David Edgar's Play for Today 'DESTINY' (1978) - essay for British Television Drama website

 
"An ideology red white and blue in tooth and claw"

I'm returning here to delightedly announce that I have a three-part epic essay about David Edgar's 1978 Play for Today, 'Destiny', currently being published on British Television Drama website. This is a significant play (currently viewable here) that dramatises the insurgent far-right and British national identity in the late 1970s. I have been researching this TV play for eight months and have included e-mail interviews with the writer and producer, as well as extensive use of the BBC WAC in Caversham (thanks to Matthew Chipping).

Thanks go to David Edgar and Margaret Matheson for their detailed e-mails with their memories of the play and conscientious answers to my questions. Thanks also to David Rolinson for his tireless work in editing this juggernaut of a piece (originally 20,000 plus words!), as well as Mark Sinker*, Justin Lewis**, Ian Greaves and John Williams who have assisted with queries and research.

Part 1 (David Edgar, the theatrical Destiny and British historical context) http://www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk/?p=7040

Part 2 (production of the TV play, its broadcast and its reception) http://www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk/?p=7043

Part 3 (analysis of the play and its afterlife and Edgar and Matheson's subsequent careers)
to be published 2 June 2017

*Who knows much more about English Baroque music than I.
**Who knows much more about UK chart history than I.

Tom May
Newcastle Upon Tyne

Play for Today #003: The Lie

TX: 29/10/1970 (dir. Alan Bridges, w. Ingmar Bergman, trans. Paul Britten Austin)

 

"We have to be able to lie to live together..."

There can be no in-depth study of PfT #002: 'The Right Prospectus' (TX: 22/10/1970), as it has not yet surfaced in the BFI Mediatheque's Play for Today collection. It is apparently 'a satirical piece in which a wealthy couple disguise themselves as schoolboys to infiltrate a public school' penned by erstwhile 'Angry Young Man' John Osborne, known for the feather-ruffling of Look Back in Anger and - for me, more affectingly - The Entertainer. It stars George Cole and Elvi Hale as the couple. Contemporary reviewer Chris Dunkley was very critical: 'he made no attempt to explode the widely accepted myth, and show how truly appalling it would really be to go back to the best regimented days of our lives. In rapid succession he aimed petulant slaps in the general direction of the technological revolution, democracy, protest marches, tradition, co-education, public schools, and a host of other subjects which cropped up too fast to memorize'. (The Times, 23/10/1970, p.15)

Nancy Banks-Smith is fairy noncommittal, highlighting the 'dream-like quality' of a play in which nobody at the all-boys' school bats an eyelid at Mr Newbold's age or Mrs Newbold's sex (The Guardian, 23/10/1970). George Melly, however, is entirely won over; partly as it chimes with his own experiences of public-schools. In particular, he praises Christopher Witty's performance as the Head of House: 'I can still remember boys like that. I still glow when, in adult life, one greets me warmly. I still detest everything they stand for.' (Observer, 25/10/1970, p.32) He acclaims it as a more 'profound' work than Lindsay Anderson's If... 'The Right Prospectus' is readily available in book format, but seemingly not in its televisual version - although it must exist, as some gent on a Minder fan-forum alludes to having seen it. I am sure it would at the very least be an interesting counterpoint to If... and the superb Wednesday Play of 1966, 'The Connoisseur', dissected here.

But now to the main point of this article - a consideration of the following week's 'The Lie', a translation of an Ingmar Bergman play. The Swedish version, 'Reservatet', was directed by Jan Molander and actually broadcast on Swedish television one day before this BBC version. Molander's version features Gunnel Lindblom, Per Myberg and Erland Josephson as Anna, Andreas and Elis; in the British version, they are Anna Firth (Gemma Jones), Andrew Firth (Frank Finlay) and Ellis Anderson (John Carson), respectively.

The story is a classic love-triangle, with plenty of the existential angst one expects of Bergman. It was acclaimed 'best drama production' of 1970 at the Society of Film and Television Arts awards, held on 4th March 1971. On 16th May 1972, The Times reported in its TV Guide that the play was being 'repeated yet again' and was 'a superb if searing production', boasting 'alpha performances' from Gemma Jones and others. Is it worth this acclaim?

It has much to commend it, but is problematic, as one might expect of Bergman being transposed to bourgeois England. The play certainly has its moments but it takes some time to gel, and the translated dialogue is often stilted in the extreme. The music is un-Bergmanian, though this was not a problem for me; Marc Wilkinson's theme is jazzy and sedate, all vibraphone, flute and horns. Wilkinson has an interesting resume of British film and TV music: he composed soundtracks for If..., Days of Hope, Quatermass, Blue Remembered Hills and The Blood on Satan's Claw. This latter soundtrack is astonishingly ancient sounding - a rare piece of music to sound simultaneously of the psychedelic era and the seventeenth century.

The photography from Brian Tufano is exemplary - capturing the staid, stultifying darkness of this enclosed bourgeois world. The couple's house is the most Swedish thing here - all clinical, clean modernism of the low-rise variety, wood and panels - autumnally shot by Tufano. They live in the sort of modernist house beloved of wealthier people, pre-brutalism. It is interesting to consider that Tufano, now 71, went on to photograph one of the greatest of all Play for Todays, Sunset Across the Bay and also over-rated popular successes such as Trainspotting and Billy Elliot.

I am probably harder on 'The Lie' due to my love of Bergman's filmic oeuvre; one Saturday last year, with a friend, I watched Summer Interlude and From the Life of the Marionettes - a double bill of his films spanning nearly thirty years. The former is a gloriously bittersweet reflection on lost love and the time it can take to achieve catharsis and move on. The latter film is an unremittingly bleak exploration of neuroses and psychosis within a faltering relationship, ending in violence - this is all treated as an academic detective case by the psychoanalyst. It really is a despondent, nihilistic film, forming a fascinating contrast to the hard-won, humanist optimism of the earlier film.

This play seems a bit of a rehearsal for the grimness to come in Bergman's work - both in terms of FTLOTM and other 1970s films. Outward respectability and 'normal' routines hide a frightening vacuum, as identified by Nancy Banks-Smith in her review: 'Anna and Frank's [sic] marriage is a very streamlined thing indeed. If you discount the fact that they are both walking dead.' (The Guardian, 30/10/1970, p.10) The play explores the deceit that is necessary to sustain many marriages; this is the case in wider society too, as witness the woman at the party's ironic words to Anna: "Your marriage is the only one I know that's happy".

Artifice and ritual are all in this cold world: Anna's wig, shopping-centre escalators, squash between work colleagues, the banal phrase "Be Seeing You" - possibly used as a nod to The Prisoner. This sense of existence as formulaic chimes with Alan Sharp's 'The Long Distance Piano Player' - though this play has a stronger focus on relationships as ritualistic compared with the earlier play's focus on work and 'leisure'.

The goldfish bowl metaphor is extremely laboured, and 'The Lie' does at times resemble that rather po-faced film, The Pumpkin Eater (1964), with its middlebrow straining after profundity. Such as with Joss Ackland's aspiring writer, babbling on about 'a great silence', 'the approaching twilight' and 'the big lie'; who is predictably enough unable to come to terms with his homosexuality. He appears in one overwrought scene with Anna near the start of the play, never to re-appear.

And yet, there is real pain and feeling in the performances from Finlay and Jones, who make this a domestic drama with more than just a surface iciness. Finlay does a superb essay of middle-class reverse and evasion in his "I'm trying to communicate..." Jones is epically glum and glacial as Anna, a lady who is well connected and guaranteed a 'tax-free grant' to travel on her academic business. These are people jaded with success in their jobs and an inability to touch or talk in their relationship.

There are attempts at rooting the play in 1970 Britain: the play is set around Easter and the General Election is 'coming', the result of which may have a bearing on which building projects get the go-ahead. A Wednesday edtion of The Guardian is visible - with the headline: 'VIETNAM MASSACRES - Trial verdict expected today'. A 'Wonderful! Radio One!' jingle mingles and blurs with Wilkinson's thoughtful vibraphone music. There is a 'man from the ministry' on the way in Firth's workplace. Firth himself is an architect, in what was an era of architectural visionaries and crooks. Finlay cuts a Michael Rimmer-esque figure in immaculate, pin-striped suit, though this TV-play is as far away in tone as possible from that irrelevant film satire of the same year - see my 19/05/2010 review of that here. We are never really shown Firth doing any work, tellingly.

Finlay is fine casting; his distinctly cadaverous features suiting this showroom dummy of a man - no surprise, perhaps, that Banks-Smith misremembered his character name as Frank! The Farnworth-born actor is a malevolent force of nature in so much British television of the past five decades: as the glowering father in Bouquet of Barbed Wire (1976) and Dylan Moran's bête noire in the underrated sitcom How Do You Want Me? (1998-99). He would surely have made a good Heathcliff.

Alan Bridges was a fairly prolific television director, who helmed six Wednesday Plays (including David Mercer's 'On the Eve of Publication', TX. 27/11/1968, which is said to be excellent) and further Play for Todays after this. He also went on to make films, such as the flawed but interesting L.P. Hartley adaptation, The Hireling (1973) - also featuring Marc Wilkinson's music - and The Shooting Party (1984) with James Mason and Edward Fox.

The large cast is peopled by the reliable likes of Alan Rowe, Ronald Leigh-Hunt, Annette Crosbie and that voice of Victorian officiousness, John Nettleton. Richard O'Sullivan, so memorable as the tortured voice of conscience in 'The Connoisseur', is subdued as the walking-suit Whiteley. Noel Coleman and Terence Bayler are re-united after their sterling performances as army officers in the World War I zone within Dr Who's 'The War Games' serial. A year after General Smythe, Coleman's formidable sideboards are still very much intact - and he makes an imposing mannequin amidst the others at the bourgeois party.

Ultimately, this is another imperfect early Play for Today - rather predictable in its depiction of well-to-do middle-class people going through the motions, not helped by an indifferent translation of the dialogue from Swedish to English. However, the core performances ensure that these scenes of marriage do register an impact; as Banks-Smith says of its context as television: 'These things are particularly painful and relevant in the living room'. I cannot pretend that 'The Lie' enthralled me in the same way that his films have, but it is worth a viewing for anyone who cannot get enough of Swedish gloom. And for fans of Frank Finlay, who will delight in the darkness.

Play for Today #001: The Long Distance Piano Player

TX: 15/10/1970 (dir. Philip Saville, w. Alan Sharp)

"That's what the people want to see..."
"There's no-one here"

'It hadn't the size, the reach that one expects from a "Play for Today." Though, strictly speaking, one hardly knows yet what to expect from this re-titled series' (Nancy Banks-Smith, The Guardian, 16th October 1970, p.16)

This was the first Play for Today, successor series to The Wednesday Play (1965-70), and is subject of the first in a series of articles in which I will write about as many PFTs as possible. The BFI Mediatheque now holds around 60 of them, and I have a few more on DVD; the Mediatheque most accessible to me is based in Newcastle's Discovery Museum and I have made many visits since it opened last year.

As Robin intimated in his last post, 'The Long Distance Piano Player' displays a rather inert, ossifying North with its northern everytown of 'Middleton'. Jack (Norman Rossington) is a small man straining after 'something big'; an impressario with a limited world-view, possessing the overbearing bravado of a Wolf Mankowitz-depicted svengali, slipping between mid-Atlantic and native accent with disturbing ease. 'Tis he who arranges for the premise: that Ray Davies' piano player, Pete, is engaged in a continuous marathon of piano playing, set to last four days and nights. Sharp seems to be commenting on the transience of such gimmickry, with the marathon being sparsely attended for the most part.

Saville's visual aesthetic is, whether by design or necessity, spartan; in keeping with the glumness that Sharp discerns in Northern provincial towns. Drab interiors are captured in an unforgiving light; as Chris Dunkley said in a contemporary review: 'The damp respectable squalor of the church hall [...] must elicit a schizophrenic shudder of nostalgia and distaste from anyone ever involved in Wolf Cubs, jumble sales or party political meetings whose trappings lurk shabbily in corners'. (The Times, Friday 16th October 1970, p.16)

Then there are a few exterior scenes that on archetypal 'northern' bleakness: houses stacked up t' hill, cobbles, Lowryesque chimneys, lonely merry-go-rounds and a pretty lady in a hairnet on a swing. This is Pete's wife Ruth (Lois Daine), looking evocatively glum in impeccably 'kitchen sink' manner.

There are deliciously banal, world-weary asides from the occasional visitors to the hall, who form a sort of Greek Chorus, observing that the "pia-ner feller" is "still playing away!" "It'd be an amazing feat if he does it..." / "Aye, aye..." This element of the play is rather witheringly described by Banks-Smith: 'Commenting on the action are a chorus of village idiots, local louts and deaf old men. The latter conversing interminably - I improvise - along these lines : "Me leg's gone again"; "Gone wheer?" "We're wot?" "We're not wot we were" "Eh?" "Nay." '

The feat seems to be considered almost as if an attraction within a bygone music-hall bill; Davies's character goes along with it through force of habit and convention. One could infer that Sharp has a critical perspective on the rather Guinness Book of Records ethos of the 'marathon' - peddled, lest we forget, by the McWhirters, free-market ideologues to a twin.

"Playing away like that can't be good f' y'!"

There are serene passages in Pete's playing, and the promise of communion ultimately unfulfilled - as when a growing audience asks for requests which start well but peter out. As the days pass, his chords become leaden and dolorous, sometimes achieving an accidental abstraction in tandem with his physical exhaustion. Davies is convincing as the self-effacing Pete; admittedly, not a particularly challenging part, as George Melly states in his Sunday television column: 'As the rather simple-minded but highly strung marathon man, Ray Davies, one of our most talented pop composers, did all that was needed and could, I think, given a part that required it, act.' (The Observer, 18th October 1970, p.32)

Both Melly and Banks-Smith are blunt about the play's limitations - an innate lack of originality - but ultimately find enough to enjoy, as does Dunkley: 'Despite this simplistic derivativeness which almost became a minor theme of the play, Sharp did achieve a remarkable atmosphere and an admirable degree of sympathy.' Indeed, the play captures a 1970 sense of flux, the cultural consensus over, as announced in John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band and explored here by the great TV documentarian Adam Curtis.

By the ending, one is left with a sense of suffocation; Sharp captures a characteristic Baby Boomer-generation's feeling of being stifled by humdrum provincial life and petty-bourgeous values. Davies embodies this younger generation with its aversion to responsibility and vague yearnings for 'freedom'. Of course, this freedom ultimately became a remoulded, tradition-trampelling capitalism - as embodied by Branson, Bono, Blair and so many others. But here it can still be identified as liberalism rather than neo-liberalism - capitalism, personified in its clapped-out 1970 form by Jack, is as mistrusted as traditional working-class or upper-class cultures. The increasingly despondent Pete feels oppressed by everything around him:

"What isn't useless...?"

As well as multiple strands of British culture, Sharp seems to be highlighting the influence of the wrong sort of Americanism - with a character pointedly querying Jack's accent: "Why does he talk like that? Like he's an American...?" The ending, with its US-centric rock song, 'Got to Be Free', suggests a yearning for the open spaces and unpredictable freedoms offered by the American counterculture, which held out great promise in the time of 'Quiet Mutiny' in Vietnam (see John Pilger's World in Action documentary of that name from this same year). It is worth noting that the Scottish-born Alan Sharp went on to write screenplays for Ulzana's Raid (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1972) and Night Moves (dir. Arthur Penn, 1975) - examples of the complex, ambivalent filmmaking that Hollywood produced in the pre-Star Wars era.

This first Play for Today works better when read as a metaphorical reflection on British society than as straight 'realistic' drama and its characters are as much archetypes as human beings; marionettes in Jack's faltering puppet-show. Pete is a hamster-in-the-wheel, as well as a harassed liberal who has lost his faith in society (see also in 1970s television: Reginald Perrin, Tom Good). The dulling grind of the marathon becomes a metaphor for the 9-5 experience of conventional work.

Pete and Ruth's relationship offers scant consolation amid the general air of depression - even this seems jaded and ritualistic. The play is not especially light or humorous other than in the choric role of the punters and occasional wry line from Pete; when there's a brawl in the hall involving diffident local hoodlums, he says: "[I] should've played the action music". Overall, a flawed but compelling PFT; as Melly intimates, it both succeeds and fails through adequately evoking the underlying boredom of its 'marathon' scenario. As a play it is far from subtle but is tellingly of its day; it is an articulate expression of inarticulacy and thwarted ideas of freedom.

You can watch it online here, though in a visual quality decidedly inferior to that at the Mediatheque.

-- With thanks to John Archbold for the Radio Times cover

Impressions of BFI Southbank, Wednesday 2nd March 2011

The walk from Waterloo station to BFI Southbank is the shortest walk I ever take, yet in many ways the most overpowered with resonances of multiple disavowed pasts, whose battles have shaped everyone's lives in ways that few really recognise or understand. Once you've walked past the Eurostar white elephant - which would never have needed to be built, replacing the atmospheric and evocative Windsor station as it did, had the party that now claims to believe in high-speed rail approached the Channel Tunnel rail link with any kind of enthusiasm, and cannot but evoke the horrible fact of such a superb train crawling along Victorian lines for thirteen years - you're faced with the memory of John Poulson, the grubby short-term capitalist whose success in buying both Tory anti-statists and Labour utopian-socialists, through cynically using the right words to convince both ilks of dreamers whose fatal flaw was remarkably similar (that they would take any route, without thought for the consequences, as long as it led Britain out of the '50s), did so much to bring the whole Butskellite edifice crashing down. His typically shoddy and ill-constructed Tower Building, beside which the 1922 station seems to cringe, almost embarrassed by its near-obliteration, is particularly jarring and depressing considering its proximity to some of the finest buildings to come out of the post-war public spirit; you're reminded of the cynical exploitation of modernist tropes and styles for utterly antithetical, exploitative reasons which the Mail and Express-reading masses confused with the real thing, and gave the Prince Charles school of neo-feudal reactionaries a justification they didn't deserve (in exactly the same way that ELP's misunderstanding and consequent abuse of the idea that rock music didn't have to take "Roll Over Beethoven" as its model, and the fact that the mass knew them but didn't know Hammill, Wyatt or even Fripp, gave rock'n'roll fundamentalists, and all those who fundamentally got punk wrong, all the excuse they needed).

This is all the more depressing not only considering the greatness (in their own contrasting and conflicting ways) of the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall/Hayward Gallery and National Theatre, but the fact that much of what is contained within BFI Southbank (the expanded and renamed National Film Theatre) reminds us of all the good that the consensus did for Britain, yet - perhaps because of its urban location and need to reflect the city around it far removed from the romanticised ruralism of Ghost Box (whose downside should be made clear for all by the Brian True-May row) - never seems to embalm it or innoculate itself from the present, always keeps open both to the complex reality of those times and to what could still happen in the present and future. In short, the post-war consensus modernised rather than abolished. But there were multiple reasons why that didn't happen in the wider society, and even as I have managed to disassociate the area - and the RFH specifically - from my own childhood experiences there, not least my first, brutal realisation of class awareness, it has become a mental battleground for the battles between those who truly believed in the consensus and those who wanted to exploit it for the crudest possible reasons, a harsh and heartstopping experience whenever I'm there. The London Studios are a little bit further on, and I don't usually think of their history; what I do have on my mind is as much as I can take.

The relevance of this piece thus far to television may seem to be merely tangential. Let that now change. While I would suspect that the majority of the Mediatheque's contents were not made for television - indeed, it goes back long before there was such a thing, and some of its most revealing moments for me have come from the lineage of experimentation and challenge in British film which those talking up The King's Speech far beyond its merits implicitly write out of history, from the all-too-relevant early 1980s social comment of Burning an Illusion or Crystal Gazing, to Nick Broomfield's unforgiving expose of harsh 1970s Lancashire authority, Juvenile Liason, to the exploration of Scotland's unspoken history in Blue Black Permanent (made for Channel 4, I know, but the point holds) - its TV collections continue to stimulate, and ask more questions than they answer. There have been many Play for Today revelations, including the very first, Ray Davies (who should have done more acting) amid a dying, rotting Old North in The Long Distance Piano Player (I notice that Tom drafted a piece on this production, and I would be very interested to read his thoughts on that matter), Licking Hitler, David Hare's unrelenting exposure of the cynicism hidden by the "finest hour" self-aggrandisement that some still cannot let go, and the chilling allusions to Britain's unkillable pagan legacy in Robin Redbreast.

But Nemone Lethbridge, James MacTaggart and Kenith Trodd's Baby Blues, seen exactly 51 years after the night Elvis landed in Scotland and, separated only by the news and seen by early ITV's millions, Daniel Farson exposed Britain's cultural humiliation by America and Wolves exposed its sporting humiliation by continental Europe, and 38 years after it was made, may stick in the mind longer than most, not least because it seems to embody the unabashed socialism possible at the time in mass communication, while at the same time being full of harbingers for the Tory reaction that would freeze such opinions out of "ordinary" media. Transmitted in December 1973 - right in the midst of a moment of acute national desperation and class-war tension, with the Civil Service being trained in how to resist anything a soon-come Labour government might try to do - it captures a moment of acute paranoia among the traditional ruling class, feeling directionless and adrift following Heath's U-turn, three months before what turned out to be Labour's, and British socialism's, fatal victory. The direct resemblance between the casino frequented by the grotesque Sir Dominic (Norman Rodway) and the very real one whose members' political legacy was so superbly dissected by Adam Curtis in The Mayfair Set only makes it seem all the more real, as if you're watching a dramatisation of history at a crucial turning point.

Among its most interesting elements is the baronet's friendship with two erstwhile proles on the make (Terry and Sid, played by Brian Croucher and Peter Childs), both every bit as odious and anti-human as he is, and representing the unpleasant underbelly of the supposed alliance (alluded to, with heavy sarcasm, by one of the private hospital staff they abuse together, who at that moment clearly feels a greater sense of affinity with NHS workers than she might normally do) of the aristocracy and proletariat fondly and falsely wished for by David Lindsay. To a 1973 audience, these characters must have seemed like washed-up ghosts of the already distant '60s - Michael Caine clones who'd thought they could make it but were now reduced to clinging to the elbows of the already privileged - but seen today they weirdly anticipate one of the major political shifts of the 1980s; the rise of the Tebbitist "barrow-boys" who felt no cultural loyalty even to a heritagised, cleaned-up version of the BBC, and accordingly precisely broke what ties remained between the Tory party and the Corporation and rendered such a thing as Play for Today unachievable, while also setting the tone for the pop-cultural leanings without which the Cameronites would never have been able to play the Blairite game to destroy Brown. If the main disappointment of the post-1979 changes - and especially the post-2010 changes - from the perspective of people like Sir Dominic has been the victory of the mass in cultural terms even as the political process in Britain has become less and less equal and more and more stratified, culminating of course in the current government, then these characters anticipate precisely how things were to work out; while the idea of a casual, cynical alliance between the Sir Dominics and the Terrys and Sids may have seemed slightly off ten years later, when what resistance there was in the Tory party to the Tebbitist doctrines tended to come from the quasi-aristocratic elements, it makes all the sense in the world in 2011, when Britain is ruled by Sir Dominics playing Terry and Sid's game, in terms of the crude, tabloid level of their tactics and rhetoric.

It may well say something about how those very same US-inspired marketing techniques have diluted class politics in terms of the basic public understanding of the terms of debate, even at the time of the most socially elitist government since 1964 - admittedly, they seemed to have been comparatively diluted when Butskellism was at its zenith, and only came back to the fore so brutally as it was withering, but the point holds - that a part of even me was thinking, with a very 2011 kind of cynicism, that Sir Dominic's portrayal was too broad and overdone, a mere caricature. Certainly, even if there were still the time, place and context within mass television for comparable dissections of the psychopathology of Cameronites, a portrayal like that very clearly wouldn't do; it would have to be based around a particular version of the marketing character, rather than an ancient class archetype. But I cannot stop myself thinking of Chuck D's line about "now the KKK wear three-piece suits", which while it refers directly to David Duke's attempt to become Governor of Louisiana, anticipates not only the BNP's post-millennial "suits not boots" tactics but also, more obliquely, the popification of Sir Dominic's class which defines current British politics. Back then, if you were a socialist, you knew exactly who the enemy was - their image, speech and dress were utterly unreconstructed and unambiguous - and you had the space within mass communication to decry them. Now, the former is hidden by the facade of Welch/Mumford pseudo-pop and the latter is frozen out forever in Murdoch's kingdom. While Play for Today poses many still-unanswered questions, this is looking to be among the most recurring, and maybe the most important.

I must at this point urge those who can make it at short notice to attend at least one of the remaining events in the Alan Plater season (and, if they have time, to visit the Atrium as well), because, without doubt, he was a great socialist, a great humanitarian, a great writer and a great man, a creative spirit with few rivals in his field. The 1965 Z Cars and 1966 Softly Softly shown in NFT2 on 2nd March were both fine representations of his talent; the former episode, "Brotherly Love", revealed his fine ear for dialogue, accent and social relationships as they were at the time, especially the now virtually unimaginable role of the church in most communities, and conveyed perfectly one of his characteristic traits, his wholly unforced balance of serious issues (which never seemed like "issues" in the worst, deathliest sense; they never did with him) and inspired humour. Broadcast in the days between Churchill's death and his funeral (poignantly, the review quoted in the programme was from the four-month-old original incarnation of The Sun), I couldn't resist the thought that it might have struck a chord with those - no doubt including Plater - who were anxious to get away from the fuss, to step further into a new era the following Monday morning, even if many of the pop-cultural forces he might then have seen as some kind of allies for socialism, or at least the building of a progressive British identity unconnected to the days of empire, proved to be anything but.

The Softly Softly episode, "Sleeping Dogs" - a witheringly accurate description of post-war British fascism and how it exploited, as that creed always has and always will, gaps and weaknesses in authority to physically attack any person or business that didn't fit into its ideals of "purity" - was quite exceptional, a warning about precisely what lies beneath official conservative "neutrality" and institutions proudly boasting that they have "no political position" and the soft-left/liberal view that it is "intolerant" not to tolerate absolutely everything that is ever said or thought - the normalisation of fascism. The greatest source of anger that it brought on is that so much of it could still apply today, right down to the Daily Mail as fascists' "least worst" mainstream newspaper - as recent polls have confirmed, there is still strong latent support for these views which would in many ways make the likes of the English Defence League more dangerous if they could somehow stop beating up Muslims (and how odious and cynical are modern-day fascists' attempts to embrace Jews as "allies of convenience"), just as organisations such as the "Free Britain" group portrayed here were more likely to pick up on the prejudices that lurked below the Butskellite surface when they simply spoke - as they do here, cleverly not displaying the Nazi iconography that was hidden within their homes - in terms of "sovereignty", and didn't scrawl swastikas and throw bricks in shop windows (as they also do here, but attempt in their "respectable" public image to distance themselves from, and could clearly fool a disturbing number of people just as their equivalents do today). Plater's passion on these matters, and his clear belief that if we don't use the rule of law against these people they will feel that they have won some kind of moral argument, shone through, and it worked even better for the moments of sharp humour, which made it much more effective as mass communication.

If Britain is the weaker for anything today, it is the lack of such unequivocal statements in mass television - the equivalents of Midsomer Murders always existed, of course, but they were much less dangerous because they co-existed with the sort of programmes I have written about here (they were also, on the whole, better - the idea that Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel in the Crown were the best things Granada did is as foreign to me and everything I stand for as the idea that David Lean's epics were better than Black Narcissus, but the big productions of those times obviously had qualities that their post-1990 equivalents could never have grasped, or wanted to grasp). When Midsomer began, 14 years ago, international sales were rapidly on the rise to their current almost total importance within the British TV industry, and the series was always clearly intended to appeal to an easily-exportable, instantly-recognisable (and of course utterly false no matter how far you go back) view of Britain first and foremost - its success with the Mail heartland here was a secondary factor for ITV in a way that audience simply cannot accept.

Visions of any country designed to appeal to globally assimilable national caricatures are bound to seem far more problematic in that country itself, for clear and obvious reasons. Brian True-May has merely been honest about the nature of these things, and (without knowing it) the damage they have done to British television, setting it back, not forward. His vision of exclusivity is, in truth, a cultural one rather than a racial one per se - because of my musical and cultural tastes as well as my political views, I myself would have no more place in Midsomer than Smiley Culture (the circumstances of whose death show all this stuff in a particularly stark light); my being on "the wrong side" in Britain's internal cultural wars would overpower my whiteness. It is the antithesis of what the likes of Plater and Rosenthal were about, and the antithesis of what BFI Southbank is still about (in a necessarily and rightly different way). As with Keys and Gray, what may at first appear to be an over-promoted media sideshow actually uncovers much deeper problems - not so much in terms of Midsomer Murders itself, but in terms of the system that created and sustained it, and exaggerated its status far beyond anything it objectively deserved.

I hope to write more here next week, once I've been back. The journey is always nervous. The day itself is rarely anything of the kind. This is a platform we should all be proud of. This is all our responsibility.