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.

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

Something of a delay has occurred since my first lucubrations on my relationship with the BBC. But, better late than not at all, I here resume the story at the beginning of 1978. We left our hero passing Yule without knowing quite what the estimable David Rose had in mind for him. As it turned out, David wanted me to produce a run of new plays of up to an hour’s duration for a new mid-week slot on BBC2. He needed me to start quite soon and hence to effect a release from my obligations to The Observer at the paper’s earliest convenience.

I was excited and flattered by the offer. As a long-standing student of one-off teledrama, I had plenty of ideas and opinions. David had picked up this inclination in my journalism and felt that it squared with what he was trying to do at Pebble Mill. His carefully achieved reputation there had allowed the modest expansion that provided this new strand and he evidently wanted to take some risks with it. In my own estimation, I certainly counted as a risk. I reckoned that no one would have been made up to producer at the BBC with so little practical experience since the days when pretty much everything went out live, nearly two decades before. And producers as young as 30 were rare.

When I arrived at David’s Pebble Mill fiefdom in Birmingham, I discovered that there was a certain amount of on-going office politics to be either contended with or ignored. David himself produced the three or four annual contributions to the Play for Today strand. Peter Ansorge, for whom at the outset of my journalistic career I had freelanced when he edited Plays & Players, had been promoted from script editing and was now running a new drama serial for BBC2 called Empire Road. The gig I had landed ought to have been handed to the other in-house script editor. He was older than me and vastly more experienced in both television and theatre. His name was Michael Wearing.

Michael Wearing

Though no stranger to anger or resentment, Mike makes a convincing show of geniality and, in all our dealings, never gave me to think that he harboured one iota of grudge against me. For that I was most grateful. At the outset, I briefly acknowledged that I understood he was more entitled to the job than I was and he gamely brushed that aside. I think we worked well together for the duration, he as my script editor. More pressing was that the schedule did not allow me to commission a full season of new work. This further suggested that my appointment might not have been as planned as David might have me think. But there was no point in dwelling on that.

Given that I had to go with a couple of existing pieces, I read Mike’s cache of possibles and settled on a modest, sincere little first play by a middle-aged Nottingham poet called Derrick Buttress. Entitled Connie, it had a nice lead role for a good actress and happily we were able to get a very good one, Marjorie Yates, to play it.

Peter Ansorge

Another from Mike’s drawer was an amusing little shaggy-dog story by the actor Jack Shepherd. Underdog was set in Whitehall and needed a couple of actors who knew how to play that thin line where high comedy meets satire. Happily, Anton Rodgers and Nigel Hawthorne took the roles, the former generously ceding top billing to the latter. Nigel in particular was utterly convincing as a Whitehall mandarin and there is no doubt that his performance in Underdog won him the role that made him famous, Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister, soon after the play’s transmission.

Pebble Mill had a tradition of throwing neophytes into the deep end and I decided that I could make a bit of reparation to Mike Wearing by asking him to direct the Shepherd. He had plenty of experience directing in the theatre: years earlier, I had seen his famous production of Max Frisch’s The Chinese Wall that won awards at the NUS Drama Festival with a cast led by one Alan Yentob. The studio technicians were relatively generous towards directors in the gallery who are floundering a little – it’s not unlike flying a plane without having been trained – and Mike never seriously floundered.

Meanwhile, my intention to find a play that treated of the situation in Northern Ireland had been picked up by my old chum Snoo Wilson. Snoo had a stage play called A Greenish Man that his and my contemporary from Time Out, Dusty Hughes, had been sitting on for ages at the Bush Theatre where he was now artistic director. Snoo had done a television version and rushed it off to me. As soon as he knew that I had accepted it, Dusty scheduled it for production at the Bush, thereby pre-empting us because of course his lead-times were much swifter. (Another languishing stage play that finally went into production after I expressed an interest in rescuing it for television was Martin Sherman's Bent which went on to great global success).

Being by Snoo, the play was hardly a documentary examination of the forces at work in the province. I routinely described it to people as a fantasia about Northern Ireland. A German professor who took a close interest in British television drama subsequently tried to make me accept that the play was a parable, but I never felt that the fact of characters called George and Patrick would bear the weight of symbolism that the good professor sought to attach to them.

Another writer I knew and admired was Stephen Davis and I was delighted to learn that he wanted to write (or had written, I can’t remember which) a play about an English photographer covering the Vietnam War. Always a fan of studio drama and of trying to extend the studio’s boundaries, I was excited about the challenge of staging the Vietnam War in the Pebble Mill studio and I think we brought if off with real style, enormously assisted by a cast largely made up of fearless American ex-pat actors. The play was called Contacts.

Keen to do right by my sisters and brothers in the gay community, I commissioned Drew Griffiths and Noel Greig of Gay Sweatshop to write a play for the strand. The notion they came up with interwove a contemporary student meeting a man who, in his youth, had met the writer and sexual liberationist Edward Carpenter with a wireless broadcast about Carpenter given in the 1940s by EM Forster. Only Connect was a soft-spoken masterpiece, beautifully achieved by the two ill-assorted writers (both now dead) and, of all the pieces of work in all mediums that have appeared with my name on it, I am proudest of that production.

Young Ian McEwan

Another writer I commissioned was Ian McEwan. He was still best known then as a writer of short stories. But a half-hour play of his had been produced earlier at Pebble Mill and I liked it a lot. Mike Newell had directed it and he came on board to do the new one. Ian’s first proposal of a version of one of his stories was, I thought, just too sexually difficult to get past the BBC management. Solid Geometry, however, looked more likely.

Like Only Connect, the story is set in two time zones, linked by a museum piece inherited from the contemporary protagonist’s grandfather. It was a severed penis, contained in a jar of preserving fluid. Aware that this particular practical prop might raise an eyebrow, I sent an internal memo to the staff involved, hoping to head off any discomfort. A section of this memo was later leaked to ‘Pseud’s Corner’ in Private Eye, the second and (so far) last time I appeared there (the first time was a spoof letter to Plays & Players but Michael Coveney, Peter Ansorge’s successor as editor, wouldn’t let me reveal to Private Eye that it had been “had”).

Before the leak, the Pebble Mill Head of Programme Services (or some such bureaucratic title) had fallen with glee on the memo. He evidently had a long-standing dislike of the Drama Department (I wasn’t to know this) and saw his chance to make mischief. Memos were fired off and phone calls placed. In very short order, several days before its scheduled studio dates (and before anyone had set eyes on the pickled penis prop), the production was cancelled. The public announcement from Television Centre was the first any of us knew of it.

I was aware of some of the context of this development, but not all of it. The censorship/editorial-control battle at the BBC, to which I alluded in the previous posting, had been raging. As a journalist writing about television, I had made it clear on which side of the fence I sat. My piece for The Observer on the banning of Roy Minton’s Play for Today about borstal, Scum, had been the most widely-read piece on the issue and had directly led Clive Parsons to set up the (inferior) movie version of the story. No doubt in reference to that, David Rose had warned me when I arrived at Pebble Mill that Alasdair Milne, the Director-General, was in his phrase “watching you like a hawk”.

It was no doubt because the BBC had disliked the coverage received for its editorial control that it sought to be so decisive in this case. Unlike the cases of Scum, Brimstone and Treacle and the other causes celebres, there would be no samizdat videotape for journalists to see and use as a basis from which to query the fuss.

There was a larger picture still, however. The Corporation was in the process of reining in its departments that had generated autonomous outposts run by people whom the management saw as mavericks. Those parts of the current affairs department that had been led by the brilliant and dauntless John Gau had recently been stripped of their power and Gau eased out. David Rose was now in their sights. Shooting down his newest producer’s project was a shot across David’s bows.

Going into bat on behalf of my production, writer and director, I “hurried to London” (according to the Daily Star, whose front-page story, run no doubt because they could use a pin-up of our lead actress Mary Maddox, referred to me bogglingly as a “BBC boss”) but was unable to get anybody to talk to me. I heard that the Controller of BBC2, the civilised and genial Brian Wenham, was an innocent party in the case – indeed he mischievously let it be known that he was a fan of Ian McEwan’s writing.

Back in Birmingham, Ian, Mike Newell and I drew up a statement of our position, pointing out that no decision to cancel, formal or informal, had been conveyed to us save by David Rose, not himself party to the decision. We issued this to the press. Only The Daily Telegraph made any mention of it.

Sir Ian Trethowan

A few days later, I was summoned to the office of Phil Sidey, the Head of BBC English Regions. Only about a month earlier, I had seen him for my annual interview (a BBC ritual that, for all I know, may still be a requirement of contractees). Sidey, a notoriously indiscreet gossip, had spent most of our time together regaling me with supposedly unrepeatable yarns about other members of the management. Now he had his stern face on. He presented me with a copy of our statement and asked me to confirm that it had been signed by me. Then he formally fired me. My crime was to have conveyed information to the press “without prior written consent”, which crime (as you may imagine) is committed by every BBC producer most days of the week.

My union, the National Union of Journalists, launched an appeal which was handled by a diminutive spitfire called John Foster: he subsequently served nine years as the union’s General Secretary. The appeal went to the then Director-General, Ian Trethowan (Milne having himself been fired in the interim). We had a highly formal audience with Trethowan at a vast table in an imposing boardroom at Broadcasting House. I remember little of it, except that at one point, in passing, I mentioned that I assumed that BBC managers knew how many beans made five and Trethowan remarked, rather crisply I thought, that he wasn’t sure they did all know how many beans make five.

As a result of my appeal, I was reinstated to the end of my contract, which had been renewed just before the Solid Geometry debacle. I was obliged to relocate to Television Centre where I would have “greater and closer supervision”. Shaun Sutton, then Head of Drama, gave me a single Play for Today slot to fill. I think I was given the script too: if so, I was happy to have it. It was Not for the Likes of Us by an astute actress-turned-writer called Gilly Fraser. The story was set in London and was to be shot on film. But all that season’s provisions for filming in London had been made, so we were shipped to Bristol. The BBC in Whiteladies Road has no drama department. I would have had “greater and closer supervision” if we had been despatched to the Arizona desert.

It was a pleasure to make a film, even on BBC schedules. When I had been planning my second run of plays for my BBC2 slot, which I called The Other Side (as in the phrase viewers then used when changing channels: “what’s on the other side?”), I had been very taken with a script that Mike Wearing found. It was called Traveller, dealt with such people in Ireland and was by another writer of short stories, a young Irishman called Neil Jordan.

Young Neil Jordan

My production manager Carol Parks, Mike and I took a trip to Dublin to meet Neil and his designated director, Joe Comerford, in a session first brokered at the Ardmore Studios by John Boorman who sat in but said little. Neil was captivating but often difficult to follow. His sentences tumbled out in a frequently incoherent mêlée and you had to hope that his enthusiasm alone conveyed sufficient meaning. If you’d told me then that he would become an A-list Hollywood director, capable of making his requirements clear to huge crews of cynical old pros, I’d have accused you of romancing.

The problem for us with Traveller was Joe Comerford. I could wholly empathise with his instinctive suspicion of the BBC and all it stands for. What he could not countenance was the schedule that he would be required to observe – Carol Parks could offer him no leeway on that. Neil was commendably loyal to his chosen director, so we went our separate ways. Comerford managed to get the movie made two years later but it only achieved a very limited release. It was once screened on television and I found it a lot more unrelievedly glum than the screenplay had promised.

Gilly Fraser’s film came up a lot livelier and it led to a remarkable run of acting. For the central role, we needed an actress of considerable girth who, after passing most of the story repressed in one way or another, finds herself gloriously as a nude artist’s model. The part went to Pam St Clement. And when Gilly was recruited to the writing strength of EastEnders, she got Pam the role of Pat Butcher that made her a household name and kept her in regular work for more than 25 years.

At the end of my contract, Shaun Sutton took me aback by offering me a renewal. I should certainly have accepted the offer. However, I had already promised a definitive account of the Solid Geometry story to the trade magazine Broadcast, which was edited by my old Time Out colleague Patricia Williams. I don’t know what Pattie’s reaction might have been if I had told her to forget it. But it wasn’t in my nature. I walked away from the BBC and wrote my piece. Pattie did her bit by me by offering me the role of regular critic on the magazine. But I would return to the BBC eventually, as we shall see …