The BBC and ME: A LOVE-HATE THING Part III

To continue this fitful saga of my relationship with the BBC, I want to tidy some loose ends from my aborted time at BBC Pebble Mill. The Other Side, the run of new one-off plays all of which I produced for BBC2, went out after I’d been sacked over Solid Geometry.

To my surprise, I had been told by David Rose to write and produce a generic title sequence for the series. I had always understood that these were made by the graphics department or the presentation department or some other bunch of specialists. After all, the original title sequence for The Wednesday Play had been directed by a young firebrand called Ridley Scott.

But I was delighted to be entrusted with it and sketched out a plan for the image of a revolving television set. The first time the screen passed by, it would show the animated BBC1 logo. The next time we would see a clip from a commercial (to indicate ITV). The last turn of the set came to rest on the series title. This sequence had not been shot when I lost my post, so David Rose himself went into the studio and made it, sticking diligently to my script. He added a neat touch: the series title itself took a further turn after the television set had come to rest. David also used the music that I had selected: a striking riff by Peter Maxwell Davis that proved to be a perfect fit. I had written to Sir Peter (as he then wasn’t) informing him of my plan but he never replied. I hope he liked it, if he ever saw it.


Jonathan Powell

I had thought to begin the run with the splash of the Ian McEwan. In its absence, David Rose scheduled Derrick Buttress’s Connie, perhaps because it was so quiet and modest. He probably hadn’t made the calculation that I had made: that my fellow television previewers and reviewers, from whose ranks I had been recruited, would expect me to knock their socks off. Inevitably, then, the Buttress got a lukewarm reception. In a run of plays, it’s the opener that gets widely noticed; the others have to take potluck. As far as audiences went, we had the misfortune to be scheduled against a brand new sitcom on BBC1, called Bread. Though scarcely remembered now, it was hugely popular in its time and so we never stood a chance of picking up extra viewers in what usually in those days was a poor choice of programmes in mid-evening on a Friday.

When I was sacked from Pebble Mill, a fair bit of my second series was in planning. Mike Wearing very properly took over my portfolio and went ahead with the scripts by Tony Bicât and David Cook that I had ordered up. Sadly, a couple of commissions to women writers were dropped. Mike also followed some of the other connections I had made, one of them benefiting him in spectacular fashion. It came about this way. At the Edinburgh Television Festival in 1978 (when I was still a producer), there had been a screening of the only surviving episode of Diary of a Young Man, a legendary BBC drama series written by John McGrath (a regular at the Festival which he had helped to found) and Troy Kennedy Martin and directed by Ken Loach. I had been thrilled by it and further thrilled to discover that Kennedy Martin was in attendance. I sought him out and talked to him excitedly and we agreed to meet in London and discuss working together.

It was wonderful to speculate that I might be able to rehabilitate a fine writer who had rather fallen out of fashion. And Troy had been one of the creators of the game-changing police series Z Cars, whose original producer was my Birmingham boss, then styling himself David E Rose. The quest seemed to promise much.

On my way to the meeting with Troy at the Hoop in Notting Hill Gate, I was smitten by a migraine. These had begun to afflict me in the run-up to finals at my university and I had yet to find the medication that could pre-empt them (happily, I made the discovery soon after this time). I found a phone-box and called Mike Wearing, who was also attending our session, and asked him to take over.


Farrukh Dhondy

Back in Birmingham the following week, I asked Mike how his discussions with Troy had gone.  He was non-committal about it and, perhaps foolishly, I didn’t press him.  The eventual upshot of Mike’s discussion with Troy was one of the most successful original television drama serials ever made, Edge of Darkness.  And this, along with Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Black Stuff, made Mike the most feted producer of his generation.  Hey ho: you win some, you lose some.

David Rose’s fiefdom at Pebble Mill, rocked by the Solid Geometry saga, was now clearly under threat from Television Centre, but happily Jeremy Isaacs rescued him by offering the post of Commissioning Editor for Fiction at Channel 4, which was due to open in 1982.  I also found myself doing work for Channel 4, though not to a fiction commission.  An independent production company pitched for – and then asked me to make – a series about television itself.  This was another invitation that I readily accepted.  It was pootling along in rather self-indulgent pre-production when the production company boss abruptly absconded to Hawaii with the programme budget.  That was the end of that.

After holding various posts, including one (not for the only time) at an ITV company that lost its franchise to broadcast during my contract, I was suddenly called in to the BBC by Jonathan Powell, the Head of Drama.  This was April 1987 and I had known Jonathan (not well) for some ten years, having first met him as a producer at Granada.  Jonathan needed a producer for a four-parter called King of the Ghetto, written by Farrukh Dhondy, who was Commissioning Editor for Multicultural Programmes at C4.  The setting was the Bengali community around Brick Lane and the story was loosely based on fact.

I quickly read the three existing scripts and happily was excited by them. Producing them would be a learning curve in several ways, including the milieu and the method (a lightweight video camera gathering takes like a movie). Jonathan told me that the director was already signed up to start pre-production in June and shooting would begin in September. He was Franco Rosso, a newcomer to television drama, though with a feature (the fairly chaotic Babylon) and a documentary under his belt. The documentary was about Ian Dury who, to my joy, had agreed to make his acting debut playing a lowlife in King of the Ghetto. And the leading man, like Ian’s a white role, had been claimed by Tim Roth, one of the hottest young actors around.

When my participation was confirmed, I took the script editor, Caroline Oulton, to lunch. She soon disabused me. Franco did not begin in June; he was already casting. Shooting did not begin in September, but June. And Farrukh had barely started work on episode 4. Jonathan had lied to me, presumably because he was in a tight spot. Perhaps another producer had walked, clearly several others would have turned it down, either because the schedule was too tight or because they didn’t care for the material.

It would have been absurd to decline to bite the bullet. Here was a chance to get back into regular producing and to pull a potential disaster out of the fire. But the difficulties came thick and fast. Franco proved an awkward customer and a disorganised field commander. He and I were soon disagreeing about many things. I also found the BBC bureaucracy much more apparent and much less malleable than it had been at Pebble Mill. Moreover, stuck in an ugly office block above a post office on Shepherd’s Bush Green, we were some way away from the stimulating hub.

Franco was random and sometimes incoherent in the many auditions we undertook to find our leading lady, also a white role (why do writers, even non-white ones, always feel they have to explore the eyes of a non-white community in drama through the eyes of white people?). And Caroline wasn’t sufficiently on Farrukh’s case, or so it seemed to me.


Franco Rosso

After a few weeks of this, matters came to a head with Franco.  He had clearly lost interest in the whole project and he walked.  I was relieved but I had to move fast.  The BBC maintains – or it did then – a long list of “acceptable” directors.  On the second page I found the name Roy Battersby.  I had never met him but I greatly admired his work.  He was part of the Kennedy Martin/McGrath/Loach generation of teledrama-makers and his masterpiece, I felt, was his epic industrial action drama, to a script by Colin Welland, called Leeds United.  I hadn’t heard of him for a while but I knew that he had been working as a fulltime political activist, including standing for parliament for the Workers Revolutionary Party, and he had made a fine feature documentary, fronted by Vanessa Redgrave, called The Palestinian.


Ian Dury, actor

I tracked him down to an address in Chiswick and called him.  He was available and readily agreed to look at the scripts overnight so I took them over to him.  A tall, handsome, beaming man welcomed me and immediately put me at my ease by expressing his admiration for my courage over the Solid Geometry business.  He then sent me packing and set to reading.  He called me first thing next morning to accept the job.

I felt triumphant that, not 24 hours after I lost my first director, I had a first-rate one sitting in my office for a discussion about logistics.  Then a summons came from upstairs.  Jonathan was away at some jaunt and the acting Head of Drama, a conventional old BBC lifer called Ken Riddington, needed a word.  When I joined him, I found him ashen-faced.  He informed me that I couldn’t employ Roy who, he said, was blacklisted.  I showed him Roy’s name on page 2 of the approved list. Riddington’s fears may not have been eased but his objections had no more ground on which to stand.  Back in my office, I found Roy smiling broadly.  He gave me a history of his own dealings with the BBC and his political activism outside the business, to which he had only recently returned.  We noted that the BBC’s failure to exclude him from the approved list had ensured that he could not be denied work there if a producer wanted him without lawyers being brought in.  Game to us.


Dury & Roth in character

Making King was very tough, although Roy made it a pleasure and, as he habitually did, raised everyone’s game in the process.  Farrukh’s final script, endlessly delayed, came in way over-length and we compromised by both trimming it as we went and shooting more than we knew we could use – practically all of Ian Dury’s scenes had to be dropped in the edit of this episode.  Each part was supposed to be 50 minutes; though it made overseas sales more difficult, we could stretch up to 60, but anything over that kicked in a slew of extra payments to actors (however, I notice that each episode of Stephen Poliakoff’s recent Dancing at the Edge ran a minute above 60 minutes and, in two cases, above 90 minutes, but he always seems to be a law unto himself).  Even so, despite the scramble, I brought the show in on time and under budget – which was (frighteningly when you have it for the first time) a little over £1million.

Unlike many producers, I attended most of the location shooting and got to know the crew – one veteran reckoned that he’d never ever been bought a pint by a producer before.  As editing got under way, I began to attend to my own BBC future – Jonathan Powell had promised that there would be subsequent projects for me but as he’d lied about everything else I couldn’t leave that to chance.


Roy Battersby

The one possibility I had great hopes for was a notion I worked up with a Manchester writer I admired called Janey Preger.  It concerned a young couple of dancers, a white girl and a black boy, who were penniless and lived in digs where they were indulged by an eccentric landlady, but who went out and had fantastical adventures, often centred around foiling criminality.  The pair furnished the series’ title, Hattie and Cole, and the prototype for the series’ demeanour and style would be The Avengers, then a rather forgotten favourite.  At the same time, the show would tap into the zeitgeist of the Thatcherite ‘80s, suggesting that being unemployed in a world full of crooks shouldn’t stop talented and sexy young people having a glorious time.  Each episode would end with Hattie and Cole performing a knockout dance number.

Another flavour I wanted to bring to the mix was to fold in constant references to classic Hollywood and to musicals and, in tandem with that, to persuade unprecedentedly starry names to make guest appearances, as much for fun as for money, so that appearing in the show became a fashionable thing to do.  In the pilot that Janey and I wrote, there was a corrupt cop named Orson Caterpillar (“whoreson caterpillar” is an insult deployed by Falstaff), a character based on Orson Welles’ Hank Quinlan from Touch of Evil.  I intended to get Robert De Niro to play this role.  Never suggest that I lack ambition.


King – a rare revival on satellite

Jonathan Powell gave me back the script, saying no more than that he didn’t understand it. This has three possible interpretations: that he didn’t read it, that he lightly skimmed it while doing something else or that he never intended to extend my contract. When King was finished, I was out of work again and that was my last job at the BBC.

In a final chapter of this saga, I will try to draw together some more general thoughts about the BBC.