TV review

  • Mad Jack (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Jack Gold (1970)

    From my late teens until my mid-twenties, Michael Jayston was my favourite actor.  I was a serious fan.  In 1976, I travelled down from Yorkshire to London to see him play the psychiatrist Martin Dysart, in Peter Shaffer’s Equus at the Albery Theatre.  (I still have the programme that Jayston autographed at the stage door – a place I’ve never hung around at for anyone since.)  The following year, aged twenty-two, I made a point of watching Jackanory because he was the reader.  I remember going over from York to Leeds for a one-off screening of the film Peter Hall made of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, in which Jayston was Teddy.  (I’d guess this was 1978-ish though the film was made five years previously.)  A few weeks after I moved to London in early 1980, I saw him and Maria Aitken as Elyot and Amanda in a production of Private Lives in Greenwich.  Jayston was a member of the RSC in the 1960s but I’d first seen him on television.  In the last series of the ATV drama The Power Game (which my mother loved) in 1969; as Rochester in the 1973 BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre; in the title role in Quiller (1975), a BBC spy series inspired by the character in The Quiller Memorandum (the series flopped and wasn’t recommissioned).  It was an earlier television role that had launched his very brief career in leading movie roles:  he was cast as Tsar Nicholas II in Franklin J Schaffner’s Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) after the producer, Sam Spiegel, had seen Jayston in Mad Jack, a BBC Wednesday Play directed by Jack Gold.

    Michael Jayston has continued to work regularly on stage and screen (and as the voice of commercials and audio books) but it’s decades since he’s had big parts in television, let alone cinema.  He was Peter Guillam to Alec Guinness’s George Smiley in the BBC’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy at the end of the 1970s.  A decade later, he was excellent as Neville Badger in Yorkshire Television’s comedy-drama A Bit of a Do, adapted from the book by David Nobbs.  It seems from YouTube that Jayston is a smallish star in the Doctor Who universe:  he played a character called the Valeyard in 1986.  But his television CV since the turn of the millennium reads largely like a tour of the usual ‘continuing-drama’ suspects – EastEnders, The Bill, Holby City, Casualty, Emmerdale, Doctors – with the odd appearance in relatively upmarket things like Foyle’s War.   It isn’t easy now to understand why I thought Jayston was such a big deal.  Watching a Midsomer Murders a couple of years ago, in which he was a dodgy vicar, I didn’t think:  what a waste – at his age, he should be doing King Lear.  Yet, when I saw the BFI were doing a Jack Gold retrospective, I urgently checked to see if Mad Jack was included.  Because (a) it made a difference in Michael Jayston’s career and (b) I never saw it at the time, Mad Jack developed in the 1970s an almost mythic significance for me – which it’s never quite lost.

    Mad Jack’s title refers to its protagonist Siegfried Sassoon, who acquired the nickname for his seemingly reckless courage under fire in the Great War trenches.  A Second Lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Sassoon was awarded the Military Cross in July 1916.  (The citation read: ‘For conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy’s trenches. He remained for 1½ hours under rifle and bomb fire collecting and bringing in our wounded. Owing to his courage and determination all the killed and wounded were brought in’.)  At the end of a spell of convalescent leave the following year, Sassoon declined to return to duty and sent a letter to his commanding officer explaining why.  Entitled ‘Finished with the War:  A Soldier’s Declaration’, the letter expressed Sassoon’s view ‘that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest’.  Tom Clarke’s script for Mad Jack focuses on the immediate aftermath of the letter, which was published in the press and read, by a sympathetic MP, to the House of Commons; and on Sassoon’s state of mind, as he waits to learn if his refusal to return to action will result in a court martial.

    This sixty-eight-minute piece has considerable historical interest as television drama.  The very explicit verbal articulation of the moral and political issues in Clarke’s script suggests a theatre piece but Jack Gold and the cameraman Nat Crosby ensure that Mad Jack, shot entirely on location, has the appearance of a movie.  Watching it at BFI, I didn’t get the sense – as I sometimes have had, watching studio-based TV dramas screened there – that I was looking at the people on the screen as larger, more exposed images than was originally intended.  The movements into flashback, as Sassoon remembers his time as a soldier, seem rather primitive now but Mad Jack tells a compelling story and it’s an interestingly unusual example of a Wednesday Play that dealt with historical rather than contemporary material.  Worth noting too that, while average audience numbers were declining by the time it was screened as part of the last Wednesday Play season (Play for Today began later in 1970), there would still have been an audience approaching five million for Mad Jack when it was broadcast – at 9.10 pm on BBC 1 on 4 February 1970.

    The play is built around Michael Jayston’s face and voice – and succeeds chiefly thanks to the impressive traction between their different kinds of expressiveness.   The voiceover includes excerpts from some of Siegfried Sassoon’s poems and Jayston reads these superlatively, with a fine, tense blend of controlled anger and despair.  In Sassoon’s conversations with other characters, Jayston is subtly eloquent.  His relatively miniaturist use of eyes, smile and facial muscles complements his speech perfectly:  conveying a great deal vocally and giving away little physically proves a highly effective means of increasing the expressiveness of the character’s face – we know from the voice how much more Sassoon is feeling and thinking than he’s showing.  Jayston was nominated for the equivalent of a Best Actor BAFTA[1] for his performance in Mad Jack (and for playing Beethoven in the BBC Biography slot later in 1970).  According to IMDB, this is the only screen work for which he’s ever been nominated for an award.

    Jayston gets good support from, among others, Michael Pennington, Clive Swift and that splendid character actor James Cossins; both the last two named, as might be guessed, play military top brass.  A tea-party gathering of cultural celebrities who supported Sassoon’s stand – Lady Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell, Lytton Strachey et al – is too caricatural (though Jonathan Cecil’s natural eccentricity makes him an amusing Strachey).  There’s overkill in a joke-patriotic music-hall sequence:  Ann Beach plays the soubrette with aplomb but Jack Gold doesn’t need to show the foolish faces of the lapping-it-up audience and have Sassoon, an unsmiling spectator of the show, express his thoughts in voiceover about the careless public appetite for war.  The authorities eventually decide not to court-martial Sassoon but instead to deem him unfit for service on medical grounds and arrange for him to be treated for shellshock.  It’s a strength of Mad Jack, in long retrospect, that it ends with Sassoon’s arrival at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh – thus avoiding substantial overlap with the period of Sassoon’s life that has since become better known in print and in cinema, through Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration (1991) and Gillies MacKinnon’s screen adaptation of it (in 1997).  Carl Davis’s sensitive, elegiac music is another of Mad Jack’s assets.

    The BFI programme note included two admiring morning-after reviews from 1970 – Peter Black’s in the Daily Mail was particularly good.  James Thomas in the Daily Express predicted that:

    ‘On the strength of work like this, the film industry will claim Mr Gold full time – and the sad thing is that he could certainly do many more people much more good by staying in TV.’

    There must have been a widespread feeling at the time that Thomas’s forecast would be an accurate one.  In the event, Jack Gold went on to make many more films for television, among them The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1972), Stocker’s Copper (also 1972, as a Play for Today), The Naked Civil Servant (1975) and  Goodnight Mister Tom (1998).  Gold, who died in 2015, did make cinema films but none had anything like the impact of his best-known television work.  Mad Jack may no longer be in the ‘best-known’ category but it’s surely up there with Gold’s best in terms of quality.  I’m so glad I’ve seen it at last – and seen Michael Jayston at his best too.

    Postscript

    On YouTube, you can watch Michael Jayston, who turned eighty last year, not only as an amiable interviewee about his services to Doctor Who but also in a short called The Man Who Choked, made in 2014.  Written and directed by Ross Jameson and produced for a budget of £5,000 under the auspices of Creative England, this eleven-minute film is a (virtual) two-hander.  Set in some kind of institution, it’s about an elderly man (Jayston) whose male nurse (Charlie Creed-Miles) appears to have discovered from a bedside diary the secrets of the patient’s criminal sexual past.  The nurse threatens to give the apparently bedridden man a taste of his own medicine.  In a pair of spectacles whose thick lenses distort his eyes, Charlie Creed-Miles somewhat overdoes the sadistic menace; the twist in the tale is a slick shocker; the whole thing borders on tasteless.  The Man Who Choked is worth watching, though, for the sight of Michael Jayston’s now lined face and the occasional sound of his still distinctive voice.

    30 July 2016

    [1] Prior to 1976, BAFTA was the Society of Film and Television Arts.

  • Scum (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    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

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