In the US: Saturday, 8pm/7c, 20th April 2013, BBC America
Nigel Kneale is something of a god on this blog. A revolutionary writer of some of the best scripts in British TV history, his effect can still be felt today. One of his most powerful and influential works was The Stone Tape, a genuinely scary scientific ghost story that has leant its name to a parapsychology concept: the idea that ghosts may be ‘memories’ of events somehow imprinted on buildings or the landscape. When you have a mo, watch it below…
The latest piece of British TV to owe a debt to The Stone Tape was Saturday’s episode of Doctor Who – Hide, which not only had a scientist investigating a haunted house with the help of scientific apparatus and a woman with psychic abilities, it was even set in the 70s.
Now, I have to admit I wasn’t sure what to expect of this. On the one hand, it was written by Neil Cross, who also wrote the rather dreadful Rings of Akhaten. On the other, Cross only got the job of writing Rings, because he’d apparently impressed Steven Moffat and co with the quality of this script. Cross also has ghost-story form, having written the recent BBC2 adaptation of MR James’s Whistle and I’ll Come To You.
So which Cross were we going to get, I was wondering: super-scary ghost-writing Cross or sucky singing child Cross?
Thankfully, it turned out to be the former. Here’s a trailer.
Now that the BFI has finally sorted out my membership, I can once again say that it’s time for our regular look at the TV that the BFI is showing, this time in the month of March 2013. This month, as well as the continuing celebration of Doctor Who, which reaches the Pertwee years and a colour-restored version of The Mind of Evil, there’s a short season of TV programmes featuring monologues by the likes of Bernard Cribbins, Tom Baker and Alan Bennett, who’ll be there in person, a documentary on The Wizard of Oz, and a Flipside looking back at how the underground scene of the 1960s was depicted on TV.
Well, in our Wednesday Play slot, we’ve featured plays that have changed attitudes, plays that have entertained, adaptations of classic works of fiction, the gritty, the funny, the meta and more. But plays can also be experimental.
Generally, television dramas tend to aim for ‘mimesis’, to be as close to reality as they can. There’s a lot that goes into that: characters that seem like real people, dialogue that sounds like something you’d hear in conversation, logical plotting with effect following cause, and so on.
But art doesn’t have to have mimesis, as many a surrealist or Brechtian will tell you. Theatre and to a lesser extent film can try not to mimic reality, but instead to challenge conventions and impose its own.
Television finds this much harder to do, thanks to audience expectations. But sometimes it tries.
All of which is a very pretentious, convoluted and somewhat sophistic build-up to my trying to defend the almost indefensible: Artemis 81.
Originally intended as a mini-series, co-funded by Danish TV, this 1981 TV production by noted scriptwriter David Rudkin (as well as several individual plays for television, he also adapted MR James’ The Ash Tree for the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas, and contributed to the screenplay for François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451) saw paranormal novelist Gideon Harlax (Shelley‘s Hywel Bennett) involved in an epic battle to save the earth from the Angel of Death (Eldorado‘s Roland Curram) and Danish organist Dr Albrecht Von Drachenfels (Dan O’Herlihy), aided and abetted by his wife, Gwen (Dinah Stabb), an Oxford student (Daniel Day-Lewis, but unrecognisable) and the Angel of Love and Light Helith (Sting, in his first proper acting role).
Now if you’ve made it through that paragraph without inadvertently sniggering once, you’re a stronger and more serious person than I. And if you can make it through the first four minutes of Artemis 81, let alone the whole thing, without doing the same, your Herculian strength of will will become a thing of legend. Follow me after the jump where you can find out more about it and even watch it. All three hours of it. Is that a challenge or what?
Since we’ve been talking a bit about the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas this week, it seems appropriate to have a look at ‘the one that (almost) got away’: ITV Playhouse‘s adaptation of MR James’ Casting The Runes.
Virtually all the BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas were adaptations of short stories by James. Only 1976’s The Signalman, written by Charles Dickens; 1977’s Stigma, written by Clive Exton; and 1978’s The Ice House, by John Bowen, deviated from this tradition. However, this wasn’t because the producers had run out James stories to adapt – far from it, since BBC4 went on to adapt James’ View From A Hill and Number 13 in 2005 and 2006 respectively.
In fact, just as the BBC was winding up its annual Ghost Stories for Christmas, ITV’s ITV Playhouse anthology series chose to get two of its rival’s contributors, writer Clive Exton and director Lawrence Gordon Clark, to adapt James’s Casting The Runes. This wasn’t the first time ITV had adapted James or even Casting The Runes: there had been four black-and-white productions made of James stories between 1966 and 1968, including Casting The Runes, which have now been virtually lost (although some parts do remain of the adaptation of Casting The Runes), and it had adapted Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance for schools in 1975. But unlike those previous adaptations and those of the BBC, which had all been period pieces, this was a modernisation and extension of James’ original story.
Starring Just Good Friends‘ Jan Francis and Children of the Stones‘ Iain Cuthbertson, Casting The Runes took James’ tale of a covert, supernatural battle between a man and an outraged mage who’d received a bad review from him and transposed it to a modern day conflict between a TV journalist (Francis) and a notorious self-styled Aleister Crowley-like figure (Cutherbertson), outraged at being mocked by one of her documentaries.
Most of the features of the original story remain, from the Satanic curse secretly passed to Francis when she least expects it to the demise of a previous critic thanks to the curse a few years earlier, although the narrative is more linear and more eventful than James’ original. While lacking the quiet, haunting atmosphere of the BBC adaptations that perhaps only age, the empty countryside and a lack of people can bring, the ITV Playhouse version overcomes this by effectively using visual and sound effects – although Cutherbertson’s costuming and performance add an element of unwanted comedy to the proceedings.
Strangely, despite ITV Playhouse running for another five years, there were no more adaptations of James’s stories by the series – or by any other series – until Janice Hadlow revived the format for BBC4 and continued it once she moved to BBC2. Hopefully, now that BBC4’s drama budget is being handed over to BBC2, we’ll get another one this year.
If not, as in 1978, there’s now a golden opportunity for ITV to revive the tradition. Are you listening, Peter Fincham?
The full thing’s not available on YouTube, although Network DVD have very kindly released it on DVD (as a bonus, you get that adaptation of Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance as well), but here’s a trailer for it:
