(UK 1962 60m) DVD1/2
Aka. Elgar – Portrait of a Composer
We walk like ghosts
p Humphrey Burton d Ken Russell w Ken Russell, Huw Wheldon ph Kenneth Higgins ed Alan Tyrer m Edward Elgar
Peter Brett, Rowena Gregory, George McGrath, Huw Wheldon (narrator),
It seems strange to think that when Ken Russell’s groundbreaking and career pointing dramatised documentary went out in 1962, the lives of composers on screen was limited to cinematic biopics such as the awful A Song to Remember and Gance’s moody Un Grand Amour de Beethoven. Half a century on we can look back and see it as a watershed; without it we wouldn’t have had the other Russell composer pieces on large and small screen that would occupy most of his work for the next decade or so.
Elgar was different to what would follow. The Debussy Film had the irreverence that would characterise, and to some flaw, The Music Lovers and Lisztomania, while Song of Summer – Deliustook a look at the composer that would look ahead to his Mahler. Elgar was more than any of these, but watching it fifty years on, with its strait-laced account of a man unable to make a name for himself in pompous late Victorian and Edwardian England, it reads remarkably like the spoof documentaries so common today. What it succeeds in doing is dextrously mixing still photos and newsreel and early film footage with silent tableaux recreations, all accompanied by the great man’s music to create a symphonic melding of music and visuals, including rolling tracking shots of Elgar as a boy on a pony or a man on a boneshaker moving through the Malverns. It not only gets to the heart of Elgar, to whom, as Wheldon’s narration tells us, “musicis in the air…all around me”, but in doing so he also succeeds in creating a quite literal family album of Britain at the height of its imperial power and at the start of its imperial decline. The composer is seen to be an artist in tune with the mood of the time, but in a country whose hierarchy are out of step with it, a composer who is feted in Germany but not at home, and who came to taste a bitter irony in the years that followed, almost prophesying the cataclysmic doom to come with the death of Edward VII. Here was a man who wrote the most patriotic of all British pieces, only to loathe what it had come to represent, abhor the idea of his country at war with the country he held such affection for and gratitude towards, given honours that meant little to him and which he had buried with his wife in her coffin.
Elgar was always the outsider, the Catholic tradesman’s son who kept being refused admission into polite circles until it became impossible to keep him out. All the great pieces drift by as if in a dream – The Dream of Garontius, the Cello Concerto that may have been written to be performed half a century later by another unhappy soul, the immortal Enigma variations and those Pomp and Circumstance marches which conjure images from everything from Yes, Minister to A Clockwork Orange to Donald Duck on Noah’s Ark. Other aspects are narrated in a way to make one think Michael Palin and Terry Jones had them in the back of their mind when writing Ripping Yarns (composing in a major-general’s bell tent, chemistry experiments in a back shed). In others it’s impossible not to be moved by the bitter irony of thatmarch accompanied by walking wounded in the Great War. Russell’s command of his subject so sublime as to make the emotions soar like the kite Elgar flies over the Malverns, so that if it’s been copied to death since, it still remains as fresh as an English rose garden in May. The immediate temptation on finishing it is to seek out the other Russell composer pieces done for the BBC’s Monitor and Omnibus. But first take a detour to another BBC enfant terrible, Alan Clarke’s Penda’s Fen, and then to Tony Palmer’s film about Purcell. The last act of that flawed piece, combining Dryden and Purcell, so illustrates the feeling Russell had first captured thirty years previously, one can see the dying Elgar, sitting up in his bed to look at Worcester Cathedral, murmuring “England, my England.”
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From the Golden Age of British TV (1960-1991), alas,they could never make anything approaching these now days, now that they’ve been so utterly gutted.
Superb review.
Interesting dates you have there. Out of curiosity, where did you come up with them? Honestly asking. For me, I’ve always considered British television’s golden age to begin with Talking To A Stranger.
Adam, those dates are a personal reference point. It was the instigation of the Canadian Sydney Newman at ITV and Sir Hugh Carton Green as the Director General of the BBC. Newman overhauled the anthology play with ‘Armchair Theatre’ during 1958 to 1962 on the ITV network, 1960 produced the BBC’s ‘An Age of Kings’. The single play is, for me, at the heart of creativity and a barometer of the life blood of the creative impulse. The BBC poached Sydney Newman and he created their provocative series of plays, the legendary ‘The Wednesday Play/ Play for Today’ (1964-1984). It was like having the US ‘Playhouse 90’ run for 20 years rather than the 4 or 5 it did. America’s TV anthologies produced as a by-product ‘The Twilight Zone’ and ‘The Untouchables’, the films ‘Marty’ and ’12 Angry Men’. Britain’s produced ‘Callan’, ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’, ‘Out of the Unknown’ (the greatest SF effort of English telly of the ’60s), ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’, the works of Dennis Potter and Ken Loach, and such celebrated singletons as ‘The War Game’, ‘Cathy Go Home’, ‘Up the Junction’, ‘Son of Man’, ‘Our Day Out’, ‘Edna, the Inebriate Woman’, ‘Home’, ‘Abigail’s Party’, Blue Remembered Hills’, ‘Penda’s Fen’, ‘Nuts in May’, ect, ect. Even without a regular anthology strand, the Beeb still produced Peter Watkins’ ‘Culloden’ in 1964 as a stand alone drama.
It wasn’t only in drama plays that the anthology format excelled but in comedy too. The BBC’s ‘Comedy Playhouse’ (1961-1975) gave birth to ‘Steptoe and Son’ (1962), ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ & ‘Up Pompeii!’ were among the 27 series that spun off into series of their own. Even ‘Porridge’ was spun from an anthology strand.
It was Newman who set up the BBC’s Drama Department into three distinct strands; Plays, Serials and ongoing Series.
Even the programs ostensibly dedicated to the arts or religion would produce the Ken Russell films as an experiment, such as ‘Elgar’ (1962) for ‘Monitor’ (1958 -1965), or ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ (1968) for ‘Omnibus’ (1968-2003) strand, and the TV version of ‘Shadowlands’ (1986) for the religious ‘Everyman’ strand. All from the ground up, surprises that no one could have anticipated.
That’s a small list and doesn’t go into the continuing dramas produced by ITV and the BBC or even more rewardingly the numerous classic serials produced by the networks.
Much like the demise of the Studio System, there were three or four different elements and one or major ones; the decree divorcing the studios from their theatres, the suburbanisation of the populace from urban areas and most damaging the advent of TV.
What killed the Golden Age of British TV?
An ill omen was the creation of C4 in 1984, which made a big hueha of producing films rather than multi-camera studio drama, micro budget films that got a limited cinema release and then were shown on the network. Most all but forgotten. And a descent into low-brow sleaziness in its desire to be dangerous and different. It’s best aspect were repeats of classic TV shows that hadn’t seen the light of day in a generation or two and seasons of classic films curated by Leslie Halliwell.
The major disaster were the sacking of Alisdair Milne as Director General of the BBC in 1988 to be replaced by John Birt, who basically privatised the BBC through the back door by out-scouring virtually all production to outside business. So now they had to pay private companies and their share holders for product that they had produced themselves. Rather than having a bustling and thriving production units where writers, directors and producers might have connected and inspired each other, they were now atomised into outside units that never met. The person with power became the commissioning editor, a Stalinist top down form of creativity that stultified. All individuality and originality and surprise coming from the anthologies strands disappeared. Birt had the same effect that John Davis had on J. Arthur Rank and the break-up of the greatest period of film-making in England. Or of James ‘The Smiling Cobra’ Aubrey had on the demise of the first Golden Age of American TV.
A stunning blow of equal weight was wielded by a war instigated by Margaret Thatcher on both the BBC and ITV, leading to what is considered by some of her ministers as the worst Bill they ever produced. The Broadcasting Bill of 1991 gave the highest bidder for the ITV franchises the con tracts to run the regional areas. The was a backlash for some kind of quality threshold, some very small skirmishes won but the war was lost. Eventually all the regional companies were consolidated in one bland corporation called Carlton ITV. That’s one of the reason why we don’t see any more productions in the manner of ‘Brideshead Revisited’ or ‘The Jewell in the Crown’, adventurous production made by Granada for the Network as a whole. I can only remember two great works in 25 years since that bill, ‘My Boy Jack’ and and a series of historical documentaries such as ‘The British Empire in Colour’.
The fourth blow was advent of Satellite/Cable TV, which had no threshold of quality whatsoever and had no demands on it to actually produce anything whatsoever. It atomised the audiences. The BBC closed, over time, it’s Children’s, Arts, Documentary and Religious departments. All black and white films were off the channel – whole generations have grown up not knowing who Laurel and hardy or Charlie Chaplin were, let alone Clark Gable or Cary Grant. Foreign films no longer got shown on BBC2. Old TV shows that once gave of frisson of excitement when repeated at the dead of night were gone too, replaced by rolling news of the whatever miserable story was/is doing the rounds. they are available on DVD, but what they don’t have is the ability to capture a new generation of younger viewers. Sitcoms are so rare as to be an in dangered species, replaced by a plethora of panel shows of comedians. an easy option but ones that leave no real lasting impressions beloved memories. “Reality TV”, by and large, replaced scripted drama. In the last five years the BBC has left it’s iconic Television Centre studios and moved to a bland corporate building in Manchester.
That’s not to say there weren’t classic shows during the ’90s, when the last of the BBC personal were still working there and a slipstream of late works still got released.
A fifth and continuing blow is the radical elements in the BBC/ITV obsession with political correctness – with the Writers Guild demanding that 50% of all drama be produced by women (no mention of quality) and a recent statement I read last week in which a BBC producer stated the ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ could never be made now because the troupe was all white and had been educated at Cambridge! Add to that, the colour blind casting in historical Shakespearean dramas in which the king’s uncle is of a different skin hue. It betrays history, it betrays all those that suffered racial discrimination and it betrays any modern progress made. And I say that as an Asian Brit. Even a BBC Radio 4 strand ‘The Film Programme’ seems to talk about gender politics in the film industry or the correctness of the these politics in a film rather than the innate qualities of the film.
All of the above are the reasons why I don’t don’t pay for a TV license and haven’t for about 3 or 4 years. I can buy and resell a box set if something good does accidentally make it’s way through the modern morass that is British TV.
But I got tired of hearing “Your BBC” and wanted to protest.
Anyway, I seem to have gone off topic.
So those years were when Newman/Greene instigated my beloved broadcasting culture and when Thatcher/Birt destroyed it.
Good writeup on the history, there. Much of which I was aware of already. Yeah, the US never quite had anything like TWP. Studio One and Playhouse 90 didn’t last long enough, nor did American Playhouse, which, due to the public funding, most resembled the old BBC model. I have been watching many of the old teleplays as part of my viewing and writing project.