BFI events

Every month, TMINE lets you know what TV events the BFI is hosting

BFI events

The Wednesday Play/Kneale Before Nigel: Murrain (1975)

27 April 2016 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Any TV buff worth their salt can name at least one or two of the most famous play series: The Wednesday Play, The Play For Today, Armchair Theatre – these were all justifiably famous thanks to the quantity of classics they produced.

However, the annals of TV history are littered with failed TV play series that almost no one can remember, usually because they never yielded a single great piece of work, even when they had great authors writing for them. Indeed, whenever I’m combing YouTube and the Internet for plays for this strand of the blog, I’m usually coming across one or two new ones each time that I’ve never heard of before.

ATV’s 1975 series Against The Crowd – an annoyingly self-consciously titled show if ever there was one – is one such unmemorable series. Heard of Against The Crowd? Neither had I and neither has the Internet, it turns out. It’s not been released by Network, the home of obscure TV that only seven people will buy on DVD. It doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. Its IMDB page is sketchy at best and even lists it under “partially lost”, since two of its seven episodes, Tell It To The Chancellor and Blind Man’s Buff, are both missing from the archives, probably having been wiped by ATV/ITV. Even the BFI offers nothing beyond “anthology drama” in its database of TV shows. 

I did discover that:

  1. It may have aired in the afternoons
  2. Dennis Potter resented the name of the series, since that imposed a house style, and he didn’t like that.

So why mention it at all? Well, it did have some very famous names writing for it, including Fay Weldon (Poor Baby); Howard Schuman (Carbon Copy); and Kingsley Amis (We Are All Guilty). But no one, it seems, is interested in carrying a torch for their lost works, though. No. You have to have a specific kind of nerdy motivation to dredge up old TV from 40 years ago, and that usually means a love of sci-fi, fantasy or horror.

Don’t be surprised then that the only episode of Against The Crowd that anyone is interested in is Murrain, written by a certain Nigel Kneale, after he fell out with the BBC after they abandoned Quatermass. That’s the one everyone cares about and that’s the only one that’s been released on DVD, bundled with Beasts, Kneale’s subsequent ITV anthology series that he wrote for Against The Crowd writer/producer Roger Marshall. It’s also the only one the BFI has shown in the past decade or perhaps ever, as far as I know.

Murrain, named after an antiquated term for various infectious diseases affecting cattle and sheep, is a standard piece of Kneale fare in which superstition (in the form of a pig farmer who thinks a local woman is really a witch) meets science (a vet who wants to protect the little old lady from him and the other nasty bumpkins who believe). Who’s right, who’s wrong or are they both right? Everything’s an option with Kneale…

Shot on location on the then in-vogue cheap-as-chips video, it lacks the atmosphere of Kneale’s BBC plays and proves that DoPs in the 70s shouldn’t have got ambitions above their stations so many years before the invention of the Steadicam. All the same, a decent cast, including Bernard Lee (M from the early Bond movies) and Una Brandon-Jones (Withnail & I), and Kneale’s dialogue and gift for ideas means it’s not a total loss. 

What TV’s on at the BFI in May? Including Peaky Blinders, The Hamburg Cell and Safe

13 April 2016 Rob Buckley Post a comment

The BFI left it a bit late putting out the PDF of its guide last month, so since I’m an intrinsically lazy person who couldn’t be bothered to type it all in manually, I decided to skip April and head into May instead. However, to be honest, although there’s a lot on at the BFI this month, there’s not that much tele. 

There is a preview of series 3 of Peaky Blinders, complete with cast and crew Q&A. There’s a new documentary about noted film and TV director Antonia Bird, Antonia Bird: From EastEnders to Hollywood, as well as a couple of her TV films, including Safe with Aidan Gillen, Robert Carlyle and Kate Hardie, and a docu-drama about the 9/11 terrorists, The Hamburg Cell. There’s also a free talk for seniors about TV director Alan Clarke.

But that’s it. Still, makes my life easier. What a lazy man I am.

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What TV’s on at the BFI in March? Including Doctor Thorne, The A Word and the Frank Cvitanovich season

28 January 2016 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Time to look at what TV the BFI is showing in March. With the LGBT Film Festival taking over the South Bank between 17 and 27 March, there’s slim pickings, to be honest, but as well as a short season of Frank Cvitanovich documentaries, you can also look forward to previews of Julian Fellowes’ adaptation of Trollope’s Doctor Thorne and the six-part drama The A-Word, the word in question being autism.

Who’s Frank Cvitanovich? He was a Canadian documentary maker who did lots of work for Thames TV, that’s who. In particular, he made this one about Barry Sheene. You can’t watch it at the BFI, though. Soz.

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What TV’s on at the BFI in February? Including Nuts In May, Penda’s Fen, Artemis 81 and Leap In The Dark

6 January 2016 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Time to look at what the BFI is showing in February. Yes, February. I never got my January guide, and since it’s now January and the February guide turned up yesterday, let’s just do February. I’ll be ahead of schedule for a change then.

February’s actually not got a huge amount of TV, but what there is is largely TV plays – and good ‘uns, too. As well as Dexter Press Gang Fletcher introducing Nuts In May, we also have a season of David Rudkin’s TV plays. Who’s Rudkin? Well, he wrote about 90% of the pagan dramas in TMINE’s guide to religion, including Penda’s Fen and Artemis 81, both of which get an airing in the season (although since the BFI describes the latter as ‘one of the medium’s greatest productions’, I’m not entirely sure they’ve actually watched it yet). 

But as well as those, Rudkin’s The Living Grave is also being shown. This was part of a somewhat odd, supernatural anthology series that aired on BBC Two called Leap In The Dark. This ran for 20 episodes in four series, over a period of eight years from 1973 to 1980, and featured work from Rudkin, as well as Fay Weldon and Alan Garner among others. Each episode featured a different incident of the paranormal, some in the modern day, but most set in other time periods.

So far, so ordinary, you might think. What’s odd about Leap In the Dark is that all these incidents were real events – indeed, the first series consisted only of documentaries, while the later series are technically docudramas, rather than dramas. Rushkin’s The Living Grave is about a young woman who regresses under hypnosis to the 1700s, with Rushkin’s play recreating both the hypnosis sessions and the 1700s. And it’s this week’s Wednesday’s Play.

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What TV’s on at the BFI in December? Including Peter & Wendy, Dickensian and Churchill’s Secret

11 November 2015 Rob Buckley Post a comment

It’s the final month of the BFI’s 2015 calendar and rather than looking behind, most of the highlights of December are previews of forthcoming TV shows, complete with Q&As with cast and crew. Well, I say look ahead, but they’re almost all all period dramas – ITV’s Peter Pan reimagining Peter & Wendy, BBC’s massive 20-part (Ed: surely shome mishtake?) Dickens crossover Dickensian and ITV’s dying Churchill biopic Churchill’s Secret. But there’s also a preview of a new David Walliams kids book adaptation, a season of plays and TV films about love and a Missing Believed Wipe mini-season dedicated to continuity footage – yes, an evening dedicated to things like this:

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