tempted at any time to venture into Black Magic, witchcraft, Shamanism – call it what you will – to remember Charles Walton and to think of his death, which was clearly the ghastly climax of a pagan rite.'(8)

Originally submitted for a suspense anthology series, Robin Redbreast was initially rejected, according to Bowen in the interview on this disc, because Andrew Osborn, Head of Series and Serials at the BBC, felt that Norah's sexual independence, symbolised in the contraceptive cap she uses, was not a subject suitable for a television play. He claims director MacTaggart, who then read the play after a discussion with Osborn about why he was rejecting it, took it to Graeme MacDonald, producer of Play for Today. (9)

Several different versions of this story have been recorded elsewhere and John Williams notes Bowen's own introduction to the publication of Robin Redbreast in The Television Dramatist which suggested the play's rejection was because 'the "close inter-relation between the fertility rite and the church festivals" would be too much…for the ‘Powers-That-Be' and it was MacDonald who ultimately came to the rescue. Another variation claims the story editor of the series Bowen was commissioned for feared it would be rejected by the head of the department and he or she subsequently brought it to the attention of the editor of Play for Today. (10)

Bowen's interest in the mythical in Robin Redbreast certainly casts the play in the 'folk horror' mode. It was a genre piece transmitted in a strand which was then seen as the home of contemporary, social realist drama. But it is also a story concerned with the moralities, beliefs and behaviours of two very distinct classes, of two different ways of life. The rural is contrasted with the metropolitan, the 'old ways' of a community set against Norah's modern independence.

This is established immediately in the opening titles. A picture of an isolated, slightly ramshackle cottage is discussed in voice over by Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper) and her middle class friends Madge (Amanda Walker) and Jake (Julian Holloway, sporting a fine set of whiskers). As they talk, a howling wind can be heard on the soundtrack. It's a sound effect, one among many, that the play uses constantly to mark out the strange, anti-urban, rural atmosphere Norah will be caught within.

This elemental force is felt as they sit in her London flat and chat about the cottage. The picture is denoted as 'before' - presumably the state the building was in when first acquired by Norah's ex-husband - and her friend enquires 'And the after?' She has not experienced the 'after' yet and the play proposes a dramatic 'before' and 'after' change of state for Norah herself. Cropper's excellent performance charts this change of state, her independence curtailed not by modern social mores but by primordial revelations and ancient truths.

'keep it warm. Them like jewels. They like the body warmth.' 

She is a successful script editor, once again single, declaring 'an unattached woman of 35 is fair game' now she is seen as sexually available. But she is also vulnerable and emotional after her husband decided to cut his losses and leave her and she sees the cottage as a perfect place to adjust to living alone again. It represents an escape to a much slower pace of life than one lived in the city. Again, the contrast between an alienating urban environment and the natural life of the country is underlined, reflecting a 1970s 'escape from the rat race' attitude, a nostalgia for simpler, back to the land village life. Norah hopes to strengthen her self sufficiency and independence, separate from her bourgeois friends whom she has grown to dislike.

Yet this is self sufficiency with a waste disposal unit in a renovated cottage with all the mod cons. The outside world encroaches in the form of mice, 'insects, everything' she tells Madge via a series of letters narrated in voice over. Director James MacTaggart uses this device several times to cross cut between the isolated Norah and her friends Madge and Jake and to poke some ironic fun, in a typical slice of Bowen black comedy, at middle class mores. 'I hope she's not going to start drinking,' suggests Madge, reading about Norah's retreat as her husband hands her a very large sherry.

The scratching of mice is, like the scratching of the rats in Nigel Kneale's 'During Barty's Party' instalment of Beasts (ATV, 1976), another sound effect that non-diagetically gnaws way at our subconscious, a general reminder of the animalistic world and, later, a signifier of the plan the villagers have set in motion to trap her. The greatest imposition is Mrs Vigo (an effective Freda Bamford), a housekeeper whose demeanour and speech connotes the rural as raw and uncomplicated, rooted in the community where signs, symbols and language are differentiated from those of urban life.

This sense of 'other' is heightened by the presence of the dumb, axe wielding Peter and most significantly Fisher (Bernard Hepton), a bespectacled local man of 'learning' who appears in Norah's garden in search of 'sherds'. His use of the word tells us that the community reflects back to Old English and Norse origins, the etymology for broken pieces of pottery. He also connects the cottage with birds, again underlined by the cawing of crows on the soundtrack, and how they become trapped in the house. As trapped as 'the women [who] have always lived here' he intimates, offering the symbol of the bird as a portent of the rituals to come. Like Mrs Vigo, he represents the 'old ways', informing her that in 'the old tongue' the cottage's name Flaneathan means 'place of birds'.

The discovery of such a sherd, a marble sliced in half Norah finds on her windowsill and brings into the house to the rising accompaniment of the howling wind on the soundtrack, prompts Mrs Vigo to advise her to 'keep it warm. Them like jewels. They like the body warmth.' Fisher agrees that it 'has to be brought inside' and he suggests it resembles an eye. Connected with the figure of Hecate, it could be read as a representation of the wheel that symbolises the mother, the maiden and the crone and associated with 'between' states, the liminal creature of the threshold, the guardian of doors and portals, watching over entrances.

The marble always seems to draw Norah back to the village and rather like the runic note planted on the victim in M.R. James's Casting of the Runes, the marble confirms Norah as a chosen, marked woman and the cottage as locus of the propitiatory rituals of the village. Bowen uses this to misdirect the audience throughout much of the play. Only when the audience reaches the final act does the real implication of the villagers' treatment of Norah become evident but until then both Bowen and director James MacTaggart set up her escalating unease with a mix of understatement and tried and tested horror cliche.

We're again reminded of the gulf between the old ways and the new with Fisher's observation about modern forestry techniques and the cutting down of ancient oaks and their replacement with conifers: 'Go a long way in them woods before you come across an oak nowadays.' The topography of folk horror is gradually evoked and startlingly realised in a scene where, upon Fisher's advice, Norah walks in the woods. We hear guttural shouts on the soundtrack as Norah walks in the distance. The shouts get louder, Norah looks up. MacTaggart cuts in a shot of the swaying tree canopy, matching the shouting with the treetops, to suggest something wild and primordial embedded in the landscape.

She meets Rob (Andrew Bradford, who suffuses the role with a strange innocence), almost naked, practising karate and later learns he works for the estate office and she should talk to about dealing with the mice. 'One can hardly walk straight up to a naked man and say please get rid of my mice,' offers Norah but she is persuaded to meet him and discovers he is one of the few people to have left the village, 'the first in eight years' to undertake a grammar school education and studies at an agricultural college. He has set himself apart from the 'inbreeding and inter-marriage' of the village but has returned, taken a job and is saving to leave for Canada.

An orphan, his real name is Edgar and only the villagers refer to him as 'Rob' after he was adopted by Mrs Vigo. This again suggests the separation between the rational and the instinctive, one is his proper name and the other is perhaps a divine name, an attribute of the village, and this naming parallels Norah's desire to separate herself from London life. Both, it seems, have failed at what they have set out to do and are in retreat, somewhat vulnerable and impressionable.

Rob of course is the diminutive for Robin, the 'Robin Redbreast' of the title and a nod back to the figure of Robin Hood, wherein one myth has him bleeding to death as a reflection of the ritual slaying of the king of the wood. As Mrs Vigo tells Norah, 'There's always one young man answers to the name Rob in these parts. 'As to be.'

A number of incidents begin to accumulate after their first meeting. She finds Rob deeply attractive and is encouraged by Jake to follow up on her desires but she rejects this idea simply because she feels the countryside is not private, not anonymous. MacTaggart briefly dissolves from the discussion between Norah, Jake and Madge to a shot of slowly swaying trees to emphasise the feeling Norah has of being watched by 'people... in the woods.' Jake backs this up with his observations about the wind that blows down 'that nasty little private road of yours' and the voices it purportedly carries but it is something of a ruse to prise Norah from her rural retreat and encourage her return to London.  

Jake's teasing triggers a strange dream. We see Rob, semi-naked, in a strange ritual dance brandishing a knife and Mr Fisher turn towards the camera as one of the thick lenses in his glasses falls out, a lens that bears a similarity to the constantly present half marble. It is a prophetic vision, foreshadowing the consequences of Norah's dinner with Rob that leads to their sexual tryst.

All around Norah preparations are being made, practically and symbolically. Much of this is a diversionary tactic on the part of Bowen who lulls the audience into believing that it is Norah who will eventually be sacrificed. The chicken Mrs Vigo prepares for the dinner offers a moment of black humour as she describes the bird as if she was describing Norah: 'She'm broody. No use for laying. Ring 'er neck, slit 'er throat, hang 'er up. That's all she'm good for.'

A bird trapped in the cottage chimney provides some disorientating point of view camera shots when, after Rob's failure to charm Norah with his thorough knowledge of the SS, Norah is frightened and Rob returns to comfort her. Both of them are now 'trapped' within the internecine machinations of the villagers, have become lambs to slaughter in one way or another, birds caught inside the house. Even their morning lovemaking and conversation is serenaded by a dawn chorus, not only a signifier of fecundity and regeneration but also of the cycle of the ritual.

That cycle is again represented by the images of the harvest festival to which Mrs Vigo drags Norah because she must 'admire the decorations'. MacTaggart stylistically evokes this through a series of still images of farm produce, first closing in on images of eggs as a voice over of the pastor's sermon mentions 'guarding and holding our precious seed even in the dark days of winter to bring it forth in the Spring', and then offering a series of images of dead hares and chickens.

Norah becomes pregnant, her missing contraceptive cap a clue to how this was planned without her permission, but she seems to ignore the evidence around her - the bird, the broken drainpipe, Rob being attacked by a poacher outside her house - and the coincidences take on a ridiculous air when she relates all this to Madge and Jake and she concludes, 'It's mad, the whole thing.'

'What good would a woman's blood be for the land?' 

When she returns to the village, having decided not to get an abortion and making it plain to Rob that the child is solely her business, Norah finds matters are out of her control. Mrs Vigo states categorically to her, 'But now, come Easter, 'ere am your place, miss' when she intimates a brief weekend stay and no intention to return soon. She is then confined at the cottage, by a suddenly malfunctioning car, a disconnected telephone and a bus that refuses to stop for her, in the two weeks leading up to Easter. This is itself a time of death and resurrection in the Christian calendar and one underlined by the themes discussed in television programmes Norah is left to watch on her own in the cottage.

She pleads to Madge and Jake in a letter that she is afraid and asks them, 'please don't be rational about it. Make allowances and come and get me as soon as you can.' She is begging them to operate on instinct. We see the letter to them on a post office counter and then hear Mr Fisher's ominous voice over asking the post mistress to keep the letter back 'just so it doesn't get lost in the post.'

The play culminates in a terrifying scene where the ritual preparations are completed and audience expectations are confounded. Norah understands that her night of sex with Rob was arranged, 'the bull was brought to the cow. It happens in the country' she accuses and, brandishing a knife, suggests the whole arrangement is some form of 'devil worship' and connects with 'stories of blood, blood... always rather vague.'

Incidentally at this point, as Edward Heath's government of 1970 began its slide into chaos, an electricians strike blacked out millions of homes in London and the Midlands on the December evening of Robin Redbreast's transmission. Viewers were certainly left 'rather vague', literally in the dark, as to what happened after Norah threatened Rob with a knife. Their complaints secured Robin Redbreast a rare and welcome repeat the following February.

Like the bird coming down the chimney so appears the axe-wielding Peter and, when Norah passes out, we see him and the butcher Mr. Wellbeloved (played by Robin Wentworth who would later appear as Professor Horner in the occult themed 1971 Doctor Who story 'The Daemons') lead Rob out to the slaughter. It is devastatingly conveyed with only a close up shot of the unconscious Norah and Rob's chilling, blood curdling scream on the soundtrack. In that instant, the play completely reorientates around the pagan English ritual of killing a king or an appropriate surrogate, one planned and supervised by close associates, and where the spilling of blood on the ground was designed to ensure the fertility of the land and the prosperity of the people.

The final scenes see Norah, confused, confront Mrs Vigo who explains Rob's fate and her survival: 'What good would a woman's blood be for the land? We bear, my dear. We give birth. That am our work. Takes a man for the other.' Thus the cycle of death and rebirth is confirmed and Fisher and Mrs Vigo are simply the conduits for the rituals and cycles of fertility, tranmogrified into the Hecate and Herne of legend, while Norah Palmer is the goddess of fertility herself as Fisher explains: 'not a married lady but nevertheless, if you'll excuse the freedom, not a virgin either.' 

The play ends on an equally enigmatic note. Bowen's exploration of myth, instinct and rationality is synthesised in the chilling final shot as Norah drives away in her car, determined to bring the baby up on her own and perhaps hoping to prevent the ritual cycle from claiming the 'new Rob' as Fisher suggests, and she glances back to see Fisher - the leader of this particular hunt - and Mrs Vigo momentarily altered into the figures of Hecate and Herne.

They are a representation of the myths touched upon in Fisher's final speech about the legends of blood sacrifice, Robin Hood and Frazer's The Golden Bough. Like his nearest equivalent Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man (1973), Fisher manipulates myth to deceive and mislead but only towards what he sees as a moral project, toward a good end. Bowen's play, William Fowler notes, also seems to quantify how After the Rain's narrator reflected upon the 'long view' of myth: 'there are no beginnings in history, history is too big for beginnings that we can apprehend but men are not too big. Men are small.'(11)

(1) John Bowen commentary in Howard MacNaughton, 'John Bowen' profile in Contemporary British Dramatists
(2) John Williams, 'Robin Redbreast' article at British Television Drama, 4th November 2010.
(3) Howard MacNaughton, 'John Bowen' profile in Contemporary British Dramatists
(4) Ibid
(5)  Dr Ruth Hazel, notes on 'Performing the Bacchae', Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English from c.1970 to the Present, The Open University.
(6) John Bowen quoted in Dr Ruth Hazel, notes on 'Performing the Bacchae'
(7) William Fowler, 'Robin Redbreast and John Bowen' viewing notes, Robin Redbreast DVD, BFI
(8) Robert Fabian, The Anatomy of Crime
(9) 'Interview with John Bowen', Robin Redbreast DVD, BFI
(10) John Williams, 'Robin Redbreast' article at British Television Drama, 4th November 2010.
(11) William Fowler, 'Robin Redbreast and John Bowen' viewing notes, Robin Redbreast DVD, BFI
 
Special Features
Interview with John Bowen (11:25)
Short but informative chat that covers the return of the Norah Palmer character, the development of the play from incidents in his own life and the murder in Lower Quinton and the problems with the original submission. He also refers to its repeat after the December 1970 power cuts. 
Around the Village Green (11:16)
Evelyn Spice and Marion Grierson's short film from 1937 offering insight into the changing economic and social history of village life which acts as an acute counterpoint to the themes in Robin Redbreast.
Illustrated booklet 
Featuring essays and biographies by Vic Pratt, William Fowler, Oliver Wake and Alex Davidson. 

Play for Today: Robin Redbreast 
BBC 1970
Transmitted 10 December 1970 / Repeated 25 February 1971
BFI / Released 28 October 2013 / BFIVD997 / Cert 12 / Black and white*/ English language with optional hard of hearing subtitles / 77 mins / DVD9 / PAL / Original aspect ratio 1.33:1 / Dolby Digital mono audio (320 kbps)

*Although originally a colour programme all that remains is a 16mm black and white telerecording

Who at Fifty – Manchester’s very own Doctor Who fringe festival 16th – 30th November, 2013
Manchester pays homage to Doctor Who with a two week fringe festival of new drama, screenings and special appearances.

Doctor Who is fifty years old on the 23rd November, 2013 and four of Manchester’s best loved venues are teaming up with a host of events over two weeks to help you celebrate. New drama, live episodes, screenings, poetry and a great big party for Doctor Who’s 50th birthday on Saturday, 23rd November. With more goodies than you can shake a sonic screwdriver at, it’s truly bigger on the inside.

Discussing the programme, Festival co-ordinator Gareth Kavanagh notes; “Doctor Who at Fifty is something we’ve been building up to for years. We’ve had so much pleasure from this wonderful show over the years and Who at Fifty is Manchester’s love letter to Doctor Who. With our links to the show being as strong as they are – ‘beit it from the links between Corrie and Doctor Who or merely as home to Russell T Davies and the place he drew his inspiration from as he plotted the show’s triumphant return to our screens in 2005, it just feels right for our City to give something back to the fans!”


THE ART OF WHO kicks things off on Saturday, 16th November at the Lass O'Gowrie with your chance to meet some of the amazing talents behind the Doctor Who comic strip – currently the Guinness Book of Records World Record holder for the longest running tie-in comic strip. You’ll see rare art, chat to the creators, sneak previews, demonstrations and maybe buy some original art if the fancy takes you. Join Matt Badham and special guests Adrian Salmon, Martin Geraghty and the team Vworp Vworp for a Doctor Who in the comics afternoon at the Lass.

Another key creative Who at Fifty is also delighted to welcome is ANDREW CARTMEL who will be in conversation at the Lass O’Gowrie on the 30th November. As script editor during the later years of the original run, Andrew did much to lay the ground for Russell T Davies triumphant return in 2005 and is a key voice in the evolution of the show from ratings also-ran to conqueror of Ant and Dec.

Sunday, 17th November sees a chance to meet Doctor Who's very first director at FAB Café - WARIS HUSSEIN, the man who, alongside Verity Lambert cast William Hartnell as the Doctor and, in doing so, shaped the 50 years that followed. A BAFTA winner and renowned director, this is the first time Waris has appeared in Manchester and is not to be missed.

Waris will also be present at a very special live restaging of his original debut AN UNEARTHLY CHILD at FAB Café. A full cast, live performance of the very first episode of Doctor Who from 1963 starring Phil Dennison as the Doctor, this unique presentation is being staged in support of the Alzheimer’s Society and is brought to you by Lass Productions and Scytheplays, the team behind 2013 fringe smash hits V for Vendetta and the Ballad of Halo Jones. An Unearthly Child runs on the 17th, 18th and 19th November and is performed as a double bill with the follow-up, EDGE OF DESTRUCTION on the 23rd November. Edge of Destruction then continues its run on the 24th and 25th November.

The drama doesn’t end there. Who at Fifty also showcases the premiere of AN ADVENTURE IN TIME AND SPACE; 50 YEARS IN 50 RELS– an anarchic and hilarious celebration of everyone’s favourite Time Lord at the Lass O'Gowrie on 21st November, brought to you by our ridiculously talented ensemble and Manchester Theatre Award winning playwright (and lifelong Who fan) Ian Winterton.

Other Doctor Who inspired drama not to be missed includes THE PYRAMIDS OF MARGATE, a solo theatre tragicomedy addressing (alien) life, love, dreams and … Tom Baker which wowed the critics at Edinburgh, ourneying to the Lass on 23rd November, and NEMESIS– a rehearsed play reading from David Agnew, a bittersweet tale of a couple and how the return of Doctor Who to our screens in 2005 makes an indelible mark on their lives. Find out at the Town Hall Tavern on 28th November.

Who at Fifty also showcases more comedy than you can shake a Perigosto Stick at! Fringe favourites THE SCOTTISH FALSETTO SOCK PUPPET THEATRE return to the Lass on the 17th November with Socks in Space, their sell-out Edinburgh show with some very special new Doctor Who material to tease us with. They are also joined later that evening by a Doctor Who themed WET FEET special stand-up evening, with Manchester’s biggest Who fan comedians giving their all with MC John Cooper. John is also at the helm for JUST AN EARTH MINUTE– A Doctor Who tinged edition of the Radio Four classic.

Stand-up and poet, Rod Tame tells us how Doctor Who makes his life make sense with his sell-out show STRANGE WORLD, ODD PERSON on the 25th November, while fans themselves get to dictate the action in a very special improvised episode of Doctor Who performed by the Comedysportz improve comedy troupe in LET’S SEE WHAT HAPPENS on Saturday, 30th November. You don’t necessarily need to be an avid fan to take part in the fun.

Thursday, 21st November sees a very special Doctor Who edition of the LASS PUB QUIZ, in association with the Manchester Library Service. Hosted by Rod Tame with special guest Bernard Padden, who starred as Tylos in Full Circle– a Tom Baker Doctor Who story from 1980, the quiz promises, fun, clips and other interactive treats to challenge the casual fan and hardcore followers of Doctor Who alike.

It wouldn’t be Doctor Who without a few screenings either, and Who at Fifty has plenty on offer. Monday, 18th November sees a rare 16mm film screening of THIS SPORTING LIFE– the 1963 kitchen sink drama starring Richard Harris and William Hartnell that convinced BBC TV bosses to give Hartnell the role of the Doctor and in doing so, change TV history.

The 26th November sees a screening of the David Tennant epic THE STOLEN EARTH while the Lass O’Gowrie will show the epic 50th anniversary special – the DAY OF THE DOCTOR on big screens in HD on the evening of the 23rd November and docu-drama AN ADVENTURE IN SPACE AND TIME on the 22nd November.

Finally, Wednesday THE COBBLES OF DOOM on the 20th November at Taurus celebrates the links between Coronation Street and Doctor Who with an evening of clips and interviews brought to you by the Fiction Stroker and Phil Collinson, the only man to have ever produced both Doctor Who and Corrie.

Tickets are available on the door (unless sold out) and advance tickets are available from http://www.wegottickets.com/. Participating venues include; the Lass O’Gowrie, FAB Café, Taurus and the Town Hall Tavern. Unearthly Child photoshoot credits - shot director Paul Anderton, lighting Peter Michael George, ace photographer Andrew Greenland and Steven Mitton's smoke machine! Join the fun over at Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/events/570519719680069

Follow on Twitter with the hashtag: #whoatfifty

For more information or for interview requests, please contact the Festival Co-ordinator, Gareth Kavanagh on 07748103698 or on garethkavanagh@hotmail.com

Complete listings are below and can be downloaded.

Many Doctor Who fans have, at some time or another, thought it would be 'fun' to watch every episode (including the reconstructions of missing stories) in one consecutive, fell swoop. I admit to doing this successfully at least once, possibly twice, and on a third failed attempt. There is, after all, only so much Doctor Who anyone can take.

I found these ventures satisfying, if something of an endurance test, and can imagine seasoned fans have often been reduced to comparing their viewing battle scars over a small port in their local hostelry. I was fortunate in that I was accompanied by my husband in the trawls through Doctor Who's memorable triumphs and utter failures. It confirmed he was as obsessive as I was. For me the experience led down a corpse strewn road to what was then known as Outpost Gallifrey, where as an innocent in the lions' den of online fandom I decided to review each of the stories. Just to see if I could do it.

To paraphrase Neil Perryman in the opening to his book Adventures With The Wife In Space: Living With Doctor Who, we underwent a form of aversion therapy akin to Dr Brodsky's infamous Ludovico Technique. Safe to say, listening to Ludwig Van was otherwise unaffected. The upshot of my own trawl was the birth of the very blog you are now reading. When OG ditched its review sections I soldiered on for a while and then had a light bulb moment when I decided all the reviews would be better off on a blog.


To date I've still not covered every Doctor Who story (sorry to have failed you, dear reader) so I'm mightily impressed by Neil and his wife Sue's commitment to their blog Adventures With The Wife In Space. When I heard Neil was about to watch the entirety of the classic series (but with a difference - he asked his wife to join in) I ruminated over the question that had previously plagued me: Would his love for Doctor Who endure? More seriously, would his marriage survive?

Their blog is that rare thing, a commentary where the series and the fans are seen through the eyes of someone, Neil's wife Sue, who had seen very little of the original series and had no concept of why Neil really loved the series. Sue has attained something of a cult status with her very amusing, no holds barred conversations with Neil as they watched everything from 1963 through to 1989 and many a diversion from the canon, including Doctor Who - The Movie, the Cushing films and even, rather bravely or foolishly, Dimensions in Time.

In the process, some sacred Who cows have been sworn at and received fan wisdom has had cushions thrown at it. And all this because rewatching Doctor Who was the preferred option to seeing that dog's arse and feather duster open the titles of another dull episode of Downton Abbey and Neil was, as Sue suspected, looking for a reward after spending ages living in a static caravan as she fulfilled a cherished desire to build her own house.

Neil's book, Adventures With The Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who, is not simply a regurgitation of the hundreds of blog posts he and Sue diligently put together. Don't worry, you haven't entered a recursive occlusion in print. Incidentally, in an alternate reality there's a Buzz/Aldrin Perry(woman) probably conducting the same experiment with their next of kin where the Doctor was played on television by Charlie Drake.

While the book contains a soupçon of the blog, an evaluation of its impact in the last third of its pages and some apposite epithets peppered through the early sections, the emphasis is firmly on the 'living' part of the book's title. In an honest way, sometimes revealing personal details almost to the point of vulnerability, Neil takes us back to his childhood and the eventual disintegration of his parents' marriage, where its decline instigated his leaving home and, like all of us, facing the world with all of our, and its, insecurities.

The 'Early Years' of the book will strike a number of familiar chords with Doctor Who fans of a certain age. Neil's earliest memory of the series is the Third Doctor and Jo's encounter with the Drashigs in the cliffhanger of episode one of 1973's Carnival of Monsters and from there he waxes about many subjects, ranging from Pertwee's grumpiness in the revamped 1974 title sequence, a fear of toxic giant flies, the struggle to draw the infamous diamond logo, to recreating the Doctor's adventures at school with the help of Beverly Sharp whose urge to realism meant she wrapped sellotape round her hand to recreate Noah's infected arm in The Ark in Space. I wish I'd had friends like that at school. 

He also revives the horror of missing an episode. If you weren't in front of the telly on a Saturday night in 1975 that was it. You couldn't record it or toddle off to BBC iPlayer. I remember being quite horrible to my parents when they dragged me to a wedding and I missed episode two of The Invasion of Time. At the time I probably thought they'd committed a heinous crime but these days I regard it as something of mercy killing on their part. As well as the trauma of missing episodes, either through the demands of a social occasion, a terrible injury or a truculent parent demanding to watch the news instead, Neil also eloquently captures how often we separate ourselves from our obsessions because we need to.

Initially, I stopped watching Doctor Who around 1978. In my lofty teenage opinion it had all become too juvenile. My attention turned to lurid horror films because, let's face it, copious bloodletting, disfigurement and supernatural hi-jinks were on a par with Eisenstein and Tarkovsky. Neil, on the other hand, was busy watching Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and finding the charms of Erin Gray were making him feel funny inside. I had the same reaction to Michael Billington in UFO but that's another story.

More seriously, he demonstrates how his own attempts to mature often coincided with a period where Doctor Who wasn't necessarily appropriate for dealing with those stressful situations life tends to chuck at us. To quote Nicholas Parsons in The Curse of Fenric (with nods to Corinthians and cf. the chapter 'Words I Learned from Doctor Who'): 'When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.' Hormones and a traumatic encounter with the Myrka triggered estrangement from Doctor Who and, in one of the book's signature moments where the reality of adult relationships bursts into Neil's life, his parents separation culminated with him leaving home.

Again, the book is all about touchstones which we (and I suppose I mean those of us who do track our lives against certain cultural artifacts like films and telly programmes) share. I returned to watching Doctor Who avidly in 1980 but by 1986 I'd again stopped watching. I'd lost my mum, packed my job in and had decided to go and get an education. Trying to watch The Trial of a Time Lord with my cynical housemates just seemed to underline how out of kilter I was as an adult with the programme I had once loved. A traumatic attempt to 'come out' to my dad (not as a Whovian, I hasten to add) also sealed the deal and I was out there in the big, bad world on my own.

However, like Neil, it was Remembrance of the Daleks that brought me back into watching the series. I've not stopped since despite the BBC's insistence in 1989 that it took a brief retirement break for 16 years. But what about Sue, I hear you cry. Where does she fit into this scheme of things? Sue does contribute a chapter to the book as a counterpoint to Neil's peregrinations through student life, feminist girlfriends and listening to Tangerine Dream. Sue's recollections are really rather beautiful. The words 'Doctor' and 'Who' do not feature in the chapter at all, which is something of a relief for her internet stalkers.

Rather that they could make each other laugh and they both knew how to use an edit suite seemed to be the deciding factors in Sue's decision to invite Neil, 'a raving feminist who looked like Jesus, who couldn't hold his drink, who was hopeless at pool and couldn't count people back onto a bus', home for dinner. Like she says, 'Neil was quite a catch'. What shines through at this point is that mercurial, indefinable, mysterious thing called love. How Neil and Sue forged a relationship then underpins the rest of the book.

That relationship faced many challenges. Neil became step-dad to Sue's four year-old daughter Nicol and introducing her to Day of the Daleks lost out to The Breakfast Club on a constant loop. He met Sue's parents and, in a surreal moment, they appeared to be Jon Pertwee and Dennis Taylor off out for a night at the bingo. For Neil, it was time to stop worrying about U.N.I.T dating controversies and get paranoid about the Millennium Bug and mayonnaise. And writing his PhD and convincing his students that watching old Doctor Who was a very good thing.

Among the highlights - which will either make you laugh or cry, or both - are: Sue's phone call to Tom Baker, much to Neil's horror, during a Doctor Who themed edition of QVC (I remember the feverish intensity of watching their Star Trek hours as they flogged lots of tat to people with more money than sense); her searching Hartlepool high and low for a pair of 3D glasses so that Neil could watch Dimensions in Time in all its grisly detail; Neil's devotion to Sue crystalised in his dilemma about watching the early VHS release of Doctor Who - The Movie without her. It's an epic love story retold in charming, affecting prose and I swear you'll have tears in your eyes when Neil asks Nicol two very important questions.

The final third of the book takes us to Neil's idea to run the Adventures With The Wife In Space blog after discovering online fan communities, for better or worse, and undertaking various web ventures on the internet - Tachyon TV, Behind the Sofa among them - but each time getting restless and seeking to move on. The new blog was seen as a test of endurance as well as their marriage and Neil catalogues not just the process of watching Doctor Who with Sue, and her reactions to it, but also the strange, murky world of cyber-stalking and internet hate. Her 'enthusiasm' for the experiment reaches apocalyptic proportions at a convention where drinks, an over-earnest barker, a microphone and John Levene's suit don't mix.

This warm-hearted book concludes with Neil's lovely reflection on Doctor Who and his marriage to Sue. In the middle of the night, an insomniac Neil decides to watch The Horror of Fang Rock. Clearly concerned about the effects of the experiment on his own appetite for watching Doctor Who (Wilde's observation from The Ballad of Reading Gaol of 'each man kills the thing he loves' is appropriately referenced) he actually discovers that his love for the series is undiminished and it has in fact been enhanced. He not only taps into his childhood nostalgia, the undying fan love that Tom Baker often refers to, but also his love for Sue and the touching, funny adventures he has now been sharing with his wife in space.

Right, I'm off to read what Sue thought of The Enemy of the World... she's indomitable, after all. Meanwhile, this comes highly recommended for married obsessives everywhere.

Adventures With The Wife In Space: Living With Doctor Who
Neil Perryman (with interruptions from Sue Perryman)
Faber and Faber
Published: 7th November 2013
Paperback, 304 pages
ISBN: 9780571298105

Network Distributing debuted a pair of exclusive vinyl soundtrack album releases this week. Focusing on two iconic ITC series of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and Man in A Suitcase, these beautifully designed albums assemble a number of instantly recognisable cues on high quality 180g vinyl pressed by Pallas in Germany.

Network worked with renowned vinyl cutting engineer Ray Staff, whose credits include David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars and The Rolling Stones'It's Only Rock 'n' Roll, to master the albums from the FX Group tape transfers.

Ray joined the legendary Trident Studios, based in St Anne's Court, Soho, in 1970 and he became part of the fledgling Mastering Department. His skill at working on major projects with Bowie and Elton John saw him progress to become Trident’s Chief Mastering Engineer. He is currently one of the chief engineers at AIR Mastering having worked with artists as diverse as Led Zeppelin and Supertramp and most recently on the triple platinum No 1 debut album and single by Corinne Bailey Rae.


Network commented: 'Although high-quality masters were already available from the 2008 CD releases, we have returned to the original analogue tapes which have been mastered afresh for vinyl to take advantage of the format’s more subtle dynamic range. Mastering and vinyl cutting have been supervised by one of the very best in the business, ensuring that these tracks have never sounded so good since they went down onto tape in the late 1960s.'

Created by Dennis Spooner and Monty Berman, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)'s 26 episodes were produced and made by Scoton Productions for worldwide distribution by ITC. Their track record stretched back to some of the classic 1960s series made under the ITC banner, including The Baron (1966-67), The Champions (1968-69) and Department S (1969-70). Filming commenced in May 1968 at ABC Elstree Borehamwood, continuing into July 1969, and the series featured the crime busting antics of down at heel private investigator Jeff Randall (Mike Pratt) and his partner Marty Hopkirk (Kenneth Cope). The major selling point was that the murdered Marty was reincarnated as a ghost in the very first episode My Late Lamented Friend and Partner, transmitted in September 1969, and then 'haunted' his partner throughout the rest of the series.

Providing the music for the series was legendary composer Edwin Astley. Ted had composed the memorable themes and cues for Danger Man (1960-68), The Saint (creating two arrangements for the black and white and colour episodes between 1962 and 1969), The Baron, Department S and The Champions. Of the distinctive harpsichord dominated theme of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) he commented: 'It has to be something distinctive in the orchestration or in the tune and I suppose that's why I used the harpsichord because in those days it was a very distinctive sound.'(1)

He recorded a total of 188 cues for the series and the harpsichord (often used as stings to herald the appearance and disappearance of Marty and effortlessly rearranged as his signature motif), organ, high strings and high-pitched flutes and clarinets add a melancholic counterpoint (Astley's use of the minor key underlining the series' quirky notions of the afterlife) to the dynamic music, driven by strident strings, drums, brass and bass, which scores the series' action sequences.

The album features the iconic opening and end titles, the trilling notes of the harpsichord highlighting a mid-tempo jazzy waltz, and specific cues from nine episodes. They brilliantly showcase Astley's splendid sense of melody, jazz structure (the music for Money to Burn is particularly lovely) and use of motif to enhance scenes. And on vinyl they sound more organic and subtle.

The thirty one episodes of Man In A Suitcase, created by Richard Harris and Dennis Spooner under its original title of McGill, were produced in collaboration with American producer Stanley Greenberg and prolific ITC producer Sidney Cole. Filming started at Pinewood Studios in August 1966 and the series was filmed in two blocks and completed in December 1967, by which time it had been given its more familiar title. The lead role of McGill, a disgraced CIA operative taking cases on a freelance basis around the world, was given to 28 year-old Texan method actor Richard Bradford after ITC's Lew Grade saw him in Arthur Penn's The Chase (1966).

Man In A Suitcase features the work of two composers, Ron Grainer and Albert Elms. Grainer needs little introduction. A prolific television and film composer, his signature themes for Maigret (BBC, 1959-63), Steptoe and Son (BBC, 1962-74) Doctor Who (BBC, 1963-89, 1996, 2005-), The Prisoner (1967-8) and Tales of the Unexpected (ITV, 1979-88) gained him worldwide recognition. He also branched out into films, such as To Sir, With Love (1967) and The Assassination Bureau (1969), and in 1971 produced the stunning score for The Omega Man. The Grainer theme to Man In A Suitcase would gain greater recognition in its appropriation for the Chris Evans Channel 4 show TFI Friday.

Grainer's strident piano, brass and percussion driven theme anticipates his work on The Prisoner and its boldness epitomises the values of the anti-heroic central character of McGill.  In counterpoint Albert Elms offers a range of contrasting cues for eleven episodes on this album. Again, his use of lietmotif, low key woodwind, moody brass and percussion offers a taste of what was to come with his eclectic work on The Prisoner. Here, the music switches from upbeat, 1960s pop and punchy action themes, to wistful melancholia or cute jazz with Spanish and Mexican influences (often as a musical accompaniment to that week's location in the episode).

Both albums make for very nostalgic listening, as wonderful examples of music from the golden age of television, and the album artwork is beautifully handled and presented by Martin Cater. Serious vinyl collectors will get a lot of pleasure from their analogue audio fidelity and quality.

(1) Andrew Pixley, Randall and Hopkirk - Accompanying Notes 2008 CD Release

Note: these albums are only available direct from Network's site.
Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)
Original Soundtrack Selections
Music by Edwin Astley
Network 7859033
Mono
Released: 28 October 2013

Man In A Suitcase
Original Soundtrack Selections
Music by Albert Elms
Theme by Ron Grainer
Network 7959028
Mono
Released: 28 October 2013

Coming from publisher I.B. Tauris this month is another publication in the 'Who Watching' project, Doctor Who - The Eleventh Hour: A Critical Celebration of the Matt Smith and Steven Moffat Era

Edited and with an introduction from Andrew O'Day, the book is published to celebrate the Doctor's 50th anniversary and provides a valuable record of the current Matt Smith Doctor, who arrived in 2010 and is still travelling in time and space. This first book devoted solely to the Steven Moffat/Matt Smith era is written by experts on the Doctor and includes contributions from Richard Hewett, Frank Collins (that's me), Matthew Kilburn, Dee Amy-Chinn, David Budgen, Simone Knox, Jonathan Bignell, Piers D. Britton, Vasco Hexel, Matt Hills, Brigid Cherry, Neil Perryman, and Ross P. Garner.


Doctor Who - The Eleventh Hour: A Critical Celebration of the Matt Smith and Steven Moffat Era is wide-ranging and varied in viewpoint and explores such issues as the performance of the Doctor, the gothic and fairy tale genres, the portrayal of history on screen, gender and sexuality, the phenomenon of Christmas television, the transatlantic dimensions of the programme, its look and sound, promotional culture and audience response. Also discussed are Doctor Who interactive games and the spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures. Written in accessible style, the book will be a valuable contribution to the expanding literature on Doctor Who, for fans, watchers of sci fi TV and students alike.

Andrew O'Day is co-author, with Jonathan Bignell, of Terry Nation (2004). He received his PhD in Television Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London and has contributed chapters on 'classic' and 'new Who' to a range of edited collections.

ISBN-10: 1780760191 
ISBN-13: 978-1780760193

Publication Date: 30 November 2013
Number of Pages: 288

You can now order Doctor Who - The Eleventh Hour from I.B. Tauris and Amazon


About 'Who Watching' at I.B. Tauris
"Why so many books on the Doctor at I.B.Tauris? Why the ongoing 'Who Watching' project? Well, the Doctor is central to contemporary media, and remarkably almost spans the history of television itself. Written for a receptive audience of fans and students, they have been warmly welcomed and have helped form a community, engaged in an argumentative dialogue about the history and future of the Doctor. Intelligent and loyal, with deep, deep knowledge of their field, provocative in their views, discriminating and critical too – Doctor Who fans keep us on our toes to publish the best writing on and thinking about this extraordinary phenomenon."

Check out the 'Who Watching' website for reviews of the current series and articles from authors in their published range on many aspects of classic and current Doctor Who.  

Leslie Megahey's extraordinary television film Schalcken the Painter finally arrives on Blu-Ray and DVD this month courtesy of the BFI. As with many of the home entertainment releases in their Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film season, Schalcken the Painter has such a reputation it has been on the 'most wanted' lists of many fans of British telefantasy for decades. Here it is and remastered in high definition from the 16mm interpositive held in the BFI Archive and released in the Flipside range of obscure British films.

Writer, director and producer Megahey's career began in BBC radio where, after he graduated from his traineeship, he wrote and produced radio plays for a year. He joined the BBC's Music and Arts department and in 1967, along with other television trainees Tony Palmer, Alan Yentob and Nigel Williams, began making films about painters and writers under the auspices of pioneering television executive Stephen Hearst.

Megahey was as much an inspirational figure himself as Yentob, then a raw recruit, professed: 'Leslie was a little older than me and had arrived at the BBC by much the same route two years earlier. We became close friends and colleagues in the Music and Arts department of the BBC. Leslie's enthusiasm and commitment were infectious. Leslie was endlessly curious and was a great believer in finding inventive ways to tell stories.'(1)


It was this inventiveness Megahey brought to the drama-documentary form. His first full length film about a painter, The Performers (BBC, 1972), an exploration of the astonishing twists and turns of Goya's life, was produced under the editorship of Nigel Williams for Omnibus (BBC, 1967-2003) and it ushered in his signature use of dramatising scenes of the artist's work and a distanced narrator for what where technically documentary biographies.

In this way he was following a direct line from director Ken Russell (whom Megahey described as 'a true innovator') and his work, both for Omnibus and its predecessor Monitor, on Elgar (BBC 1962), The Debussy Film (BBC, 1965) and Song of Summer (BBC, 1968). During the 1970s Megahey continued to make 'personal essay films, where the dramatised parts evoked ideas and obsessions about the artist's work' covering such subjects as John Donne, Ligeti, Rodin and Gaugin. (2)

'brooding, sexy and gothic - and based in some kind of art historical reality'

Schalcken the Painter, made in 1979, came about in a rather circuitous way. Megahey's editor Paul Humfress, who had worked with him on a number of films, picked up a collection of short stories by J Sheridan Le Fanu in a second hand shop in Amsterdam and immediately thought one story, first published in The Dublin University Magazine in 1839 as 'Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter: Being a Seventh Extract from the Legacy of the Late Francis Purcell, P.P. of Drumcoolagh' and later in a revised form 'Schalken the Painter' (sic) for inclusion in 1851's Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery, was perhaps the property they were looking for.

Megahey and Humfress had wanted to make something 'brooding, sexy and gothic - and based in some kind of art historical reality' and Le Fanu's story, re-typed by Humfress and submitted to Megahey for his approval, fitted the bill. (3) He then researched 17th Century Dutch painting by visiting the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie at The Hague. In the collections archive, he examined the documented work of Godfried Schalcken, the genre and portrait painter who was the inspiration for Le Fanu's story.

Schalcken was notable for representing scenes by candlelight and a number of paintings paralleled many of the scenes Megahey had incorporated into his own script: 'I was amazed at how prolific he was having never heard of him before. So the extra scenes, and the brothel incidents, were based on the Schalckens I had seen in Holland and on the images of deHooch and other painters.'(4) One painting - a girl holding a candle while in the background a man draws a sword - remained elusive, presumed destroyed. A mock-up was used in the finished film. 

After showing a hand written screenplay, completed in the course of one night, to drama director Tristram Powell he was advised to add more dialogue and dramatisation, After struggling to expand the script when in reality he had no mind to, Megahey devised the opening, off screen introduction to the film where Schalcken poses his model and asks her rather ominously to 'look into the dark'. 

In August 1976, he asked the acting Head of Music and Arts Norman Swallow to look at the script as 'an interesting offer from our department as a Christmas ghost story with a serious leaning towards the arts. It's a very unusual way to deal with the psyche of the artist and the conflicts between art and life.' Even at this stage, Megahey was thinking of raising co-production money from the Dutch Public Broadcasting company, Nos and sending the script to Vincent Price, asking him to play Le Fanu as the narrator. (5)

Offering it to director Lawrence Gordon Clark, who had been responsible for the superb M.R. James adaptations in A Ghost Story for Christmas since 1971, was mooted but Megahey was rather protective of the project, feeling he wanted to direct it himself. A commission was not forthcoming and the film remained unmade until Megahey became series editor of the Omnibus strand, taking over from Barry Gavin, and he could in effect commission himself. The opportunity therefore arose to make Schalcken the Painter with co-production finance from Rainer Moritz. This was serendipitous as the television BBC ghost story tradition could said to have begun with Omnibus and Jonathan Miller's Whistle and I'll Come to You in 1968.

The idea of casting Vincent Price was quickly abandoned when Megahey decided the notion of an on screen narrator would not work and especially so when Price's qualities as an actor might 'tip an entire film over in the wrong direction'. Megahey also has vague memories of the script being rejected by Peter Cushing who 'objected to the script, I think, probably on moral grounds.'(6)

Instead, the silky voiced charms of Charles Gray provided the framing voice over narrative, with the Le Fanu fiction delivered as both commentary and constructed fiction around real people and actual paintings. The opening sequence, of the painter Schalcken (Jeremy Clyde) hard at work on a portrait, flashes back to his apprenticeship with his master Gerrit Dou (Maurice Denham in a role originally considered for Arthur Lowe) and his pathetic attempts to woo the old man's niece and ward, Rose Velderkaust (Cheryl Kennedy).

A strange, chilling story unfolds in which the corruptible and miserly Dou sells off his niece to the ghoulish but aristocratic figure of Vanderhausen (John Justin) and Schalcken, in his fruitless attempt to find her, turns to prostitution - not only for sexual gratification but also for the commercial realisation of his art.

Justin had worked with Megahey on radio and was part of a small repertory company of supporting actors the director regularly used. Jeremy Clyde was cast because he bore an uncanny resemblance to the Schalcken self portraits and Cheryl Kennedy embodied not just the 'creamy looks of a Vermeer model' but also Rose's fierce intelligence. (7)

The low budget production was confined to several small sets, replications of exteriors made in studio and the brothel interior, and one large set for the interior of Dou's house. Megahey's core team comprised of editor Paul Humfress, lighting cameraman John Hooper and designer Anna Ridley. All three had previously worked on Megahey's films.

Ridley worked closely with Megahey and Hooper to recreate the signature look of Dutch paintings, particularly Vermeer and Rembrandt. Hooper lit the sets with miniature spot lights, opted for large areas of the frame to tail off into inky blackness and pushed the exposures to encompass candlelight and subtle colours. 'A most important design feature of the shooting was the lining up of doors within doors. While we were on the set we pinned up a lot of repros of Dutch paintings on a board to refer to while lighting and shooting,' Megahey recalled and he also strove to capture a certain authenticity in the sequences where Schalcken was painting. (8) Ridley employed an art consultant, Paul Martin, to advise on the recreation and production of many of the paintings in the film.

It's certainly amise-en-scene - artist biography, precise use of props, lighting, a documentary realism coupled with stillness and carefully choreographed camera moves - that reflected Derek Jarman's work on The Tempest (1979) and anticipated the same director's Caravaggio (1986) and the postmodern formula of Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) wherein both films are full of references to paintings, use of tableaux and symbolic objects. Megahey also offers, in the documentary, that Walerian Borowczyk's Blanche (1971) was a thematic and stylistic influence on the shooting of the film.

'... allegories warning the viewer to take care to live a life of virtue and realise your immortal soul will have more weight than your possessions'

Schalcken the Painter opens with a close up of a burning candle, used within Dutch painting of the period as a symbol our time is brief and life is short and as a repeating, foreboding emblem in the film, before the camera pans up to a woman posing and reaching up to a drapery for the off screen Schalcken. She is directed to look into the dark.

The image is reproduced again when the narrator asks us to consider a particular painting, one of a woman holding a candle before such a drapery while a man draws a sword in the background. Some terrible shape also lurks in the darkness behind the coquettishly smiling woman. The image of drapery unveiling something uncanny and unpleasant in the shadows reoccurs in the film.

We are taken back to Gerrit Dou's studio in 1665, during Schalcken's apprenticeship, to understand the terrible significance of this painting. In Dou's house, Megahey crams in as many references as he can, often opulent tableaux, to underline the film's themes and the allusions to art of the period - the goods of exchange, consumerism, commodification and the price of everything and anyone.

Game birds, hanging rabbits and dried flowers slowly move out of frame as the camera replicates the perspective of Vermeer's 'Woman Holding A Balance'. We see Gerrit Dou counting his money. It acknowledges a genre of painting, which depicted various civilians counting money or weighing gold, presented as allegories warning the viewer to take care to live a life of virtue and realise your immortal soul will ultimately have more weight than your possessions. It summarises the theme of Schacklen the Painter perfectly.

Right from the opening scene Megahey is preoccupied with commerce and the notion that everything, including sex and death, is up for sale in Schalcken's world. The image of the balance is repeated when Schalcken takes Vanderhausen's box of gold coins to be valued before Dou accepts it as payment for his niece and, again, when Schalcken poses a woman with a balance holding a dead bird and jewellery for one of his paintings.

The notion of value, of the real Gerrit Dou's 'real respect for money' and the aggrandising of art and money over 'the transports of love' are present and correct in Le Fanu's original story. As Simon Schama noted, seventeenth-century Dutch painters insisted on reminding those whom appreciated their work wealth was transitory and death and God's final judgment were ever looming and materiality was fleeting when compared to divine salvation or damnation. (9)

Rose is of course the antithesis of this very male, moneyed world. We first see her revealed by a gentle pan across the studio and caught in a faithfully mounted reproduction of Vermeer's 'Young Woman Standing at a Virginal' playing a refrain on the keyboard. Music was one of the most popular themes in Dutch painting and carried many diverse associations. In portraits, a musical instrument or songbook might suggest the education or social position of the sitter and refer to the idea of faithfulness to one lover or, in conjunction with the virginal, to the traditional association of music and love.

It is the scene of Schalcken's first fumbling attempts at courtship and one repeated in Megahey's nod to Vermeer's 'The Kitchen Maid' as Rose virtuously carries out her household duties as Schalcken dithers at her side. In one of these moments of 'courtship' Schalcken cradles Rose's breast. Again, Megahey mirrors this encounter in the unsettling conclusion to the film where Schalcken is reunited with Rose. Before she forces upon him the ultimate humiliation there is a brief, ironic moment where she cradles her own breast.

Damnation is the course that both Gerrit Dou and his pupil Schalcken are set upon (many shots contain a skull as a visual reminder of their fate). Dou's greed knows no bounds and he eventually sells his pretty ward to Vanderhausen, the Death figure who drops in for dinner and demands her as his concubine. Le Fanu's tale then inverts Schalcken's fate. He becomes as in demand as his old master and just as corruptible.

At first unrequited in love and then plagued with guilt when he fails to rescue Rose from the clutches of Vanderhausen, he finds solace in the beds of prostitutes. That reversal of fortune aligns Schalcken not only with his greedy master but also with the figure of Death personified by Vanderhausen. The realisation is 'The old possess money and power and the right to dispose of the young as they see fit, the most powerful being the oldest and wealthiest and, in fact, dead'. (10)

Megahey achieves this not through Sturm und Drang but by subtle degree. The interior of the studio, the exercise of painting and the awkward courting between Schalcken and Rose seek to domesticate the Gothic. The camera is often static or very slowly panning or tracking in contrast to the continual movement of figures through doorways and in and out of rooms. Gradually, unease is generated.

When Rose is lost to the predations of the deathly Vanderhausen, Schalcken uses the creation of her portrait as a form of exorcism, 'an attempt to distance and interpret a dream' just as Le Fanu's narrator reinterprets it for the reader and viewer. (11) There's an amusing scene where Dou is instructing his students and posing his models for a tableaux of 'The Temptation of Saint Anthony'. After identifying an old man and a luscious young woman as the titular saint and his nemesis, he casually instructs his pupils, 'devils, you will imagine the devils'.

Indeed, as a result Schalcken conjures up the haunted figure of Vanderhausen. A brilliant, subtle shot shows Schalcken at work on his painting of Anthony. It is not going well and upon the cry of 'Damn the picture, damn the devils and the saints. Damn the lot of them to hell' a slow camera pan to the left of the screen reveals the spectre literally sitting at the shoulder of the artist and emerging from the gloom behind him.

At the tolling of a bell, the strike of a clock and the creak of a floorboard Vanderhausen demands an audience with Dou. Sound and music is used very creatively in the film. The scratching of pens on parchment and charcoal on canvas, the chiming of clocks, cutlery scraping on plates and busy footsteps provide a domestic soundscape which is then augmented by an ominous, rising bass note to signal the impending appearance of the demonic lover Vanderhausen.

The Gothic and the uncanny are thus rendered through visual composition dominated by shadow and candlelight, the recreation not just of Dutch painting but in the studio mounted moonlit canals of Rotterdam, and the combination of natural sounds and discordant musical tones.

Megahey takes his cue from Le Fanu and sets out to disjoint reality and our expectations of the ghost story on television, as noted by Simon Cooke: 'Le Fanu’s light and dark is a symbolic exemplification of the uncertainties of reality, a frightening space where nothing is fixed, and Megahey creates a strong visual equivalent which preserves the story’s sense of ‘ill-defined' menace and strangeness.'(12)

This is matched by Megahey's own playfulness with narrative and documentary techniques describing the lives of artists, their milieu and the power of the personal commission. The personal commission comes in all forms - the selling of portraiture and the selling of the living to the dead.

Rose becomes the 'object of our contract' according to Vanderhausen. She, Dou and Schalcken lose their appetite when they finally cast their eyes upon the gaunt visage of her husband to be, the 'very rich friend' for whom she 'must trick her self out handsomely', at their gloomy, candlelit dinner.

John Hooper's control of lighting in this scene is quite stunning with the dinner table and diners marooned in inky blackness save for the guttering candlelight. When Vanderhausen takes his seat, his ornate coat glistens wetly and he looks as if freshly emerged, rotting, from one of the canals. There are glimpses of his pale, drawn face, alluding back to the many skulls placed within the working space of the artists' studio, framed between glowing candles as food is served and left untouched. The skull, which Megahey places in many scenes throughout the film, quotes Pieter Claesz's painting 'Vanitas' and its reminder of the certainty of death.

The dinner ends with the narrator simply underlining Dou's 'heartlessness' at binding his niece to this creature. The real tragedy is Schalcken's fecklessness as Rose urges a plan upon him to elope before she is contracted to Vanderhausen. All he can offer is paint and canvas as a way of saving money to buy out the contract but, more truthfully, 'Schalcken, with at least one foot inside the establishment pale, cannot directly confront the horror that haunts him, perhaps because he is implicated in it. He can paint it only indirectly as part of his attempt to minimize his own guilt and failure.'(13)

And so Rose departs and leaves behind her shoes. Like a quasi-Cinderella figure, with her Prince Charming rather slow off the mark, she succumbs to the deathly sexuality of Vanderhausen. E. de Jong, one of the leading Dutch specialists in symbolism, regards these so-called pantoffel, shoes without backs, as one of the top ten erotic symbols in Dutch painting of the seventeenth century.

The scene reflects such paintings as 'The Slippers', by van Hoogstraten, which was an allegory of lust and temptation. The missing Rose is later the object of the unfaithful Schalcken's search in Rotterdam but his distraction by the alluring delights of a brothel, the temptations of the flesh, emphasises the images of women as commercial sex objects. They also capture the visual intensity of Schalcken's own paintings of women by candlelight.

‘the dead and the living cannot be one’

In one of the film's most disturbing scenes, Rose reappears many months later as a haunted figure seeking sanctuary from Dou and Schalcken. It's very noticeable how her terror, at the imminent arrival of Vanderhausen to claim her back, briefly shifts the rhythm of the film. The slow pace is replaced by swift camera moves and a crane shot, breaking the dominance of horizontal camera moves with an emphatic vertical, as she takes refuge in a bedroom before being snatched away again by her demon lover.

There is a brooding intensity to the scene and Rose's claim of ‘the dead and the living cannot be one’ not only highlights the tale's Gothic trappings but also signifies that creativity and emotion, her musicality and Schalcken's talent, cannot be wedded to the dead hand of commerce and its moral bankruptcy. Rose's terror, her emotional state, momentarily disrupts an all male, dispassionate milieu which is 'possessed and animated by the spirit of avarice'. (14)

There is a sense, after Schalcken is terrified by a vision of the dead Rose making love to Vanderhausen in the crypt of St. Laurence's church at the end of the film, that the tables are turned. Incidentally, the church is referred to several times - Rose recognises Vanderhausen from a tomb effigy after previously visiting the church; Schalcken meets a coach driver who brought her and Vanderhausen to the church - and is codified as the ultimate Gothic space. Here death and sex merge together.

Schalcken is seduced into entering the crypt by the vision of Rose only to find himself unable to escape the hellish act of debauchery she subjects him to. When he offers her money and she tips his purse onto the floor, Rose underlines 'the power of wealth over love... reducing Schalken to the status of a client who failed to pay enough, or, perhaps, a pimp who sold his ‘love’ for the greatest profit.'(15)

Rose has discovered the 'marriage bed' is as cold as a tomb and in the final scene her and Vanderhausen's lovemaking in the crypt is a translation of Dou's equally claustrophobic, emotionally empty, dark house. It is also the trigger for Schalcken to project his guilt into the painting we see him feverishly completing in the pre-titles sequence and later in another flash forwards. After tantalising him with the goods he has so longed for and reduced him to failed rescuer and rejected lover, Schalcken attempts to redress the balance. The figure with the drawn sword is a vain attempt to paint himself as 'hero' perhaps. Le Fanu's interlacing narrative folds inwards.

Megahey's film both embraces the television ghost story and almost elevates it to documentary. Le Fanu's fiction and Megahey's production weave between a treatise on Dutch painting and a Gothic chiller, entwining the Gothic tale within the reception of a television arts documentary strand and evoking Freud's notion of the 'uncanny' in the traditions of art history and the deeper symbolism of Dutch painting.

(1) Sarah Brown, Moving On Up
(2) Phil Tonge, interview with Leslie Megahey, 'Look into the dark' in Creeping Flesh: The Horror Fantasy Film Book Vol.2.
(3) and (4) Ibid
(5) Interview with Leslie Megahey, 'Look into the Dark' on Schalcken the Painter BFI DVD
(6) Ibid
(7) Phil Tonge, interview with Leslie Megahey, 'Look into the dark' in Creeping Flesh: The Horror Fantasy Film Book Vol.2.
(8) Ibid
(9) James Swafford, 'Tradition and Guilt in Le Fanu's "Schalken the Painter"', The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2
(10) Ibid
(11) Ibid
(12) Simon Cooke, 'The Demon in the House: Le Fanu at the British Broadcasting Corporation' in Le Fanu Studies 3. 2008. No. 2
(13) James Swafford, 'Tradition and Guilt in Le Fanu's "Schalken the Painter"', The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2
(14) Simon Cooke, 'The Demon in the House: Le Fanu at the British Broadcasting Corporation' in Le Fanu Studies 3. 2008. No. 2
(15) Ibid


About the transfer
Grain is abundant but that is hardly surprising as this is transfered from a 16mm interpositive. There are occasional flecks of dirt but overall this is a very welcome presentation after years of looking at very murky, fuzzy bootleg copies of the film. Even though the image is soft, the clarity of this remaster yields up details in the sets, props, costumes and faces and the subtleties of Hooper's cinematography. This is seen particularly in the red and green colour washes gently bathing key scenes and his effective use of candlelight. The contrast, along with the grain, gives this a thick texture and for the most part it is fairly robust and provides the appropriate levels of blackness. Don't expect this to pop off the screen but do relish the opportunity to 'look into the dark' at last and see the details of a handsome looking film. Sound is crisp and clear with little hiss and other discrepancies such as clicks. 

Special features
The Pit(Edward Abraham, 1962, 27 mins)
An experimental gothic short, adapted from Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum', The Pit is a powerful visual poem without dialogue. It does remain quite faithful to Poe's original although the ending is darker and nastier. Gregory Lawson's design is very strong and the film is dominated by a superb use of sound.  
Original sketches for The Pit
The Pledge (Digby Rumsey, 1982, 21 mins)
Three criminals pledge to free the soul of their friend from his gibbeted corpse in this short film. One of a series of short films shot by Digby Rumsey and based on 'The Highwayman' by noted Irish 'Weird Fiction' writer Lord Dunsany. The BFI describes it thus: 'At the heart of this evocative tale is a gloriously well-realised corpse, creakily dangling from the gallows. As the highwayman's sinful life is slowly revealed, the jarring contrast between the stillness of death and the bawdy rigour of life is vividly reflected'. An interview with Digby Rumsey can be found at Celluloid Wickerman.
Look Into the Dark (2013, 39 mins)
A significant interview with director/producer/writer Leslie Megahey and director of photography John Hooper about the development and production of Schalcken the Painter. Megahey discusses the original script, raising the funding and the themes and ideas in the film. Hooper discusses the use of chiaroscuro lighting and the influence of Dutch paintings on the look of the film.
Illustrated booklet
With new essays by Ben Hervey, James Bell and Vic Pratt

Schalcken the Painter
BBC 1979
Transmitted 23rd December 1979
BFI Flipside Cat. No 028 / Cat No. BFIB1184 / Cert 15 / Colour / English language with optional hard of hearing subtitles / 70 mins / Original aspect ratio 1.33:1 
Disc 1: BD50 / 1080p / 24fps / PCM mono audio (48k/16-bit)
Disc 2: DVD9 / PAL / Dolby Digital mono audio (320kbps)

Two names synonymous with the pioneering days of creating visual effects for television are Bernard Wilkie and Jack Kine. Back in the 1950s, they were the Visual Effects Department of the BBC even though at the time it wasn't even known as that, BBC Television Centre was yet to be built and neither of them had created effects for television before.

Bernard Wilkie's previously unpublished memoir, written in the 1990s, arrives from Miwk Publishing this September. Although Wilkie wrote The Technique of Special Effects in Television in 1971 (considered the effects industry bible by many) and his notes and diaries were accessed for Mat Irvine and Mike Tucker's excellent BBC VFX: The Story of the BBC Visual Effects Department published in 2010, this book provides an in depth, illuminating and often hilarious account of his profession directly from the horse's mouth, as it were.

He takes us, via some amusing detours, from his inauspicious introduction to fibreglass techniques during his first interview with Richard Levin, the BBC's Head of Television Design, in 1954 to his retirement from the BBC in 1978 shortly after overseeing the Visual Effects Department's move to Western Avenue in Acton.

As he told the Radio Times for its Doctor Who 10th Anniversary Special in 1973: "Special effects are a combination of engineering and artistry, with a spot of conjuring thrown in." Conjuring is from whence Wilkie's inventive and creative impulses seem to have sprung. The trouble is, he wasn't terribly good at it.

He was clearly passionate about showmanship and stagecraft (regular family visits to the Lewisham Hippodrome inspired a love of comedy and variety acts) and as an eight year old had already decided he was going to be a stage magician. However, a disastrous performance at the school Christmas concert, where all his tricks conspired against him, taught him a valuable lesson: "a performer should always rehearse with his props before going on stage."

This rule certainly applied to the testing of effects that he and Jack Kine undertook at the BBC but even then the pair of them were asking for trouble when certain effects got out of hand. But we're jumping the gun.

"do you know anything about fibreglass?" 

He spent the Second World War as a draughtsman and engineer at the Air Ministry before joining the Royal Air Force. Towards the end of the war he worked for Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force and then in Germany was part of an Air Force entertainment group. Here, he was set designer, scene painter, carpenter and stage manager for shows mounted at a former health spa with a 300 seat theatre. Talking of guns, he provides an amusing anecdote about a prop gun which underlines his edict about rehearsing before going on stage.

The BBC's relocation of their Engineering Research Department to Kingswood in Surrey proved fortuitous. His family had moved there after being bombed out of London and Wilkie discovered the BBC were about to move into a nearby manor house, Kingswood Warren. A prompt letter to them asking for a job secured him six years of employment "drawing wiring diagrams and component layouts."

His eventual restlessness resulted in a mountain of job applications, for many positions way beyond his experience, to the BBC television service. Despite his local manager getting rather frustrated with him, the BBC granted him a special interview after showing such determination. It's when he is interviewed by Richard Levin that the book plays to one of its great strengths.

Wilkie captures the sense of place extremely well, whether it be his journey to Television Centre, not even built when that fateful day he got the bus to White City, or his later wanderings around the subterranean studios at Lime Grove and Ealing. There is a palpable sense that Wilkie was going to be part of television's future in 1954, a witness to the modern television facility that would rise from the White City rubbish tip. It is an evocative recollection of the period.

Levin's question of, "do you know anything about fibreglass?" was the catalyst for a completely new career. Wilkie bluffed his way in by claiming he did, by swotting up in a public library on the subject and then impressing Levin in a meeting with a sales rep.

A three month secondment to create a fibreglass unit making lightweight scenery in the workshops eventually led to his encounter with Jack Kine, a scenic artist working at the BBC's Scenery Block, and the creation of the Visual Effects Department. When Wilkie was disposing of a bucket of smoking resin, Kine spotted him and tried to help, ending up with burnt fingers and ruined shoes for his trouble.

Just as Wilkie had struck upon the idea that the BBC needed such designers he again met Jack Kine, this time sitting in Levin's office. Kine had had the same thoughts and now Levin was bringing them together to create the Effects Department. Over a couple of pints at the White Horse, they put any differences aside and plunged headlong into the unregulated world of television production. There's a wonderful chapter devoted to Kine, where Wilkie's mutual respect and shared humour shines off the page about a colleague who claimed "if it can be imagined, it can be made." He recalls Kine's background as a model maker, Slade trained artist and as a draughtsman at Alexandra Palace and when, in his late seventies, Kine underwent corneal surgery to partially regain his sight.

What would seem to be simple tasks - creating spiral captions (deemed the very first television visual effect they created for a 1954 edition of the arts programme Mobiles), generating dry ice with tin baths (there's a whole chapter devoted to the perils of working with the stuff), smoke effects and simulating snow - paled into insignificance when it came to organising their workshops and setting up their first office. They painted their long workbench with a maroon paint that refused to dry and it almost ripped the seat out of David Attenborough's pants and they blew up most of their office with an advertising gimmick designed to promote their skills.

However, he also illustrates the hazards and hard lessons they learned. They pulled their workshop apart to retrieve a chip of yellow phosphorous that could explode and start a fire that would have gutted Television Centre and, at an effects demonstration, a Thermos of dry ice exploded and covered the front row of the audience with glass shards. Wilkie constantly iterates that, despite the lax regulations, he and staff were safety conscious, especially when it came to involving artistes in effects and stunts.

These 'experiments' and 'accidents' formed the backbone of their Heath Robinson expertise and they slowly accrued work on various productions. However, inadvertently setting off very loud explosions in the Design Block or interrupting the Buying Department's lunch hour football with a ricocheting pyrotechnic gained them a less than respectable reputation.

"It can't be easy to act out naked fear while peering at two gay rats having it away like knives."

Despite this they were involved in some of the key television programmes of the 1950s. Wilkie's love of comedy and variety found him rigging props and effects and sharing the Shepherd's Bush Empire stage with Morecambe and Wise as they recorded their television bête noireRunning Wild (BBC, 1954). Their first show for television was a disaster, eliciting that infamous newspaper review: "Definition of the week:- TV Set: The box they buried Morecambe and Wise in."

It's a fascinating account of Eric and Ernie's growing sense of insecurity as the recording of the show progressed. They would ask Wilkie and Kine their opinions of the jokes and sketches, whether they felt their director was competent and apparently started losing confidence in their own partnership. This was exacerbated by certain effects not working on cue when water syphons refused to work and exploding amplifiers were miscued.

If you are looking for chapters on their work with Rudolph Cartier and Nigel Kneale then you'll not be disappointed. Wilkie provides some lovely detail about working on Nineteen Eighty Four (BBC, 1954), Quatermass II (BBC, 1955) and Quatermass and the Pit (BBC, 1958).

Using tiny budgets they created the props for Nineteen Eighty Four out of scrap, including the surveillance Telescreens which were made from salvaged roadside oil lamps and pocket torches attached to the spindles of wound up gramophones. These had to be cued in live on air and you mislaid the winding handle for the gramophones at your peril.

They were also responsible for the props and effects in the infamous closing scenes of Kneale's adaptation of Orwell's book. Winston Smith (Peter Cushing) is tortured by O'Brien (André Morell) with rats enclosed in a cage strapped to Smith's face. The sewer rats used for the scene acquired stage fright and wouldn't perform and the tame rats they used were more interested in sex. As Wilkie recalls: "How Peter Cushing and André Morell didn't collapse with laughter I shall never know. It can't be easy to act out naked fear while peering at two gay rats having it away like knives."

Quatermass II saw them using rocket effects, which escaped from a test launch and flew down Wood Lane, designing space suits, and making a brief appearance on TV as white coated technicians helping John Robinson and Hugh Griffith into their suits. Any book that mentions Hugh Griffiths' private parts getting crushed in a space suit deserves your attention. Finally, Wilkie fondly remembers the appearance of the tentacled monster as "merely a toilet cleaner's glove being waggled about by a bloke in a wet shirt, pissed off and smelling of cocoa."

When the BBC bought Ealing Studios in 1955 for the princely sum of £350, 000, Wilkie and Kine were instructed to audit the studio's assets. It's a remarkable account of how they wandered through the abandoned studios and recalled the glory days of filmmaking at the facility, noting the workshops, the lots, the cutting rooms, and saw a bright future for a visual effects unit based there. As well as working at Ealing, he and Kine were also given use of the Puppet Theatre space in Television Centre, which became known as the Model Stage, as one of their bases near the television studios.

Wilkie recounts the purchase of his first car and taking his driving test alongside his effects work on The Sky at Night (BBC, 1957-), getting lost in the fog on a remote Scottish Loch while providing model effects on location, suffering sea sickness as he worked with Michaeljohn Harris on simulating a fire on a coastal cargo carrier and designing a huge rubber fish for Cartier's television opera Tobias and the Angel (BBC, 1960) that shed its iridescent paint over all and sundry.

In 1958, Wilkie worked with Kine at Ealing Studios on Quatermass and the Pit and they were required to provide a melting spaceship, three legged Martian bodies and disturbances of the ground. Nigel Kneale's brother Bryan inspired the design of the tripod Martians with one his paintings and they were duly created in fibreglass. One of the scariest moments in the serial came about totally by accident. Hanging up the Martian corpses with nylon lines, Kine broke a thread and one of the creatures suddenly dropped. Cartier immediately saw the potential that this sudden, dramatic movement would have on the audience and incorporated it into the episode.

Other effects for the serial unfortunately ostracised them from sharing the tea trolley and a lunch time drink with colleagues. The serial's rout of the Martian civilisation had to show several Martian heads breaking open and they simulated the splattering contents with spaghetti and tomato sauce. But the effects were prepared two weeks in advance and under the hot studio lights they decomposed further. The melting spaceship was achieved with covering the model with lashings of Golden Syrup. It got everywhere. The studios not only stank to high heaven but were now also covered in a sticky residue.

Reorganisation at the BBC in 1964 took Wilkie and Kine to premises in Woodstock Grove and they had several effects staff under their auspices, including Peter Day and Ron Oates, covering a wealth of children's programmes, documentary, comedy and drama. At Television Centre, Wilkie amusingly recalls their invite to the opening of the BBC Club, that began as a refectory dinner table set for twelve people in a single room on the fourth floor and eventually became the legendary bars and roof garden where, in an era long gone, it was famous as the meeting place for actors, producers, technicians, composers and writers.

In his witty and unpretentious style, Wilkie traces the development of Television Centre and his encounters with bosses such as Richard Levin and Michael Mills. Mills epitomised the upper echelons in charge of production back in the day, an ex-seaman who equated programme making with the chain of command in a major military operation. If you weren't ex-Navy then your time in the services would count for little in the pecking order he established, especially if you were on a boat filming an inflatable Loch Ness monster being dragged across a stretch of water in the Highlands. 

Nothing seemed to phase Wilkie, whether it was the eccentric joys of working with a fibreglass whale for Michael Bentine's It's A Square World (BBC, 1960-64), almost burning Eric Porter in the house fire set up at Ealing Studios for an episode of The Forsyte Saga (BBC, 1967), trying to create a water filled ice wall for Doctor Who (BBC, 1963-89, 1996, 2005-) which promptly leaked all over the studio floor, preventing John Scott Martin from falling off a cliff in his Dalek, or travelling up to Scotland to film Monty Python's Flying Circus (BBC, 1969-74) in the company of Eric Idle and, en route, enjoying the hospitality of the Loch Lomond annual junket held by the Scottish Whisky Distillers' Association.

"like a rogue elephant with a bee up its bum" 

The sense these were happy days and that he couldn't believe he was getting paid to blow things up or set things on fire, so obviously an extension of his misspent youth making his own fireworks and roping in his younger brother to set them off or inspired by his father's use of gunpowder to clear the flue of the kitchen copper boiler, permeates these memories.

Of Doctor Who, there are particularly strong recollections as he and Kine were there from the beginning and advised Ray Cusick about realising his designs of the Dalek. To meet the deadline for construction, Wilkie suggested faceting the skirt section in case they needed to make them from plywood rather than fibreglass.

They tackled the demarcation disputes about who was responsible for assembling and operating the TARDIS console, created authentic looking giant spiders, and wrangled the recalcitrant radio controlled K-9 prop, which often behaved "like a rogue elephant with a bee up its bum."

Even the strange beauty of the waterlogged clay pits used in filming 'Colony in Space' for Doctor Who were a delight to him and his effects assistants Ian Scoones and Colin Mapson. Mind you, Scoones suffered when he had to carry the full weight of the IMC robot prop on his shoulders when one of its castors malfunctioned. 

The closing chapters focus on much of the work he did for comedy shows such as Not Only... But Also (the utter madness of filming the title sequence on Tower Bridge in 1970 would send the Health and Safety Executive in a spin today), The Dave Allen Show (BBC, 1968) and Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em (BBC, 1973-78). The latter two shows featured exploding outside toilets, a Stonehenge and a chicken house both set to collapse on cue and dangerous stunts launching cars into the sea or off the edge of cliffs.

Working on Some Mothers with the martinet producer/director Michael Mills appeared to be more stressful than anything that the BBC had previously thrown at Wilkie and his team. How to stop a Morris Minor from bouncing up and down on the roof of a coach and do it in your lunch hour epitomised "the fate of everyone who worked in Visual Effects". There also appeared to be little thanks from the likes of Mills as Wilkie, Scoones and Rhys Jones had to suffer for their art putting together and testing a cupboard, eventually containing Michael Crawford, that was required to topple down a set of stairs.

This delightful book is rounded off with Wilkie's thoughts on the Department's move to Western Avenue in Acton in 1977. Here, the facilities and space were greatly expanded to meet the increasing demand for visual effects and would incorporate improved workshops, a dedicated model stage, offices and car parking. However, Jack Kine was unhappy that the Department was to be administered by former scenic designer John Cooper (also uneasy about his own promotion over Wilkie and Kine) and opted instead to take early retirement.

New techniques and processes had superseded the "string and elastic philosophy" of the original founders of the Department and Wilkie himself was planning his own retirement. Kine and Wilkie would meet up again. most memorably for the closure of Lime Grove studios in July 1991, celebrating with a sherry in Studio E. It was the end of an era.

Martin Wilkie, Bernard's son, and effects designer Mike Tucker, now supervisor at the award winning The Model Unit, provide suitable afterwords. Martin sums up his father's immense contribution to the development of television and visual effects and Mike heaps appropriate praise on that effects bible written by Bernard, The Technique of Special Effects in Television, that inspired his own career.

Bernard Wilkie and Jack Kine pioneered what became the largest TV Visual Effects Department in the world, where art and engineering combined to produce magic. Martin reflects on Bernard's humble recollections of "just another day at the office", and outlines his father's post-BBC activities writing for Russ Abbott and the Grumbleweeds, providing effects expertise for West Deutsche Rundfunk and assisting Lorne Martin with Doctor Who exhibitions. It's a suitably moving coda to this hugely enjoyable tribute to one of television's genial magicians.

A Peculiar Effect On the BBC
Bernard Wilkie
Foreword by Mat Irvine
Afterword by Martin Wilkie and Mike Tucker
Miwk Publishing Ltd
29th September 2015
Hardcover
288pp
ISBN-10: 1908630221
ISBN-13: 978-1908630223

Note: I am indebted to Mat Irvine and Mike Tucker's BBC VFX: The Story of the BBC Visual Effects Department for some of the images used to illustrate this review. No copyright infringement is intended. Thanks also to http://www.tvstudiohistory.co.uk for background information and images of the Scenery Block and TV Centre under construction.

Yes, my lovely readers I am still here. I know the Cathode Ray Tube site has been silent for well over a year but I just thought you might like to know that I haven't been idle. I've just been out and about writing for other sites and publications in the brief pauses I can find during my full-time job.

I'd love to write more and, in fact, I'd like nothing better than to write every day and earn a living from it but my job is all-consuming of my time and energy at the moment. However, more paid work would be lovely and I remain, as always, a writer for hire.

So... by way of promoting my wares here's a brief run down of where you can find my latest keyboard twiddlings.


Doctor Who - Series 9 and Christmas Special: The Husbands of River Song
Click above for ALL of the Series 9 episode and 2015's festive special coverage at the splendid film and television review site Frame Rated posted between September and December 2015. Plus there's a three-part overview of Series 8 too! More Doctor Who soon.

Other television reviews at Frame Rated
OutlanderSeasons One and Two, Penny DreadfulSeasons Two and Three and The Man in the High Castle Season One and Sherlock: The Abominable Bride are just some of the other shows I've covered in the last year. Latest The Man in the High Castle and Sherlock reviews are forthcoming. 

Film reviews at Frame Rated
You'll also find my reviews (including Blu-ray releases) of Spectre (2015), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), One Million Years B.C.(1966) and Kes (1969). Plus you can also read a brief tribute article about David Bowie and his work on screens big and small: Cracked Actor

For those avid Blu-ray watchers out there I was also commissioned to write essays for a number of Arrow Film and Video releases this year, including:

The Count Yorga Collection
For the first pressing of the Blu-ray of Count Yorga, Vampire and The Return of Count Yorga, released in August 2016, the enclosed booklet featured my essay about the films: A Tale of Unspeakable Cravings.

Woody Allen: Seven Films 1986 to 1991
Due out in February 2017, this Blu-ray box set containing Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, September, Another Woman, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Alice and Shadows and Fog features a book of new writing about the films. I've completed an essay 'The air is full of electricity' about September (1987), which will also gain a standalone Blu-ray release in March 2017.

Cathode Ray Tube remains blessed with visitors even though nothing new has been posted for some time and I remain ever grateful many of you still enjoy the material archived here. If I can overcome a few personal obstacles I hope I can be back here with new posts in 2017. Until then, I wish all readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Well, readers. It's hard to believe that this blog has been around for tenyears. Yes, TEN years. Before we break out the champers and the cake please indulge me as I update you on my latest work. Once we've got that sorted, then we'll properly celebrate with a series of competitions, the first of which is announced below.

Although I've not written anything new specifically for the blog since September 2015 (the review of the Bernard Wilkie book if we're being pedantic) I have been rather busy since my Christmas update.

I've just finished reviewing all 18 episodes of Twin Peaks: The Returnfor Frame Rated and I'll be doing much the same for OutlanderSeason 3 over the next few months.

A lovely piece I wrote some time ago about the Doctor Who comic 'The Age of Chaos', published by Marvel back in 1994 and written by none other than Sixie himself, Colin Baker, has recently been published in the third issue of that extraordinary fanzine Vworp, Vworp! It was an honour to feature in this stunning publication and you can purchase it from their site.

I have been publishing on Medium recently and also judging whether to move Cathode Ray Tube over to that platform. A couple of reviews from the archive have been dusted down and re-published over there and you can keep an eye on developments on my Medium page. Please give me a follow there.

There are a couple of projects that I can't talk about at the moment as they are either not confirmed yet or, if they have been agreed in principle, I won't announce anything until the good people I'm working with deem it appropriate to do so.


I've been clearing out the Cathode Ray Tube cupboards and thanks to BBC Books I'm able to offer some giveaways to my readers, particularly those of whom have stuck with me since the beginning, way back when I published the first review here on the 8th September 2007. Let's celebrate!

This weekend I'm giving away a bundle of two books: DOCTOR WHO: THE LEGENDS OF ASHILDR anthology and THE SCIENTIFIC SECRETS OF DOCTOR WHO by Simon Guerrier and Dr. Marek Kukula.


DOCTOR WHO: THE LEGENDS OF ASHILDR
Ashildr, a young Viking girl, died helping the Doctor and Clara to save the village she loved. And for her heroism, the Doctor used alien technology to bring her back to life. Ashildr is now immortal – The Woman Who Lived. Since that day, Ashildr has kept journals to chronicle her extraordinary life.

The Legends of Ashildr is a glimpse of some of those stories: the terrors she has faced, the battles she has won, and the treasures she has found. These are tales of a woman who lived longer than she should ever have lived – and lost more than she can even remember.

An original novel written collaboratively by James Goss, Jenny T. Colgan, David Llewellyn and Justin Richards featuring the Twelfth Doctor as played by Peter Capaldi, and Ashildr as played by Maisie Williams.

THE SCIENTIFIC SECRETS OF DOCTOR WHO
Doctor Who stories are many things: thrilling adventures, historical dramas, tales of love and war and jelly babies. They’re also science fiction – but how much of the science is actually real, and how much is really fiction?

The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who is a mind-bending blend of story and science that will help you see Doctor Who in a whole new light, weaving together a series of all-new adventures, featuring every incarnation of the Doctor and written by many recognised and established Doctor Who authors.

With commentary that explores the possibilities of time travel, life on other planets, artificial intelligence, parallel universes and more, Simon Guerrier and Dr Marek Kukula show how Doctor Who uses science to inform its unique style of storytelling – and just how close it has often come to predicting future scientific discoveries. Because anything could be out there. And going out there is the only way to learn what it is.

Cathode Ray Tube has one copy of each to give away to one lucky winner courtesy of BBC Books and Penguin Random House. Simply answer the question below and submit your entry via email.

• - This competition is open to residents of the UK only but not to employees of BBC Books and Penguin Random House or their agents. 


• - Entries must be received by midnight GMT on Friday 22nd September 2017.
  


• - This offer cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer and no cash alternative is available.


• - No responsibility will be accepted for delayed, mislaid, lost or damaged entries whether due to system error or otherwise.


• - Only one entry per visitor per day. No multiple entries allowed. Entries sent using answers posted on competition websites will be deemed void. We know who you are!


• - The winner will be the first entry with the correct answer drawn at random.


• - The winner will be contacted by email and the books will be sent by first class post to the winner after the competition closes.


• - The judges' decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.


• - Entrants are deemed to accept and be bound by these rules and entries that are not in accordance with the rules will be disqualified.


• - By entering the free prize draw, entrants agree to be bound by any other requirements set out on this website. Entry is via email to frank_c_collins@hotmail.com. No responsibility can be accepted for entries not received, only partially received or delayed for whatever reason. Paper entries are not valid.

Question: In the Doctor Who universe what's the name of the physical effect that occurs when two versions of the same person from different time periods make physical contact? 

Email your answer to the question above, with your name and address, including post code, and we'll enter you into the prize draw.

Good luck!