Conference Report – ‘Performance and Television Space’, University of Glamorgan, 20 April 2012

Posted on October 1, 2012 by billysmart

‘Performance and Television Space’, a one day symposium held at the University of Glamorgan on 20th April 2012, was the second in a series of three conferences organised by the research project ‘Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style’. This AHRC funded venture, shared between the Universities of Reading, Glamorgan and Leicester, continues to investigate how material spaces of British television productions conditioned the aesthetic forms of television fiction produced in the UK from 1955-93. The programme drew on a wide resurgence of interest in television performance and how it can be influenced by a number of cultural, institutional and technological contexts and constraints. Organisers were pleased to welcome contributors with backgrounds in either academia or the television industry to help generate new understandings and readings of television history.

Christine Geraghty‘s keynote ‘Twitchy editing and careening cameras: the presentation of performance in Bleak House (2005)’ opened the event. Geraghty argued, in terms of the organisation of space, that Bleak House combines soap opera conventions with the language of the classic serial to create an interesting hybrid. Specifically Geraghty believed that the use of handheld cameras and frequent close-ups, a typical convention of the soap opera, added a new dimension to the classic serial performance that is traditionally captured through steady and observant camerawork. The close-ups for Geraghty are an integral element of the Bleak House performances as they draw out nuanced differences between Esther (Anna Maxwell Martin), whose expressions give clarity to her thoughts or responses, and Lady Dedlock (Gillian Anderson), whose enigmatic control of facial expression is designed to deny revelation of her feelings. This method of approaching performance was considered by Geraghty to be at odds with the BBC’s original 1985 adaptation of the Dickens classic, starring Diana Rigg, that placed far more emphasis on the spoken word and a respect for the lavish set designs rather than focusing on characters’ micro-gestures. This issue of hybridity inspired a thoroughly interesting debate that followed on from the keynote and a more detailed version of these discussion points can be found in Geraghty’s forthcoming BFI TV classics publication Bleak House.

In ‘Performing Studio Languages and Practices’, David Dunn’s ‘Inviting the camera in: the television frame as a space of drama and performance’ reassessed the precise function of the television frame as part of a performance. Douglas McNaughton’s ‘Performing Spaces: The Influence of British Actors’ Equity on BBC Studio Drama’ followed, arguing how the Equity union’s insistence on television performances to be recorded live inhibited aesthetic possibilities of studio-based drama. Lez Cooke concluded with ‘Spaces of Television: The Dining Room’ where a close textual analysis of dining room scenes from landmark texts demonstrated how editing is an integral part of television performance.

For ‘Community Performance’ Leah Panos’ examination of feminist performance space in ‘Rock Follies: feminism, performance and the television studio’ was followed by ‘Relationships between radical black theatre performance and television space as exemplified in Black Feet in the Snow (1974, BBC)’ where Sally Shaw explored the intersection between radical black theatre and television drama. To finish Julie E. Robinson in ‘“Views from an Iron Bridge”: A Musical World and the performance of Midlands’ regional identity’ analysed the influence a landscape has on the way regional narratives are presented.

Genre and Performance’ opened with Richard Hewett’s ‘Adventures in Space and Time: Regeneration Performance Style in Doctor Who’ that compared the different production processes behind the ‘classic’ and re-launched series. Billy Smart’s ‘Hunters Walk and Juliet Bravo: Representing rape in the studio police drama’ was followed by Ben Lamb’s ‘Going undercover: detectives, police officers and the infiltration of criminal spaces’ that examined the layering of performances within the depiction of undercover police work. Lastly Steve Blandford examined the importance of casting in his paper ‘Cracker: performance and casting issues’.

In ‘Theatrical Performance’ Amanda Wrigley’s ‘Performing Antiquity: Translating Ancient Greek Theatre Space and Practice to the BBC Television Studio’ explored how three BBC productions of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus incorporated performance styles of 5th century Athens. John Wyver’s ‘Performance from the Whitehall: the Brian Rix comedies in a “third space” of production’ analysed the largely forgotten live broadcasts made by the BBC from 1952-1969. John Izod’s examination of Brechtian satirical devices in ‘Alienating the audience: the Old Crowd (1979)’ was followed by Patrick Pilkington’s ‘Doubled Performances: engagement with Notions of the Courtroom as Stage in the Legal Drama’ where he looked into the changing role of performance in courtroom space.

The symposium concluded with an informal interview between project contributor Billy Smart and well-known veteran television actor Maurice Roëves whose long lasting career has spanned over fifty years in the British television industry. Notable performances discussed included Roëves’ portrayal of Hitler in the postmodern television play The Journal of Bridget Hitler (1981), Vincent Diver from the BBC Scottish-based comedy Tutti Frutti (1987) and his portrayal of Alexi in The Gambler (1968) alongside actress Edith Evans. Roëves discussed his influences and the techniques he employed within different production contexts, namely the transition from video to film, to provide an engaging talk that synthesised the themes of earlier papers to draw proceedings to a close in a fitting and thought-provoking manner.

Ben Lamb, University of Glamorgan

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Roger Marshall interview Part II: ‘Missing From Home’ (1984) and Douglas Camfield

Posted on September 13, 2012 by billysmart

Last February, I had the good fortune to interview one of the great screenwriters of British TV drama, Roger Marshall in his Richmond home. His extensive C.V. has included episodes of The Avengers, The Sweeney, The Professionals, two plays for Armchair Theatre, the serials Missing from Home, Traveling Man and Floodtide. He was also the creator of three series: Zodiac, Mitch and (with Anthony Marriot) Public Eye. In this part of this interview he discusses his 1984 BBC1 serial Missing From Home – an exceptionally successful and popular drama that has subsequently been all but forgotten – and the work of its director, Douglas Camfield:

Douglas Camfield

RM. I was reading in your note that you’re a fan of Dougie Camfield. I was just remembering with my wife, the first came that he came into our house we were in the front and he said to me “So this is where you churn them out, is it?” and that wasn’t the greatest start to our friendship, but we did survive that! He did a very good job on Missing From Home, without a doubt. I thought that Judy Loe came out of it best of all, and he came out of it second best, and I think that I was probably third best. I didn’t like the ending much.

BS. Missing From Home is an interesting production in your career because, first of all, it’s a BBC production, of which there aren’t many.

RM. No, there aren’t. A producer in the BBC told me quite early on that, “The problem with you is you’re too expensive.” And I said, “Well, you’ve never even asked how much I’m on!” You know, this is agent talk. So until Missing From Home I’d never really cracked the BBC, you’re right.

BS. I only know the one episode of Survivors before then –

RM. Rubbish! Nothing to stick your chest out about. But later, I did quite a few Lovejoys for the BBC.

BS. Missing From Home was a serial rather than a series, the form for which you’d become extremely established for writing. Would that have been more difficult to get commissioned and get off the ground?

RM. It came about because Ron Craddock, the producer, actually contacted me and said “We’d love you to do something for us at the BBC. Have you got any ideas?” I said “Well, I have got an idea.” He said well tell me and I told it to him and he said, “Could you put that on three or four pieces of paper and we’ll take it from there.” And good as his word, he did. So, one of those things.

BS. What sort of form did you envisage the story taking?

RM. I envisaged it taking the form that it did, really. Six interrelated hours, like six chapters of a book.

BS. One of the things that I particularly like about it is it’s a very good illustration of the merits of how television drama was made at the time; the interiors of the studio, and the exteriors on 16mm film.

RM. Yes, it was conventional old-fashioned television in that sense, with the studio and the filmed inserts. Because that’s now gone, hasn’t it? The sad thing about it was that it was very successful with the viewers and it topped the ratings – I was working in Granada when it was shown and we went to have a drink in the bar one lunchtime and somebody came up to me who I didn’t recognize and said, “Your show has just knocked the Street off the top of the charts.” I said, “Yes, its good, isn’t it?” He said, “Well, once is alright, but twice is a kneecapping” and then he turned on his heel and walked away, and I said to somebody “Who the hell was that?” and he said, “That’s Bill Podmore, he’s the overall producer of the Street” I never spoke to him again, he never spoke to me again, and that was the end of that.

But sadly, after its terrific success the show sort of disappeared; it didn’t get sold anywhere, its never been repeated. I’ve no idea why, you never know. Everybody worked on it, including the producer who was employed by the BBC would have wanted it to go on, and it didn’t happen.

BS. What do you attribute its particular success to?

RM. Well, I think that it probably worked on the level of “I’ve got to watch the next week, just to see what happens next”, on that basic level. And Judy Loe was very good in it. How did you see it? I’m interested in how anyone would get to see it today. I’d imagine that few people would have heard of it now, its just a name.

BS. I saw it for the first time recently, but I do remember my parents watching it when it was on. I didn’t see it myself because I was still at primary school, but I remember the simplicity of the title – Missing from Home – capturing my imagination.

RM. Did your parents enjoy it?

BS. Yes, they watched it for six weeks!

RM. Well, that’s good enough, isn’t it? It was a good success. There are bits of it that I remember with great affection, and I think that Dougie did it very well. I was trying to think, prior to your coming, if I’d worked with him on something else.

BS. Yes, there’s one Sweeney, ‘Bad Apple’ (Thames, 11 October 1976) –

RM. About corruption in the force. I’d forgot he did that, and I think he did a Professionals.

BS. Yes, an odd episode (‘Take Away’, LWT, 12 October 1980).

RM. The Chinese one. Yes, I thought he did that very well. It was interesting, I’d been working in Hong Kong and I was sort of gung ho on the Chinese at the time, so I sold them the idea. I got a very sweet letter from a Chinese actress in it that said it was lovely to work on something that restores my belief in British television. I don’t know who she is or where she went, but it was good.

BS. The only other thing that I’ve seen her in is Philip Martin’s Gangsters where she plays a Chinese gangster’s moll.

RM. Of course, with things like The Professionals there was no read-through where you’d meet, so we probably never came across each other.

BS. Thinking about Missing From Home, one of the points where it fits in quite interestingly with Camfield’s career is that it has a continuity with the programme that he’d directed immediately before, The Nightmare Man (BBC1, 1981), in that they both use a lot of location and are set in secluded places, but also the way in which the viewer understands the story changes throughout the run of the series. So the first episode of Missing From Home could be a thriller, when the police investigate the husband’s secret service connections, and the drama then changes to become increasingly domestic and internal.

RM. That’s true. Dougie Camfield of course worked a lot at Thames, as did I, so we came across each other quite a lot, and he lived just across the bridge in Twickenham, so we knew each other reasonably well. It was very funny, when he got the script he came over and said, “Who have you got in mind for the lead?” and I said, “Well, there’s a girl I worked with a couple of times at LWT, Judy Loe” and he said, “I don’t think I know her”. And we got Spotlight out and we saw a picture of her and he said, “I can’t make a comment but I’ll at least meet her and talk to her”. That weekend, he went up shopping in Peter Jones in Sloane Square and, lo and behold, it’s not believable, across the counter buying something for her child was Judy Loe. So he said that he did a sort of Philip Marlowe and followed her round the store, keeping an eye on all her reactions and who she spoke to, and he said, “She looks interesting. I will definitely meet her” and the rest you know.

BS. Something that’s particularly good about both her performance and the way that Camfield turns it out, which is very specific to the way that television studio drama of that period worked, is the way that she responds to rooms and is aware of space. It’s particularly striking to see the amount of time that’s devoted to showing her alone in her domestic space in that series.

RM. Yes. That was an integral part of the story. That suddenly there’s a lot of time when she is on her own, with one boy at school and another one at home, but no man around the place, and suddenly she’s got time to look around and consider.

BS. Camfield brings out a tremendous rhythm that must be there in your script, alternating between quite silent, slow, domestic scenes and her then visiting other peoples’ offices and being fobbed off.

RM. Yes. I think that’s more instinctive in the writing than considered – You don’t think ‘that will balance that’, it sort of happens.

BS. With the best directors of that period, the sense of rhythm in the script is much more apparent.

RM. Yes, well that depends upon the quality of the director. The good ones get it and those who are not so good miss it.

BS. The Suffolk locations in Missing From Home are particularly distinctive.

RM. I placed it there because it was a part of the country that I knew. We had an actress friend who had a cottage just outside Saxemunden. We took it a couple of times, so we got to know the area, and it seemed relatively unexplored in terms of television, so we honed in on that, everybody liked the idea.

That tale reminds me of a rather funny story that when we took this cottage the first time it was a very, very, hot summer and we took the kitchen table into the garden, there were a couple of apple trees, and we had our meals out there. One day we were sitting having our lunch and our son, who would have been four at the time, was sitting at the table and he had his chin literally on the table. We said “Sit up, Christopher, sit up.” He said, “I am sitting up, I haven’t got a very big chair”, they were his lines, I remember. And he hadn’t, he’d got this dinky little chair, so we changed it around and went on. A year later, we went to see an Alan Aykbourn play, Table Manners, with this vet sitting with his chin on the table. I mean this was ridiculous; it was exactly the same scene. I said to the actress who had hired us the cottage “You didn’t have Alan Aykbourn?” She said he had it the year before you did. Obviously, the same thing had happened to Alan Aykbourn as happened to us. Lovely little coincidence.

BS. With the rooms and the houses that Judy Loe visits in Missing From Home, in the end when she meets her husband’s mistress, there’s a very immediate and intricate sense for the viewer of this being a different space, in the way that all of the mistresses’ furnishings reflect the way that she lives her life. Do you think that this was something that worked particularly well in studio drama?

RM. I can’t remember that, it’s been a long time since I saw it. I imagine that it would have been something that Dougie had done very deliberately, to have visually set up what was happening in the relationship. I didn’t even remember that one saw the husband’s mistress.

BS. The casting of it is also interesting in that Camfield used a kind of repertory company, so there are people like Jonathan Newth in it –

RM. Well, he was the man that she met when she went to the school. He was a father. I thought that those scenes together worked very well, I thought he was excellent.

BS. There’s a counterpoint to the interior, studio, scenes in the way that Judy Loe responds to the Suffolk countryside and locations like the railway station and canals. Do you have a kind of geographical sense when you’re writing of the topography of where things are set and how the viewers come to understand them?

RM. Well, it was particularly appropriate in the shows that I did at Granada, the two big ones where I wrote all of them [Travelling Man and Floodtide]. Because they were such a long stint of work, four years or something, I got to know all the Production Managers, and got to a sort of wonderful thing that you can’t really achieve in television very often when I would be able to say to them, “Look, give me a location and then take me to it and show it to me, and then I’ll write the script about what you’ve shown me” and they said that’s fabulous, because it suddenly brings them into the forefront of the production, and it worked terribly well on both of those series. And then in Floodtide I went with them to France and it paid off again. Not easy to do – I mean it was easy for John Ford to go up to Monument Valley and the rest of Hollywood will wait. Television doesn’t work that way. Not often, but it did on these two occasions.

BS. I’ve read that both of those series were shot on Outside Broadcast on single camera. So when you initially went to the locations were you recording them on a camcorder?

RM. Oh no, I just went with a pad. They’d say, “Well there’s that farm over there, and if you’d get… I think that it might be good, and you could see the hill behind and the train.” So it was evolving, and it just required me to move the pieces around in the front, which was great fun.

The two series that I made for Granada were interesting in your relation to the theory of space. They’re both heavily full of location, but the locations came before the story which was a lovely, luxurious way to work in that you were writing a scene for a place that you know exists and you can visualize it. It was just lovely. It gave the whole show a lift – particularly when you’re walking around Harfleur on the French coast and you see the fisherman with their nets and you think, ‘Oh God, this is all there, isn’t it? I don’t have to do anything!’ Lovely, a great privilege.

BS. Single camera was very much a different discipline to film or studio. Did you approach that warily?

RM. No, I didn’t. I left that to them. I’m not sure that many directors want too much in the way of camera instruction, and I certainly didn’t give it to them. But then, of course, in this particular instance one guy was directing them all as I was writing them all, so we had a sort of shorthand, where he would say “I’m not happy about… I think we could…” etc, that give and take.

BS. Something that I’m very interested in historically is the relationship between the writer and the director. In the series that you initially worked in the sixties and seventies, were you aware of whom the director was going to be, or be likely to be?

RM. Well just occasionally you had a director who brought so much more to it than you imagined that anyone could do, that you immediately thought “He’s somebody I’d like to work with again” and I sort of evolved the idea that the writer-director relationship was a great element so – you mentioned Public Eye. Well, the original director of that, Kim Mills, stayed with it all the way through, of course, and we had a very profitable relationship.

BS. Because he produced the Brighton series as well –

RM. As well as directing three of that series. That was just marvelous.

BS. It’s interesting that you talk about this close relationship between the writer and the director with Public Eye, Travelling Man and Floodtide – it being both a preferable state of affairs, but also quite a rare one.

RM. Yes it is, I don’t know why it should be that rare. But the most successful things that I have ever been associated with, The Avengers or whatever, have been with a small handful of particularly good directors.

Dougie was never very strong. He had a bad heart, which killed him in the end

BS. You were fortunate to get his work right at the end. Missing from Home was shown posthumously.

RM. Oh God, that’s terrible. Another strange thing is that Judy Loe was absolutely rock solid – super performance all the way through – and the next year nobody wanted her, because she was a star now, so they thought they couldn’t afford her. And the next thing that she did was a part in Travelling Man. That was the first time that she’d worked since. She knew Leigh Lawson quite well, so it was marvelous to see her working.

BS. She’d recently been widowed when she made Missing from Home.

RM. Yes, Richard Beckinsdale. We watched an episode of Porridge at Christmas. He was so good, such a tragedy. She’s married now to a director, ex-BBC.

BS. In comparison with contemporary television drama, it’s interesting that you could have such a successful series that wasn’t predicated or marketed around any star casting.

RM. No, but then you can be very badly served by your masters. I did a series for LWT with John Thaw called Mitch (LWT, 1984) and we started with a series of thirteen and then we were cut down to ten because they were in some sort of financial difficulty. And then because of this mythical financial difficulty we were on the shelf for eighteen months, so by the time that the opener, which was about policing the streets of Brixton, was transmitted it was about as topical as Victoria’s Coronation. We never got any publicity although we had the hottest actor in British television playing the lead. But it was a good idea, well done with no reward at all. Very disappointing. That happens.

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Spaces of Television panel and papers at Westminster ‘Theatre Plays on British Television’ conference

Posted on September 10, 2012 by billysmart

‘The Cherry Orchard’ (BBC1, 1981)

Four presentations of ‘Spaces of Television’ research can be heard at the ‘Theatre Plays on British Television’ one-day conference at the University of Westminster on Friday 19 October.

We are presenting a panel entitled ‘Spaces of television, spaces of theatre’:

Billy Smart (Department of Film, Theatre and Television, University of Reading)
‘Three different Cherry Orchards, three different worlds: Chekhov at the BBC, 1962-1981’

Jonathan Bignell (Department of Film, Theatre and Television, University of Reading)
‘Screen and stage space in Beckett’s theatre plays on television’

Stephen Lacey (Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries, University of Glamorgan)
‘Television’s natural disposition? An analysis of Naturalism and performance in relation to the BBC’s Performance series’

A fourth ‘Spaces of Television’ paper will form part of a panel entitled ‘Regional theatre, regional television’

Ben Lamb (Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries, University of Glamorgan)
‘The Roses of Eyam: reassessing the theatrical legacy of studio-shot television drama’

Full details of the conference line-up can be found at: http://screenplaystv.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/registration-opens-for-october-conference/

Registration form: http://tiny.cc/il2ikw?

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Roger Marshall interview Part I: ‘Public Eye’

Posted on September 5, 2012 by billysmart

 

Last February, I had the good fortune to interview one of the great screenwriters of British TV drama, Roger Marshall in his Richmond home. His extensive C.V. has included episodes of The Avengers, The Sweeney, The Professionals, two plays for Armchair Theatre, the serials Missing from Home, Traveling Man and Floodtide. He was also the creator of three series: Zodiac, Mitch and (with Anthony Marriot) Public Eye. In this part of this interview he discusses Public Eye.

BS. I would imagine that writing for the studio series and the film ones would have required different skills.

RM. I don’t know whether the writer thinks in terms of film and studio. I’m not aware of a tremendous switching off or switching over. Obviously, when you started on The Avengers in the studio days, the Honor Blackman days, there were severe limits to what you could do. You could have four sets and two corners, that’s all there would be. So it was interesting having to work your story around this scale. But there was one that Bill Bain did called ‘Mandrake’ (24 January 1964) and he built a cemetery and it was stunning. I remember scores of letters coming in from people who lived in Teddington saying, great television but is it fair that you do all that malarkey in a cemetery, and of course it was a studio. But it was very well designed. Whenever you’re talking about Thames always remember that the budget for Thames design was that much greater than anybody else’s, so the shows always looked very good, however nonsensical. And a lot of their designers went on to become directors, which wasn’t the regular occurrence.

BS. It’s true that Thames and BBC productions always tended to look much better than the other ITV companies. There’s an interesting point in 1967 when the way that television looks changes, because it goes over to 625 lines in preparation for colour. And the rules for design change overnight, in that exteriors made in the studio look much less convincing than they had done earlier.

I’m always interested when I read about programmes that were made in the studio with filmed inserts, the gap between the filming of the inserts and then the studio recording. Was much rewriting ever required between filming and recording?

RM. No, I don’t think so. I watched some of the Brighton Public Eyes recently and there’s one where Stephanie Beecham comes to the digs where Marker’s living, and she tries to commit suicide and he saves her (‘My Life’s My Own’, 20 August 1969), and there’s quite a long sequence of him walking her up and down the seafront, watched by the police. No, as a writer you filter that in and pick it up in the rehearsals for the studio the next day or whatever.

BS. That works really well in the Brighton series. I was thinking about that because I was watching an episode of the Birmingham series with my colleague (‘Don’t Forget You’re Mine‘, 9 July 1966) , and it climaxes with one big sequence that clearly required a lot of money and effort of a chase in New Street Station. That scene’s great, but the preceding scene in the studio feels odd, because Marker immediately decides to head off to the station and chase after this woman.

RM. Yes, I can well remember that there was no editing of the tape in those days, because if you edited the tape then it suddenly became a different deal. I remember Alfie Burke doing something quite wrong in a scene and he said, oh I’m sorry, we’ll have to do that again and they said, no, go on. They carried on whatever he did, so eventually to force their hand he walked off the set, but they still didn’t stop, until they realized that the leading man wasn’t there anymore, but it went on. It was like trying to stop the night train.

BS. There’s a lot to talk about with Public Eye. Its unfortunate that so little of the ABC series has survived. How involved were you with the last three series set in Surrey?

RM. I would write the odd one or two. For the record, I thought that it got a bit cosy then. My thesis was that Marker was a loner, and he didn’t need women who’ll cook his supper or friendly policemen. I can remember when we were writing the original brochure I came across a phrase from Kipling; “He travels fastest who travels alone” and that seemed to sum up, for me, what Marker was about. Inevitably, probably, as the years went on, they needed other things to take the weight off Alfie, but I didn’t like antique shops and the like. Too cosy.

BS. So you weren’t involved with the scenario of him moving to Windsor or establishing the new regular characters?

RM. No, but the Brighton series was certainly me, because I had a big relationship with Brighton at the time, and it fitted very well with Marker being in Ford Open Prison – the now notorious Ford Prison!

BS. The Brighton series is unusual in that it works as well as a serial. Was that an innovation at the time?

RM. Oh yes! Credit to the Head of Drama, Lloyd Shirley. He was keen on the series and wanted it to go on. I said to him that I would like to do a batch that is not about the client and his problem, but about Marker, the detective, and his problem. And he said, “Well that’s very interesting, I’ll go for that. Let me know what you want and I’ll make it happen” which was excellent of him.

BS. How did you reach the decision of Brighton, because so much of the mood of that series is specific to the place?

RM. Yes, he was put into prison in Winston Green in Birmingham. When became obvious that he wasn’t a villain or a hard nut, they transferred him to Ford, and Ford is geographically one stop on the train from Brighton, and Brighton is a lovely place to work from.

BS. The quite unfamiliar Brighton setting then dictates several of the stories in that series, which could only happen in a seaside place. So there’s the beachside café where the bikers work their scam (‘Divide and Conquer’, 6 August 1969) –

RM. – When Marker is building a sea wall, one of the jobs that he got from the builder. And while he’s working on the wall, a couple of thugs come to duff him up.

BS. The end of the pier show one is remarkable, too (‘The Comedian’s Graveyard’, 3 September 1969).

RM. With the comic, yes. When the director, Jonathan Alwyn came he said, “Have you got anyone in mind for the comic?” I said, Alfie Marks because I’d worked with him – disastrously. So a lot of this comic was written for the Alfie Marks that I knew, even down to him building a model galleon in his hotel room when he was in Brighton. And Jonathan said, I don’t think I can work with a comedian, I’ve got Joe Melia in mind, and I said, oh, he’d be marvelous if we could get him, and he was brilliant – I worked with him since.

BS. You get that sense of sadness about a comedian not being very good, that you might not get if it was an actual comedian playing the part.

RM. That’s absolutely true. It’s just that when I was working with Alfie Marks he was working in Brighton, and we went to see him in this little kosher hotel on the outskirts of Hove, so it was Alfie Marks in my mind.

BS. The Brighton series looks more elaborate and expensive than the previous ones.

RM. I’m sure that it wasn’t. It’s just easier to make Brighton look good than Birmingham.

BS. I thought that it might have been because ABC had changed into Thames.

RM. It’s possible. Certainly, the move to Birmingham was precipitated by the fact that ABC was a Midlands company. It was interesting for me that the Brighton series was very popular, which was lovely. I remember that we all went to Ford Prison when we were doing the recce, and the designer was there and they duplicated the size of the cells absolutely to the inch, and when it was started it was reviewed in the Mail by a lady called Virginia Ironside who said that the sets were ludicrous, that any prison cell that you see on television was much bigger than the reality!

BS. I think that I’m right in saying that the Brighton series includes a lot more location filming than the previous series had. In the episode where Marker confronts the bikers on Brighton Beach, that sequence is all on film and goes on for eleven minutes.

RM. Really? Well, that’s the director making a statement, isn’t it? I didn’t know that.

BS. It’s interesting how that episode works dramatically – A showdown with two toughs is always a good way to end an adventure story. You could compare it with your episode of Survivors (‘Parasites’, 2 June 1976, BBC1) where a similar sequence is shot on OB and there isn’t the opportunity to cut the scene so dramatically.

RM. The only interesting thing about Survivors is that it features canals and barges, which became a recurring theme later on for me.

BS. For the viewer, that episode of Survivors is surprisingly brutal. For the first ten minutes, Partick Troughton arrives on his barge and is a mystical Doctor Who-type character, and you think, oh this nice old man is going to improve things, and then the yobs murder him. The juxtaposition between the gentle and the nasty is quite distinctive.

RM. Well, it was always an idée fixe of mine that you put your girlfriend or your wife and your two children on this barge and you go sailing off and you don’t know where you are, you’re completely at the prey of anybody. I wrote one story where they’re going under a bridge and a bloke leans over and spits and it lands on the girl’s head – and suddenly you’re into a dramatic incident.

On a more ridiculous level we knew a couple who knew that we were mad on canals and barges and they hired one and they’d only been out a quarter of an hour before the woman got her hand jammed between the barge and the brick wall, so…

BS. This might apply more to the Surrey series, but I think that Public Eye was particularly well suited to the studio mode of drama. In the way that the character of Marker is realised through his understanding of the rooms that he’s in, so; the way that his office is shabby, and different ways that directors shot it…

RM. Yes, Marker was always pushed for another fiver, particularly in the beginning. In the very first series his office was supposed to be within sight and sound of Clapham Junction, and you could hear the announcements at his window.

BS. And in the Birmingham ones his office is above a timber yard, which has the same sort of effect.

And the way it works spatially is that most episodes involve Marker going from his own office into someone else’s house or office and – particularly through Alfred Burke’s camera sense, how Marker responds to the room – it gives the viewer such a sense of narrative and character even without dialogue.

I understand that Thames wanted you to make a final series, but with Euston Films –

RM. Yes, that’s absolutely true. It’s a big personal regret of mine that we didn’t. I won’t say anything against Alfie if we sit here for a year, but he turned it down, and I think he was wrong. Because he feared that it would just become cops and robbers and chases to utilize the meaning of film. Well, a couple of years later Minder completely put the lie to that, and that was a really good series.

BS. Do you think that you’d have had to change the mood and feel of it to make it work for Euston?

RM. Yes, it would have been a change of pace, but I think that we could have done it. We saw Alfie at Christmas, he’s still going strong, 92. (sadly, Alfred Burke died a fortnight after this interview was conducted)

BS. I saw him as the old shepherd in Oedipus at the National a couple of years ago.

RM. Its very interesting, he’s too old to get insurance, so when the National called him he said, I’m sorry, of course I’d love to, but I’m too old to get insurance. And the director (Jonathan Kent) said, I’ll take the risk – whether he told the powers that be what he was doing, I don’t know. Because prior to that, he’d been offered a part in Aristocrats at the National, and he didn’t get it for the reason I’ve just told you. We went to see it and the character that he would have played was played by T.P. McKenna and all that you got was this voice over a speaker from upstairs, and then he came down from upstairs an hour later and he dropped dead. When we saw Alfie and he hadn’t got this part we said, we saw it and I have to say, as a fan, I’m thrilled that you didn’t get it, because it would have been an insult. He said, I understand where you’re coming from but it would have just ticked the box, getting work at the National.

BS. I saw him in a lot of things at the RSC in the nineties, before I was aware of his television persona.

RM. Unlike a lot of actors, when a series of Public Eye finished you’d say to Alfred, what’s next and he’d say, I’m going to do a Strindberg in Oslo or something. He was always doing something, something very different, and usually very challenging. He didn’t just sit on his money and dream, he was off.

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Recording ‘Public Eye’ (ABC) on location in Birmingham (1966)

Posted on September 4, 2012 by billysmart

 

Guy Verney directs Alfred Burke on location

Few major British television drama series of the 1960s have a worse survival rate than that of the first three series of Public Eye (ABC, 1965-68/ Thames 1969-75). Of the 41 episodes of the first three series made by ABC, only five survive, which have just been released on DVD by Network (the four later series made by Thames thankfully survive in their entirety). Much of the reason for Public Eye’s poor archival status must lie in the sort of programme that it was, recently described by Dave Rolinson as “a magisterial detective-based drama (…) which got huge ratings for many years with its alliance of inventiveness, character focus, an unconventional lead and sometimes minimalist narrative”. A downbeat series about the cases taken on by a shabby enquiry agent (Frank Marker, played by Alfred Burke), the concerns of Public Eye seem low-key and parochial in comparison with ABC’s great success The Avengers, and achieved little in the way of equivalent cult status or international commercial export. Similarly, popular crime series were commonly held in lower esteem than other, more apparently ‘authored’, forms of drama such as the single play, hence the much greater retention of contemporaneous ABC Armchair Theatre plays.

The paucity of surviving material from the original Public Eye series makes attempting to imagine what these lost programmes must have been like an archeological process in reconstructive imagination. As even the camera scripts don’t appear to still exist, such patchy sources as a few press cuttings and the Public Eye novelization have come to hold disproportionate weight. But one extra on the DVD set provides a remarkable insight into the conditions of Public Eye’s recording and how they affected the form that the programme took onscreen.

Although the second series episode ‘You Can Keep the Medal’ (30 July 1966), does not survive, footage of it being recorded on location in Birmingham does, in the form of a five-minute feature recorded for the midlands local news programme ATV Today, transmitted on 3 June 1966. The feature consists of a scene of an encounter between Marker and a policeman (Timothy West) by a canal being recorded by an Outside Broadcast unit, the director making suggestions for a retake and an interview with Alfred Burke during a snatched tea break. Burke’s reflections about the value of different forms of TV recording are pertinent, and when viewed alongside another episode from the same series, the feature helps the viewer to understand why Public Eye took the form that it did, and the qualities that were particular to the programme.

The second series of Public Eye marked a development for the programme. Where the first series had been set in London and filmed entirely in the studio, the second moved Frank Marker to Birmingham and started to incorporate location footage. In his ATV Today interview with Reg Harcourt, Alfred Burke explains the thinking behind this decision:

Well, we felt the lack of location work last time. There were a good dozen occasions where we could with advantage have gone outside and widened the scope of it, particularly with the character of Marker who does a great deal of footwork from door-to-door

 Birmingham hasn’t been exploited on the television screens. In fact, it hasn’t been seen to my knowledge. A big city, with all the sides of life that it contains – the sordidness and the squalor as well as the smart residential areas – is the sort of area in which Marker operates and gets most of his employment.

These changes can be felt when watching the two surviving episodes from the London series back-to-back with the three that survive from the two Birmingham series. While the London episodes present rather generic stories of gangsters and prostitutes, the combination of second city local colour and sequences in actual locations create stories that feel more idiosyncratic and distinctive to the viewer. Burke describes this sense of actuality being evoked onscreen when he compares the processes of performing in the studio and on location:

Well, naturally it’s a different thing. Working in the studio, everything is much more under your control. On the other hand when you’re out here everything is real, you’re enabled to be a great deal more spontaneous because you’re in a real street, by a real canal, or on a real farm, as we were yesterday.

Much (but perhaps not all) of the location footage for Public Eye‘s second series appears to have been shot on Outside Broadcast equipment, meaning that it was recorded electronically onto videotape by a similar process to the one in the multi-camera studio, with the signals from the cameras on location being relayed by cable to a director sat in a mobile recording van, who would mix the images in the same way that he would do in the television studio gallery.

Sometimes the director’s absence from the site of recording could be problematic for performers on the ground. When asked a general question about how location work is going by Reg Harcourt, Alfred Burke’s reply appears to conflate both experiences of working on film and on Outside Broadcast, but is useful in understanding the specific problems faced by actors in the conditions of television drama production in the 1960s:

It’s going very well. It’s going the way it always does – a great deal of hanging about. The trouble with doing filming for television is that it’s alright when you’re actually doing it, but in the meantime it’s cosmically boring, because you have to do your own standing in and you’re usually standing in for your own left ear, or you’ve got to change your position and you find your foot’s in a hole or something of that kind, and the director – who is sitting 500 yards away in a mobile recording van – can’t understand why you can’t get the right position, you have to tell him that you’re half way up a mound of earth or something, but otherwise it goes alright.

  The ATV Today footage does illustrate some the limitations of Outside Broadcast recording, with the cumbersome camera equipment appearing difficult to manouvre. One of the two cameras on site attempts a mobile panning shot that requires two members of the crew to push it, and a third person to steer it.

 Such techniques were achievable on relatively flat and even surfaces such as canal walkways, but would have been hard to manage in bumpier or more remote locations.

 The benefits of the use of Outside Broadcast location and the Birmingham setting to Public Eye can be seen in the first surviving episode of the second series, ‘Don’t Forget You’re Mine’ (9 July 1966). A standard scene of Marker visiting a school in the hope of discovering information about a missing person is enlivened by being set in a real schoolyard:

 The narrative purpose of such a scene would have been just as apparent if realised through small cutaway set of the corner of a schoolyard in the studio, with sound effects of children playing, but the real setting provides the scene with the sense of spontaneity that Burke mentions. Having to speak above a noise made by the children at the same time and respond to the elements while conveying the plot means that the scene has a sense of occurring in the specific conditions of the moment, and adding considerably to the viewer’s imaginative understanding of the door-to-door work of a private detective.

 Although most of the location inserts in the episode are similarly modest scenes, the episode culminates in one highly ambitious sequence in a distinctive Birmingham landmark, when Marker sprints around New Street Station in pursuit of an endangered and unhappy girl: Enjoyable and evocative though this ambitious sequence is, it has to be said that it isn’t seamlessly integrated into the narrative of the story, appearing to come out of nowhere – the woman leaves her room and Marker suddenly tells her husband that she’s in grave danger and they must comb the streets for her, an assertion unsupported by her previous behaviour in the episode.

 It can be much harder to ascertain whether inserts are recorded on videotape or 16mm film in black-and-white programmes than it is for later colour ones, so my instinct that this sequence was made on both film and video can only be an informed guess. What is apparent about this scene is that it locates the programme into a precise point in space and time – Central Birmingham in the mid sixties, when New Street Station is being rebuilt, with the sight the Rotunda and the Bull Ring in the background signifying modernity and the urban to the ITV audience of 1966.

The Public Eye website ‘A Marker for all Seasons’ is an exemplary source of available information and appreciative and thoughtful reviews of the series – http://www.contquots.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

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The Spaces of Television project

Posted on August 7, 2012 by billysmart

The project concerns television fiction produced in the UK from 1955-94. It will analyse how the material spaces of production (in TV studios and on location) conditioned the aesthetic forms of programmes, and how fictional spaces represented on screen negotiated the opportunities and constraints of studio and exterior space, film and video technologies, and liveness and recording. Specific foci for the research include BBC studios in London and the regions, the sound-stages at Elstree where programmes for ITV were made, and location shooting of drama series and serials in the period. Genres of programme studied include popular drama such as the police and adventure series, science fiction, period costume drama and sitcom.
The research will involve significant archival work, and will produce a historiography of production spaces in British television and connect this spatial and institutional history with a historiography of television style. Fictional space will be understood as a component of mise-en-scene, where the material space of production impacts on modes of performance, styles of camera work, and the significance of sound environments and visual design. Material spaces of production will be understood as a component of the economic, institutional and political histories of British television, where the availability of production space, its architectural design and resourcing, technologies of camera and sound, and the cultural meanings of these conditions of production changed over time and were negotiated among professional personnel in the television industry.

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