The Quatermass Experiment, by Toby Hadoke

This comprehensive plunge into the sci-fi horror TV serial from 1953 has been a joy to read. I should declare right away that it’s written by my mate, with whom I’ve just made a documentary for the forthcoming deluxe Blu-ray of the film version of the same story, out next month. But then the reason Toby fronts the documentary is that he’s the go-to guy for this stuff.

The book is him sharing what he knows, the facts gleaned from decades of research and some shrewd deductions, plus his analysis based on long years of consideration. I especially like how good he is at probing sources: he says when he thinks an anecdote has been embellished; he also says when he isn’t sure what to conclude.

There’s lots of factual information here that I didn’t know and there are lots of fresh insights that open up this old TV show. It’s also very engaging — for example in Toby’s increasing exasperation with the Daily Mail’s TV journalist of the time, Peter Black. (By chance, I once gave Toby a copy of Black’s book, The Mirror in the Corner; I wonder what he made of it.) 

The serial was broadcast live in six episodes. The first two episodes were recorded and survive; the rest went out once and were then lost to the ether. What hadn’t occurred to me before I read Toby’s book is that at least some of episodes 3 to 6 were recorded — even if those recordings have now been lost. They each featured a small amount of pre-filmed material, detailed by Toby. It also seems that producer Rudolph Cartier filmed a little of each instalment up to episode 5 to act as a “trailer” or story-so-far at the start of the subsequent episode (pp. 168-9). 

The chances of this material having survived are next to zero, but sometimes — just sometimes — this kind of thing turns up. 

Indeed, Toby has turned up a load of archive material never seen before, including a roll of film from studio rehearsals on episodes 1 to 5, the images in very good condition and presented beautifully here. Reader, I have pored over these thrilling, vivid glimpses of what is otherwise lost to us. I should also like an illustrated version of the script - or even a whole comic strip - done by Robert Hack, whose artwork features here.

Toby has also gathered a wealth of sources to tell a detailed story. What we learn is set nicely in context — how this serial compared to other TV productions of the time, how people watched and engaged with it, and where it sits in the history of science-fiction and horror. Much is made of the fact that nothing like this had been seen on television preciously. That meant I was struck by the line at the end of Episode 1, when a reporter responds to the sight of astronaut Victor Caroon emerging from his rocket,

“That suit they wear, it is like the comic magazines after all,” (p. 70).

That is surely a reference to the Eagle and Dan Dare, pilot of the future, who dons a kind of diving gear in space. His comic strip adventures launched in 1950 but he perfectly exemplifies the kind of “New Elizabethan” hero referred to and then undercut in the serial. Quatermass is, I think, a kind of anti-Dan Dare.

Later, Toby notes that in L’esperimento Quatermass (Mondadori, 1978) — an Italian translation of the script book of the serial — a small change was made to the spoof, 3D sci-fi film playing in the cinema visited by Victor. 

“The Space Girl (Ragazza Spaziale) doesn’t call the Lieutenant ‘Chuck’ as in the UK version, but ‘Jim’,” (p. 269).

That’s a random change, I thought. Unless it’s a reference to the well-known Jim Kirk from Star Trek, updating the allusion to (what was seen as) a contemporary example of hokey sci-fi.

Toby is especially good at keeping the focus on the people involved, the contributions made by cast and crew to both the original production and recounting how it was made. A last section, detailing what they all went on to do after Quatermass, is compelling — like the serial itself, Toby gives them a last bow.

But what I was most taken by, I think, was what the leading man — the first Quatermass — brought to the role in particular.

Toby tells us that Reginald Tate made his TV debut in March 1937, which was less than six months after the start of the BBC’s regular TV service. He appeared in an exact from the stage version of Jane Eyre in which he was appearing at the time in London’s West End. Tate played Mr Rochester, a role he’d had since the stage production began in Malvern the previous year. Toby tells us he played Rochester again on stage in Leeds in 1946 (p. 65) and on TV in 1948 (p. 66). He then performed as Rochester once more, for BBC Radio, at the same time as he was in production on The Quatermass Experiment. He told the Evening Standard at the time that, 

“The transition [between the two roles] is not very great. The two seem to have characters in common” (p. 70).

Toby describes Quatermass as a troubled, guilt-ridden figure, trying to put right what he got terribly wrong — in this case, sending three men into space to devastating effect that now imperils the whole Earth. I don’t think writer Nigel Kneale had any thought of Mr Rochester when he wrote it; but that’s what Tate brought to his performance.

It’s another example of how the leading man of this new kind of TV drama — a pilot of the future, in his own way — is anchored in the past. The ideas are new but the emotional heft of the serial is an echo from the past…

• Buy The Quatermass Experiment, by Toby Hadoke, from Ten Acre Films

Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein

“It’s all so unbearable. No wonder we work so hard to look away. No wonder we erect those walls, literal and psychological. No  wonder we would rather gaze at our reflections, or get lost in our avatars, than confront our shadows.” (p. 323)

This is a compelling, sometimes difficult read and I’ve had to stop and start a few times to process some of what it says. Naomi Klein, the author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, keeps being mistaken for the conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, and becomes obsessed with trying to understand her double, the journey she has taken in the past few years and what it can all mean. In the process, she grapples with Covid, the history of anti-Semitism, the situation in Gaza and a whole load besides.

I’m haunted by the radio interview with Wolf, which I heard go out live on the evening of 21 May 2019. Presenter Matthew Sweet (my mate!) asked her to explain the thesis of her new book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love, and then, at 21:20, said words to chill the blood of any writer.

“I don’t think you’re right about this.”

What follows is polite, curt and utterly devastating. When Matthew then turns to the next item in the programme, and another guest, you can hear their nervousness. You can still hear the whole programme, if you dare.

Klein charts how Wolf got there and what happened next, but really this is a book about how we respond to extremism of one kind and another without becoming extremists ourselves. That entails some self-examination and scrutiny of the structures we so often take for granted — Klein has a lot to say about capitalism as a whole.

Much of this will linger with me. I was especially taken with what she says about the response from John Berger to her previous book, The Shock Doctrine, where he said shock can make us lose our identity and footing. Berger concluded that, “Hence calm is a form of resistance.”

“I think about those words often. Calm is not a replacement for righteous rage or fury at injustice, both of which are powerful drivers for necessary change. But calm is the precondition for focus, for the capacity to prioritize. If shock included a loss of identity, then calm is the condition under which we return to ourselves. Berger helped me to see that the search for calm is why I write: to tame the chaos in my surroundings, in my own mind, and—I hope—in the minds of my readers as well. The information [of the sort she reports on] is always distressing and, to many, shocking—but in my view, the goal should never be to put readers into a state of shock. It should be to pull them out of it.” (p. 227)

At the end, we’re told Klein invited Wolf to respond, to have a conversation, but never got an answer. One question Klein wanted to ask was whether Wolf might remember her from the one time they met, when Klein was still a student and Wolf was promoting The Beauty Myth. Klein admits she was dazzled by Wolf, was probably influenced by her as she started as a writer — in effect, she might be the doppelgänger, not the other way round.

But there’s another devastating sentence, on p. 345, when Klein repeats the first thing Wolf ever said to her. I felt that, in just those few words, it unlocked so much about her.

Cybermen: The Ultimate Guide

I’ve received my copy of this lavish new guide to the Cybermen, produced by the team at Doctor Who Magazine.

Gav Rymill and I have written a history of the changing look of the Cybermen, with a double-page spread devoted to each of 20 iterations from their first appearance in The Tenth Planet (1966) to their last TV story to date, The Power of the Doctor (2022). These are accompanied by new CG illustrations by Anthony Lamb — and Gav, too.

There is plenty of new information in what we’ve written, let alone among all the other stuff by other people. If you like Cybermen, you will like this. And if you don’t, it will convince you.

Is there really more to say about Cybermen, or Doctor Who in general?

Well, last night, I was in Liverpool to meet John Higgs for the first time and hear him talk about his brilliant new book Exterminate, Regenerate. He was interviewed / chatted with the music journalist and novelist David Keenan, who also has a book out, his a collection of writings about the weird fringes of culture while John maps something more mainstream. 

But David said he got into all this weird, edge-of-culture stuff in the first place by, as a kid, reading Doctor Who novelisations by Terrance Dicks. Doctor Who changed the way he looked at things, and the things he looked for. It made the mainstream more rich and strange — and involving.

He also used the word “unfathomable” to describe Doctor Who. Whereas a murder mystery has a solution, or a romantic story ends with a couple getting together — or not — Doctor Who keeps going on and on. That means that, no matter how deeply we dive into it, we will never reach the bottom. 

I’m really taken with that idea, Doctor Who as abyss into which I can’t stop staring.

British Television Drama — Past, Present and Future (2nd edition), ed. Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey

Following Friday’s post, a bit more time travel via old TV. This book exploring the “golden age” of TV drama — and critiquing that term — transported me back almost 30 years. Many of the contributions here were originally talks given at On the Boundary: Turning Points in Television Drama 1965-2000, an event held at the old Bulmershe campus of Reading University in April 1998, which I attended while an MA student there more than half my life ago.

As well as being in the audience for talks by luminaries such as Tony Garnett and Timothy West, I was among the students sat for dinner with Kenneth Trodd — who, on being told I was studying science-fiction, wanted reassurance that Cold Lazarus hadn’t looked and felt like Blake’s 7. A group of academics who seemed so ancient and wise — and were probably younger than me now —  were patient when I interrupted their conversation about Dennis Potter to ask what they knew about him pitching to write Doctor Who.

The whole event was overshadowed by the recent death of Sydney Newman, effectively becoming a conference about his legacy as Head of Drama at the BBC, 1963-67. But a recurring topic in the bar was the public response to the death of Princess Diana the previous summer — how it affected viewing figures of drama at the time, how it would shape drama to come. One producer said she thought that increasingly risk-averse broadcasters would veto any drama that was not sufficiently respectful to the public mood. 

When, the following year, Queer as Folk contained a scene of characters talking about the death of Diana, it was rude and funny, yet at heart about a shared sense of grief — and the closing joke was about not Diana but Elton John. The friend I watched with was shocked; I could see it navigating the sensibilities I’d heard that producer raise.

Reading the book now has made me acutely aware of what I missed while at the event all those years ago. I had not heard of, let alone seen, many of the dramas cited. I did not know the names of many people there or whose work was being discussed. Now I see I was rubbing shoulders with, perhaps even serving wine to, John McGrath, Irene Shubik and a whole host of others whose work I now know so well through my various bits of research. The things I wish I could go back and ask! 

But telly has always been ephemeral; it is made and then you move on.

There’s lots of fascinating, insightful stuff in the book, both from the conference in 1998 and added new for the second edition (2014). There is lots on the ideology behind what makes it to the screen, the move from schooling the audience in culture to trailing after them as consumers, as well as the respective value accorded to different kinds of drama by a male-dominated, male-centred industry. That’s informed my viewing of the BBC’s Vanity Fair (1987), on which I’ll have more to say in due course.

I was also engrossed by accounts of how developments in technology changed what we see on TV, and its look and feel. Phil Redmond explains how Brookside made use of developments in computer technology and word processing to streamline writing and recording, and dovetails this with the aim of the programme to reflect a fast-changing world. Victoria Byard’s chapter on The Sarah Jane Adventures addresses the way it worked across traditional broadcast TV as well as new digital platforms, and there’s a concluding chapter by the editors on time-shifted viewing and the changing ways that the audience — or audiences plural — are consuming media. Or were, given how much things have moved on in the past decade.

Sarah Cardwell’s chapter compares three different TV versions of Persuasion made over a 36-year period (1971, 1995 and 2007), though I’m not sure I entirely agree that the 1971 one was slow-moving and wordy because of “the technological and institutional context” (p. 86). Compare it to Upstairs, Downstairs or The Stalls of Barchester from the same year and you’d get a very different sense of the way the past could be realised. I think Persuasion was made within a tradition of serialised dramatisations of “classic” novels, what Screening the Novel referred to as a “house style”, resulting in an old-fashioned mode of TV drama even for 1971. The question, I think, is how consciously the people who made it resisted the wider technological and institutional context. 

That’s got me thinking about the way any new dramatisation of a classic novel must balance making the old story relevant to a modern-day audience without feeling too “new”. A common objection to the 2022 Netflix version of Persuasion was that protagonist Anne Eliot directly addresses the audience in the style of Fleabag (2016-19). Obviously, Fleabag didn’t invent talking-to-camera, but that particular series is mentioned in much of the criticism. Such “gimmicks” (Variety) are “jarring” (Vanity Fair) in drama set in the past, resulting in a “disaster of anachronistic dialogue and annoyingly wry glances at the camera” (the Guardian). 

We could point to other anachronisms — the teeth and skin of the actors are too perfect, their costumes look brand new, the whole world on screen is too picturesque, clean and healthy — but that’s the same in most other costume dramas of this sort. That, I think is at the heart of the objection: it’s not about whether it authentically presents the early 19th century, but the expectations we have built up from previous screen dramatisations. Persuasion (2022) does not sufficiently look and feel like old TV.

In fact, I’d argue that the direct address to camera is a neat way of tackling a perennial issue in dramatisation: how to transpose both the content and flavour of narration in the book into dialogue used on screen. In this case, the direct address conveys something of Jane Austen’s use of free indirect speech, which gives the book an intimate, informal, even gossipy style. In that sense, it’s authentic. 

Deep Space Nine: Outside In Can Live With It

I am one of the 171 authors in the newly announced Outside In Can Live With It, an anthology of perspectives on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The book is out on 24 July and available to pre-order now, with proceeds going to the charity Against Malaria.

My contribution, “Red Flags”, is focused on episode #168, ’Til Death Do Us Part. By chance, I wrote it while working on the script for our documentary Terror of the Suburbs, which refers to the BBC sitcom Till Death Us Do Part (1965-71), and I had to pay close attention to the order of the “us” and the “do” in each case.

Which has got it right? 

Well, in fact, neither. I mean, both appear in the solemnisation of matrimony, depending which editions of The Book of Common Prayer and other prayer books you check. But if you’re an awful nerd and feel compelled to trace the phrase back to earliest historical source, you reach the 1549 edition of the Book of Common Prayer, and it says something else.

I N. take thee N. to my wedded wife, to have and to holde from this day forwarde, for better, for wurse, for richer, for poorer, in sickenes, and in health, to love and to cherishe, til death us departe: according to Goddes holy ordeinaunce: And therto I plight thee my trouth.

The suggestion is that it was written as “departe” but heard as “do part”; the sense of being together until death mutating into one of being together until death forcibly separates us from each other. That is subtly different but I think slightly more romantic, which may explain why it caught on.

The “do us part” is surely a latter correction so as not to split the infinitive. 

I decided this wouldn’t do for my entry in the Deep Space Nine book so inflict it on you here.

The Brigadier’s family hatchback

Old TV is time travel. It’s full of extraordinary, telling details, often stuff that the people making the programme weren’t conscious of as they made it. The things they took for granted or didn’t sweat can now seem so vividly odd. They’re well worth digging into. They are history alive.

For example, in the 1971 Doctor Who story Terror of the Autons, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and two of his officers drive a pale blue Austin Maxi, registration POF 61OG, which is involved in an action sequence in Episode 3. The shape of it, the boxy way it moves, the guttural sound of the engine, are all very distinctive of the time. “Gosh,” I thought, watching a bit today while fact-checking something something else, “I’d forgotten cars sounded like that…” 

The sound of the past, once so prevalent and now a detail from history. 

On the commentary recorded for the DVD release, producer Barry Letts and actors Nicholas Courtney and Katy Manning joke about the incongruity of such an ordinary car in the midst of an alien invasion. Basically, they ask, why doesn’t the heroic Brig drive something more, well, manly?

I think something quite interesting* is going on here. This car we see on screen isn’t ordinary at all. 

The Austin Maxi was the first car to be launched by the newly formed British Leyland Motor Corporation. That was on 24 April 1969 — less than 18 months before this particular model featured in scenes filmed for Doctor Who in September 1970. It’s brand new — and also more than that, too. 

Around this time, British Leyland’s publicity people seem to have loaned several Austin Maxis to BBC productions, surely as a means of subliminal advertising. The idea, of course, was to make the new model of car familiar to viewers, encouraging them to buy one. In that sense, this is the car of tomorrow — the next model that viewers’ will themselves drive. And that fits with this story, and Doctor Who of the time, being set in the very near future.

That’s why, I think, that in September 1970 it didn’t seem incongruous to the production team for Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart of the UN’s Intelligence Taskforce to drive into battle in a five-door hatchback. At least, it wasn’t incongruous enough for them to put him behind the wheel of something else.

The irony is that the subliminal advertising worked. People did become familiar with and buy Austin Maxis, so this particular model took on a range of associations as an ordinary, family car. It was once the aspirational new car of the future. That it now feels incongruous is a sign of how much we’ve moved on. 

See also

• 15 years of The Coup — or how I gave the Brigadier a knighthood
• My long-ago plan to make him a Lord and all
• More of me wanging on about the Third Doctor’s era of Doctor Who

My family the refugees

On 2 December 1677, a certain Jean Guerier (sic) from Paris was recorded in a list of refugees arriving at the Huguenot Church in Threadneedle Street, London.

That word, “refugee”, was relatively new. According to the OED, it was first used in English in 1628, in specific reference to Huguenots — the Protestant asylum-seekers fleeing persecution in Catholic France.

The “T” in Jean’s listing is for témoignage or “testament”, meaning that when he arrived at the church in London he presented a document to confirm that he was a practising member of the Huguenot church in France.

That the “T” was listed shows that témoignages were important in being granted asylum in England. But not everyone had them — many names in the same list don’t have an accompanying “T”. It seems that some refugees made a point of not carrying them as, in France, being caught with such a document was evidence of trying to escape the Catholic church and state. Penalties included enslavement or execution. 

What courage did it take to acquire this declaration of faith in the first place and then carry it, hidden away somewhere on your person? If Jean got the document in Paris, the place named in the listing, he must have carried it the 125 miles / 200 km to the coast, or about four days’ ride on horseback. Where did he stay along the way? Who helped him or turned a blind eye? What dangers did he face?

Once Jean reached the coast, who took him across to England and how perilous was the journey? There are accounts from the time of would-be refuges drowning in the Channel. Those who made it, often with few possessions, could face a mixed reception.

Officially, the king and Parliament welcomed Huguenot refugees. Charities were set up to support them. But there were also protests and riots against them. Pamphlets accused Huguenots of low standards in morality, housing and hygiene, and of eating strange food.

What did the Huguenots make of London, this utopia of virtue and good health? Sadly, I’ve not seen any accounts from their perspective. Even the log of refugees and their témoignage documents — published as a book by the Huguenot Society of London in 1909 and now available online — is only a partial record. The book explains that the original log got wet, erasing listings on the bottom of each page. The names of members of my family, perhaps ones who traveled with Jean or followed him soon after, may well be lost in these lacunae.

In what survives, we can trace something of the life Jean made for himself in London. There is a listing for a Paul Guerrier, son of Jean and native of (ie born in) London. He was 20 years-old on 24 June 1702, so born c. 1682, five years after Jean arrived. 

The widowed Ester Guerrier listed after Paul, with a témoignage recorded at the Huguenot Church in London on 1 November 1674, is also the first Guerrier ever recorded in England, from when she got married at the same church on 27 September 1654. How Ester and Jean were related isn’t clear and there’s nowhere else we can really go to check. In France, many Huguenots refused to have marriages or baptisms in the Catholic Church and what Protestant records there may have been were largely destroyed.

But the Huguenot Church in London holds other documentation, including baptism records for more of Jean Guerrier’s children: Jacques (on 10 September 1684), Jean Pierre (16 August 1686) and Marie (30 January 1688). Their mother — Jean Guerrier’s wife — is listed as, respectively, “Marie Jenings”, “Marie Jaine” and “Marie Jenngs”, the discrepancy in spelling suggesting some confusion around a foreign name pronounced with an accent. Was she also from France? If so, did she accompany Jean when he escaped from Paris?

There’s no baptism record for Jean’s son Paul and no témoignage listing for Jacques, Jean Pierre or Marie when they reached adulthood (as with Paul). Was Marie Jenings/Jaine/Jenngs Paul’s mother? And what about the Anne Guerrier, listed in attendance at the baptism of Jean Pierre but nowhere else? With partial records, we can only guess connections.

Note that the three children were baptised with French first names, as if to keep some vestige of the culture Jean had left behind. But the Goldsmiths Company has a record of a John Peter Guerrier son of John, which is surely our Jean Pierre and his father Jean. John is listed as a “taylor” based in St Anne’s Westminster; his son was apprenticed as a goldsmith in 1700, aged 14, and allocated his mark in 1717. 

(An article in the Proceedings of the Huguenot Society from 1933 says John Peter was made free in 1716 not 1717, and was then working at the Mitre, on the Strand. His surname was also listed as “Guerrie”.)

Did Jean’s son give the English versions of his own and his father’s names when he signed up with the Goldsmith Company, or did the company impose anglicisation on the teenage apprentice? Why only anglicise the first names and not the Guerrier bit? We don’t know. 

But on 29 September 1698, there’s a record (Pat. Roll. 10. William III part IX) of the denization of Jean Guerrier — not John. Denization was a partial form of citizenship, less expensive than full naturalisation which until 1844 could only be granted to those born outside the country by a private Act of Parliament. Some 21 years after arriving in England with his témoignage document, Jean became a denizen of his adopted country but his children were citizens by birth and adopted English names.

In 1708, a James Guerrier married Hannah Sales in St Clement Danes — then a slum. The groom was listed as “22” but the guess is that this James was Jean’s other son Jacques (b. 1684), so actually 24. Records from the same parish also list an Edward Guerrier. There were so few Guerriers in England at the time — even in the 1881 census, there were just 46 in the whole country — we think Edward was a close relative, perhaps even another brother of James/Jacques, John Peter / Jean Pierre and Paul, ie another son of Jean. 

If so, Jean is my direct ancestor. And if not he's some sort of nth-great uncle.

While Jean’s arrival in London suggests adventure, Edward’s story haunts me. We know little of him except that he was buried at St Clement Danes on 2 October 1730. On 7 February 1732, the Archdeaconal Court of Middlesex recorded his impoverished widow Mary effectively putting up her three surviving sons for adoption. George, Christopher and William Guerrier were given into the charge of guardians David Porter and Jonathan Spalding.

Without that judgment, the boys would surely have starved. But, supported by the local parish, these poor sons of an immigrant prospered. George entered the City of London Draper’s Company as a painter on Grub Street. His son William (born 11 January 1747) was a member of the Painter-Stainer’s guild but seems to have fallen on hard times by the end of his life. William’s son George (born 8 July 1771) was a grazier or farmer on the Isle of Dogs and did well. Indeed, he was the first of a line of successful butchers and cattle salesmen in London, lasting into the 20th century. (George is also the most recent common ancestor I share with Edith Guerrier of Boston.)

I didn’t know any of this until a few years ago. The history of my own distinctive surname was lost in a lacuna, not least because my paternal grandfather was estranged in his teens from that side of the family. He handed down next to nothing of any family lore he may ever have gleaned. 

Thanks to Micol at the Huguenot Library, part of the National Archives in Kew, for helping me untangle all this, and my distant Guerrier cousins who walked the path before me.

Screening the Novel — The Theory and Practice of Literary Dramatization, by Robert Giddings, Keith Selby and Chris Wensley

Published in 1990, this short, 174-page book examines the process of adapting “classic” novels for the screen. “Intended for a general as well as an academic readership”, says the back-cover blurb, it begins with chapters on what is lost in dramatisation, the issues involved in recreating the past authentically and the traditions of the BBC’s Classic Serial, which had (it says) been a fixture of the schedules since a six-part adaptation of Trollope’s The Warden in 1951 (p. 100).

There are then two chapters on dramatisations of Great Expectations by Dickens — mostly focused on the film version directed by David Lean (1946) — and three chapters covering the BBC Classic Serial’s 16-part dramatisation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1987). 

The latter include interviews with producer Terrance Dicks and others involved in production and promotion of the serial. These interviews were conducted by Chris Wensley in autumn 1987 and spring 1988, so offer a perspective from and soon after broadcast. Had the interviews taken place a month or two later, the perspectives might have been very different. In the summer of 1998, BBC management decided, rather abruptly, to cancel the Classic Serial altogether just as production was getting under way on the production to follow Vanity Fair. The dramatisation of The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey, broadcast in September and October 1988, was the last in the 37-year run. Screening the Novel doesn’t address the cancellation but provides insights into why that happened, which I can match up to other stuff I have been reading. 

Vanity Fair was well received critically, with several examples cited in this book. However, viewing figures, averaging 5m per episode, were down on previous Classic Serials (p. 165). This, the authors suggest, was because the “cynicism and sexual innuendo” of Vanity Fair did not “suit all Sunday teatime family audiences” (p. 166). That suggests the Classic Serial was usually “cosy”, “safe”, even “conservative” — or at least that was the perception.

The format of Vanity Fair is criticised by the authors: 16 episodes too much of a commitment for the audience, the half-hour duration of each episode not long enough to satisfy. At the time Screening the Novel was written, the hope was that a repeat re-edited as 10x 50-minute episodes would prove more successful. However, this version never materialised.

But whatever the faults of Vanity Fair, a lot of the criticism here is directed at the Classic Serial generally. The first chapter of Screening the Novel gives an overview of what it calls the “literature/screen debate”, largely taken up with the critique in Jonathan Miller’s book Subsequent Performances (Faber, 1986) of the inability of screen versions to match the richness and interplay of prose. 

I’ve got but have not yet read this book by Miller, who’d previously adapted several works for the screen: Alice in Wonderland (BBC, 1966), Whistle and I’ll Come to You (BBC, 1968), Take a Girl Like You (film, 1970) and six Shakespeare plays (BBC, 1980-82). The sense I get (for now) is that Miller felt that his screen adaptations of Shakespeare were more successful than those earlier works. Indeed, he wasn’t alone in seeing a fundamental difference in form, as Screening the Novel tells us that, 

“Within the BBC, a clear distinction is made between ‘adaptation’ and ‘dramatisation’. An ‘adaptation’ is the preparation of a television version of a work which is already in dramatic form, for example a stage play. A ‘dramatisation’ is the preparation of a television drama from a work which was not previously in dramatic form, for example a prose narrative.” (p. 24n)

Miller sees dramatisation as of less value than adaptation and even actively damaging to the source work. Screening the Novel cites his own examples of the richness and interplay of the prose in Great Expectations before he then concludes:

“There is no way in which a film could do justice to this artful alternation between indirect and direct speech. And in the dismal realisations of Dickens that now infect the screens of domestic television we are assaulted by pretentiously picturesque usurpers.” (p. 20, citing Miller in Subsequent Performances, p. 240). 

He doesn’t say which “dismal” TV productions he means but it’s pretty obvious given that Dickens was the Classic Serial’s “bread and butter and jam”, according to Terrance Dicks (p. 139). As script editor, Terrance oversaw TV dramatisations of Great Expectations (1981), Dombey and Son (1983) and The Pickwick Papers (1985); as producer, he oversaw dramatisations of Oliver Twist (also 1985) and David Copperfield (1986, the year Miller’s book was published). Screening the Novel asked Terrance for his response.

“TD: I actually had that argument with Jonathan Miller at the Edinburgh Festival. He argues that the dramatization of a novel inevitably damages the original, that future readers are corrupted and previous readers are disappointed. I think it’s nonsense, basically. As I said, he gave this idea in a speech at the Edinburgh Festival where I was also appearing on another panel and I was in the audience and leapt up and said, ‘I am the producer of the BBC-1 Classic Serial and you have been trying to put me out of business for the last hour!’ — which got a nice laugh. What I said was that I thought that we had three classes of viewers. People who knew and loved the book and could then compare our version. People who had not read the book but would see it on television and would then be led to go to the book and read it: obviously it’s not for nothing the publishers do tie-in editions. There is always a huge upsurge in libraries when anything appears on television, a lot of people go to the book, so we gain readers.” (pp. 101-2)

Screening the Novel provides evidence to support these claims. Joanna Webb, promotion manager at Pan Books, says the company had been selling “about fifty copies a month” of Vanity Fair before it brought out its tie-in edition with the TV serial. Having paid the BBC between £3,500 and £4,000 — “which for us is a lot of money” — for the “exclusive use of the photograph of the cast in the production on the cover”, Pan hoped for “fifteen to twenty thousand extra sales” but actually sold “thirty thousand … during August and September [1988]” (pp. 117-8).

There’s evidence from a librarian of a corresponding surge in loans of Vanity Fair (p.168). The authors also quote a 1985 study led by by Dr JM Wober at IBA Research Dept into the reading habits of viewers of dramatisations. Of 3,000 people surveyed, some 46% — or 1,380 — bought or borrowed a book having seen it dramatised, though one quarter of these (some 345), “admitted to reading [only] half or less than half of it” (pp. 22-3). That still leaves more than a third of those surveyed — 1,035 of 3,000 — who bought or borrowed the book and read most if not all of it.

In his response to Miller’s criticism, Terrance says the third type of viewer were those who had not and never would read the original book but would gain something of it from seeing the dramatisation. There’s a sense in all this of imparting, through the screen, the value of the book and of reading. I can understand Terrance’s enthusiasm here as a child from a modest, working-class background whose love of reading led to grammar school, Cambridge and escape. “I got caught in an educational updraft,” Terrance told Toby Hadoke in 2013 of the Butler Education Act 1944, which came into force just before Terrance turned 11 in 1946. “Anybody with a bit of promise was shoved on.” I think he saw the Classic Serial as a means to share the benefits he himself had enjoyed, shoving on a mass audience.

But such a paternalistic view was rather outmoded by the late 1980s.

“As Ien Ang (1991) has described [in Desperately Seeking the Audience (Routledge, 1991)], the BBC moved from a conception of a disciplined audience (where programme types, levels of intellectual content and scheduling patterns would gradually school the audience to listen or watch in a particular way) to a conception of the audience as citizens or consumers exercising a free choice.” (Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey, British Television Drama — Past, Present and Future (2nd edition, 2014, pp. 11-12.)

So the Classic Serial was seen as at once “schooling” the audience — ie it was worthy and hard work — yet also bland, safe and easy. As well as the criticisms of the form made by Jonathan Miller, Screening the Novel cites Hanif Kureishi:

“It’s as if the real passion of the writers … gets lost in the peripherals which are to do with the look of the thing, and with the kind of softening out and flattening out that you get … it’s as if the stories are pulled out, whereas the ideas are left behind.” (p. 100)

A footnote on page 119 says Kureishi made these comments about the Classic Serial on an edition of The Media Show, shown on Channel 4 in May 1987. IMDB suggests this was actually episode S1E7 of The Media Show, broadcast 10 June 1987 — and that Terrance Dicks was on the same programme. I’d love to know more about this.

Screening the Novel also addresses the look or house style of the Classic Serial, dictated by studio and outside broadcast recording on videotape. Again, there is the sense of this being an outmoded form, with film productions becoming synonymous with “quality”. Given all this, we could understand the Classic Serial being cancelled on aesthetic grounds, a relic of an old way of making TV and simply no longer relevant.

Except that Terrance Dicks later gave very different reasons for the end of the Classic Serial. In 1992 — four years after leaving his staff role as producer and so off the BBC leash — he was asked at a Doctor Who convention about the cancellation and potential resurrection of Doctor Who. His answer put that in the context of the wider BBC. Science-fiction, he said, was much like costume drama.

“The two things are expensive. I’ve always working in the wrong areas, you know! And the classic serial, which I used to produce, eventually the BBC stopped making, not because it wasn’t popular, not because it didn’t sell overseas, not because they weren’t good shows. Everybody thought they were wonderful, and the jewel in the crown of the BBC. They just did not have the money.”

This was because, he said,

“No politician wanted to up the licence fee because it was unpopular, and so the BBC found that its income was shrinking and that its output wasn’t. Ultimately, you try and do cheaper and simpler programmes, but at the end of the day, the only way you really save money is by not making the programmes.” (Michael Procter, ‘Terrance Dicks interview’ (26 September 1992), published in Celestial Toyroom #191 (vol. 18, no. 1), January 1993, p. 8.)

I’m watching Vanity Fair at the moment. Four episodes in, it’s a confident, bold production, textured and nuanced and rich. It’s also very relevant to its late ‘80s audience, being all about money. Given the plot, it’s ironic that the BBC couldn’t afford to make programmes of this sort any more. And then there’s this, amid the praise cited in Screening the Novel:

“The Listener for 17-24 December [1987] informed its readers that Vanity Fair was chosen by the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, as his ‘programme of the year’, and the Daily Mirror on 9 January 1988, that the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, had asked the BBC to send her video cassettes of all 16 episodes for her Christmas viewing.” (p. 167)

Enjoying but not paying for lavish entertainment is exactly what happens in Vanity Fair, such as when a young, unscrupulous gentlemen encourages his friends to join him for an evening at Vauxhall Gardens, then contrives to have someone else pay. From today’s perspective, that link couldn’t be more on the nail, as the rogue’s name is George Osborne.

For more of this sort of thing, see Billy Smart’s interview with Terrance Dicks about the Classic Serial from 2015.

For more from me on the history of TV, see my book David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, and these old blog posts:

• Writing for Television by Sir Basil Bartlett (1955)
• A Survey of Television by Stuart Hood (1967)
• The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. V: Competition by Asa Briggs (1995) 
• The Intimate Screen by Jason Jacobs (2000)

Brat Farrar, by Josephine Tey

We know from the off that Bartholomew “Brat” Farrar is a crook. He’s a young American hustler, sometimes working as a groom or blacksmith, or anything else to get by. Importantly, he’s also got good manners, thanks to having been brought up in a better kind of orphanage. 

A nefarious friend thinks Brat looks rather like Simon Ashby, the heir to a great estate in England who is just about to come into his inheritance at the age of 21. Simon was a twin, but his slightly older brother Patrick disappeared at 13, apparently taking his own life soon after the tragic death of the twins’ parents in a plane crash. The nefarious friend knew this family and — for a fee — provides Brat with all he knows about them, meaning Brat can pretend to be the long lost, prodigal heir.

Some people believe at once that Patrick has walked back into their lives. Others don’t and are hostile. Several people aren’t sure. As Brat inveigles himself into the family, he convinces at least some of the doubters — but also starts to form attachments with these likeable people. Can he go through with defrauding them? 

It’s all brilliantly suspenseful, even before an attempt is made on Brat’s life. And then he starts to suspect a dark secret at the heart of this respectable family, a longstanding injustice that he alone can uncover. Only he can’t do that without exposing the truth about himself…

Its ingenious and effective, making a compelling protagonist out of the most unscrupulous rogue. Unlike Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley the interloper here is not a monster. There’s something more nuanced and interesting going on, and we’re rooting for Brat all the way.

The characters (expertly realised in this audio version by Carole Boyd) and their world are vividly realised: Brat (and we) must negotiate the complex web of connections between this rich family, their staff and the local community. There’s a lot about horses, on which the estate’s fortune depends. It’s quite a trick to make this so utterly compelling to a reader who has never been in the saddle. The different personalities of horses, the psychology of getting them to do what the rider wants and the thrill of competition are all used to great effect. And in the understanding of horses, we come to understand these people — and uncover the long hidden secret.

Tey tells us from the start that Brat is not Patrick Ashby but towards the end she withholds key information to keep us in suspense. It’s cheating, I think, but of the best kind — like a conjuring trick. At the start, there’s little chance of a happy ending. Things then build and build until that prospect is impossible. 

And yet, with a flourish, the last pages neatly tie it all up. It’s a thrilling story, arrestingly told, and we leave it wholly satisfied.

One more thought: I wonder if this was an influence on Saltburn. 

See also:

• Me on The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey