IRON in the SOUL

On a Wednesday in November 1990, I was sitting in my office at Greenford. We were on location shooting the Euston Films series Minder, of which I was then script editor. The phone rang, I picked up the receiver and a voice said two words. I needed no explanation of who the caller was, his voice being so familiar as the senior writer on the series, David Yallop. Nor did I need any more explanation than his two words: “She’s gone”.

Now she’s finally, definitively gone. She’s never coming back, though god knows she’s going to go on in legend. No national leader since World War II has cut quite so divisive a figure, not Francisco Franco nor Hugo Chavez nor Hendrik Verwoerd nor Mao Zedong nor Fidel Castro nor Alexander Dubcek nor Robert Mugabe nor Radovan Karadzic nor Charles de Gaulle nor Richard Nixon nor Idi Amin nor even her great chum Agusto Pinochet. Perhaps the only credible suggestion to trump her is Stalin.

That she should have contrived to become and remain so divisive sits amusingly with the famous quote she had readied for her first walk up Downing Street as newly elected Prime Minister in 1979: “I would just like to remember some words of St Francis of Assisi which I think are really just particularly apt at the moment. ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony, where there is error, may we bring truth, where there is doubt, may we bring faith, and where there is despair, may we bring hope’. And to all the British people – howsoever they voted –may I say this. Now that the election is over, may we get together and strive to serve and strengthen the country of which we're so proud to be a part. And finally, one last thing: in the words of Airey Neave whom we had hoped to bring here with us, ‘There is now work to be done’.” (Note the use of 'we' throughout. She was imperious and monarchical long before her bizarre announcement "we are a grandmother").


Millar

The quote was found and rewritten for her by her favourite speechwriter, Ronald Millar, whom she later knighted. Millar was a jobbing playwright and former actor, the products of whose day job have not stood the test of time. (His best-known works, the play Abelard and Heloise and the musical Robert and Elizabeth, both draw upon the inspirations of others). It’s intriguing that David Cameron also depends for speech material on an old-fashioned dramatist and former actor whose work is unlikely to last – Julian Fellowes.

Millar also came up with one of Thatcher’s most quoted lines: “You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning”. This is a gloss on the title of Christopher Fry’s verse play of 1948, The Lady’s Not for Burning, which was already forgotten by the time of Thatcher’s reference in 1980. Indeed, the PM herself had no more heard of it than she knew of the St Francis quote. And she delivered the line with no suggestion that she expected anyone to find it witty or smart; but then nobody claims that any sort of sense of humour was part of her make-up. That she didn’t have the smarts to see the bear-trap that she was digging for herself when she declared of her dependable deputy William Whitelaw “every Prime Minister needs a Willie” speaks volumes.

Thatcher’s unparalleled divisiveness derived from her uniquely uncompromising approach to government. She is routinely accounted, by enemy and ally alike, “a conviction politician”. An alternative gloss would be to call her blinkered. At any rate, she was the antithesis of the politician embodied by RA Butler in his summary of government as being “the art of the possible”. Thatcher never talked in those terms. She preferred such nostrums as “there is no alternative”. She judged Tories more severely than those of rival parties – “is he one of us?” – and she dismissed consensus-seeking Tories as ‘wets’. When Chris Patten, then Chairman of the Party under John Major’s leadership, lost his Bath seat at the 1992 general election, Thatcher did nothing to refute the widely circulated claim that the gathering for the results at the Thatcher home had cheered.



But though all other leaders of major British political parties in the modern era have consciously sought to build consensus and to appeal to the supposed centre ground of the electorate, Thatcher’s own triple electoral success evidently commends itself to subsequent party leaders. Thatcher was the first former leader of any party to be invited to take tea at Downing Street with, in succession, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. You might think that Blair would first welcome Jim Callaghan, that (after the latter’s death) he or Brown would invite Neil Kinnock or Michael Foot, but doubtless the fact that none of the three won a general election counted against them.

By the same token, Cameron might have first welcomed John Major, but I suppose by 2010 he was completely out of favour. Or he might have invited Michael Howard, the only one of his predecessors as opposition leader not to join the cabinet (and it was Howard who brought both Cameron and George Osborne onto the front bench). In fact, following the logic of Blair and Brown’s respective embrace of Thatcher, the obvious first guest for Cameron would have been Blair himself, in whose mould Cameron has consciously moulded himself and to whose pragmatic politics Cameron is rather closer than to Thatcherism.

Margaret Thatcher came to the leadership of the Conservative Party by means of a daring coup. She was part of a loose grouping in the party in the early 1970s that was disenchanted with Edward Heath who was seen as being ideologically weak, managerially inept and lamentably Europhiliac. Heath had lost both the general elections of 1974, conducted initially to answer the question “who governs Britain?” and to invite the response “the government, not the unions”. Not many – certainly not Heath himself – saw a decisive challenge coming from the far right of the party and especially not one to promote the candidature of Heath’s widely disparaged education secretary (“Margaret Thatcher, milk-snatcher”).



But Thatcher was seen to have the legs for it by a faction whose membership ebbed and flowed but who came to be dubbed by the press ‘the gang of four’, after the cabal that surrounded the widow of Chairman Mao. Its staunchest members were Airey Neave, Norman Tebbit, George Gardiner and Nigel Lawson. Thatcher’s own particular ideological guru was the Jewish intellectual baronet, Keith Joseph.

Some time in 1974 – I cannot recall when exactly but it might have been between the February and October elections – my mother visited me in London and took me to lunch at a splendid restaurant, L’épicure, which sadly no longer exists. Margaret Thatcher was at the adjoining table, dining à deux with a man whom we later were able to identify as Airey Neave. I wish now that we had eavesdropped more diligently. They must certainly have been plotting.

During Thatcher’s term as leader of the opposition, Neave was killed while driving out of the House of Commons car park – an IRA bomb had been planted on his car. The Thatcher circle was targeted more than any other establishment political grouping: the 1984 bomb at the Brighton Grand Hotel was intended to get her and might well have done; her old ally Ian Gow was killed in his own driveway. No British politician was more hated by Irish Republicans than Thatcher.

Trade unionists hated her too, none more than the miners, whose livelihood as well as power Thatcher intended to destroy. The British coal industry never recovered from the long-drawn-out and fiercely contested strike of 1984 and those parts of the country that formerly depended on mining are now among the most deprived.

Thatcher’s ogre-like reputation among mining communities gave rise to a song lyric that is more venomously disposed towards a politician than any other I know. It was written by Lee Hall (to music by Elton John) for the stage musical version of Billy Elliott and the chorus goes: “So merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher./
May God's love be with you.
/We all sing together in one breath:
/Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher./
We all celebrate today,/
'Cause it's one day closer to your death”. American tourists who flock to the show in London must be astounded to hear such a sentiment about a woman who they think of as an English heroine.

It’s clear that Thatcher never gave two hoots for any idea of rapprochement with miners or any other kind of blue-collar worker. Despite her Franciscan sentiment of 1979, she never sought or expected to be supported by the votes of people whose lives were alien to hers. Making an early television appearance as pensions minister, Thatcher was told by her interviewer that “it has been said that Britain is a fine place to live if you are neither very poor nor black”, to which she responded “well, what has that to do with me?” There is no evidence that she ever sought the vote of anyone very poor or non-white.



Another remark attributed to Thatcher is to the effect that “a man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure”. The reliability of this quote is contested but it says a good deal about Thatcher that anyone would believe her capable of saying it.

Her absence of empathy with people who lacked the drive and ruthlessness that she herself embraced made her the most unpopular Prime Minister in history in the course of her third year in power, as unemployment rates reached unimagined heights. But the invasion of the Falklands changed all that. Thatcher was unbelievably fortunate to have such a cause fall into her lap and, despite such unforgiveable decisions as the gratuitous sinking of the Argentinian cruiser the General Belgrano with the loss of more than 300 lives, she reaped a colossal electoral advantage that sustained her until the second, post-Poll Tax collapse of support, this time fatally, in 1990 when, on Wednesday November 22nd, she bowed to the inevitable and announced that she would stand down. The lamentable legacy of the Falklands War was that leaders across the planet began to believe that waging war was the best means of reversing domestic unpopularity, a theory that Blair went on to test on five separate occasions. No doubt he still doesn’t understand why Iraq was not his own Port Stanley.

The most far-reaching and destructive effect of the Thatcher governments was the transformation of the nature of the British economy, with state assets sold off, financial regulation abolished and the “loads-a-money” mentality fostered. It’s hard now not to think of the 1980s rather than the 1930s as being the “low, dishonest decade” of Auden’s description.

Tragically, it seems unlikely that Labour will ever seek to reverse this transformation. However greedy the privatized utilities become, Labour is not about to take them back into state control, nor is it likely to find the gumption to bring the banks and the so-called financial services industry to heel. Ed Miliband’s party is as post-Thatcherite as Cameron’s is.

Indeed, there remains more residual resentment of Thatcherism in the not-entirely-moribund tradition of shire Tories than survives in any other part of the political forest. I cannot resist the feeling that Peter Carrington, Jim Prior and Michael Heseltine will all take some grim satisfaction in having seen her out. But I bet not even Denis Healey took pleasure from the demise of Michael Foot, the nearest Labour has ever come (and it’s not very near) to a conviction-politician leader comparable to Thatcher.

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

Wherein I conclude this account of my sentimental education in one of the most institutional of British institutions. We last glimpsed our protagonist leaving BBC employ for the final time. I cannot now recall with certainty but I guess I must still have been on contract when my production of Farrukh Dhondy’s four-parter, King of the Ghetto, went out. At any rate, I do remember being interviewed for Radio Times in my office at Threshold House on Shepherd’s Bush Green. It was, I feel sure, part of the reason why Jonathan Powell, the Head of Drama, pretended that the production schedule was a lot more comfortable than it turned out to be that he required the tapes for transmission almost as soon as editing was completed.

As I was on hand, I couldn’t resist popping down to the viewing room to see my old previewer chums on the Friday that Part 1 was screened for them. Most of the faces were familiar to me, not least that courtly old gent Herbie Kretzmer, long the previewer for the Daily Express, whose lyrics for Les Misérables had not quite yet made him a millionaire. There was a new kid on the block, though, the previewer for The Sunday Times, who spent the entire duration of the episode on the telephone. Perhaps understandably, he has never been my favourite journalist. His name was Mark Lawson.


Herbie Kretzmer: do you hear the people sing his lyrics?

King caused a certain amount of flurry, not least because Farrukh had been writing loosely fictionalized versions of real people. I knew nothing of the background to his fiction and – call me irresponsible if you like, but – I was happy not to know. After all, the BBC had committed to production long before it was in any sense my responsibility. My first duty was to get the thing done in time for the booked slots.

In several ways, I was on a hiding to nothing. For instance, we were going to need a number of extras for several scenes shot around Brick Lane. I tried the usual gambit of placing an announcement in the trade magazine, The Stage. The mag’s advertising manager sharply informed me that we could not seek to recruit Bengalis, however. This evidently was a breach of provisions under the Race Relations Act. All we could ask for were people who could play Bengali. Consequently, on the day, the extras that reported covered the waterfront: Indo-Pakistanis, Arabs, Orientals, Afro-Caribbeans, Turks, Greeks and Cypriots, Jews and Muslims, Latinos, indeed anyone who didn’t look obviously WASPy or Nordic. Hence our crowd scenes did not bear much scrutiny.

Another problem was that Farrukh had written some dialogue to be exchanged between Bengali characters but did not himself speak Bengali. I contacted the Bengali department of the BBC World Service and someone there expressed himself delighted to supply the translations, which he duly did. Come the shoot, however, our actors who were to say the lines decried the translations, saying that they sounded more like the Bengali equivalent of Shakespeare than the appropriate demotic. This put me and the director Roy Battersby in a quandary. None of the actors was actually Bengali so how reliable could they be? On the other hand, there was no time to mess about. We had to trust the actors not to create a further problem.


Mark Lawson: he was never young, even when he was young

Before the run of the serial was finished, a formal complaint had been lodged with the BBC by people reckoning to represent the Bengali community around Brick Lane and a small if noisy demonstration was mounted at the gates of Television Centre. Roy happened to be at the Centre that day – I suspect we were still editing episode 4 – and he quizzed the protesters closely.

Farrukh, Roy and I were summoned to a meeting with some Bengali representatives in the office of the then Controller of BBC2, who was none other than Graeme McDonald, the producer of the one-off drama Circle Line that launched my BBC career. Graeme was obliged to play it lofty and impartial. The Bengalis – clearly articulate young men with a particular axe to grind and no conceivable right to speak for “the whole” Bengali community – were angry and dismissive. The three of us decided not to get into too much detailed debate or to reveal the difficulties under which we had been labouring or to concede much of anything. I remember one young chap declaring “you have raped my language and culture” and I decided he would be a local councillor before too long. I imagine some formal record of the meeting was kept by the BBC but, as far as any practical consideration went, that was the end of the matter.


Bengalis marching in Brick Lane (though not, on this occasion, against the BBC)

Whether that – relatively modest – outburst of controversy had any bearing on my own standing at the BBC, I cannot tell. The press didn’t pick it up, mercifully. On balance, it seemed to me that I had done exactly what was required and got Jonathan out of an awkward scheduling hole. But I was never rewarded for it.

I had spent quite a lot of the mid-1980s looking for work. After King, I was again unemployed. I recall feeling that, as I turned 40, I was good and ready for a major post in television. Yet I couldn’t even get an interview as an assistant sub-editor on Radio Times, a publication for which I had written quite often as a freelance. Meanwhile, my contemporaries were taking over the top television jobs. Soon after my departure from the BBC, Jonathan Powell was appointed Controller BBC1 and, simultaneously, Alan Yentob became Controller BBC2. As another contemporary pointed out, they were both 40 and neither had a family. Well, nor did I.


Alan Yentob, also old when young

Over the years, I have applied for a large number of posts, many of them at the BBC. I usually managed at least to get an interview because my cv, if I may say so, is pretty interesting. I may not be a particularly dynamic interviewee. The only two times that I actually enquired what in particular had counted against me, I was told that the person who had won the post was “hungrier”. I couldn’t but feel that this was not much help. In both cases, the appointed person was quite a bit younger than me. I suspect that “hungry” in someone older can easily come over as “desperate”.

One BBC post I applied for required applicants to furnish a list of “contacts” in the industry. As a long-time journalist, I could make a list running into hundreds but I confined my submission to a few dozen, beginning with the then BBC Director-General (John Birt) whom I had known as far back as when he was a humble programme-maker, let alone an executive.

But it occurred to me that I needed to append a covering note to my submission. The BBC form required one to enter one’s full name, in my case William Stephen Gilbert. If someone checking out my contacts claim were to refer to me as William Gilbert, she would draw a total blank. Stephen Gilbert would trawl many more confirmations and W Stephen Gilbert one-hundred-percent success. But I might be unfortunate enough to find myself being checked out by the one person in the exercise to whom no version of the name meant a thing.

As it transpired, I never heard any more about that post, so I have no notion whether my application was dismissed as fanciful. Another attempt at securing work was even more disastrous. Someone had decided to create a new post, that of executive producer on the BBC2 magazine The Late Show. The programme already had an editor so it was difficult to see why it had any need for an additional manager.

I rang the information number given on the advertisement for the post, only to be told that the person who had the information was on leave and no one else there could help me. This seemed somewhat amateurish. I decided that I would be sure to press the query when I was interviewed and sent off my application. I was given an appointment for an interview at Kensington House, in those days the home of BBC arts programmes’ offices, to be conducted by the then Head of Arts Programming, Kim Evans (whom I had never met), and Mike Poole, The Late Show editor, whose path I had crossed several times, never especially to my own advantage.


Mike Poole, not always as genial as he photographs

My appointment was for 3:15 and I arrived by 3:00 and walked round the block a couple of times (one should never appear too keen) before presenting myself at reception comfortably before 3:10. A young woman came to collect me, explaining as she took me up to the interview room that unfortunately Kim and Mike would have to go to the studio shortly so it would necessarily be a rather brief encounter. I felt pretty miffed but what choice did I have?

The beginning was taken up with explanations about their need to finish by half-past and their none-too clear account of why an executive producer was suddenly required for the programme. I was asked one or two desultory questions and then dismissed, feeling sure that an appointment had been agreed before I had even entered the room. As the assistant accompanied me back to reception, she remarked that it was a pity that I had arrived “so late”.

What did she mean? Well, she said, my interview was supposed to be at 2:45. I had the letter in my pocket so I fished it out and showed her: 3:15, perfectly clearly. Suitably embarrassed, she rushed back to the interview room while I reflected that of course Evans and Poole would have spent an unlooked-for empty half-hour deciding which of the applicants deserved the post, discounting the last one who was “so late” and who anyway Poole doubtless didn’t much rate.

The assistant returned, all apologies. I could have castigated her for the corporate failure to have an explanation of the post available as promised and for screwing up the particulars of my own interview but what would be the point? I went home and tried to call Mike Poole – we didn’t have mobile phones in those days – but of course he was unavailable in the studio. I got a letter off to him, which should have reached him first thing next day – we didn’t have email either but we did have relatively early postal deliveries. But I knew that it was futile and, sure enough, he didn’t bother to reply. Nor did I receive notice that I hadn’t got the job. I never troubled to check out who did get it.

Screw-ups like this and other posts that I applied for without any response made me wonder if I was on some BBC blacklist. Perhaps my file was decorated with one of those infamous Christmas-tree symbols that every BBC watcher had heard tell of. I wrote to the appropriate executive asking whether this was the case and I received a long and discursive letter back, full of pain that I should think such a thing and assurance that no such let or hindrance applied to my prospects at the BBC. Nevertheless, as I have indicated, I have never again worked for the corporation.

I had intended to go on to some more general reflections about the state of the BBC but it feels as though I have maundered on long enough for this posting. In due course, I shall work up a more considered conclusion. Be patient.

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.

A HORSE! A HORSE! MY BURGER’s MADE of HORSE!

I shall be returning to my series of postings about the BBC in due course, but for now I cannot forbear sticking in my two-penn’orth on Britain’s latest food scandal. For many years, I have viewed the food industry with grave mistrust. No field in which profit is to be made ever escapes corruption and fraud, and the profits to be made from food are among the highest. All the supermarkets grew so rich and powerful by leading with food, in particular processed food, and foregrounding its appeal to the attraction of shopping “all under one roof” that such outlets claimed from the first: convenience. The price of convenience, as shoppers are now learning, is a systematic cutting of corners.

In our house, we long ago cut our consumption of processed foods to a minimum. Only in a restaurant can we have inadvertently imbibed horseflesh since long, long ago. Speaking for myself, I can report that it is thirty years since I gave up eating burgers. Somebody (I don’t recall who) asked me back then if I knew how burgers were made. The answer was: “they pulp the whole cow”. This seemed to me to be so incontrovertibly true that I foreswore burgers thereafter, with the sole exception of Hamburger Hamlet on Larchmont Boulevard, Los Angeles, where the composition of the offerings, I am persuaded, is uniquely impeccable.

Hmmm, delicious ...

More recently, a phrase of Jonathan Meades’ coining has stayed with me. Describing the generalised filling used in so many commercial “convenience” dishes that claim to contain meat, he used the term “abattoir slurry”. It is as convincing an aperçu as it is repellent. I paid several visits to a nearby abattoir as a youngster and, while I dare say that regulations have been much tightened since, the casual nature of the slaughtering and quartering that I observed made me wonder how sharp the distinction was between “fit to eat” and “not fit to eat”. My mother used to buy horsemeat from the butcher for the family dog. It was marked with a blue dye and labelled “not for human consumption”. The dog ate it with relish. Maybe we would have done too.

In those far-off days, there was no regulation of much of anything and transactions at every level of society were conducted on a basis of trust: “a gentleman’s word is his bond”. My paternal grandfather did all his business on the shake of a hand. No contract ever needed to be entered into. He settled every receipt within 24 hours and expected everyone else to do the same. I don’t think he was often disappointed.

My grandfather was in the boot and shoe trade. In the food business, there was far less overt concern about standards than there is now and perhaps there was far less need for such concern. Sell-by dates, lists of ingredients, analyses of content in terms of fat, fibre and so on – these things were far in the future. Common sense told you when something had been kept too long to be wisely consumed. On the other hand, many foodstuffs went untouched for months and months because housewives had larders, pantries and store-cupboards. And because perishables were seasonal, all kinds of techniques were developed to preserve what we called “the goodness” of the various food items.

Slaughter-house scene

At the same time, the popular press did not go in for “food scares” most weeks, as they have done at least since the millennium. Withering us has become a favoured technique to boost sales: for example, the daily glass of wine that was “beneficial for the heart” last week is “ruinous for the liver” this week.

Attitudes were pretty hard-nosed, though. I think most people accepted that the limited range of processed foods – sausages, pork pies, ice cream – were apt to be used by manufacturers as a dumping ground for various kinds of perfectly digestible offal. And lord knows what went into such confections that came in jars, like fish paste and potted meat, that were presumably stiff with primitive preserving agents.

The Food Standards Agency was only set up thirteen years ago but at least we now have regulation, professional testing and controls. We also have huge scope for backhanders and scams. Ministers and food processors are falling over themselves to assure us that the issue is “mislabelling”, not food safety. I am not so sure. The horsemeat market is far less regulated than, say, the trade in beef – which naturally is one of the reasons why the food industry (both mainstream and cowboy) has tolerated the horsemeat market. But a free-for-all in a market where testing is minimal and tracing sources virtually non-existent is itself a food safety issue. In The Guardian on Saturday, the estimable commentator on food commerce Felicity Lawrence – her book Not on the Label is required reading – described an industry “in which live animals are transported vast distances across borders for slaughter, before being stripped down to constituent parts to be shipped back again in blocks of frozen off-cuts that may be stored for months on end before being ground down to unrecognisable ingredients in our everyday meals”. It’s hardly an appetising prospect.

A horse not in the best of condition – evidently this one was nursed back to health

Let’s set aside the issue that horsemeat has been sold as beef, itself a criminal deception punishable by severe penalties. Horsemeat may well be perfectly fit for human consumption but only if it is in fine condition. If you have been unwittingly feasting on some derelict and diseased old donkey, purchased cheaply from a Romanian tinker several months ago and rendered without expertise or care into bite-sized chunks in some filthy shed in mittelEurop, you surely have grounds for concern.

Moreover, we already know that across Ireland, both south and north, thousands of the horses traditionally kept by inhabitants of that island have been abandoned since the onset of the recession. It would hardly be surprising if some were sold for processing and indeed if the many starving nags roaming wild were rounded up to make a fast buck.

You may say that horse is merely meat, just like beef and pork and lamb, but animals bred for the table are (in theory, anyway) unlikely to have been imbibing chemicals that will do you harm. At least any medication introduced into them (if so done with official blessing) will have been tested to ensure that it will cause no ill effects to humans. Horses, which were not formally bred as foodstuff, will have had no such scruples applied to the administration of their medicaments. And indeed a horse doctor is a proverbial rogue in popular mythology.

It may be that many of the myriad cases of cancer of the stomach, bowel and other organs of digestion recorded in the modern era are untraceably caused by the consumption of unfit meat by-products. The health experts have been telling us for a long time that a diet heavy on meat tends to be carcinogenic, but when they talk of “meat” they certainly mean properly regulated and wholesome meat. If meat products are unregulated and untraceable, those who carelessly release them into the food chain need have no fear of being found out and hence suffering the consequences if the population is made ill or worse by what it consumes.

And of course, this issue of traceability speaks to the modern mania for outsourcing. If enterprises keep their processes under one roof, control and responsibility is a simple matter. Farm out the supply, the methodology, the packaging and everything else and pretty soon the scope for error and abuse opens chasms in every direction.

Recent television news bulletins have featured vox pops of people reckoning not to know what the fuss is about and saying that the lasagne or meatballs they buy have always been “delicious”, even if they were indeed composed of horsemeat. Well of course, most people interviewed in vox pops are irredeemably stupid and, in every sense, have no taste.

From a Shippams paste advert of the 1950s

But disguising meat to make it palatable is as old as cooking itself. That’s the whole point of curries and all such spiced dishes. The processed food industry has learned from Asian cuisine. Smother the main ingredient in monosodium glutamate and it hardly matters any more what constitutes the main ingredient. Wikipedia lists 66 recognised food additives, and that’s just the ones whose names begin with the letter A. Making gunk taste like ambrosia has been the food industry’s mission since it began.

Even sophisticates get suckered into innocently eating that which they might not chose to eat. We once clocked an elderly American couple, clearly seasoned travellers both, in a hotel restaurant on the West Indian island of Dominica. They were each tucking into a plateful of mountain chicken. We felt perfectly certain that they had no idea that mountain chicken is the local name for frogs.

Well, we only have ourselves to blame if we consume unthinkingly. On the other hand, children are fed unthinkingly and thereby acquire the habit of relying on food that tastes of chemicals rather than natural flavours. One can protect oneself and one’s household by growing all one’s own vegetables and fruit and keeping chickens and other domestic livestock for home consumption (provided one has the stomach and the resources to slaughter one’s lambs and pigs and preserve their carcasses). But even that self-sufficiency is no guarantee against genetically modified seeds and spores getting into one’s crops, wild creatures spreading infection into one’s livestock and pesticides blowing in from neighbouring farms. The trouble is that no man is an island and the surrounding seas are infested with sharks.

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 …

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

It’s been a tumultuous year for the BBC, with the autumn debacle surrounding the Corporation’s role in revelations about the child abuse practised by its long-time employee Jimmy Savile costing the new Director-General his job after fewer than eight weeks in post. I would hardly call it, with veteran World Affairs editor John Simpson, “the worst crisis that I can remember in my nearly fifty years at the BBC” – perhaps my memory is sharper than Simpson’s – but it has certainly not been an edifying spectacle.

The BBC has always been an unwieldy institution, even when it was considerably more collegiate and streamlined than it is now. Corporation lifers (of whom there are still many more than in most enterprises, even though it can never again be depended upon as a secure haven by those to whom the mores are palatable) are apt to insist (a verb much loved by BBC news scriptwriters) that “the Beeb” is still broadly “trusted” by the public and always has been. I’m not so sure. Equally, my own dealings with the BBC have often been complicated and thwarted by manoeuvrings that seem peculiar to intensely bureaucratic ivory towers.

John Simpson at the outset of his BBC career

The first television broadcast I ever saw was the BBC’s coverage of the coronation of HM Queen Elizabeth II on June 2nd 1953. Along with a majority of British households (56 percent of the population, plus another 12 million following it on the wireless), we joined in the very first exercise in mass media communication in Britain. If you include the audiences for relays and recordings shown in other countries, the total viewing audience topped 277 million. The coverage cost the BBC £44,000.

Like so many others, we had to up sticks for the duration and squeeze into the living room of a neighbour’s house to gaze at that tiny black and white picture on the large and cumbersome but elegant wooden set. It was television that fixed the image for us: “Miss Jones: What colour was the Queen’s coach? – Michael: Grey, Miss” [The Golden Pathway Annual by John Harding and John Burrows].

My Dad was one of the million householders who bought a set in the year following the coronation. And our lives changed forever. The pattern of viewing began to dictate family life. I especially was entranced by this lively source of information, education and entertainment available (after a delay while it warmed up) at the touch of a button. The wireless could always be playing while you did other things, but the goggle-box demanded your full attention (at least, we thought so).

Until 1955, there was only the BBC’s single channel to watch and its hours were very restricted. ‘Closedown’ (when the national anthem was played and some viewers dutifully got to their feet) came early enough to allow even the petit bourgeoisie to have a glance at the evening paper before turning in. A smattering of items for children in the late afternoon was followed by a suspension of transmission between 6.00 and 7.00pm, to allow parents to pack them off to bed or to homework; this period became known as “the toddlers’ truce”. With such limited hours, it was feasible to watch everything broadcast. In our house, we often did.

Apologists for ITV are wont to claim that the BBC was staid and safe until the commercial channel gave it competition. The press had dubbed the BBC ‘Auntie’ but many newspaper owners nursed hopes of involvement in ITV franchises; they were far from disinterested. My Dad, himself a businessman, distrusted the commercial interests and “wouldn’t have ITV in the house” till he relented in 1961.

Joan Miller, the so-called switchboard girl, on Picture Parade

BBC producers established the conventions that subsequent services emulated and that still make up the major genres of the medium: one-off and serial drama, variety, sketch comedy, sitcom, panel games, quiz shows, children’s programmes, documentary, current affairs, news, magazine programmes, relays of outside events and what Homer Simpson would call “edumacation” programmes. While most of these forms derived from television services elsewhere (especially the States), from wireless and from entertainment sources of other kinds, little of substance has been added since.

Pre-ITV, the BBC produced the first magazine programme, Picture Page; Come Dancing; Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass serials and his dramatization of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; The Good Old Days; Sportsview; David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest; Watch with Mother; Panorama; Mr Pastry; Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?; the first British serial to embrace soap-opera values (The Grove Family); regular news bulletins and the basis for a network of schools programming. ITV introduced two ingredients of which the BBC knew nothing: advertising and showbiz. The impresarios who owned the companies that built ITV – the Bernsteins, the Grades, the Rank Organization, Associated British Pictures – had long experience of and wide links with the native film industry, the variety circuit, the popular press and myriad talent agencies. ITV aimed for and achieved a populist stance that the BBC felt (often with justice) was vulgar and down-market. Even its news service, ITN, had a more sensationalist approach than BBC News.

Over the years, the populist approach has utterly routed the thoughtful approach. By the 1970s, media analyst Anthony Smith was able to note that BBC1 and ITV were “moving towards a point of convergence”. Since then, the rush away from serious programming has accelerated. What was once thought perfectly accessible on BBC1 began to be shunted to BBC2 but now that channel is just as down-market. What the biz calls ‘quality’ programmes are found on BBC4, but in recent times that channel too has lowered its sights. Its bill of fare tonight – The Bridges That Built London; … Sings Disney Songs!; The Best of Kenny Everett’s Television Shows; Numb: Simon Amstell Live at the BBC; More Old Jews Telling Jokes; The Art of Tommy Cooper; How the Brits Rocked America; Sounds of the 70s – would have readily been scheduled on BBC1 thirty years ago.

Tommy Cooper, present-day BBC4 fare

That the media generally have dumbed down is beyond dispute. I never trust surveys but when their findings agree with one’s own view … and it so happens that an ICM poll in 2004 did find that of those questioned “54 percent agreed the BBC had ‘dumbed down’ or lowered quality”. I have no way of knowing how credible or properly worded the survey was, but in the end it matters little what proportion of people think that the BBC and other mediums of news and diversion have dumbed down. I know they have.

I turned 13 in 1960 and my teens happily coincided with what is unarguably remembered as the Golden Age of British television. I became particularly drawn to BBC1’s contemporary drama strand, The Wednesday Play, which ran from 1964 to 1970. My father’s resistance to ITV meant that I only discovered ABC Television’s Armchair Theatre in retrospect. This slot, which began in 1956, was in every way the forerunner of The Wednesday Play – Harold Pinter was among the playwrights to cut their teeth on it – and, in setting up its rival, the BBC even poached the presiding genius of ITV drama, Sydney Newman, to be its Head of Plays. Newman’s lethal combination of progressiveness, fearlessness, non-conformity and showbiz instincts ensured that the BBC’s contemporary drama was never out of the headlines.

I was at university and tinkering with a teleplay of my own when the BBC announced a play-writing competition open only to college students. Over the Easter vac, I settled seriously to the task and got my entry off just inside the deadline. By the summer, I had forgotten about it, so the letter telling me that my play had won the competition was a complete surprise. At a small and – as I was to discover – a very BBC ceremony in the Bridge Lounge at Television Centre, I was presented with a head-spinningly large cheque for £500 by the Head of Drama, Gerald Savory, attended by my proud parents. I don’t think either of them had actually read the play – certainly my father hadn’t – so they may not have been as braced for the ensuing events as they might have been.

The two runners-up were also at the ceremony, Catherine Itzin and Andrew Dickson. Both went on to do intriguing things. Itzin became a highly respected theatre academic and a formidable campaigner against pornography. Dickson had a varied career in journalism and became the lover of BBC drama producer Irene Shubik. Both died much too young.

The charismatic Sydney Newman

My play was called Circle Line. I actually entitled it Circle/Line which I fancied made it sound like the name of a modernist painting but the producer and script editor who subsequently put it into production briskly scotched that notion. Though (as regular readers of this blog will testify) I have a gift for nicely judged titles, almost nothing by me of substance that has been set before the public has been allowed out under my chosen title.

My protagonist was, like me, a London University student of philosophy. He was, in Peter Fiddick’s succinct assessment in his smart review for The Guardian, “a moral blank-sheet”. In the play’s overarching conceit, he viewed life as “like travelling round the Circle Line”. In a climactic scene, the Circle Line passengers panic when the train is stalled in a tunnel. My hero watches them dispassionately. Then the train restarts and they settle down. As an image of modern life, it was … well, serviceable.

The play was an active project within a few weeks of its prize: production turnaround was much faster then than now. Despite my inexperience, I was given full access to every stage of the process and even allowed by the director to choose the actor I favoured for the lead over his preferred candidate. There was some shooting on the underground for telecine drop-ins. One shot through the opening doors was ruined by a London Transport official standing in mid-shot barking “not this train”. But it was thrilling to be part of a location movie shoot in the city. The director even cut a shot of me into the final edit, my Hitchcock moment.

A lot of drama was still made with multiple cameras in the studio and that was how mine was recorded in the two days before Christmas in 1969. My mother and I sat in the back of the gallery and watched the whole process. Occasionally I was consulted – not, I felt, merely for form’s sake. However, at one point a note came from Gerald Savory who was in a viewing room somewhere above the studio. He couldn’t allow one of my more literary jokes.

My student hero, grumbling about some aspect of the service in a café, was to utter: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a Wimpy and chips” (if this quip leaves you struggling, I suggest you put “this is the way the world ends” in Google Search and “Wimpy” in Wikipedia). Gerald declared that we couldn’t use the word Wimpy, both because of the BBC’s barring of brand names and because it might be defamatory. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why this problem had been overlooked until the moment of recording. But, to my intense chagrin, the actor had to go with “not with a bang but with a cheese omelette” which, those of you who now have the joke under your belts will concur, lacks something by comparison.

Gerald Savory, long before the days when I knew him

It was more than a year before the recording was actually broadcast. Higher up in the management structure, there were concerns about the play’s content. Again it seemed to me that the proper time for these concerns was much earlier in the process. But I had the misfortune to coincide with a turning of the tide. Sir Hugh Greene, the most progressive and imaginative DG the BBC has ever had, was eased out of office in 1969 by the new Chairman of the BBC Board, Lord Hill. His replacement, Charles Curran, was a conservative placeman. The Golden Age was over.

In the 1970s, there was a long, brutal struggle over what writers and producers called ‘censorship’ and what managers called ‘editorial control’, fought in the corridors of television companies, especially the BBC. Many of the battles were about language. In Circle Line, some language detail was conceded by Savory, provided a brief discussion about masturbation was removed. On the other hand, a scene depicting my student hero post-coitally in bed with a 14 year-old boy was shown intact and, on that count alone, the play wouldn’t get accepted for production now, certainly not as written.

The language battles were often as trivial as that once described by Peter Cook, in which you would be, as it were, trading three ‘bloodies’ for a ‘shit’. The agent whom I had acquired, Clive Goodwin, argued that nobody who watched a Wednesday Play had cause to complain if she found it ruffled her sensibility. But if Cilla Black swept in at the top of her variety show and cried “Hello, you fuckers”, that would be an outrage. It was, I thought, a seductive if also reductive example. The point – that context is all – was pertinent, however. Now, of course, expletives that would embarrass a navvy are routinely included in the most humdrum, mainstream programmes, provided a warning about “strong” language has preceded the broadcast.

By the time that Circle Line was transmitted, The Wednesday Play had been axed. The rationale was that the new strand title, Play for Today, allowed greater transmission flexibility. But we one-off drama aficionados sensed that the writing was on the wall. Even though the leading teleplaywrights – Dennis Potter, David Mercer, Alun Owen, John Hopkins, Julia Jones, Jim Allen, Trevor Griffiths – were now taken as seriously as their equivalents in the theatre, the inevitable result of the increasing competitiveness of scheduling was that one-off programmes could not justify their comparatively high budgets.

After Circle Line, which was pretty well received, the BBC turned down the next eight plays that I wrote. Eight! I’d like to be able to say that this was a learning experience but the standard rejection letter that I received vouchsafed no more explication than the stock line “it’s not for us”.

Graeme McDonald during his uneventful spell as BBC2 Controller; he later nominally ran Prince Edward's production company Argent while drinking himself to death

After eighteen months, I was offered a consolation prize, a contract as a trainee script editor. The first three months of this were the best. I was sent on attachment to the Script Unit, which was based in the East Tower on the Television Centre site (the Drama Department was on the fifth floor of the main block, “the doughnut”). The legendary producer Tony Garnett also kept his office in the East Tower because, as he told me, it removed the temptation to get embroiled in the politics of the Drama Department. He also gave me some wise advice: "if you have to see a member of the management, always make the appointment for after half past five. Then they'll think you're working terrifically hard and there's a good chance you'll be offered a drink". Garnett was definitely one of the Corporation's survivors.

The Script Unit was staffed within and served from without by a bunch of delightful, generous people. Its function was to assess all the unsolicited scripts that poured into the BBC and to reply to them, often in remarkable detail. Those submitting their scribblings mostly had little appreciation of this extraordinary free tuition; indeed, some would argue fiercely with the findings. But all submissions were read, either by the in-house assessors like me or by wise old owls outside to whom scripts were farmed out. Of course it was a very useful exercise for me too. I learned a lot about how to read a script – a considerable skill now rarely encountered in the business – and how to structure and project material. Needless to add, the unit was closed down before the decade was out.

After that, I was attached to Graeme McDonald and Ann Scott, respectively producer and script editor of Circle Line, for the rest of my contract. This was a frustrating experience. The script editor’s function – nominally to look after the writer’s interests throughout the production – is in practice a nebulous job, wholly dependent on the relationship with the producer, whose strengths the script editor should ideally complement. Graeme and Ann had a well-established modus operandi that left little for me to do but pad around after them, making more or less unhelpful suggestions.

Moreover, they were not cut from the same generous cloth as Robin Wade and Betty Willingale in the Script Unit. There was an outsize character with whom I would sometimes have a lunchtime drink in the BBC Club. Derek Ingrey was small and dynamic, affecting an Aristide Bruant fedora and red scarf (long before those were a cliché) and expressing forthright opinions on everything. Bizarrely he was the script editor on Dixon of Dock Green (on the surface at least, a most unlikely piece of casting) and allegedly he would spend the autumn, winter and spring tending to Ted Willis’s workaday scripts and the summer in France having outrageous affairs with local schoolgirls. Anyway, Derek asked me one day how I was getting on with Graeme and Ann. He caught my moment of hesitation and observed shrewdly: “yes … costive, aren’t they”. I agreed for form’s sake and, having looked up the word later, agreed whole-heartedly.

David Rose, a lovely man, later C4's first drama controller

At the end of my contract, Cedric Messina (“the African queen” as one or two unkind souls called him) wanted me to become his script editor on Play of the Month, the slot for splashy production of theatre plays, typically Shakespeare, Shaw or Chekhov. I had got to know Cedric and liked him, had been to the house – very grand, as was everything of Cedric’s – and met his unexpected wife and even more unexpected tiny, ringleted daughter, had made some suggestions for the strand that had intrigued him: Morecambe and Wise in Waiting for Godot, Olivier in a role he had yet to conquer, Lear (which he famously did some years later for Granada). But Chris Morahan, the Head of Plays, declared that Cedric needed a mature script editor (he got Alan Shallcross) and that I ought to go off and run a theatre. “Oh yes,” I thought, “I’ll just nip into the Royal Court and stage a coup”.

It was five years before I returned to the BBC. At the time, I was writing television previews and a news column for The Observer, sharing a page with Clive James. Just before Christmas, I went up to Birmingham to attend the launch of Pebble Mill’s contribution to network drama which regularly launched the new year. After the main presentation and a buffet lunch, I sat down with a cassette of a complete play (I was always a diligent previewer). Throughout, I kept receiving messages that I must call in to the office of the Head of English Regions Drama, David Rose, before I left.

When I finally got to David’s office, it was packed with very noisy and drunken writers and directors. David, himself well away, hauled me into his inner sanctum and asked if I was ready to come back into television. This was very unexpected. He said he had a producing job that he hoped I would like to do and that we should have lunch in the new year. And in the new year I will continue the story.