Experimental British television

Laura Mulvery, Jamie Sexton

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780719098567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

The first academic study to focus on experimental British television. Uncovers the history of experimental television, bringing back forgotten programmes and places the aesthetics of experimentation within historical contexts. The book also examines the importance of the changing technologies on British television

1

‘Creative in its own right’: the Langham Group and the search for a new television drama

John Hill

The Langham Group, an experimental outfit established within the BBC in 1959, occupies an unusual position in the history of British television drama. While most accounts of the development of TV drama in Britain pay lip-service to the group’s efforts, these have mainly been written off as unsuccessful. Such a view appears to have settled into a critical orthodoxy in the early 1960s and has prevailed ever since. In 1964, for example, the producer of David Mercer’s first television plays, Don Taylor, declared that the group’s work amounted to an ‘artistic failure … based on an aesthetic misconception’.¹ In the same year, Troy Kennedy Martin published his well-known demand for ‘experiment and development’ in television drama, ‘Nats Go Home’, but was keen to disassociate himself from the activities of the Langham Group which he denounced as ‘an art set-up … propitiated on the altar of prestige’.² Writing at around the same time, Arthur Swinson was slightly better disposed towards the group but still concluded that its work, although ‘rich in visual texture’, was nonetheless ‘lacking in meaning’.³ Given the scarcity of subsequent writing about the Langham Group, and the lack of opportunities to see what it produced, these accounts have not only remained among the few sources of information about it but have also continued to influence the way in which the value and significance of its work is perceived.

Is it, however, a reputation that is entirely deserved? It is clear, for example, that those critical of the Langham Group’s work held allegiances to conceptions of television drama that were unlikely to make them the most sympathetic advocates of the experiments in which the group were engaged. In particular, the group’s downplaying of the role of the writer in favour of the producer/director was guaranteed to upset those (such as Swinson) with a vested interest in a traditional form of written script (and the association of ‘meaning’ with dialogue). However, precisely because of the importance that the Langham Group attached to visualisation (and recorded sound), it has inevitably proved difficult to be sure just what the group was up to. Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence to indicate that the group’s experiments merit more than the usual passing mention and, certainly, amount to more than the artistic ‘cul-de-sac’ that has often been suggested. On the other hand, in attempting to rescue the group from critical neglect, it would be a mistake to overstate its achievements.

The group itself was short-lived and only three productions – The Torrents of Spring (tx. 21 May 1959), Mario (tx. 15 December 1959) and On the Edge (tx. 16 July 1960) – appear to have been transmitted bearing the title ‘a Langham Group production’. Indeed, given the modesty of the group’s output, it might even be argued that it is surprising that the group has commanded as much attention as it has. What follows, therefore, is an attempt to identify the group’s main aims and activities and, given that only one of the group’s productions (The Torrents of Spring) has survived, arrive at a tentative conclusion regarding the nature of its achievements. The discussion considers some of the ways in which the group’s experiments anticipated subsequent developments in television drama but also suggest how the sense of ‘failure’ attached to the group was most likely the result of a lack of ‘fit’ between their experiments and the prevailing mood surrounding television drama at the time.

Origins

The origins of the Langham Group may be traced back to the establishment by the Head of BBC Drama, Michael Barry, of a sub-committee in early 1956 intended ‘to chew over the problem of experimental Television programmes’.⁴ This evolved into an ‘Experimental Group’ concerned with ‘new methods’ of presenting not only ‘poetry and the dance’ but also ‘story-telling and … stories that cannot be told in a conventional form’.⁵ This then led to a number of wide-ranging discussions concerning possible forms of television experiment that covered the use of film, the treatment of fantasy and the exploitation of television technology in an unusual manner (including the viewing of ‘people from several angles simultaneously’).⁶ Although it was intended that the discussions should generate ideas for a series of half-hour experimental programmes, these do not appear to have materialised and it was not until the establishment of the Langham Group in 1959 that a specific programme of experimental work was begun. It is, however, clear that the debates of the Experimental Group were to influence what followed.

The name of the group carried no particular significance other than that it was housed in the former Langham Hotel, now occupied by the BBC. Although the group was conceived as ‘a floating population of producers, designers, technicians’ who would ‘change from project to project’, the key figure in the group was undoubtedly Anthony Pélissier who was also a founder member of the Experimental Group.⁷ Pélissier had worked as both a theatre and film director but moved into television in the mid-1950s when he produced The Tamer Tamed (tx. 7 February 1956) and Mrs Patterson (tx. 15 June 1956). He became the effective head of the Langham Group and wrote, directed and produced the group’s two main productions, The Torrents of Spring and Mario (billed, in the latter case, as ‘A Langham Group Production by Anthony Pélissier’).⁸ The activities of the group itself were driven by two main concerns. First, the group was conceived of as a kind of research laboratory in which producers should be free ‘to study production methods and ideas away from the steady day-to-day demands of regular drama presentations’.⁹ Second, it was intended to permit the testing of new techniques that would extend and refine the existing vocabulary of television drama. As Pélissier himself explained, the purpose of the group was ‘to explore new techniques … that break away from the inheritance of the theatre and the cinema, and from which eventually, we hope, will evolve something that is exclusive to the medium’.¹⁰

New forms of expression

This pursuit of new modes of television presentation led the group in a number of specific directions. From the beginning of the Experimental Group’s deliberations, it had been clear that there was a thirst for television to develop new forms of visual expression. In a paper prepared for the group’s first meeting, the producer Christian Simpson had stressed the ‘visual qualities’ of the television medium and called for the use of all ‘the tools at our disposal – namely objects known and unknown, shapes, surfaces, in conjunction with lighting, camera movement and accompanying sound’.¹¹ This emphasis was also reflected in the group’s own discussions which included consideration of ‘the merits’ of ‘a 30 minute play without dialogue’.¹² Simpson himself continued to champion the idea of ‘Drama Without Dialogue’ and, partly under his influence, the Langham Group planned, but did not complete, a production of Romeo and Juliet, entitled ‘The Time is Now’, which it described as ‘an essay in Sight and Sound’ that would eliminate all studio dialogue.¹³ As might be expected, Pélissier also took the view that the television camera was not just ‘a recording machine’ but was primarily ‘a visual medium’ that should be treated as ‘creative in its own right’.¹⁴ As a result, he maintained that the job of the producer-director in television was to provide ‘a visual treatment’ or ‘orchestration’ of a subject that would match the way in which ‘a composer might … express an idea in music’.¹⁵

Thus, while Pélissier’s work for the Langham Group is sometimes seen as falling within a well-established tradition of literary adaptation, this was hardly the case. For, although The Torrents of Spring and Mario are based on works by Ivan Turgenev and Thomas Mann, they are only adaptations in the most general of senses and are almost entirely ‘unliterary’ in character. Pélissier did not prepare a full dialogue script (or commission a writer to produce one) but concentrated on devising a picture script to which dialogue would be subsequently added following rehearsal with actors. Thus, the ‘script’ for Mario held by the BBC contains barely a word of dialogue but mainly consists of descriptions of what is to be shown and how. Much of the dialogue is also missing from the script prepared for the final rehearsals of The Torrents of Spring despite the provision of detailed camera directions to which the finished production largely adheres. This stress upon the visual, rather than the verbal, aspects of television production led, in turn, to two main kinds of visual experiment involving increased camera mobility and the use of montage.

Partly due to his background in cinema, Pelissier was critical of the stylistic functionalism which he believed the multi-camera set-up in the television studio had encouraged. In The Sleeping Clergyman (tx. 11 January 1959), co-produced with Michael Barry shortly before the establishment of the Langham Group, and The Torrents of Spring, he, therefore, set out to explore the potential of the technique of one camera to each scene. Unlike cinema, the circumstances of live transmission meant that the adoption of this technique involved the elimination of cutting during a scene. As a result, Pélissier’s productions contain relatively few shots compared with other dramas of the period. Thus, despite the use of montage, The Torrents of Spring still consists of only 43 shots over a running time of 60 minutes. However, while extended shot lengths such as this might be taken to indicate an excessive dependence on stage traditions, this was not so in the Langham productions, which self-consciously sought to break free of ‘proscenium presentation’ through extended camera movement.¹⁶ It is, therefore, probably more than a coincidence that, in the early 1950s, Pélissier was responsible for directing a mild satire on television entitled Meet Mr Lucifer (1953). One of a number of films made in both the USA and Britain to poke fun at the cinema’s new rival, the film, as Charles Barr notes, mounts a critique of television’s capacity to seduce the ‘naive viewer’ and identifies this with a televisual aesthetic typified by frontality and direct address.¹⁷ Although Barr is reluctant to attribute any special authorial status to Pélissier, it is tempting to see his productions for the Langham Group challenging the frontality and camera immobility that his earlier film associates with television. Pélissier himself felt that the demonstration of ‘the visual potential of how to handle cameras’ was one of the group’s main achievements and it is indoubtedly the case that the subsequent criticism of the Langham Group’s ‘aestheticism’ has obscured the contribution it made to the freeing up of the television camera.¹⁸ Thus, while ITV’s Armchair Theatre series (launched by ABC Television in 1956 and headed up by Sidney Newman from 1958) has been rightly celebrated for its encouragement of increased camera mobility, the movement of the camera in the Armchair production Lena, O My Lena (tx. 25 September 1960), popularly singled out for its innovative camera-work, is much less sustained and systematic than in The Torrents of Spring, broadcast some sixteen months earlier.

However, it is not simply the amount of camera movement that distinguishes the two productions but the way that the camera is used. In discussing the famous opening shot of Lena, O My Lena, John Caughie indicates how the production succeeds in turning the television studio into ‘a full three-dimensional space’ but still remains tied to a conception of the studio as ‘a space for acting’.¹⁹ While The Torrents of Spring could certainly be said to extend the ‘performative space’ of the studio because of the way in which the camera moves around the sets, the opening out of the studio as ‘a space for acting’ is hardly its main concern. This is because the production places much greater emphasis than Lena upon camera movement as an expressive device ‘in its own right’, and hence the requirement that actors should not simply ‘perform’ but also accommodate to the programme’s overall visual design.

This kind of ‘creative’ use of the camera was not, of course, without precedent. In his discussion of camerawork in television drama in the 1950s and early 1960s, Jason Jacobs identifies an ‘exhibitionistic’ mode in which, he suggests, camera movement is ‘not motivated by performance, but is the performance’.²⁰ However, as he also acknowledges, this ‘exhibitionistic’ element (even in a stylistically flamboyant production such as the Armchair Theatre play Afternoon of a Nymph made in 1961) represents an extension of an established multi-camera style rather than constituting a fully-fledged style of its own. In the case of Pélissier’s productions, however, the multicamera style is genuinely abandoned for large sections of the drama and it is the moving camera, rather than the a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: experimental British television
• 1 ‘Creative in its own right’: the Langham Group and the search for a new television drama
• 2 ‘And now for your Sunday night experimental drama …’: experimentation and Armchair Theatre
• 3 A ‘new drama for television’?: Diary of a Young Man
• 4 ‘The very new can only come from the very old’: Ken Russell, national culture and the possibility of experimental television at the BBC in the 1960s
• 5 From art to avant-garde? Television, formalism and the arts documentary in 1960s Britain
• 6 An experiment in television drama: John McGrath’s The Adventures of Frank
• 7 Don’t fence me in: The Singing Detective and the synchronicity of indeterminacy
• 8 Visions: a Channel 4 experiment 1982–85
• 9 Experimenting on air: UK artists’ film on television
• 10 Experimental music video and television
• 11 ‘Yes, it’s war!’: Chris Morris and comedy’s representational strategies
• Bibliography
• Index