Tim Bannerman's Theatre Chronicles – Part 16: 1984 – “Unstained”
EXT. STALAG AREA – NIGHT
A half-crazed Higgins is preaching to the world as he nears the gate.
HIGGINS
The woman shall not wear that which
pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man
put on a woman’s garment; for all that do so
are abominations unto the Lord thy God.
Weiss’s car drives past him.
HIGGINS
Wait! Herr Kommandant! Wait for me!
A message! I have a message from the Lord!
The car keeps going and drives out of the gate. Higgins runs after it.
ANGLE - TOWER GUARD
He looks below.
GUARD’S POV - GATE AREA
Higgins runs towards the gate.
ANGLE - HIGGINS
HIGGINS
Wait, Herr Kommandant! Even Satan disguises
himself as an angel of light!
ANGLE - TOWER GUARD
He gets behind the machine-gun. Another GUARD looks down.
GUARD
Stop! Crazy man! Stop!
INT. BARRACKS - NIGHT
The men look out the window
PRESTON
They’ll kill him…
INT. RED CROSS HUT - NIGHT
Jenny waits, trembling, as she hears what’s happening outside.
ANGLE - TOWER GUARD
GUARD
Stop!
ANGLE - HIGGINS
HIGGINS
(as he reaches the gate)
I charge you to keep the commandment….
A burst of MACHINE-GUN FIRE rips into him just as he reaches the gate.
HIGGINS
…. un:… stained….
He drops to the ground, dead.
From “Jenny’s War”, HTV
If you’ve never been machine-gunned while walking backwards clutching the Good Book at a half-stumbling run spouting a load of Old Testament nonsense with huge, rumbling WW2 German Army trucks coming closer and closer to you as you watch them without quite knowing whether you’ve hit your mark or not (which is quite important if you don’t want to be either run over or have to do it again and again until you do or are) – “unstained” isn’t quite the word I’d use.
As it is, you’re sporting a good deal of best, gory, horror-blood spilled liberally over your British Army uniform, nicely distressed anyway to look as if you’ve been realistically incarcerated as a Prisoner of War for a good while now. Then add the fact that you’ve been going quietly and then more noisily off your rocker any time your sense of what’s right and proper in the eyes of the Lord is upset – which is quite often. Plus the sheer stress of delivering the goods at vast cost per second in reverse order to the script under the eyes of an equally vast team waiting for the slightest slip-up for all those eyes to roll in weary disdain with the inevitable: “Cut!” All in all, the whole thing is pretty staining, I can tell you. Particularly when this is your biggest tv part to date and you’re being paid £1,000 a week – A THOUSAND POUNDS A WEEK in 1984!! – for five weeks, when you’ve got a family of five to feed and you don’t want this to be the last time you ever work again. In television, at least.
And, yes, there was the odd stain at work, on my brow and under the armpits, if hopefully nowhere else, not least when they told me on arrival that they would be starting with my death and working back from there. But bowels behaved, even after the 7th or 8th take if I remember correctly, with quite a bit to co-ordinate and a couple of close shaves between my left leg and a huge 10-ton truck tyre that had to come past me as I gave my last twitch. But we got it in the can with no “hair in the gate”, leg, trousers and reputation unstained, in the end.
The actual machine-gunning was quite clever if you got it right. It required explosives attached beneath your uniform – a bit like a suicide belt but less harmful to you and others – to go off together at the right moment, set up to make holes in the cloth rather than you, all timed to chime in with the burst of fire from up in the tower. And then they put it all together seamlessly afterwards in the edit as long as they’ve got all the bits required and the editor knows what they’re doing. Which in the case of the film as a whole was debatable. But it was fun too, being part of a major exercise in one of the serialised films for TV, or “mini-series” as they were known then, for Columbia HTV called “Jenny’s War”.
I was lucky in that, over the past three years or so, I had been “in” with a director-producer at HTV called Peter Graham Scott. He used to call me up, after my first foray in ’80-’81 with two episodes of “Into the Labyrinth”. Firstly as “Allons enfants” French Revolutionary Pierre and then, a few months later, as hapless, black-toothed, Cockney comedy villain, Long Tom. Over the next few years he’d ask me to play pirates, toffs, side-kicks of various kinds, mostly with not a lot to say but nice frocks and enough to be a featured artist and get my name in the Radio Times. This time in the summer of 1984, as producer, he took a gamble and asked me to audition for my biggest part yet with his director, a hardened Hollywood veteran called Stephen Gethers. To my great relief it all went well and I was signed up for the role of Higgins to shoot on location in Nottinghamshire in two months time over the end of October into November.
We got on well, Peter and I, to the point where he and his wife, Mimi, would come to parties at our house in The Golden Pot. I remember Mimi once offering motherly love to a handsome, if horizontal, young man, who needed their brow soothed having overdone it a bit, with Peter beaming avuncularly on.
Peter died not long after my 50th birthday party at which he gave me a copy of his book, “British Television, An Insider’s History”. I don’t feature in it, unsurprisingly, and he is luke-warm about the “not exactly inspired script” of “Jenny’s War”, which crashed with the critics. However it proved a surprising hit with the audience both here and around the world, even if it didn’t launch me into the stratospheric heights of fame and fortune from thereon in.
I have a letter, written 12 March 1985, from an old Cambridge friend, big cheese of the banking and insurance world, who happened to be lying awake in the middle of the night in the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, as you do. “What a strange world!” he writes. “My jet-lagged, insomniacal scan of the Tokyo TV channels at 4.00 am was arrested by the sight of your smiling face, speaking fluent Japanese in what appeared to be a World War II German POW camp. My grasp of the language was unfortunately inadequate to allow me to follow the plot but I can confirm that your Japanese is well-enunciated, if somewhat guttural… although Nigel Hawthorne’s sounded, to my untrained ear, rather more cultured!”
The whole team at HTV became a kind of family where I knew them and they knew me, from the people in the canteen at the HTV Bristol Bath Road Studios, to the camera, lighting and sound guys (important people to have on your side), first, second, third assistants and the crew of Grips, Gaffer, Boom operator, etc, etc, who made it all come together. Sadly, it all fell apart later when the television world of smaller, tighter-knit companies was sold off piecemeal to make it a more profitable business, in the process losing that welcoming sense of coming home, whether HTV, the Beeb, Anglia, Southern, etc., that I’d enjoyed so much.
There was only one 1983 HTV production that I should draw a veil over where professionalism is concerned, the aptly named “The Forgotten Story”. Unfortunately, a great friend from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School days and I had both been cast as characters in the drama, directed by John Jacobs and starring the wonderful Angharad Rees and Van Johnson.
Peter Macqueen is a man of many parts, some of which one might not normally associate with each other except, perhaps, where Mohammed Ali is concerned, although he was still called Cassius Clay when he coined the phrase.
Butterflies and boxing. These were, probably still are, two of Peter’s most passionate joys in life, alongside theatre and gardening. To butterflies, one should add moths, particularly in this instance, and boxing was of the art variety, rather than pure thuggery, you may be glad to hear.
As an actor, Pete does indeed “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”, as I can vouch for from the days when we would improvise on one of our Harassment and Discrimination programmes in the early days of my old company, AKT Productions Ltd. And if you’re lucky enough to live near the Theatre by the Lake, in Keswick, Cumbria, his local rep, you might have caught him in shows like Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in which I saw him play, brilliantly, the Richard Burton role a few years back.
When not recovering of a lunchtime at the Black Boy Café up at the top of Whiteladies Road in Clifton, after a hard morning being urged by the legendary theatre school teacher, Rudi Shelly, to “squveeze your lemon” (ie clench your buttocks to maintain your frame) in his smoky, Prusso-Jewish accent that he had retained many years after escaping on the last legal train to leave Germany for Paris at the outbreak of World War II, Peter and I were also fond of a pint or two of an evening, should the opportunity arise. These pints could be pulled in various hostelries of 1980’s Bristol, like The Albion or The Highbury Vaults, or even the Coronation Tap, a renowned cider house in Clifton, just a few dangerous yards from the entrance to BBC Radio Bristol where I, and he, no doubt, found ourselves in paid employment on more than occasion.
On this particular occasion, Pete – I’m sure it was his idea – suggested that, as we were on set together next day, why didn’t we make a night and a day of it? We’d not seen each other for a while and by heading off after dark up the big hill just outside Bristol heading South, with his moth trap and net, we could go and see what we could catch, it being a fine night in prospect.
Despite an element of Constantin Stanislavski’s “Method Acting” in mind – my job next day was to be a drunk in the bar, singing the German National Anthem with gusto before being forcibly ejected – the mistake was taking a bottle of whisky with us.
Having enjoyed an excellent bit of mothing in the moonlight, this might have had an influence on us then deciding to go and hear the cuckoos at dawn by the Arthurian lake at Chew. The cuckoos were wonderful but we were due on set at 7.30 am at the Studios. Returning with the dawn, after a quick wash and brush up, off we went, me to do my authentically inebriated German national anthem, he to do his barman, or whatever it was.
It was not my finest hour, even though I got it out more or less intact. Strangely, unlike Pete, you will not find my name in the credits of “The Forgotten Story”, nor my scene in the final cut. I like to think it was not because of the performance, although I was never directed by John Jacobs again, but “Forgotten” it surely was and is – apart from a little flush of shame when it comes to mind from time to time.
The moral is clear: do not go mothing in the moonlight with a bottle of whisky the night before a shoot with a lifelong drinking pal, Stanislavski or no Stanislavski. “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” Quite.
Fortunately, Peter Graham Scott didn’t get to hear about it. Otherwise I would not have found myself hobnobbing with Nigel Hawthorne, Christopher Cazenove, Robert Hardy, Dyan Cannon, Elke Sommer, Richard Todd and all over five weeks in October-November 1984. I never got to hobnob with a very young Hugh Grant in his first big television role as the eponymous “Jenny”s son, as played by Dyan Cannon, but the rest of the cast present during during my five week shoot provided diversion and entertainment on a daily basis.
Funniest and naughtiest by far was Nigel Hawthorne who would choose the worst or best moments, depending on whether the camera was on you, to induce a corpse. Robert “Tim” Hardy had the best stories round the dinner table from his time as Yorkshire vet in “All Creatures Great and Small”. While Christopher Cazenove was the kindest on or off set, even offering to baby-sit for me and Gill to give us a break when she came up with little Amy to see what the fuss was all about for a couple of days mid-shoot.
Nor would I have experienced being machine-gunned while, next door, in the other half of Proteus Camp, near Ollerton, in Nottinghamshire, the new British equivalents to the French CRS or Spanish Guardia Civil were rehearsing their picket charge with intent, shields and batons held menacingly to the fore.
“The country is sliding swiftly from crisis to chaos. By this time next week, there is every chance that the mines of the Midlands will be closed by the pit deputies’ strike, that picket-line violence will escalate, and that the politics of Britain will be frozen in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between contestants unable to break each other’s will.” So said The Guardian newspaper on 18 October 1984.
How ironic it was to be spending one’s day surrounded by the barbed wire and paraphernalia of war in our pretend German “Stalag” prisoner-of-war camp on one side of the old Army camp near Ollerton, while, literally next door in the other half of the camp, Mrs Thatcher’s riot squad were refining the techniques that were designed to smash the picket lines before they could make their protest at the wholesale closure of their way of life.
We quaffed our Chablis in our posh hotel, having been driven past groups of men, huddled round their braziers in the rain as night fell outside Ollerton Colliery where their fathers and grandfathers had worked the seam since the 1920s. In warmth and well-fed comfort, we listened to Tim Hardy expounding on how the longbow played such a key role at the Battle of Agincourt on St. Crispin’s Day that very day, 25 October, 569 years before. An authority on bows and bowmen, he was worth listening to. Strangely, a few years later, it was his unmistakable Siegfriedian tones he kindly lent to the reading of my poems at an exhibition in the old Town Hall in Warwick in 1992. I’d met a visionary painter called Tim Craven on the long Brittanny Ferries crossing from Portsmouth to Ouisterham when we lived in Normandy, and he invited me and Gill to contribute to his exhibition, Gill with photographs, me with poems, all on the mythology of trees.
My big scene in Jenny’s War was with Dyan Cannon, thrice Oscar-nominated and once married to Cary Grant. It was by far the most scary moment of my brief encounter with, if not the Big Time, then certainly my closest brush with the more glamorous end of the business where tv was concerned.
Starting off with calling her a whore, it kind of went downhill from there in terms of script. But when you’re nose to nose, eyeball to eyeball, in a frothing at the mouth kind of way, on a bed with a woman to be reckoned with in terms of Hollywood hierarchy, you don’t want to fuck it up, basically.
Despite a major attack of Imposter Syndrome while being really far too close for comfort with this multi-nominated Academy Award and Golden Globe Best Supporting Actress winner (for “Heaven Can Wait”in 1978), let alone being inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame the year before, she was kind and altogether lovely. “See you in LA, Tim,” she said as we wrapped up the scene. “Don’t forget to look me up when you come.”
Well, I did get to LA and sort of hobnob with the great and the good, but that was many, many years later. The great and the good concerned in this case were all long dead and preserved in wonderfully evocative posters on the walls of the old fishing lodge hotel, the Sportsman’s Lodge, on Ventura Boulevard. That is where I and my fellow adventurer, Marc Bolton, who now runs my old company, AKT Productions Ltd, found ourselves putting together a road safety training programme for Castrol in the US. But it was nearly 30 years after our big scene together during the Miner’s Strike and I never looked her up – sorry, Dyan. Whether you would have remembered me, I somewhat doubt, but you were kind and gracious and made the whole thing a lot easier than it might have been.
On my way home on Hallowe’en in a break in the schedule for me, I stopped off at the George Hotel, Kilsby, on the old Roman Road of Watling Street. Now the A5, it runs from Dover all the way up to Wroxeter in Shropshire, once a great Roman city, now a small, out-of-the-way village. I was reminded that, far from being a focus of attention, however briefly, in the gargantuan business of mass entertainment, I was but a floundering minnow in this river of folk that had flowed ceaselessly from the time of the Ancient Britons, through the Romans, right up to the present day with the M1 roaring past nearby.
Over a refreshing pint, I allowed myself a quick solitary game of the quirky Northamptonshire version of table skittles in which you chuck “cheeses” at the pegs set into a netted alcove in the wall, hoping to achieve a “floorer” when you knock ’em all down, before collecting my thoughts in the back of my paperback edition of Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island”, first published that year, in 1984.
“What a spoilt life I’ve led in the heart of a split land – coal country. Dining on the cholesterol of an American film machine while the strikers struggle and the Ethiopians wither. Mrs Ghandi assassinated today. I was machine-gunned four times last week. It looked “very real” they told me. Reagan is preened to win the American election. Thatcher and Scargill are locked in mortal combat. But the blood burns slowly in the Public Bar and the world hangs – by the neck.”
Two weeks later and it was a wrap. This time on my way home, my eye was taken by a sign on the road running through the legendary Robin Hood country of Sherwood Forest. “The Longdale Craft Centre” it was called, situated not far the “Table Top Tree”, an old thorn with tales to tell.
Surrounded by his work, the proprietor was a sculptor called (“the other”) Gordon Brown, and he had a way with wood. We talked and I was drawn to him, to his feeling for the forest that seemed to flow from him and into his work and, in some way, into me too. I wanted to buy something – but what?
Having looked around, I came back to something I had seen in his workshop, something not on show among the objects for sale in the showroom.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Pick it up,” he said. So I did.
It was a cylinder of solid yew, about a foot high, cut flat at either end, with a wide, hollow groove running up one side from top to bottom into which you could slide your arm against its knots and ripples within. It had a beautiful grain to it and a pale, light, almost faun colour on the outside, darker within the hollow groove. It was perfectly smooth round the outside and oiled, rather than stained or artificially polished. It was, truly, in every way “unstained”.
“How much can I give you for this?” I asked him, deeply struck.
He looked at me and said, “It’s not for sale.”
Somewhat crest-fallen I said, “I see. Of course. It’s very beautiful.”
“It’s from an old yew tree in the forest,” he said. “I just keep it here. I don’t know why.”
“Well,” I said. “I’d better be on my way. I’ve still got quite a drive before I see my family again. It’s been a while now.”
We talked a bit more, him about his work, me about mine and then I went and had a last wander round his showroom at some of the fine objects he carved there, mostly from forest oak but also lime, for which again you could tell he had a special feel. But I didn’t find anything that I felt was right, or not in the way the piece of yew had been, so I came back to say goodbye.
“Wait a moment,” he said. And he picked up the cylinder of yew. “You’ll need this.”
“No,” I said. “I can’t.”
“Yes.” He said. “I can see you know it for what it is. But I’ll need to put my mark on it.”
I watched him delicately putting the mark of his tree on the smooth, curving side of the work with a small, fine chisel. Then he put some white tissue paper round it and handed it to me.
“Thank you,” I said. “How much do you want for it?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Take it.”
And so I did and I’m looking at it now, nearly 37 years on. It is beautiful. And has a timeless presence in a way that is both of some great, indeterminate age and everlasting – past, present, future. The opposite of the evanescence that is so much of the business of life, let alone all things theatrical.
I wrote in Station Island, sitting in my car later:
“I have just been given,
by a man of the Forest,
a piece of yew, cut
straight from his heart;
taken with his hands
from deep in the dark,
beyond age or time,
as bitter as the ale,
as deep and as dark.
His eye found it. It
sank into his heart
through the strong skin
of his magical hands
and the clear well
of his artisan’s eye
that reveals the yew,
the oak and the lime,
the yew above all,
that avenues a path
beyond age or time
straight to my heart.”
