Inspired by Scarfolk, the English town that still lives in the 1970s, this week we’re starting up a new feature on the blog: Charley says.
The 1970s was a terrible time, of course, where the risks to people from everything from electricity cables to water to other people could not be overstated. It was horrifying. Particularly the rabies.
To save the public from these threats – and themselves – the British government authorised a series of public information films designed to scare the living daylights out of anyone who watched them. And each week, I intend to scare the living daylights out of you with a public information film or two – watch them, as they might just save your life.
This week: Rabies. Beware. The threat is still there, you know, and if you aren’t scared shitless, you haven’t been watching. And that means death for you (unless you watch the third movie – you’ll be sound as a pound after that).
Greek tragedy was the very first formal theatrical genre to be invented. Created in the 5th century BC to honour the Greek god Dionysos during his annual festival in Athens, it developed over the next century or so thanks to numerous playwrights, including Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, to give us some of the greatest ever works of Western theatre and literature.
But since those times, as a genre, it’s pretty much fallen by the wayside. For all that David Simon and his fellow writers on The Wire may claim to have written to the rules of Greek tragedy rather than the more common Shakespearean model, they rarely touched on the classic formula devised by Aristotle for tragedy: the hubris, catharsis then nemesis of the protagonist, an ordinary man, who through some tragic flaw or mistake is eventually undone by the gods.
Greek tragedy itself didn’t always stick to the formula (e.g. Euripides’ Helene, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound), so you have to hand it to former Daily Mirror journalist turned TV writer Michael J Bird to not only create one of the very few modern pieces of drama to stick to that formula, but to also set it and film it in Greece with a largely Greek cast.
1977’s BBC2 serial Who Pays The Ferryman? sees former soldier turned boat builder Alan Haldane (Jack Hedley from Colditz) return to Crete after more than 30 years’ absence. A legendary fighter with the Crete resistance during the War, he’d been a hero to the people and had fallen in love with Melina, one of the women he’d met there. Hoping to meet with her again after all this time, he tragically discovers that she has died. Compounding his misery, he is now getting a cold shoulder from the people who’d formerly seen him as a hero and been his friends.
Why? Well, unbeknownst to him, she’d fallen pregnant with his child. She wrote to him and, given the Cretan attitudes of the time and receiving no reply, she ended up marrying another man who would raise the daughter as his own. Haldane, who never received the letters and who now discovers his own letters to her were never received, decides to meet the now grown-up daughter he never knew he had and become her benefactor. And along the way, he meets a woman Annika (played by the very famous Greek actress Betty Arvaniti), who seems very familiar …
Why no one received the letters from their respective lovers and the lengths some people will go to to destroy Haldane are some of the central dilemmas of a very Greek story about vendetta, family and even the gods themselves that does not, of course, have a very happy ending. Here’s the title sequence, followed by the opening of the second episode. It features the incredibly popular and catchy theme song by Cretan composer Yannis Markopoulos.
Oh, and here’s Marina Sirtis – Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation – in her second ever TV appearance. This is all she gets to do, mind.
Hedda Gabler is generally considered one of the great dramatic roles in theatre. The heroine (of sorts) of Ibsen’s eponymous play, she is a woman who has recently married, not out of love but because she thinks her years of youthful abandon are over. Into her life comes the writer and her former lover Eilert Lovborg, who throws both her and her new husband’s life into disarray.
Since its 1890 publication, Hedda Gabler has been performed many, many times all over the world. Indeed, Sheridan Smith did a superb job back in September at the Old Vic last year. However, back in October 1972, it was Janet Suzman’s turn to play Gabler in Waris Hussein’s production for BBC Play of the Month. Co-staring (Sir) Ian McKellen has Gabler’s husband, Tom Bell as Lovborg and Jane Asher as Lovborg’s lover Thea Elvsted, it’s generally considered to be one of the best adaptions ever recorded, with Suzman more or less perfect as Gabler.
It’s time for our regular look at the TV that the BFI is showing, this time in the month of May 2013. This month, as well as the continuing celebration of Doctor Who, which reaches the Peter Davison years with The Caves of Androzani…
…there’s a Missing Believed Wiped special and the first half of a season of Tony Garnett’s work, that’s partly a Ken Loach season and which also includes Roland Joffé’s directorial debut, The Spongers, which I will arbitrarily declare this week’s Wednesday Play (on Thursday). Set during the 1977 Jubilee celebrations, Jim Allen’s script focuses on the plight of Pauline as she struggles to make ends meet. With a searing contemporary relevance, the film shows the human cost of decisions made by bureaucratic committees as council budgets are put under increasing pressure. Christine Hargreaves’ performance is devastating as we see the full impact of these decision on her children. One of the most important plays of the 70s, it still speaks loudly to our conscience today. Don’t forget to watch it at the BFI if you like it!
Normally, I have to raid the archives for our regular The Wednesday Play but this Sunday saw BBC2 unveil the rather impressive The Challenger, a TV movie/play all about the US presidential commission into the Challenger disaster.
For those who don’t know, in the mid-80s, one of NASA’s space shuttles, the Challenger, exploded shortly after take off and a presidential commission was convened by President Reagan to investigate the cause of the accident. The commission included the likes of Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride, but most notably it also included the Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, who ultimately was to discover the cause of the accident.
Feynman was/is a bit of a hero to geeks. A New York City boy and an atheist with contempt for all forms of authority and ‘sacred cows’, he was also involved in the Los Alamos project during World War 2, played the bongos, cracked safes and was generally an all round fun guy. That and he invented Quantum Electrodynamics, path integration and, of course, Feynman diagrams.
Being a geeky sort, when I won a physics prize at my school, it was Feynman’s What Do You Care What Other People Think? that I requested: I’d first seen Feynman in the 1981 BBC Horizon documentary, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, which I’d really recommend watching it if you have any interest in science or indeed people, since it’s a great bit of work:
For those who prefer movies, his early life during World War 2, particularly his relationship with his dying wife, Arline Greenbaum, was depicted in the film Infinity, with Matthew Broderick playing Feynman.
The Challenger, a co-production between BBC Scotland, the Open University and the Science Channel in the US, was as much an examination of Feynman and the nature of science as a rational tool as it was of the cause of the disaster. With a stellar cast that includes William Hurt as Feynman, Joanne Whalley as his third wife Gweneth Howarth, Brian Dennehy as Chairman Rogers, Bruce Greenwood as General Kutyna, Eve Best as Sally Ride and Kevin McNally as Larry Mulloy, the play depicts the events during the inquiry, as well as his ongoing struggle with cancer (he died two years after the start of the inquiry). It follows the story from the disaster itself through to Feynman’s adventures in Washington DC, Huntsville AL (I’ve actually been there – I’m not entirely sure the programme makers have been, despite the various subtitles claiming so, but I guess you have to save budget where you can. Plus Huntsville ain’t the most exciting of places) through to the eventual conclusion of the inquiry.
Written by actress-writer Kate Gartside, it’s a tad more conspiracy theory-ish than perhaps it should be, but it’s a really impressive dramatisation and well worth a watch. Hurt’s not quite Feynman – he doesn’t try to do an impression, not even aiming for a New York accent, and doesn’t quite have Feynman’s exuberance – but he does a very good job all the same.
I’d love to be able to embed it below, but the BBC being what it is, I’ll merely link to the iPlayer instead, and leave you with Feynman’s appearance at the Rogers press conference, vividly demonstrating in characteristic style, what he’d found wrong with the shuttle, as well as his take on the commission. No word yet on a US broadcast date, by the way.
