Caught on a Train

     I had intended to take a break from this blogging lark for a few days, but yesterday, purely by chance, I watched 'Caught on a Train' a BBC television play from 1980, part of the BBC2 Playhouse strand of one-off dramas that ran for 8 seasons between 1974 and 1983.  It was deeply impressive, so much that I've felt the need to commit my thoughts to 'paper'.

     'Caught on a Train' was written by Stephen Poliakoff, produced by Kenith Trodd, and directed by Peter Duffnell.  It was first aired 31st October 1980, and has been repeated a few times on the BBC, and is now available on BBC iplayer (if you live outside the UK you may have difficulties in accessing this remarkable play).  Score, I should add, by Mike Westbrook.
          The play, filmed entirely on location (much of it on the Nene Valley Railway nr Peterborough), is set in a Europe in the mist of The Cold War, haunted also by the fear of terrorism.  The 'Red Army Faction', aka 'The Baader-Meinhof Gang', were then active in the German Federal Republic.  In Italy, these were the 'Anni di Piombo' - 'The Years of Lead' - a perfect storm of extreme left and right violence.  Poliakov depicts the continent in decline; the train is filthy; there are football hooligans; the station in Frankfurt, and then the train, are crowded with young people silent, sullen and resentful; the authorities are jittery.  Into this continent of distrust and fear arrives the young Englishman, Peter (Michael Kitchen).  He is travelling by train from Ostend (in Belgium) to Linz (Austria) - he works in the publicity department of a London publishers and is on the way to a trade fair.  Peter is ambitious and 'full of himself'.  Not an entirely sympathetic character.

     At Ostend, when Peter and the other passengers, especially Lorrine (Wendy Raebeck) with whom Peter fancies his chances, have settled into their seats, an elderly Viennese lady, Frau Messner (Peggy Ashcroft) - stylish, neat, self-contained, quite dreadful - steps into the compartment, and proceeds to demand that Peter give up his seat even though it is not the seat she has booked, claiming; 'I don't think you understand. I have to sit by the window."  An uneasy relationship then develops between them that is the emotional centre of this film. Both actors sparkle, but I think the palm goes to Ashcroft.  One feels that her character always has the upper hand, that she has greater reserves of intellect and guile to draw upon. The narrative, keeping pace with the train, lurches towards disaster when Peter is escorted from the train by the Austrian police.

     At the end of the film Frau Messner sits alone in the restaurant car surrounded by detritus of the journey.  The wreck, one is tempted to say, of European culture at the end of 20th century.

'A Ghost Story for Christmas'

 

     Well, here in the UK the terrestrial broadcasters, BBC & ITV, have released their Christmas Day schedules and they are quite simply appalling.  Perhaps the worst I have yet seen.*  They have added a little edge to this post which was to be in the way of a celebration of a remarkable, but relatively short lived television tradition from the 1970s, making it somewhat more of a valediction.  If you haven't seen any of the original series, please make the effort to do so. They are excellent.  You may be able to find them on Youtube, but the whole collection is available from the BFI as a two box set.

     In its original iteration, 'A Ghost Story for Christmas' was broadcast at some point during the Christmas period on BBC1 from 1971 until 1978 with a different drama presented each year.  The director was Lawrence Gordon Clarke, and the producer (from 1973) was Rosemary Hill.  The first five productions were adaptations of work by that master of the ghost story M R James: 'The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral', 'A Warning to the Curious', 'Lost Hearts', 'The Treasure of Abbott Thomas', and finally in 1975 'The Ash Tree'. In the following year perhaps the most atmospheric of the series was aired, the Dickens short story 'The Signalman' in an adaptation by Andrew Davies.

     The final two dramas in the that first iteration were not literary adaptations but written specifically for the series: 'Stigma' in 1977, by Clive Exton and 'The Ice House', 1978, by John Bowen; the latter not directed by Lawrence Gordon Clarke, who had left the BBC in the previous year, but by Derek Lister.  Both have contemporary settings, and are not really ghost stories as such, and whatever their merits they lack the atmosphere of the previous dramas. 
     Those first six dramas, often cited by critics as examples of so-called 'Folk Horror', are quite remarkable for their ability to conjure up a certain atmosphere, a certain sensibility, and to do so out of limited resources. As Gordon Clarke said of them: the 'focus [was] on suggestion. The aim, they say, is to chill rather than shock. Partly because television is not best suited to carrying off big-screen pyrotechnics but mainly because they want to keep faith with the notion of a ghost story in its literary rather than cinematic tradition'.  There was, of course, no CGI in those days, and quite frankly they are all the better for it.  All were shot 16mm film on location, at some time in the midst of an English Autumn.  All these things may seem trivial enough, but they really are not.  God, after all, is in the details.  In addition, the actors are really top-notch, e.g. Denholm Elliot and Bernard Lloyd in 'The Signalman', and excellent use is made of Classical music throughout.  In all, considered filmmaking at its best.  And very northern.

     In 1978/79 James Gordon Clarke went to Yorkshire television and made a very atmospheric adaptation of M R James's 'The Casting of the Runes' set in contemporary Leeds.  It starred Jan Francis and Ian Cuthbertson. (We have encountered Cuthbertson before when discussing Nigel Kneale's 'The Stone Tape'.) I believe it can still be found on 'YouTube'.  It too is well worth the watch.

* To clarify, having now seen the Christmas edition of the 'Radio Times' the BBC1 & ITV1 are indeed terrible.  The BBC2 schedule is a much better bet being a mixture of films, ballet and Morecambe & Wise.  What more could one want?

'Metro-land'

Every single little dream

Is a rafter or a shingle

We can paint the house with laughter

When we build a little home.

It's not a palace nor a poorhouse,

But the rent is absolutely free,

This is my house but its your house,

If you'll come and live with me.

With a carpet on the floor,

Made of buttercups and clover,

All our troubles will be over,

When we build a little home.

     Earlier this year, the 26th of February to be exact, the BBC quietly marked the fiftieth anniversary of that wonderful documentary 'Metro-land' made by that admirable combination of the then Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman and producer & director Edward Mirzoeff. The result, as one would expect, is a delight. For A N Wilson, Betjeman's biographer, it was 'too good to be described simply as a 'programme''.

     I've outlined before, in my post about their 1974 documentary 'A Passion for Churches', the history of the Betjeman & Mirzoeff's collaboration. (That really does sound like the name of a firm of solicitors or even, maybe, a rather posh shoe shop!); but just to recap. The two of them began working together on three programmes BBC2 documentary series 'A Bird's Eye View' in the late 60s, and 'Metro-land' represents the continuity of their collaboration and, one must feel, their friendship. 

     'Metro-land' was, apparently, conceived (in a very civilised fashion) over lunch in Wheelers, the well-known London fish restaurant. Originally the documentary was intended to be an exploration of the suburb in general but it was decided to concentrate on one area of suburbia in NW London that was served by the Metropolitan line out of Baker St.  This was chosen not only as a sort of paradigm of suburban living, but because of the unique way the suburbs in that part of the capital developed in the interwar period with the railway company effectively acting as property developer. (It was the advertising department of the Metropolitan Railway who coined the term 'Metro-land'.) Compared to 'A Passion for Churches' this is a straightforward linear narrative. Sir John takes the train from Baker St tube station to the end of the Metropolitan line in distant Buckinghamshire, stopping off along the route for a little exploration, both historical and contemporary. And a lot is crammed into those 50 odd minutes. Our first call is at an earlier suburb: St John's Wood. It can, in fact, claim to be one of the earliest, dating from the end of the 18th century - all villas strung out along tree lined avenues. Rus in urbe. We then proceed to stop off at Neasden, Harrow, Wembley, Moor Park before we come to the end of the line at Amersham. We visit Grimsdyke (1870-72), at Harrow Weald, by Richard Norman Shaw; the great Baroque house Moor Park which is now the club house of a golf club; the Orchard (1900) by Voysey at Chorley Wood and High and Over (1929-31) by Amyas Connell. We meet the man behind the Neasden Nature Trail and the chap with a full scale cinema organ in his house.  And although, as I've said, a lot is squeezed into those fifty minutes, the pace is calm and unhurried. The camera is left to linger in telling ways.
     I couldn't help but feel, watching Sir John standing in one of the avenues of, I think, Harrow Garden Village which was the Metropolitan railway's Flagship development that 1973 is a long way away from today. What has become of those neat front gardens, bursting with roses? Probably paved over for extra parking. If not I imagine the roses have long gone for the sake of easy maintenance and the wooden window frames painted in such jaunty colours lost to upvc. 

     Indeed they have.

     One of the joys of this documentary and, indeed, its contemporaries, is that it contains no introduction as such - Betjeman does not tell us he's 'on a journey'. As the writer Gareth Roberts wrote in a recent article for 'The Spectator' an awful lot of programmes these days are essentially all, or nearly all, padding. It really is amazing how the producers of, say, 'Strictly' or 'The Masked Singer' manage to stretch things out as they do, rather like a 1940s housewife eeking out a meagre meat ration. I remember watching a recent documentary about gardens - by a well known tv gardener - and there were three consecutive introductions. He was on that 'journey' as he repeated told us.  With 'Metroland' we just jump straight in.  The audience is treated, properly, as adults.  Sink or swim.  Neither do Betjeman or Mirzoeff feel the need to repeat ad infinitum what they are doing.  And neither is Sir John vain enough to make the documentary about himself.  I can think of a number of presenters of BBC arts/history documentaries, all male I might add, who really are demons for this. 

     The suburbs and the 'semi' (the semi-detached house) have come for a lot of criticism over time some of it valid and some it just downright snobbery; the most obvious example here in the UK is the play 'Abigail's Party' of 1977, which the playwright Dennis Potter described in a 'The Sunday Times' review as "based on nothing more than rancid disdain, for it is a prolonged jeer, twitching with genuine hatred, about the dreadful suburban tastes of the dreadful lower middle classes".  For good measure, try this example, which I inadvertently and fortuitously found last night while flicking through a small book on interior design* published by 'Good Housekeeping' magazine in the early 70s:

'Sophisticating your semi

   Moving into a 1930s 'semi' is enough to make anyone's ideas shrivel up on the spot. It is daunting to know all the neighbours have got floral carpet in the halls, three-piece suites in the living rooms, and dressing tables in the upstairs bay windows. But there's no reason why you shouldn't go out on a limb and create a very sophisticated interior with, say, bitter chocolate carpet in the hall and up the stairs (perhaps with off-white walls, plenty of modern prints, stainless steel spot-lights and, if you can, afford it, some new dead-simple banisters) With modern seating units in the living room, grouped into a square 'conversation' area, instead of set at an angle around a ghastly mottled fireplace. With built-in storage in your bedroom instead of the cumbersome and space-consuming wardrobe, chest of drawers, and dressing table trio. And with crisp roller blinds at the bay window instead of frilly, knickerbocker drapes.'

    Well, there writes somebody eager to escape their upbringing, and no mistake. At least the author has a strong opinion; read 'Good Housekeeping' these days and your brain will turn to mush.

     Oh, I suppose it is easy to mock the suburb and the 'semi', and indeed there has been a long history of that too from 'Diary of a Nobody' to the satirical magazine 'Private Eye' with its one time near obsession with Neasden. And then there the numerous sit-coms set in suburbia whether it's 'George and Mildred' or 'The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin'. The best, perhaps, was 'The Good Life'. All that said the suburban type, which was originally developed with the slightly elitist Garden Suburb and was popularized and commercialized with the spread of Metro-land, has turned out to be a particularly successful and popular urban type - certainly a damn sight more successful and popular than that proposed by the Post-War professionals. And I have to admit at this point to a certain ambiguity: rather liking the houses (at their best they can be rather good) having grown up in one not in the orbit of some British city but a small pretty nondescript Lincolnshire market town, but hating the suburban form. I think I would find it too quiet a place for me to live. I need more human interaction. 
     And then there's the issue of style. The suburban-semi is based on the Vernacular architecture of the southeast of England, as reinterpreted by the Arts and Crafts architects such as Sir Edwin Lutyens, or the earlier Queen Anne and Ye Olde Englishe Revival such as Richard Norman Shaw.  I suppose, if one was being particularly mean, you could call it a process of bastardisation. The problem for me is that with the success of Metro-land the semi, as a sort outlier of a particular vernacular architecture tradition, began its inexorable march across the UK and nowhere was safe. Tile hanging, red tiled roofs, pebble dash (that is wet dash) spread like a rash over the entire country. There are to be found here in South-west Wales. Local vernacular materials and traditions tended to be ignored. At the least the builder of my old house, who was my great grandfather, provided it with a pantile roof in the local tradition.

Steam took us onward,

Through the ripening fields,

Ripe for development,

Where the landscape yields,

Clay for warm bricks,

Timber for post and rail,

Through Amersham to Aylesbury and the vale.

In these wet fields the railway didn't pay,

The Metro stops in Amersham today.

*'Doing Up Your Home', written by Shirley Green; part of the 'Good Housekeeping Family Library' series, General Editor Isabel Sutherland. 

Philip Larking Centenary

     On the centenary of the birth of the poet Philip Larkin, just a short post to share this wonderful clip of Sir John Betjeman talking to Larkin for the BBC arts programme Monitor in 1964. Betjeman's reading of 'Here' is just superb. Larkin (1922-1985) is a poet I have warmed to more over the years. Anyway, enjoy before he's cancelled.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Coe11pgoj8E

'A Passion for Churches'

     'I was eight or nine years old when I used to come here, to the Norfolk Broads on the river Bure, sailing and rowing with my father and I think it was the outline of that church tower, of Bylaugh against the sky, which gave me a passion for churches so that every church I've been past since I've wanted to stop and look in.'

     Back in 2015, you may remember, the bf and I went on holiday to Horsey in flattest N E Norfolk. On our last full day of holiday we went out into the Broads, walking along the Fleet Dyke until we stood opposite the scanty remains of St Benet's Abbey. A small homage to Sir John Betjeman, the Poet Laureate, and the documentary film maker Edward Mirzoeff and their collaboration of 1974 the BBC documentary film: 'A Passion for Churches' (subtitled 'A celebration of the C of E with John Betjeman'). Previously they had worked together on three episodes of 'A Bird's Eye View' between 1969 & 1971, and most famously 'Metro-land' of 1973. Their final work together was, I believe, 'The Queens Realm - A Prospect of England', 'an aerial anthology with verse chosen by Sir John Betjeman'. It consisted of clips garnered from 'A Bird's Eye View' series accompanied by music and poetry read by the likes of Janet Suzman and Michael Horden; the whole thing tied together Betjeman's narration. It formed part of the BBC's cultural offerings for the Silver Jubilee Year of 1977, along with Huw Wheldon's 10 part series 'Royal Heritage' which Wheldon co-wrote with the historian J H Plumb. They certainly knew how to celebrate a jubilee back in the day. In 1979 Mirzoeff collaborated with Betjeman's daughter Candida Lycett Green on documentary film 'The Front Garden'.

     Anyway, my first encounter with 'A Passion for Churches' was in 1984, when, following the death of Sir John, I caught a glimpse of this wonderful film on the BBC tribute to the late Poet Laureate. There were, I think, three sequences shown and two have remained with me: there was the visit to the 'Golden Church' of Lound (in Suffolk, but part of the Diocese of Norwich) where between 1912 & 1914 the church architect Sir J N Comper worked his magic, and, more importantly to our family, the Mother's Union garden party in the cloisters of Norwich cathedral, where we believed we could espy my paternal grandmother amongst the crowd. 

     Judging by Eddie Mirzoeff's account in The Oldie the filming process seems to have been a picaresque affair, with an ever shifting cast of characters, such as Penelope Betjeman and the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, popping up and needing to be dealt with.  However the result of the collaboration of poet and film maker is something quite sophisticated and complex. The nearest equivalent would be a novel by Barbara Pym where the profound is both hidden and revealed to us through the medium of the domestic and mundane. The churches seem to be mainly chosen from N and NE Norfolk. The churches to the W and SW are largely omitted, though this partly because the churches of the Norfolk fenland are in the Diocese of Ely. 

     The title itself is a pun of a gentle sort, referring to both Betjeman's love of church architecture and the passion of Christ - that his death and burial; the implication being that the churches themselves were undergoing a death, or martyrdom (the Latin passio is used to describe the martyr's death), as faith was beginning in earnest 

     'its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating, to the breath of the night-wind'.

     Perhaps the best way of understanding this film is to think of it as cable or yarn made of a number of individual threads entwining together: the celebration of the church architecture of the diocese  and a plea for conservation; the celebration of the parish life of the diocese - PCC meetings, church fetes and the like, in which we see the preparations for Easter. Connected with that there is a linear exploration of the spiritual journey of the individual parishioner through the 'Passage Rites' such as Baptism and Marriage, the sacraments by which we participate in the death and resurrection of Christ, through the portal of death to the resurrection - of which the joy of Easter Day, with which the film ends, is a foretaste.

*  *  *  *  *

     I think a lot about Norfolk these days - that land of lost content - from this Infernal City that is a place of of exile and a place of eclipse. The very gutter. 
     I love the county. My paternal grandparents were from Foulsham, my maternal grandmother from Melton Constable. (My maternal grandfather was the odd-one-out here being a Yellow Belly.) Growing up I used to visit so many times. Hopefully I will return soon.

Into my heart an air that kills  
  From yon far country blows:  
What are those blue remembered hills,  
  What spires, what farms are those?  
  
That is the land of lost content,
  I see it shining plain,  
The happy highways where I went  
  And cannot come again.

Holiday VII: St Benet's Abbey and the Ranworth Rood Screen

   On the final full day of our holiday we went west into the Broads.  We parked up at the rather suburban looking South Walsham Broad and walked along the Fleet Dike to see the ruins of St Benet's Abbey.  The remains of abbey were a favourite with Romantic artists such as Cotman, and were included in John Betjeman's 1974 documentary, 'A Passion For Churches', which was as much about Norfolk as it was the diocese of Norwich. (Produced and directed by Edward Mirzoeff, who was also responsible for Betjeman's 'Metro-land' of 1973.) Quite good reasons then for a long, cold muddy trek into the marshes!

     "I hear a deep sad undertow in bells which calls the Middle Ages back to me. From Prime to Compline the monastic hours echo in bells along the windy marsh and fade away. They leave me to the ghosts which seem to look from this enormous sky upon the ruins of a grandeur gone. St Benet's Abbey by the river Bure, now but an arch way and a Georgian mill. A lone memorial of the cloistered life."

   We then stopped off at the 'Fairhaven Woodland and Water Gardens', the creation of Major Henry Boughton.  Major Boughton was the younger brother of the 1st Lord Fairhaven, who lived at Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire mentioned elsewhere in this blog and where the bf works.

   Our final visit of the day was to Ranworth and one of the great pieces of English late Medieval art, the Ranworth Rood Screen.  I'm tempted to call it a prime example, along with the Despencer Retable, of the 1st Norwich School; certainly it was painted locally.  The importance lies not only in its design but that so many of the painted panels survived the Reformation in such good nick.  A marvel.

Cambridgeshire Open Studios 2014

     We left Wales on Friday, but instead of returning straight home I spent the weekend with the bf on the Isle of Ely.  One of of my favourite things each year is the 'Cambridgeshire Open Studios' which takes place in July.  So after a lazy Saturday we spent Sunday in the car and visited four studios in and around Ely plus Angela Mellor's studio/gallery which also open but not part of the scheme.

   Angela Mellor is a ceramicist working in bone china and producing the most delicate if not ethereal objects.  Her beautiful gallery space too is worth a visit for its own sake.
     We then drove to Little Downham to two studios: firstly Andy English, and then Phil Treble.  Andy English is a wood engraver and illustrator and produces wonderful things like this 'Prospect of Ely which was designed, engraved, printed and bound by Andy himself in a limited edition of 100.  He uses a Victorian Albion Press.

     Andy English works in what originally was his garage as does Phil Treble.  Phil is a letterpress printer, though during the week he designs stuff for the internet.    

     Corinne Blandin-Eagling does not work in a garage or a shed; she works in a bright yellow double-decker bus which is parked in her back garden in Barway. "You're aboard, You're aboard.  You're aboard with the Double Deckers..."  Barway is a remote place, a 'dead-end', with a small village green and old houses; at the far end of the village is a wonderful old hump-backed bridge and a delicious view of Ely Cathedral.  I hope she won't be insulted if I say that it's all wonderfully eccentric chez elle.  Corinne does a wide range of courses including pottery.
     Finally we drove to Burwell and the hidden away studio of James Ryder, letter cutter, who trained at the Kindersley workshop.  The studio is literary up the garden path - possibly the best commute I know.  It was Phil Treble who printed James's wonderfully tactile business cards.

     Heading back to Sutton we caught the last few minutes of Jarvis Cocker's evocative documentary on 'Betjeman's Banana Blush' - the album of late Poet Laureate reading his work to musical accompaniment by Jim Parker.  The album was produced by Hugh Murphy.  It was released in 1974 on the Charisma label.    All rather eccentric, and quite, quite fantastic.  I urge you to go and get a copy or listen to both it and the documentary on-line.  It's well worth it.  Betjeman, I think, was the last Poet Laureate to really connect with people (that is usually prefaced with 'ordinary', but I'll dispense with that slightly lit snobbish term). But enough said about that.

Angela Mellor                    www.angelamellor.com
Andy English                    www.andyenglish.com
Phil treble                          www.muttonsandnuts.co.uk
Corinne Blandin-Eagling www.corinneblandin.com
James Ryder                     www.jamesryderlettercutter.co.uk