TV review

Christopher Morahan (1966)

John Hopkins made his name as the writer of dozens of Z Cars episodes between 1962 and 1964, but he’d been the author of plenty more television drama before Talking to a Stranger, the series of four, interconnected plays, for which he’s best remembered.  (Hopkins died in 1998 at the age of sixty-seven.)  Screened on consecutive Sunday evenings in October 1966 as part of BBC2’s Theatre 625 offering, Talking to a Stranger is widely regarded as a TV landmark.  George Melly, the television critic for the Observer at the time, described it in 1968 as ‘the first authentic masterpiece written directly for television’.  I must have seen clips in television history documentaries but I’d never watched any of the plays in their entirety (although they have been repeated a couple of times in the decades since their original transmission).  I was excited to find out that BFI would be screening the plays this month, over the course of a single Saturday afternoon and evening session (with three intervals) – as the centrepiece of the programme celebrating the television work of Christopher Morahan, whose later credits include producing, and directing several episodes of, The Jewel in the Crown.

 First and foremost, the BBC deserves undying admiration and gratitude for commissioning Talking to a Stranger.  John Hopkins was to write four ninety-minute dramas.   All would cover a traumatic weekend in the lives of a single family – mother, father and their adult son and daughter.  The individual plays would focus on the perspective of each one of these four main characters in turn.  The BBC’s sponsorship of Hopkins’s project – of what the Corporation nowadays calls ‘Original British Drama’ (although it rarely is) – is a powerful illustration of why, in the 1960s, TV writers, both established and aspiring, were seized by the creative opportunities of the medium.   Talking to a Stranger could be said to have paved the way for the likes of Dennis Potter to branch out from individual plays to innovative drama series – to that extent, the significance of Hopkins’s plays is unarguable.  Sad to say that, for me, they turned out to be unwatchable too.  I got no further than the end of the second play – and that far only in order to confirm whether it was father or mother who dies suddenly on the Sunday evening.  (It was clear from the end of the first play that one of them had.)

Ted Stevens (Maurice Denham) and Sarah (Margery Mason), his wife of many years, live in a semi-detached house in suburban London.  Their son Alan (Michael Bryant) has his own family although we don’t see his wife and children[1].  The Stevenses’ daughter Teresa (Judi Dench), known as Terry, has had a turbulent relationship with her mother since her teenage years and been virtually estranged from both parents since her short-lived marriage to a black African immigrant.   The two immediate catalysts for the emotive showdowns among the main characters are Alan’s announcement that he’s been offered a new job which, if he accepts it, will mean emigrating to Australia; and an unexpected and unusual visit to the family home by Terry, whose mother immediately and correctly suspects that her de-married daughter is pregnant.   Like many domestic (large and small) screen dramas of the mid-twentieth century, Talking to a Stranger is based on the idea of a family, especially the parents, keeping up appearances and a loose-cannon son or daughter demolishing routines of determinedly maintained propriety and emotional reticence.  A problem with what Hopkins has written (in this genre, not a unique problem) is that the premise of familial tensions unresolved and resentments festering over many years is repeatedly contradicted by what’s on screen.  While the main action is concentrated on a single Sunday in the present, Hopkins makes extensive use of flashbacks – nearly all of which demonstrate that yelling home truths at each other is a longstanding Stevens family tradition.

Hopkins’s scheme allows little scope for development of the characters and their relationships with each other.  This deficit is filled by the use of traumatic backstory, melodramatic incident and colossal histrionic effort on the part of the cast.  For example, it’s clear from the first play, with Terry at its centre, that her father has always tended to indulge her:  Ted Stevens still regards his now thirty-year-old daughter as his little girl.  It’s clear too that Ted is a henpecked husband, unavailing in peacemaking between his wife and daughter.  The focus switches in the second play to Ted’s viewpoint but there’s already not much left to say about his feelings for Terry or Sarah.   It’s a matter of using flashbacks:  to Terry’s early adulthood, to show Ted’s love for her being put to the test and him found wanting; or, more distantly, to the early days of his marriage (to reveal his wife’s horror of sex – unsurprising, given what we’ve already gathered about Sarah) and, beyond that, to Ted’s experiences in the Great War.  Hopkins keeps upping the ante in demonstrating Ted’s feelings of disappointment, frustration and hopelessness.  It’s a startling moment when this well-meaning, ineffectual man tells Sarah simply, ‘I hate you’.  It’s bizarrely unconvincing when he then explains the reason why – that his wife is younger than him and will still be alive when he’s dead.  Ted goes on to say this is why he hates nearly everyone he sees.  Hopkins introduces this speech purely for shock effect (and immediately ironic effect:  the unfailingly contrary Sarah commits suicide a few screen minutes later to prove her husband wrong).  Ted’s florid outburst comes across merely as John Hopkins’s idea of what an elderly man might feel.  It doesn’t connect to anything else we’ve seen or heard of this particular man – to, say, the young soldier who survived the trenches and vowed to make the most of every day of life he was given once the war was over.

I found myself looking away as Maurice Denham did this monologue – pretty futile as I could still hear him.  I recoiled not because Denham didn’t deliver the speech expertly but because of what he was being asked to do – and the conviction he showed in doing it.  Maurice Denham was a good actor, usually in supporting roles.  You can feel his enthusiasm for the more extensive, emotionally violent part he has here but the actor’s enthusiasm is more affecting than his character.  Margery Mason, with her sad eyes and querulous voice, seemed to corner the market in elderly suburban scolds in the TV years that followed Talking to a Stranger.  This makes it hard to avoid seeing her characterisation of Sarah as practised though it may have been a new departure for Mason at the time.   (In real life, she did survive Maurice Denham, although both lived to a mighty age.  Denham died in 2002, in his ninety-third year; Mason in 2014, a few months after celebrating her hundredth birthday.)  As the son, Michael Bryant impresses with his relative quietness, at least in the Terry play, raising hopes that the hidden feelings premise might mean something in Alan’s case.  In the Ted play, however, Alan starts to speak up.  What’s unconvincing about his doing so is the lack of residue from his outbursts in the scenes that follow.  His candour and its effects are put to one side:  John Hopkins is artificially ensuring that Alan doesn’t overplay his hand at this stage and is left with some cards for his part of the drama, the third play of the four.  (Hopkins has to do this since Alan is too young to have fought in a World War or to see death as just around the corner.) Talking to a Stranger is of historical importance not only as a form of television drama but as a record of an early starring TV role for Judi Dench.  (Her main cinema role in the 1960s came in Four in the Morning, the year before Talking to a Stranger.)  She is extraordinary as Terry:  you admire her inventiveness and how her empathy and artistry can often create a semblance of truth.  But Dench’s vibrancy is excessive:  there are times when she seems to be detonating, rather than delivering, her lines.  And there are so many lines!

I don’t think my negative opinion of Talking to a Stranger is a simple matter of its seeming ‘dated’ half a century on.  The piece’s shortcomings relate more to what television drama was conceived as in the 1960s – and how this reflected widespread (and enduring) cultural assumptions that theatre was intrinsically superior to cinema.  Television was still, of course, a relatively new and unsophisticated medium.  It could be argued that its technical limitations made it pointless for a TV drama to try to look like a film drama.  But those limitations also enabled television plays to occupy a middle ground between theatre and film and, when it suited, to nudge closer to the stage than to the screen – that is, to art rather than entertainment.  This snobbery didn’t attach to weekly series like Z Cars but it’s evident in the conception and writing of this ‘important’ drama.  The flashbacks sometimes look primitive compared with today but Christopher Morahan’s technique pays off in at least one important respect.  The timeframe of Hopkins’s plays means that a scene from one will almost inevitably be repeated in another.  Morahan shot such scenes from different angles in the different plays – a simple, effective way of realising the different viewpoints of the stories.  John Hopkins, however, is using television to ape theatre – the Stevens family is a Eugene O’Neill family in English suburbia.  And Hopkins does so without taking account of the difference between experiencing these characters from the back of the stalls and experiencing them in your living-room armchair.  For all the skill and commitment of the main players in Talking to a Stranger, their acting is too much:  their characters never stop talking, their words leave nothing to the imagination, and the audience is on the receiving end at very close quarters.  (This effect may have been magnified by seeing the plays in NFT2 rather than on a television screen but I can’t think it would have been much reduced watching Talking to a Stranger at home, even in the days when television screens were much smaller than they are now.)

The script, although there’s yards of it, is light on persuasive detail.  Ted and Alan are given matching office jobs, defined purely in terms of their soul-destroying dullness.  This is in spite of the fact that Alan’s job is meant to be relatively high-powered – so that Ted (who’s now retired) can lament his own lack of opportunities compared with his son’s.  The racial element in the plays is disingenuous.  Terry Stevens’s marriage to Leonard Ngana (Calvin Lockhart) is used to illustrate the narrow-mindedness of her parents, her mother in particular.  The implication is that this narrow-mindedness is (like the mother’s fear of sex) typical of people of the Stevenses’ class and time.  While this may be accurate, John Hopkins doesn’t take the trouble to explore the particular impact on a family of an interracial marriage – which was still unusual in the 1960s.  Although the following year’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner isn’t a good movie, the situation that it presents – of a white couple who are professed liberals struggling to accept their daughter’s marriage to a black man – has more dramatic bite than that of parents who are simply racially prejudiced.  Besides, Hopkins exoticises Leonard to the hilt.  He’s fortunate that Calvin Lockhart is very good in the part:  although Leonard’s rant in his and Terry’s squalid Barons Court bedsit is an obvious piece of writing, Lockhart makes Leonard’s outburst deeply felt.  He also has the advantage over the main actors of not having to deliver big speeches repeatedly.  Other supporting players are not so well-served.  The visit of Gordon (Emrys James), who was at school with Alan, to the Stevens home at the same time as Terry turns up there, is a blatantly mechanical means of unleashing reminiscence and making things happen between the family members.  A final quibble:  why does Terry, as she walks towards her parents’ house on a Sunday afternoon, pass a playground full of kids in school uniform?

16 January 2016

[1] They’re unseen, that this, in the first two of the four plays – a qualification that obviously applies throughout this note.