Scum (TV)
Alan Clarke (1977)
Scum, which describes the various brutalities of borstal life, was scheduled for broadcast as part of the BBC’s Play for Today season in 1977-78. Among the plays I watched in that season were Stronger than the Sun, Abigail’s Party, Licking Hitler and The Spongers. Scum – written by Roy Minton, directed by Alan Clarke and produced by Margaret Matheson – is more famous than at least three of those four because the BBC decided not to screen it. Clarke went on to remake the piece for cinema in 1979 (with many but not all, of the cast from the TV version). The BBC film eventually appeared on British television on Channel 4 in 1991 (the year after Clarke’s early death) and it’s now showing as part of the BFI’s ‘Radical Television Drama’ season. The pompous BFI man who introduced the screening averred that no item included in the programme better deserved its place in a two-month celebration of ‘radical’ drama but Scum – for all its notoriety and Alan Clarke’s legendary status in television drama history – really isn’t up to much. In political terms it’s clearly anti-establishment but that could be said of the majority of Play for Today offerings of the time. As a piece of drama, it’s not radical in form and much of the direction and acting looks antediluvian. Watching Brimstone and Treacle years after the BBC refused to show it, I found the play interestingly disturbing – thanks chiefly to the unaccountable charm that Michael Kitchen gave to the Devil. That’s not at all the case with Scum. It seems obvious that the BBC pulled the plug not because of socially subversive themes but merely because of the explicitness of the verbal and physical abuse which dominate proceedings.
It’s not enough to say that Scum has dated badly – I’m sure I would have found it clumsy three decades ago. Clarke and the director of photography John Wyatt establish a documentary look through the visual claustrophobia and the gloomy, greenish lighting of the stairways and corridors of the borstal. The realism of the setting, however, serves to expose the artificiality of other components. More than once, a character walks into a room at the start of a sequence and delivers his first line in a way that makes you hear it as the second line – the first being the director’s ‘Action!’ Much of the violence among the boys (who are euphemistically known within the borstal as ‘trainees’) and between them and the screws is inexpertly faked. In spite of the continuous animosities and fights in the place, no one ever interrupts another speaker: if a single instance of overlapping dialogue occurred, I missed it. (As the highly articulate trainee Archer, David Threlfall comes closest to bridging the gaps between lines but you sense this is not so much naturalism as the impatience of a selfish actor.) The institutional powers-that-be say their pieces as dutifully and woodenly as (poor) amateur actors might do.
I wanted to give Alan Clarke the benefit of the doubt. At one point I started wondering if he was making a subtle point – if the fact that the governor and the assistant governor and the matron could go on talking without fear of interruption was supposed to underline their detached impersonality and the implacability of borstal hierarchy. But I knew I was kidding myself because the same speaking privilege is extended equally to the lower orders in the place. Roy Minton’s political thinking is very shallow. There’s not a moment when he suggests that any of the guards are themselves victims of a vicious system. Because they have some power within it, the script characterises them as callous sadists, and they’re played with inept crudeness. They’re also shown as thick, compared with most of the trainees: I’m not sure what political comment Clarke and Minton are making there but we’re clearly not expected to regret the officers’ lack of brains or education.
A few of the young actors playing the trainees have become familiar from subsequent television appearances: Ray Burdis, Patrick Murray (from Only Fools and Horses – and playing here at about the same level of cartoon exaggeration) and particularly Phil Daniels (whom I didn’t actually recognise). It’s not a surprise that David Threlfall and Ray Winstone are the two who’ve gone on to bigger and better things, and that Winstone is the only one who’s made it in cinema. The attention-getting mannerisms that limit Threlfall as an actor are already in evidence here but his wit is welcome. Even so, Winstone is the only performer with real presence, inner force and complexity. He plays Carlin, whose reputation precedes him to the borstal and who becomes the ‘daddy’ of the wing. His tyranny is less malignant than the one it displaced and Winstone is good at conveying the tension between the bullying and the decent sides of Carlin’s nature. This hard nut’s walk has a streak of campness right from the start but you hesitate to recognise it as such until Carlin has become top dog, with the authority to adopt one of the other boys as his ‘missus’. Winstone’s interview of the chosen one lifts this scene above the level at which it’s conceived in Minton’s script, where its purpose is to tick the box of institutionalised homosexuality as other sequences in Scum tick institutionalised racism, brutality etc. Winstone shows us that Carlin is determined to get what he wants but troubled about the feelings that are making him determined to get it.
In 1977, much television drama was still made in the studio. Because Scum is shot on film on location it might seem to be unusually ‘cinematic’ for its time and genre. This is an illusion: in some respects it seems better designed for the theatre than the screen – that’s to say for an inherently artificial medium where characters can speechify without that being jarringly unrealistic. You’re particularly conscious of this in a sequence like the one featuring Archer and a senior officer, who’s spent thirty years working in detention centres of one kind or another (prisons before borstals). In a monologue of considerable length, Archer demolishes the system and, as a consequence, the officer’s life in public service. The scene is all talk. The longer Archer’s tirade goes on, the more unconvincing it becomes as something happening in the real world that the physical setting suggests. It might be said that the riot which forms the climax to Scum couldn’t have been done on stage but it’s so poorly executed that I wonder if even that’s right – a relatively stylised violence might have been more expressive.
The riot is the third of four major episodes in the closing twenty minutes or so of Scum (the whole thing runs 73 minutes). A physically unprepossessing boy called Davis (Martin Phillips), bullied from the moment he arrives, is sodomised by two other trainees. That night, scared and hurting, he rings for a guard, who derides and dismisses Davis’s tearful panic. To convince the guard there’s something wrong, the boy slits his wrists and manages to sound the bell again but the guard ignores it and Davis dies of his wounds. Next morning the trainees riot. In the final scene, normal service has been resumed – the governor explains that unfortunate accidents will happen even in the best-run places. Of course I don’t think the BBC should have refused to show Scum but the riot sequence is a deplorable piece of grandstanding by Clarke and Minton. The strongly divisive nature of the place is suddenly replaced by a moment of unity among the trainees who, until this point, have been described as rival groups who hate each other’s guts. The scene could have been genuinely powerful if it had been done in a way that showed some of the boys excited by the opportunity to smash things up, realising the destructive potential of their acting as one. As it is, they all join in immediately, motivated purely by the social conscience of the writer and director who have brought them to the screen.
The BFI programme note included interviews with Roy Minton and Margaret Matheson (like quite a few others in NFT2, I didn’t stay for the Q&A with them after the screening). Minton explains there that Mark Shivas was originally going to produce Scum but, when he read the script, pronounced it ‘too biased’ and left the project. Shivas, who died in 2008, had a distinguished career with the BBC. As the producer of The Six Wives of Henry VIII and one of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads series, he might be dismissed by ‘radicals’ as too safe a pair of hands, but he also got Dennis Potter’s Casanova made and screened in 1971 so he can’t easily be accused of avoiding controversy. No doubt he could also see when an excessively biased script was going to make for a poor piece of drama. He was spot on with Scum.
13 November 2009