Tag Archives: BBC

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Penda’s Fen

Pendas Fen
Penda's Fen

Format: Blu-ray

Part of Dissent & Disruption: Alan Clarke at the BBC (1969 – 1989) limited edition 13 disc box-set

Release date: 20 June 2016

Distributor: BFI

Director: Alan Clarke

Writer: David Rudkin

Cast: Spencer Banks, John Atkinson, Georgine Anderson

UK 1974

90 mins

Alan Clarke’s visionary coming-of-age dream still lingers in the minds of 1970s children.

‘You can tell he’s not a nice man because of his television plays.’

So says Stephen Franklin (Spencer Banks), possibly the screen’s least hip tortured teenager, referring to a fellow inhabitant of the village of Pinvin, the lefty playwright Arne (Ian Hogg). Stephen is wholly on the side of the Mary Whitehouse-alike figure popping up in the papers in wanting all this 70s permissiveness and insurrection off the air. He prefers Elgar to rock n’ roll, believes in supporting ‘the Aryan national family on its Christian path’ and is, generally, a priggish, self-righteous, eminently slappable sort. But all this is about to change in writer David Rudkin’s utterly unique 1974 Play for Today. The line seems wryly prescient about Alan Clarke, who hadn’t become pegged as the controversial chronicler of Britain’s violent criminal underclass yet – that reputation began in earnest three years later with Scum. Penda’s Fen would appear to be an odd item on his CV:* it’s rural rather than urban, mystical and elliptical rather than plain speaking, and is largely concerned with the kind of Worcestershire villagers that Radio 4 makes dramas about, rather than the working class ne’er-do-wells that would come to dominate his later social realist works. And this most definitely goes beyond the bounds of social realism.

For Stephen, military cadet, church organist and son of a parson, starts to have dreams and visions, and dreams that turn to visions, interfering with his certainties and upsetting the status quo. He has dreams of sweaty heaving rugby scrums that it wouldn’t take an advanced Freudian to interpret (underlining the repressed enthusiasm he has for the saucy milkman). He will see an angel on the riverbank and a demon in his bed, cracks growing in the church floor, and an unsettling image of smiling mutilation in the Elysian grounds of a country mansion. He will see an aged Elgar himself during a rainstorm and chat with him about the secret of the Enigma Variations. Even his village’s identity becomes slippery. Is it Pinvin, Pinfin, Pendefen? Could it be Penda’s Fen, burial place of the last pagan king of England? Already an outcast at school for his grating piety he will be subjected to increasing humiliations that the masters ignore or condone. He is not what he thought he was. Certainties of race, sexuality and religion are stripped from him, leading to his climactic acceptance of his new identity during a strange confrontation in the Malvern Hills.

Penda’s Fen is an odd beast, a coming-of-age drama of sorts laced with elements of folk horror, full of psycho-geographical ruminations about the layers of history and endless meanings contained within the English landscape. The camera seeks out the sacred and arcane, the choir sings William Blake. It wouldn’t be a 1970s TV drama without earnest political arguments in the Parish hall. But here conversation also turns to the heresy of Manichaeism and the fact that the word ‘pagan’ originally meant ‘belonging to the village’. Modern music and media are unseen and unheard. Clarke’s treatment of the weirder elements is deft and physical and unfussy, his demon is a dark gargoyle straddling Stephen as he wakes from his wet dream slumber, like Fuseli’s nightmare, winningly sticking around when the light’s turned on. He drops out the sound for the hazy visionary sequence where children queue to get their hands lopped off save for the noise of the chopper hitting home. The appearance of Graham Leaman as Elgar sticks in the memory, in his dotage and wheelchair-bound, a ghost haunted by memory. But Clarke was always good with actors, and there are a fair few striking performances here.

It’s not perfect, a sub-Quatermass strand about a horribly burned youth and secret military bases underground is unceremoniously shelved after a substantial build-up. The pacing is uneven, dragging in the early stages, going bonkers in the latter, with a penchant for dense theological discussions in the cornfields in a decidedly ‘tell, don’t show’ mode. It’s a tying together of disparate elements into an ungraspable whole, and I doubt even its biggest fans would claim to wholly get what Rudkin’s getting at in places, but the mysterious is part of its DNA and part of its charm. It carries a rare emotional heft, aims for the visionary and actually gets there. Stephen’s ‘I am nothing pure!’ speech at its climax is unexpectedly rousing, a rallying cry for an alternative England. You can see why it lit a spark in the likes of the young Grant Morrison.

The fact that there were only three channels meant that the one-off TV plays of the 70s could draw a sizable audience no matter how abstract or intractable they were. Beamed once or twice into millions of homes and then never seen again they would often linger as a series of singular images and ideas long after the title and tale had been forgotten. Penda’s Fen is a perfect example of this, a film with followers who might not know its name but remember gargoyles in bedrooms and burning men on green hillsides. It’s wonderful that it’s finally getting a decent release 40-odd years after it first came into the world, its themes still resonant, a strange and impure child.

Mark Stafford

* Then again, this is the man who gave you Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire, cinema’s only snooker-based horror musical. Which is an odd item on anybody’s CV.

Penda’s Fen screens at Close-Up Film Centre on 26 June 2016. For more information and to buy tickets visit the Close-Up website.
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Baal

Bowie Baal
Baal

Format: Blu-ray

Part of Dissent & Disruption: Alan Clarke at the BBC (1969 – 1989) limited edition 13 disc box-set

Release date: 13 June 2016

Distributor: BFI

Director: Alan Clarke

Based on the play by: Bertolt Brecht

Translated by: John Willett

Cast: David Bowie, Robert Austin, Jonathan Kent

UK 1982

64 mins

David Bowie brings star swagger to Alan Clarke’s take on Bertolt Brecht’s dissolute poet.

Baal is a debauched poet and boozy douchebag who leaves a trail of ruined women and exploited friends behind him. He has an enthusiastic following amongst the drunken crowds in the cafes where he performs, but has nothing but contempt for bourgeois society and its measures of success. Opportunities for publication are squandered, patrons are insulted and wives and daughters are shagged, only to be abandoned when boredom or unborn children arise. His poems reveal a certain yearning tenderness for the natural world, his words and actions an utter callousness towards everything else. Finally, inevitably, he murders a man, becomes a fugitive and dies alone. But he never lied about what he was, which makes him a kind of hero, existentially.

I remember hearing, gawd knows where, that the British film industry, in its early years, had a massive inferiority complex, being seen, in the land of Shakespeare, as a vulgar novelty when set before the venerable art of theatre. The result of which was that a good chunk of UK output didn’t really trouble itself with the aesthetics of the new medium, with all that movement and montage, and the average brit-flick more resembled a night at the Lyceum with a camera plunked front and centre of the stalls, occasionally panning left and right to keep the performers in shot.* I bring this up because Alan Clarke’s treatment of Bertolt Brecht’s first play Baal most resembles that notional idea of moribund British film. Except that it all works rather well. Each scene takes place on a new set (a drawing room, a bar, a junk-strewn flat), with the actors artfully arranged therein. It’s lit, at times, like a Caravaggio painting, except when it’s not, and the sets disappear entirely. There are no edits, each scene is played through in its entirety. And the only close-ups occur in short chapter-heading sequences between scenes where we are informed what is about to occur by text on screen whilst Baal engages us directly with a little performance of his dyspeptic poetry. The result compels. What would seem natural techniques on stage acquire a distinctive strangeness on screen, appropriately enough, ‘Brechtian alienation’ and all that.

A large part of the reason it plays well in 2016 is that Baal is portrayed by David Bowie, whose death has given his screen appearances a poignant vibrancy. During his lifetime there was often a debate as to whether he was a ‘good’ actor or not. What seems obvious now is that he could be terrific used by the right director in the right way, especially if the role played up to his recurring artistic themes of alienation and reinvention. His Baal here hits all the right notes of arrogance and disdain, augmented with a healthy dose of rock god swagger. His first speech to camera, a monologue about the Ichthyosaurus refusing to board the ark and preferring to die, sets out his stall with admirable concision. All life here is miserable and wretched, he says, as he regards us with an insolent, mocking, black-toothed grin, and dares us to claim that we care.

Mark Stafford

* In this version of events it took the likes of Hitchcock and the Kordas and Powell and Pressburger to shake out the cobwebs and drag us all kicking and screaming towards the Art Of Cinema. Discuss.

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Elephant

ELEPHANT
Elephant

Format: Blu-ray

Part of Dissent & Disruption: Alan Clarke at the BBC (1969 – 1989) limited edition 13 disc box-set

Release date: 13 June 2016

Distributor: BFI

Director: Alan Clarke

Writer: Bernard MacLaverty

Cast: Gary Walker, Bill Hamilton, Michael Foyle

UK 1989

39 mins

Alan Clarke’s bold, stripped-down take on sectarian killings in Northern Ireland remains as provocative as when it was first screened on the BBC.

Through spaces industrial and domestic men move, in pairs or alone, tracked relentlessly by fluid Steadicam, negotiating doorways and traversing empty halls, down roads and paths and corridors, encountering nobody, until somebody is located, a gun is produced, and they are killed. Alan Clarke’s legendary (at least in my school) Elephant traces murder after murder after murder, with no music or context or explanation, 18 in all, over 39 minutes, with only a title card to clue us in to the fact that it’s based on actual sectarian killings in Northern Ireland. The title is a reference to the phrase ‘the elephant in our living room,’ which Belfast-born writer Bernard MacLaverty used to describe the conflict.

Elephant may well be the most audacious piece of film ever screened by the BBC. It’s blunt and difficult and simple and achieves whatever effects it does through repetition. We get a Steadicam killing, then a lingering still shot of the corpse for a few seconds, then on to the next. There are variations and surprises, but the emphasis is decidedly upon the repetition: the steady pace, the footfalls, the gunshots. Shock gives way to confusion gives way to a kind of numb dread, the brief running time and relentless forward motion staving off a slide into traumatised boredom. Tossed into the last years of the Thatcher reign like a bilious little hand grenade it evaded the usual controversy and clumsy censorship through its Spartan nature; robbed of telling information, you couldn’t accuse it of taking sides, or collusion. You can only say for sure that it was anti-killing, laying bare the grubby, brutal acts that are usually cloaked in partisan bullshit and political rhetoric.

I missed it on TV at the time, goddamnit, but can remember the reaction of friends at the time being one of disbelief that such a thing had been made and screened on TV. Going by their descriptions it actually sounded like an inevitable endpoint for all those stalk and slash horror movies we were dragging home from the shelves of Star Video on a Thursday night: the film that was all murder and nothing else: the political nuances lost on hormonal teenagers with a pitiful grasp of the Troubles. I wonder if a teen catching it today would see it as an uncool warm-up exercise for the first–person-shooter aesthetics of Hardcore Henry and the like; doubtless most modern audiences will only possibly be aware of it as a key inspiration for Gus Van Sant’s austere high school massacre movie of the same name, or be familiar enough with the idea of the film that they don’t feel obliged to actually watch the thing. They should, though, because it’s a strange and unsettling film, provoking reaction after reaction. What would it be like longer, or shorter? What‘s happened to these huge spaces, are they all developed now? Gentrified or demolished? You wonder if the peace process will hold. You wonder about murder as the background noise of your weekly shop. You wonder at the blood that flows under every civilised street.

Mark Stafford

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Supernatural

Supernatural
Supernatural

Format: DVD

Release date: 18 November 2013

Distributor: BFI

Directors: Simon Langton, Alan Cooke, Peter Sasdy, Claude Whatham

Writers: Robert Muller (7 of 8 screenplays), Sue Lake (Viktoria)

Cast: Billie Whitelaw, Ian Hendry, Robert Hardy, Jeremy Brett, Gordon Jackson, Denholm Elliott, Sinéad Cusack

UK 1977

400 mins

Fevered, fervid and not a little bit fruity, Robert Muller’s anthology TV series Supernatural was broadcast by the BBC in the summer of 1977 with little fanfare, to a largely indifferent reaction, and then sat on the shelves, unrepeated, ever since. If Dead of Night, the other spooky 1970s anthology offering recently released by the BFI, was an attempt to drag the ghost story into the modern world and drop all the traditional trappings, Supernatural represents a wholesale volte-face, an enthusiastic swan dive into all things Gothic, Stygian and stylised, from the opening blast of doomy organ and shots of gargoyles onwards. It’s all set in the 19th century, with a delicious framing device wherein the Club of the Damned is gathered to hear the true-life tale of terror of a would-be member. If their story chills the club’s blood sufficiently, they will be allowed to join; if not, death awaits. We don’t see much of the club’s activities beyond the slurping of claret, so we have to assume the rigour of the entrance exam is worth the candle.

The meat of the show then consists of the likes of Robert Hardy, Jeremy Brett and Gordon Jackson relating their terrible tales, seven in all, over eight episodes, which run the gothic gamut, featuring ghosts, werewolves, doppelgangers, vampires and the reanimated dead. A common theme is of the unspeakable desires bubbling under the surface of an excessively polite and straitened society, so in Viktoria, the tale of murder, remarriage and revenge from beyond the grave, is complicated by the wicked stepfather’s barely repressed homosexual longings. In Night of the Marionettes, Jackson’s scholar has a troubling, passionate relationship with his own daughter (Pauline Moran). And in Mr Nightingale the timid titular character (Brett) brings chaos and ruin to a Hamburg family household when his libido is unleashed, via his doppelganger, shagging one daughter (Susan Mawdsley) and inducing pyromaniac ecstasy in another (Lesley-Anne Down). Perhaps it was all those stultifying conversations about fish…

If the above suggests a barrage of blatant filth and depravity, then relax, gentle reader, for Supernatural is one of the least explicit, and most literary forays into freakery that TV has created. It’s mainly about performance and dialogue; eloquent, precise and polysyllabic in the style of the works it references, Muller’s scripts (only one, Sue Lake’s Viktoria, was not his work) are as rich as Christmas cake, and clearly relished as such by a cracking cast of British thespians. The two parter Countess Ilona/The Werewolf Reunion, for instance, manages to have a theme of sexual exploitation and venereal disease, a self-confessed ‘erotomane’ as one of its characters, and features four apparently grisly deaths via lycanthrope, without showing so much as a bare buttock or a hairy hand. Its delights rest in Ian Hendry, John Fraser, Charles Kay and Edward Hardwicke having a whale of a time as the utterly despicable representatives of the male sex whom Ilona (Billie Whitelaw) has assembled for a ‘surprise’ party. Lady Sybil manages to assemble the great Denholm Elliott and former angry young man John Osborne as the loosely hinged sons of grand dame Catherine Nesbitt, for a tale of phantom visitations and wayward mesmerism. The first tale, The Ghost of Venice has Sinéad Cusack, and Robert Hardy as an aging actor, getting lost in obsession and self-deception, and the last, Dorabella, is a twisty number about vampiric infatuation. In all, there is no place for naked fumbling or method mumbling – this is all about sweaty brows and crisp pronunciation, with performances aimed at the back row, Loachian realism be damned. Near everybody here seems prone to fits of delirium and the derangement of the senses. It’s drenched in Mary Shelley, Stoker and Stevenson, and all things dark and romantic. Marionettes actually turns on the Byron/Shelley/Polidori meeting on Lake Geneva that spawned Frankenstein. And it’s telling that what seems to be a gratuitous close up of a see-through blouse in one episode turns, via a dissolve, into a literary reference.

This is not to suggest that Supernatural’s charms are purely verbal. Shot on the customary, for the time, mix of 8 mm film and standard videotape, the series has a distinctive look, revelling in Dutch angles, chiaroscuro lighting and deliberate compositions. Some effects are clearly borne of budget, like the close-ups of woodcut drawings shot in ‘wibble vision’, which replace expensive exterior shots of period Venice and Hamburg, or the use of negative to create Mr Nightingale’s visions of ‘black seagulls’; other techniques show a creative mastery of the technology available. Overlays and dissolves are used extensively, but most of the show’s mood is conjured by stagecraft, sleight of hand and elaborate set design. One gets the feeling that every ornate candlestick holder or piece of carved wood from the BBC backlot was used thrice over to fill out the Olde European Castles, Mansions and dodgy roadside Inns required.

Supernatural, in all its florid excesses, is an honest attempt to revel in the possibilities of the gothic genre, and while at times it skirts close to camp, there is no winking at the audience here, no arch references to modern mores. It may be played to the hilt, but it’s played straight nonetheless. The stories all have something to say about sexual politics, repression and desire, and are packed with sly and unexpected moments and strange details. How much you enjoy it rests upon your tolerance for its wordy, slow-burning storytelling, its emphasis on atmosphere over sensation, and its utter lack of interest in humdrum reality. Personally I found it irresistible. Some episodes work better than others: Ghost is too stagey, and ultimately too silly, and Dorabella doesn’t ring enough changes with its vampire schtick to pay off, but all have their moments. Mr Nightingale is gleefully subversive and cruel, Lady Sybil is The Old Dark House with weird psychology, and The Night of the Marionettes is an extraordinary thing, with its German expressionistic stage sets and freaky living puppets. All in all, it’s smart, engaging stuff, and well worth a wallow.

Mark Stafford

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Dead of Night

Dead of Night The Exorcism
Dead of Night

Format: DVD

Release date: 28 October 2013

Distributor: BFI

Directors: Don Taylor (The Exorcism), Rodney Bennet (Return Flight), Paul Ciapessoni (A Woman Sobbing)

Cast: Clive Swift, Edward Petherbridge, Anna Cropper, Sylvia Kay, Peter Barkworth, Anna Massey

UK 1972

150 mins

A seven-part anthology with a supernatural theme, Dead of Night (title nicked wholesale from the Ealing classic) was originally broadcast by the BBC in 1972. Producer Innes Lloyd’s brief for the show seemed to be a desire to remove the ghost story from its traditional Gothic trappings; the resulting episodes still concerned hauntings, of a kind, but Dead of Night specialised in characters being haunted by regret, middle-aged malaise and repressed emotions made manifest, rather than any run-of-the-mill spectres. Unfortunately, four of the seven plays have been lost, with this BFI disc containing the three remainders.

The Exorcism, written and directed by Don Taylor, concerns a Christmas dinner being given by Edmund and Rachel at their newly renovated country cottage for guests Dan and Margeret. Champagne Socialists all, they revel in the modern conveniences that working in P.R. can bring, and sit down to a sumptuous feast. But it soon becomes clear that someone, or something, has other ideas: the power fails, the ‘lovely burgundy’ Dan has brought along turns to blood in Edmund’s mouth, the turkey sets their mouths on fire, and the outside world seems to have disappeared. The Exorcism isn’t exactly subtle in its social message or delivery, taking one generation to task for the crimes of another, and pointing out that the comfortable lives of the bourgeoisie are, here literally, built upon injustice and suffering. A couple of shots of the cottage exterior aside, this is pretty much a one set, four-hander chamber play. It’s the most traditional of the ghost stories on offer, in that it features manifestations of a specific unhappy spirit, but the strident political tone makes this more of a very 1970s’ curiosity than a successful spookshow. It’s like Abigail’s Party goes to hell, with appropriately alarming fashion choices, and a tone of howling despair.

Return Flight, directed by Rodnet Bennet from a Robert Holmes script, is more elusive. It stars Peter Barkworth as Captain Rolph, a recently bereaved commercial airline pilot who becomes plagued by visual and audio manifestations of WW2 aircraft and radio chatter. He’s a bit of a cold fish, a man of a certain generation, unlikely to admit to weaknesses of any kind, and the things he’s seeing and hearing seem to well up from somewhere in his psyche, representations of a life not lived. Fair enough, but when he’s flying a crowded airliner, there’s more than his mental well being at stake, and Return Flight builds a fair amount of disquiet out of this situation. The first half is a character study of a damaged man, the second follows his low-key breakdown on a troubled flight, and the increasingly alarmed responses of Air Traffic Control. Ultimately, though, the execution here lets the inspiration down. Maybe it’s just that I didn’t like Captain Rolph much, maybe the technical demands were beyond a 1972 BBC budget, but this is all a bit well mannered, when it should be a study in sweaty brows and mounting tension.

A Woman Sobbing, however, is a stone-cold gem. Anna Massey is excellent as Jane Pullar, who has a stable marriage with husband Frank, two boys, and a sizable house in the country. Convention suggests she should be happy with her lot, but something is clearly wrong: she is being tortured at night by the sound, coming from the attic above, of a woman sobbing. Jane takes her valium, calls in the gas fitters, tries shrinks and priests, all are found wanting. She wonders, for a while, if her dull, undemonstrative husband is trying to drive her crazy a la Gaslight. She wonders if the house is haunted, if only women can hear the noise. The sound persists. John Bowen’s script is sharp and tragic, presenting an inescapable, circular nightmare in which suburban desires, modish psychiatry, and the modern church are skewered. It’s a feminist work which manages to avoid being reductionist or humourless. Here, as in Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water, supernatural phenomena are bound up with the daily trials of modern female existence, but here they are denied a backstory explanation or simple cause. Jane’s children get on her nerves (’I’ve decided I don’t like them much nowadays’) and Frank may indulge in fantasies about the au pair, but he’s no bastard. Everybody seems to be doing their bit, but nothing gets any better. ‘They didn’t build haunted houses in 1910’, reasons her husband, amusingly, and he may well be right, but still, that doesn’t help Jane.

While not up there, in terms of chills, with Nigel Kneale’s fantastically creepy series Beasts, or the splendours of the BBC’s M.R. James Ghost Stories (both pretty much essential), Dead of Night is well worth a look for fans of vintage cathode weirdness. There’s something about that blend of video and 16mm, that solid British thespian commitment and unflashy professionalism, that conjures an atmosphere not found in contemporary cinema. These are tales of emotional complexity and political mindfulness, which seem a touch mannered and artificial to modern eyes, but nevertheless carry their own distinctive charge.

Extras on the BFI’s DVD release of Dead of Night include a detailed, well-presented booklet, and a stills gallery of the lost episodes.

Mark Stafford

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Dead Head

dead-head
Dead Head

Format: DVD

Release date: 15 April 2013

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Rob Walker

Writer: Howard Brenton

Cast: Denis Lawson, Lindsay Duncan, Norman Beaton, Don Henderson, George Baker

UK 1986

191 mins

Come, come back to 1986, when the BBC, seemingly in a bilious reaction to the height of flag-waving Thatcherism, threw up a strange four-part fever dream of a show, a stylised class-war thriller aimed at the heart of a sick establishment. Shown once, it caused a bit of a fuss, and then was promptly shelved and never broadcast again, only to linger half remembered in the minds of a generation. ‘Remember Dead Head? What the hell was all that about?’

Denis Lawson, giving his best cockney snide, plays Eddie Cass, a booze-addled, whining toe rag who accepts an offer of a grand, simply to transport a hat box from one London address to another. But things go awry, the hat box is found to contain a severed woman’s head, and from that point on, Eddie seems to be the focus of a cruel game played by the powers that be, pursued, seduced, humiliated and tortured, up and down the social scale from one end of the country to another, until he finally determines to find out why.

Starting with a scene in a pub filled with smoke, Howard Brenton and Rob Walkers’s Dead Head flags up its anti-naturalistic colours from the get go – The Third Man (1949) via O Lucky Man! (1973), filmed on video and 16mm, and with a dry ice budget to kill for. The cast are significantly costumed rather than simply clothed, and characters and situations shift alarmingly as comedy is followed by pervy sexuality is followed by menace. This is a world of smacked-up debutantes and gun-toting SAS frogmen, emerging from rivers mid foxhunt. The upper classes are crazed and debauched, and their shady protectors are capricious and chaotic.

It’s flawed, of course, it’s built on sand, a series of vignettes that barely hold together. The third part loses momentum as it takes an awkward turn into subsidised theatre-group dynamics; the plot relies upon coincidences and illogical leaps; and of course the 80’s pop video stylings have dated alarmingly, but this, for my money, only adds to its nightmare charm. And the bare-faced audacity of the punchline is positively Pythonesque.

Lindsay Duncan vamps and fatales like it’s going out of style, Norman Beaton, Don Henderson and George Baker pop up along the way, and Simon Callow pretty much steals the second episode as a cracked spook of divided loyalties: ‘Once, for professional reasons, I joined the rather nasty little gay scene in Moscow.’ Really, Mr Callow? Highly recommended.

Mark Stafford

Watch a clip from Dead Head: