The Blue Touch Paper (35 page)

Margaret had long believed that Tony was potentially the most popular of the Portable writers, because his mixture of wit and mellow characterisation was attractive in a way which might one day reach all kinds of audiences. He wrote about people. By the turn of the year we were off on a tour of leisure centres and arts centres, where Tony's pleasing modesty and quietness went down well. For the first time in a Joint Stock production, the women's parts were as good as the men's, with Jane Wood, Suzanne Bertish and Gillian Barge all seizing them gratefully and having a whale of a time. But in a major miscalculation, Tony and I were talked into moving the play's London opening from the fringe theatre where it was tentatively scheduled onto the proscenium at the Royal Court, where, we were assured, it would blossom. It was a costly mistake. It turned out
that at a time of strong feelings, when audiences wanted plays to be instantly decipherable and clearly partisan, I had not done Tony any favours by setting his subtleties down in such a mainstream house.

My life was now punctuated by long writing periods in Peggy's Kemp Town shack. In Trafalgar Lane, the weather always seemed to be bad. Salty rain ran down the dismal windows and the electric light stayed on all day. I loved the smell of the wood-yard opposite and the sound of the circular saw. I would write for as long as I could in my hutch, then go out to drink and eat at night, alone and with a book. Brighton became my precious place of retreat, a sort of home from home where I worked not only on polishing
Licking Hitler
but on a new stage play which I saw as a deliberate companion piece. ‘Delighted you are emotionally exhausted', wrote Peggy, ‘as a play which doesn't emotionally exhaust an author is –
useless
.' But while I was writing with a growing certainty that I was this time onto something really interesting, Margaret's life was taking a similarly positive turn. Her tactic of zig-zagging out of the BBC had paid off again. Once more she had been invited back in, and having produced exactly one film, was now, at the age of thirty, being put in charge of the weekly one-off strand on BBC1,
Play for Today
. In the next chaotic couple of years Margaret would go on not only to produce one of television's most popular plays of all time –
Abigail's Party
by Mike Leigh – but also one of its most controversial. Since the mid-1950s, the promotion of the single play had been one of the best features of public television. But soon, with the making of Roy Minton's film
Scum
, which dramatised the rough culture of the British borstal system, it was about to become the bumpiest as well.

Most people who had run the BBC since the war had come
from journalistic backgrounds. It had long been clear that few of them had any understanding either of the arts or of drama, and even fewer a feel for it. Their bungling interferences and attempts at censorship were notoriously inept and dangerous, usually coming about because they wanted to apply the rules of newspaper reporting to works of fiction. With the honourable exception of Hugh Carleton Greene, who shared with his novelist brother Graham a family fondness for making trouble, and of the visionary David Attenborough, the most senior bureaucrats were lacking in courage when called upon to stand up to government. But my good fortune was to be summoned by David Rose, who ran a drama empire of his own from some studios in the Edgbaston suburb of Birmingham. They were housed at Pebble Mill in a famously ugly building which would all too soon die of concrete cancer, only to be replaced by something fancier called the Mailbox, which was even uglier. David had made his reputation as the producer of
Z-Cars
, the first of television's realistic police series. By moving a hundred miles from London, David, whether by luck or calculation, enjoyed a degree of freedom from the excessive supervision which sometimes made film-making needlessly difficult in the BBC's headquarters at Wood Lane. By the time the senior executives in London discovered they had made a film on the questionable topic of wartime black propaganda – a shameful operation which had hitherto been swept under the carpet – it was too late.
Licking Hitler
was already scheduled for transmission. When it went out, eight million people would watch.

BBC Pebble Mill became my second university, an admirable place of learning where the company of your peers, if you were willing to listen, improved both your mind and your skills, and the place where almost every serious film writer or director
trained or practised. On any day in the canteen, while they were recording
The Archers
downstairs, you might be able to sit and talk with Stephen Frears, with Ken Loach, with Willy Russell, with Alan Bleasdale, with Mike Leigh, with Alan Clarke, with Peter Terson, with David Rudkin and with Alan Plater. Of all the places I have ever worked, this was the most collegiate. We took a sympathetic interest in each other's work, and we gave advice when it was asked. To the same degree that the Royal Court was shark-filled and competitive, Pebble Mill was democratic. It was what a Hollywood studio was intended to be. Everyone had headed to the West Midlands for the same reason: to prosper under the protection of a regime which could be trusted to leave us alone to do our best work. If from today's perspective the personnel seems overly male, the one thing it was not was overly white. It was Pebble Mill, positioned as it was in the second city, which alone had championed the portrayal of a multiracial Britain. It was thanks to David Rose, and to his resident producers Peter Ansorge and Barry Hanson, that the screen was beginning belatedly to look like the street. In 1973, Tara Prem had written
A Touch of Eastern Promise
, the first television play with an all-Asian cast. This had been followed by at least two series,
Gangsters
and
Empire Road
, which achieved quiet revolution by putting black and Asian actors at the centre of the drama and refusing to present them as familiar stereotypes. Norman Beaton became the most popular in-house actor. Pebble Mill was the only television outfit in Britain where you would find yourself working in the same building as Horace Ové, Mustapha Matura and Michael Abbensetts. Put BBC Birmingham beside any other media organisation in Britain and it was years ahead of its time.

There were only two difficult issues in my years at Pebble
Mill, and they were both resolved on the day of my arrival. Would I be allowed to direct my own work and would I be allowed to make it on film? Obviously I had no experience as a film director, and, worse, the greater part of
Licking Hitler
was set indoors. It was only reasonable that people were therefore asking why the whole thing couldn't be made, like most subjects in that period, much more cheaply in a studio with video cameras. We only needed, they said, to go outside once or twice to pick up the odd film insert. But there was something in the tone of my own conviction which moved David Rose to take a risk on me. I argued that the subject of the film was propaganda. The form had to fit the content. I was intending to make
Licking Hitler
look as though it had been made in the 1940s, so that it might most closely resemble the national cinema of uplift that it was setting out to undermine. The camera, if it moved at all, would move only in that contemporary style. Further, the film was about isolation. A terrified woman was growing up far from her friends and family in a closed environment with a bunch of crazed misogynists. In the course of the story she would tap into her own unrecognised resources of character to challenge the morality of what she was doing and of what was being done to her. The more hermetic we could make the atmosphere, the better. I had waited my whole life to make a film. Every childhood visit to the cinema in Bexhill had been a preparation. I was ready.

When the final film was shown, Stephen Frears loved to tell me, rather more often than perhaps was necessary, that its authority was a fluke. Anyone could make a first film. Just wait, he said, until I made my second. That's when the problems would really start. He was right. If you fling yourself ignorantly at a day's filming, the sheer intensity of your longing
can initially get you through. You've dreamt of it for so many years that if you know what story you want to tell, its realisation becomes a formality. That's why careers behind the camera so often falter. It's only as you go deeper that you begin to realise how little you know, and how much technique you lack. Almost all film-makers jump confidently out of the landing craft, but only a gifted handful make it up the beach.

After
Licking Hitler
, a tide of similar films would soon follow in slightly cringing homage. The murkier corners of the war began to be routinely re-examined from a woman's point of view. But those of us who made
Licking Hitler
had the satisfaction of knowing that we would be the first. This was what made my period of research in the spring of 1977 so rewarding. Every week I was speeding on trains all over a sunlit Britain from Cornwall to the north of Scotland, on my way to meet the elderly survivors of the generation who had taken part in the eccentric and sometimes scabrous tasks of propaganda. In ten years, nearly every one would be dead. Without exception they seemed pleased to see me, grateful that after all these years of neglect someone wanted to throw a light on their peculiar contribution. They would describe trips ferrying German actors back and forth from detention camps for their broadcasts with the freshness and assurance of people who knew that what they had to say was both shocking and unfamiliar. At the same time, I was casting. Kate, fresh from a commanding performance under Maximilian Schell's direction in an Odön von Horvath play,
Tales from the Vienna Woods
, was a given. And to portray the working-class Scottish genius of propaganda, in came Bill Paterson whom I'd seen being hilarious in the Theatre Upstairs playing forty years more than his true age in a comedy by Billy Connolly called
An' Me wi' a Bad Leg Tae
.
For the Head of the Political Warfare Executive, very loosely based on Richard Crossman, who later became a minister in the 1964 Labour government, I chose the Billy Wilder favourite Clive Revill. And to play another important character, this time based on Ian Fleming but transposed for the purposes of my fiction from his real-life role in Naval Intelligence, I cut the hair off Hugh Fraser, who had played bass guitar in the band in
Teeth 'n' Smiles
. As a newcomer to film, Hugh was blank and expressionless for the first few shots. On questioning, he explained that someone had given him the useful tip that film acting was about doing nothing. ‘Doing nothing, maybe,' I said. ‘But not thinking nothing.' From then on, Hugh was great.

Birmingham itself was a rebarbative place at the end of the 1970s, a nightmare of lousy post-war development, where to drive a French or German car into the BBC car park was still to invite contempt. You were spitting in the eye of the locals. But the city became warm and rewarding once you got past its sullen facade. Because the sun hit the glass of my office so hard in the afternoons, I positioned some grobags on the window shelf, and puffed up with pride when Percy Thrower, the legendary presenter of
Gardener's World
, came by to tell me my tomatoes were doing much better than his in the office next door. In April, before filming, I went up to Oldham for a day's patient education at the hands of Mike Leigh, who extended me the kind of comradeship which made Pebble Mill so creative. Characteristically, Mike was filming in an undertaker's. He was having to deal with a corpse on a marble slab. The actor's stomach was visibly moving. When I pointed this out, Mike said he knew, but that lying dead was a skill. The daily rate for people who could really do it, clothes off, was too much for the BBC to afford. But even after Mike's eight-hour crash course, I walked
onto my first film set a couple of weeks later in a state of sublime ignorance. When at the end of the day I revealed to Ken Morgan, the most talented of BBC lighting cameramen, that it had been the first time I had ever looked down a camera, he shrugged and said, ‘Well it didn't show.'

To make up the composite country headquarters of black propaganda, Aspley Guise, we used two different locations. One, Compton Verney, near Stratford-upon-Avon, was uninhabited, but the other, Edgcote House, near Banbury, was a private home. The patrician owner sat apparently content at rushes as Bill Paterson's character, over many repeated takes, described it as ‘this bloody awful English house'. It was an amazingly disciplined shoot throughout, everything accomplished in seventeen days during one of those blazing English Mays where spring turns to summer in front of your eyes. Driving in to work at dawn put me in a confident mood which lasted all day. When I went into the editing room, the storytelling was so planned in my head that I threw away no more than fifteen shots. It turned out to my astonishment that, besides writing plays, there was a second thing to add to the list of what I could actually do. I could direct film. The actors I had chosen, all from different backgrounds, had been perfectly matched. Kate, Bill and Brenda Fricker, who had once lived with Margaret and me in the Chase, liked each other from the off and their gears clicked as if they'd been acting together all their lives. There was nothing more rewarding than to have a brief rehearsal at the end of the day, to roll out of bed before daylight next morning and, on the basis of the actors' insights, to improve the scene on the spot. The huge advantage of being a writer-director was that some of the film's most potent moments, particularly when Anna Seaton finally turns on her persecutor Archie Maclean,
came from this freedom to rewrite as we went along. The solidarity in the whole group was symbolised by one touching comic gesture. Kate realised that in the improvised dressing rooms, where only a string and a curtain separated the sexes, our most elderly actor, well into his seventies, could tilt a mirror to watch her changing. Without ever saying anything, she regularly prolonged the process of undressing each day to allow him this pleasure.