Memoirs of a Private Man (28 page)

Two well-known actors to whom I spoke at this time both said that Robin and Angharad were unwise to refuse such an offer.

Personally I greatly fault Robin's and Angharad's agents for not going into this matter thoroughly at the
very outset
. For God's sake get these two key people agreed and signed up before
anything else
begins. Even a relatively unbusinesslike type like me knew that much about the world – particularly, of all professions, the film and TV world! HTV's accountants were equally to blame. Did both sides quietly think ‘Oh,
they
'll agree when the time comes'? Was there already an element of bluff on both sides?

As I say, I have never believed that money was the whole cause of the break. From the beginning Robin and Angharad gave me the impression that because this was commercial television it might be slightly lower grade than the BBC. From the beginning HTV gave me the impression that though Ross and Demelza were the major stars, it was the story of their children that they wished mainly to concentrate on.

I don't know if either of these attitudes became perceptible to the other side, but neither of them would have mattered without the clash of temperaments which had grown up and which finally came to a headlong battle over the second script.

While I was away with my daughter, Angharad went to stay with Robin at his house in France, and one afternoon the two sides had a violent argument by telephone which lasted over two hours. I have heard both versions of this telephone call, but I gather that tempers were lost on all sides, that halfway through Angharad retreated into the garden and would take no further part in it, that Sally Haynes was in tears, that Richard Laxton had accused the actors of wanting to take over the film. Mistakenly, Sally thought that Angharad had joined forces with Robin in France in order to ‘gang up' against them. Richard said it would be near impossible to direct them, since they wanted to direct themselves. (From time to time they had done just this in the earlier series, with benefit to the production.)

But Geraint Morris, the executive producer and in my view the only film-maker of repute and experience in the team, summed it up when he said: ‘To me making a television play should be fun; otherwise the thing is not worth making. I don't see much fun in this. We are going to have to recast.'

What Robin and Angharad were chiefly complaining about in the second script was that the writer had totally misunderstood the characters of Ross and Demelza. (A lot of these mistakes were lost, as I had hoped, in the final shooting, but enough were left to spoil many of the scenes.) Whether, if Robin and Angharad had been playing the parts, they would have been able to influence the director or writer on the set we shall never know.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the break up of the entire production was chiefly a matter of chemistry.

When the news broke the fury of Robin and Angharad's admirers knew no bounds. A factor in all this which has been overlooked was that about two years before HTV began to mount the film the BBC after so many years decided reluctantly and timorously to release the twenty-nine instalments on videotape. Following a careful weighing of the pros and cons they had decided that it might just be financially viable to take this enormous risk. In the event the
Poldarks
went straight into the best-seller top ten, and over the next twenty-four months sold about two million copies. So that, along with the memories of the fifteen million-odd people who had watched the series twenty years before, there was a whole new mass of people to whom the series had just come fresh and in whose minds the original enormously engaging cast were still vivid and new.

To this was added the noisy voice of the Poldark Appreciation Society. Perhaps 4,000-strong, it had formed itself as a band of fervent admirers of the original books and the original cast. As that admirable actor John Bowe, who came to play Ross in the HTV version, said: ‘ It should really be called the Robin Ellis and Angharad Rees Appreciation Society.' Which was perfectly true. I had seen this all along, and had never regarded it with anything but great pleasure – until the break took place.

Many of the members took up an angry attitude, changing in a trice from happily pro to extremely hostile to HTV, and a number of them wrote to every newspaper they knew, staged demonstrations in Bond Street, paraded in Cornwall, etc.

Most of these good people were ardent admirers of the books too. Often and often they had come over to me and told me what the books meant to them in terms of sheer pleasure, and (God help me) uplift, succour in ill-health, comfort and relief in times of personal distress. Many of them had read all the novels three or four times. It has always been a genuinely heart-warming experience to meet them.

But what of those idols, those who had come to portray visually characters hitherto only alive in their imaginations? Were they for the sake of a few extra thousands of pounds to be cast aside for a set of new idols, slowly obscuring the lineaments of the old?

They were not willing that this should happen. Val Adams must have felt unable to unknit her strong allegiances. All the same, it would have been more becoming to have kept a lower profile out of some consideration for the author of the books.

For the most part I was the one to keep the low profile, though behind the scenes I did everything humanly possible to heal the split. Some people, notably among the Poldark Appreciation Society supporters, thought that if I had aligned myself alongside Robin and Angharad the TV companies would once again have backed down and invited Robin and Angharad to return. This was a complete pipe dream. ITV were quite adamant. So I was left with a choice, disagreeable though that was. I faced the facts. HTV had bought the rights of the last four
Poldarks
. Although in some ways they had behaved like infidels, they were in deadly earnest, they had, chiefly because of my disapproval, thrown out the first script and brought the whole production to a stop, at great expense; more than the BBC had done when I raged at them. Now HTV, however wrong-headed they were in some things, had produced a second script which, for all its faults, was better than Jack Pulman's for the opening of the first series ever. In those days, though, there was no Poldark Appreciation Society to throw up its hands in horror, nor did the leading parts ‘ belong' to any actor or group of actors. No one knew where they were going. The BBC was at least as unfaithful to the intentions of the novels to begin. The redeeming feature was that Maurice Barry and his associates had been so generally inspired in their choice of cast. And the BBC had commissioned a long one-hour weekly showing of the four books so that they were able to stagger through the first episodes under a hail of criticism from the snide press. HTV, under the orders of their masters, were committed to an enormously expensive two-hour blockbuster to ‘ test the water'. Even if the reaction was overwhelmingly favourable it would have been another year before the beginning of a proper series was shown.

But my full commitment to HTV was not until I was invited to a meeting at which all the new cast was present and we sat, thirty round the table, technicians standing in the background, while Geraint Morris read the agreed script from beginning to end. I was tremendously impressed by the sheer look of quality of the new actors engaged. And nothing thereafter shook my intent to go along with this new production of my novels through thick and thin.

After the shooting in Cornwall was completed, where we had been dogged by foul weather, there was a big ballroom scene which was to be shot in the Pump Room in Bath (standing in for London). I had returned home for a couple of days and was taking two friends back to Bath to see the shooting. The day before I left the
Mail on Sunday
came down by appointment for a feature interview at my house in Sussex. The
Mail
, among whose staff Val Adams had some friends, had consistently supported the old actors and published all possible news derogatory to HTV; so I awaited the interview with lively interest.

In it I answered all their questions as truthfully and in as detached a way as I could, trying to keep a level between what was good on one side and what was good on the other. At about noon there was a break for coffee, and wandering into my study I found the chief interviewer – a very pleasant chap – on the mobile to his editor. I heard him say: ‘But he favours
them
.' ‘ Them' being presumably HTV. The interview ended about 2.30 and the chief interviewer said: ‘ There'll be a full-page spread tomorrow.'

The next day I drove to Bath with my friends and watched the magnificent ballroom scene being shot. When I met Geraint he said that news had got around among the cast and technicians that there had been this interview, and every
Mail on Sunday
sold out the moment the papers arrived.

In fact there was nothing in the paper at all. Because my view had not been unfavourable to the HTV production and therefore did not fit in with his policy, the editor had killed the interview.

I have written at some length of the failure of this – possibly – final attempt to put
Poldark
back on the screen, because it was so widely discussed, so widely written about, and yet with the issues so widely misunderstood. Everyone had a different version of what they thought were the facts. As the one who stood to lose or gain most by this enterprise and who, feeling sympathy and impatience with both sides, yet for the most part I could only stand by and watch the lemmings carefully plotting their own fall.

Many of the scenes in the HTV film were magnificent and almost all the acting was of a high standard.

Quite the most important contribution to the failure of
Poldark
3, even outweighing the change of cast, was ITV's bull-headedly stupid insistence on a first two-hour film to be made, to ensure it was going to be a success. This had the double-edged disadvantage of an all-or-nothing throw on the one showing. (ITV would certainly have given up if they had taken account of the adverse notices of the
first
episode of the
first
series). But also it meant that they had compressed the whole of one
Poldark
novel into quite a bit less than two hours, while the BBC had allotted four instalments of fifty-five minutes for each of the novels they used. The HTV film had far too much to say in too short a time.

Of course
Poldark
was so closely and affectionately associated with Robin and Angharad that without them much of the old magic was lacking. But I am pretty sure that, had it been presented in the way the BBC presented it, the public, while hating the changes, would have become absorbed in the progress of Ross and Demelza's children, played as they were by Ioan Gruffudd and Kelly Reilly, and would reluctantly have switched on in increasing numbers as the series went along.

My wife had had her first stroke – a slight one – in April 1967, when she was fifty-four. Our local doctor had taken her blood pressure a couple of months before, had noted it was over 200, but had not bothered to tell us.

One can hardly believe the strides medicine has made since then. Control of blood pressure was in its infancy. She went into University College Hospital where the head physician, John Stokes, was an old friend of mine. They gave her Esbatal tablets, which brought the blood pressure down most effectively. Unfortunately the BP reading was too dramatically different when the patient was lying down to when she was standing up. The result was that although the pressure was satisfactory when she was in bed, the minute she stood up she fainted.

She successively survived the spring and our daughter's wedding and the summer – during which we went twice to Ireland and then a tour of America (of which more later) – and the early autumn, taking a few of these pills which in small doses kept her blood pressure within safer limits but which were always inclined to make her dizzy and feel faint. In the September we went to Crete, hired a Volkswagen and drove round the island, ending up at Agios Nikolaos, where we spent ten days at the Minos Beach Hotel, bathing and sitting in the sun. The slight weakness in her left arm, which was the only visible sign of her illness, had quite gone, and she seemed well enough.

On the way back to Heraklion, where we would spend another day or so before flying home, we stopped at a little hotel called Grammatikakis at Malia, where we had spent a night on the way out, but this time only for a bathe and a picnic lunch.

As we were about to get out of the car, Jean said: ‘I feel queer. A nasty sensation in my head.'

Hoping it was just the effects of the sun I said: ‘Well, sit still a minute. I'll get you a brandy.'

When I came back she said: ‘Oh, God, I think I'm losing the use of my hand.'

We both knew what that meant. I most particularly because I had observed it too closely in my father. We had two choices: go straight into this hotel and take a room and see what happened; or drive the thirty-odd miles into Heraklion. We knew from our previous visit that they spoke no English at this hotel, only Greek and German, also that the beds were like boards and that when dark fell the lights were hardly as bright as candles. At Heraklion we should be in relative civilization. I shut the door on her and we drove on.

I shall not forget that on the way there – although she must have known as well as I did what was happening – she commented on the scenery, pointed out things of interest, never referred to how she felt. It was a brave foreshadowing of the way she would face this illness which she had to face for the rest of her life. When we got to the Hotel Astir at Heraklion they had to carry her out of the car.

Up in the bedroom, her left arm seemed to improve a bit and she sat up in bed and insisted on making our luncheon sandwiches, which we tried to eat while waiting for a doctor. Dr Xekardarkis, when he came, confirmed what we already knew, gave her more pills, which from their effects must have been similar to Esbatal, and said we should try to manage in the hotel; he would not under any circumstances recommend the hospital, which in his view was appalling. (Unknowing of this insult, the Cretan proprietor of the hotel said to me next day: ‘I wouldn't trust that doctor too far, he's a Greek.')