Roy Battersby was a great TV director able to generate performances in dramas which created an effect of deep, focused intensity. My tribute to Roy here consists mostly of reflections concerning his body of work, with a special aim of generating more awareness and interest in his overlooked single dramas for TV from 1975-93.
Battersby’s main love may have been cinema – and he talked and wrote voluminously about Pabst, Eisenstein, Wajda and many more – but, as a TV director, he was equally adept at use of video in the studio. Escape from Kampala (1991) and Olly’s Prison (1993) used studio confines for gripping and disturbing ends. Yellowbacks (1990), one of two he directed for BBC1’s final video-led contemporary single play strand in prime time The Play On One (1988-91), also presents a real building vividly via Outside Broadcast video. A strong sense of place and ability to foreground the salient features of an environment through lighting, camera movement and careful framings marked Battersby’s work.
This is evident across Escape from Kampala‘s drama of a prison break in Amin’s Uganda, with a cast comprised of all Black actors, Malcolm McKay’s depiction in Yellowbacks of state political interrogation of dissidents in a looming, empty house and Gentry (1988), a very late ITV play by Nigel Kneale, an excoriating drama about class warfare and an attack not just on Thatcherite gentrification but anticipating the inequalities of the asset boom politicians have consistently stoked since. In Olly’s Prison, a three-part drama by Edward Bond shown in increasingly late night time slots on BBC2, one room provides the setting for a frighteningly enigmatic drama in a first instalment which plays out between a jittery, mobile Bernard Hill and his daughter, Charlotte Coleman, totally withdrawn, still and profoundly silent.
Battersby gained a crucial apprenticeship in 1960s documentaries such as The Stockbroker’s World (1964), for the Men and Money series, a carefully observant study of the London Stock Exchange in a time of mottled stability and mild flux. We see archaic top hats, gleaming, and a man shaking a cacophonous rattle, but not as if at a football game.
And inevitably, it’s controversial. A man doesn’t become a stockbroker or a stockjobber in order to serve British industry, or help investors. He buys himself into this little world because his father was there. Or because he’d like to make a good living in a way that’s socially acceptable. But he’s entitled to claim that he and his colleagues are a necessary part of an ingenious mechanism for raising money… For making our kind of society possible…
A lot of metaphorical blood has flowed here, and perhaps a little actual blood as well…
Narrator’s (Tony Garnett) final words in The Stockbroker’s World
Battersby went on to direct Tony Parker’s Some Women (1969), a feature documentary The Body (1970) with a Ron Geesin and Roger Waters score, and Julia Jones’s Home and Away (1972), while displaying his remarkable facility with filmed single dramas.
Roll On Four O’Clock (1970) is a bleak, utterly compelling masterpiece, the first of his two major collaborations with writer Colin Welland and producer Kenith Trodd. Welland’s drama unflinchingly reveals the pervasive bullying and homophobic evil that permeates a Secondary Modern in Salford, with a range of stolid, complacent teachers, like that adroitly played by George A. Cooper, and Clive Swift’s kindly art teacher who is the one to act with humanity. This work carries Welland’s patented immersive veracity, his writings emerging from a mixture of his own experience and embedded research in communities. It is a humanist clarion call that was 18 years in advance of the cruel homophobic Section 28 legislation and thus light years ahead of dramas in the early 1970s which tended to avoid this subject.
Then came Battersby’s three Play for Today jobs. The first, Better Than The Movies (1972) is one of the remaining 32 Plays for Today I’ve yet to see or, in this case, read: a John Elliot drama featuring Christine Hargreaves, which Roy professed he didn’t have strong memories of and that he regretted he’d turned down directing Welland’s marvellous Kisses At Fifty (1973) and got this instead. Roger Smith’s The Operation (1973) is an incredibly odd melange of pointed politics and lurid exploitation filmmaking, a kind of bad taste Marxist Melodrama, which is utterly unique and divided viewers then and would now, as a Play for Today viewing group in April 2021 attested! This is not subtle, or in the liberal humanistic dramatic tradition. There is a thinness to much of the characterisation. It skewers its villainous property speculator protagonist, an oddly well-cast George Lazenby. While I find certain elements of this don’t work – a haphazard diegetic soundtrack* and it is glaringly androcentric, watching fifty years on – few can doubt that this leftist melodrama’s targets are totally deserving and relevant in 2024.
Also with Welland and Trodd, Leeds United! (1974) opened Play for Today’s fifth series in especially trenchant, politicised fashion, dramatising an actual 1970s strike in Leeds. While it found predictable brickbats from Whitehouse types, and defensive responses from union leaders and textiles firm bosses alike, it was this very uncompromising attack on both these settled establishments that shows the drama’s power. It really is a people’s drama, conveying the vox populi of the women textile workers who are grassroots union members who develop a fervent, ferocious socialist consciousness through their industrial action and who learn the bitter lessons of betrayal by senior figures in their own movement. Clearly, even the compromises of the 1970s seem Utopian compared with today, when the unions are disempowered. This is part of this drama’s historical value, in that it shows a time of relative strength in the Labour Movement, and also warns against compromising too much with conservative forces, as it lets passionate demands for structural change fade away. Battersby’s peerless cinematic technique for TV is kinetic and often deeply moving.
The elaborate, virtuoso opening tracking/crane shot is a British TV equivalent of Pabst or Welles. The set piece exchanges in the Town Hall send the hairs standing up on the back of your neck, while the Woodhouse Moor sequence evokes a gradual, melancholy realisation. While it’s very much a de-individualised crowd drama, and thus is demonstrably socialist, Battersby enables especially fine performances from Lynne Perrie, Elizabeth Spriggs and Lori Wells.
Next, Battersby directed Post Mortem (1975), a superb one-set studio drama by the undervalued Brian Clark, which anticipated Battersby’s later mastery of video studio aesthetic. This is a one-hander centring on the intense Judy Parfitt, playing an archetypal English workaholic, a formidable backstairs fixer in the financial world, notably in the year that Margaret Thatcher became Tory leader. This play, one of several masterpieces, utilises Battersby’s experiences with The Stockbroker’s World, and also his visual sense, to deploy some elaborate camera movement unusual for the studio setup – anticipating Alastair Reid’s work on series 1 of Gangsters (1976). Battersby is the ideal director to tell a story whereby professional flux and incomprehensible jargon and deals is interwoven seamlessly with the personal tragedy of the forsaken private life. The hubris is writ far wider than this one room.
By the mid-1970s, Battersby had taken a job working full-time for the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. His self-published memoir gives a fascinating account of a controversial incident in Derbyshire, which I have yet to fully read, and there’s a nuanced account of the Party’s aims, tactics and intractable limitations.
While working for the WRP, and largely due to the uncompromising radicalism of Leeds United!, Battersby was effectively blacklisted by the BBC, under pressure from MI5, with Post Mortem an overlooked final parting shot. However, Verity Lambert and June Roberts, producers of Thames Television’s ITV daytime soap opera drama Couples (1975-76), employed Battersby to helm several instalments written by his old collaborator Tony Parker. ITV work dried up after that, and in his full time WRP role, he worked on film projects, the most significant and sadly relevant of which is the documentary The Palestinian (1977), which contains testimony of Palestinian children in Lebanon dying through lack of water supply. It’s partial in its politics, yes, without any attempt to chase the elusive and often duplicitous goal of “balance”. It reveals the disturbing, subjective truths of a particular moment and illuminates the facts of its historical context.
Suffice it to say, that the independent thinking Battersby fell foul of the autocratic Gerry Healy leadership, for being too vocal in a way that the controlling Healy could not countenance. After a semi successful stint organizing for the WRP in Glasgow, for which he gained scant recognition, Battersby left after the falling out with the leadership and had fully left his full-time role and the WRP itself by 1980.
His memoir details his more humbled attitude to life since then, speaking of his love of his then new partner Judy Loe and how he recognised and valued family life anew after effectively being married to his work and the WRP for so long. There are some almost unbearably moving reflections on their life in Italy and the attempts in the late 1980s with Kenith Trodd to get a political and historical drama set in Italy with full cooperation of the locals, which a touchy, cautious BBC kiboshed.
However, that’s jumping ahead. Aided by Margaret Matheson in his return to TV work, in her time at ITV regional company Central, Battersby directed tantalising series by Peter Tinniswood and Barrie Keeffe which I have yet to see, including the latter’s No Excuses (1983) starring the peerless Charlotte Cornwell. He subsequently worked with another great Play for Today alumnus David Rose, producing Films on Four including Winter Flight (1984), irreverent and damning about masculine pub culture, if with a somewhat questionable ending, and Mr. Love (1986), which I’ve not seen, yet sounds a lovely, perhaps uncharacteristically upbeat work in the Battersby oeuvre. Others I’ve sadly yet to be able to investigate are Farrukh Dhondy and W. Stephen Gilbert’s notable series King of the Ghetto (1986) and for, BBC2’s leftfield, experimentalist strand ScreenPlay, The Act (1989).
Battersby worked on a range of the generally stronger and vastly popular range of police dramas of the 1990s like Between the Lines, Inspector Morse, A Touch of Frost and Cracker. His autobiography gives a frank and caustic account of his thoughts about certain other police dramas of the era they came to wearyingly dominate. His book in that and another section is also as strong an inside account of how television drama lost its soul in a Faustian, nay Birtian, pact whereby utilitarian economics and ratings obsession merged to snuff out the questing innovation and the sort of passionate, committed focus that Battersby and two whole generations of writers, directors, producers and actors, had provided from the 1960s to 1990s.
My interviews with Roy, held on Zoom in September 2023, were, therefore, probably his last, as he was, as I only faintly knew, very ill, though he seemed in good spirits and managed to talk at some length both times.** In his chats with me, his fundamental geniality and helpfulness and interest in other people shone through. He was deeply intelligent and impassioned, and wore these attributes lightly. His memoir clearly indicates a lifelong socialism, and awareness of the need for more than incremental reforms, despite his bad experiences with the WRP organisation. In this book, he shows his political development by engaging with environmentalism and the need to stop destroying our planet in so many interlinked ways.
Roy seemed flattered and happy to be able to discuss his life’s work with me, especially the deep acres of it which have undeservedly passed into public obscurity. I intend, very much in line with his stepdaughter Kate Beckinsale’s public calls, to ensure his unparalleled contribution as a great BBC-trained director, equally at home in ITV’s popular dramatic mould, is remembered and inspires others to look deeply at the world and make good, intense art infused with commitment.
*They should’ve stuck to and expanded its Stanley Myers underscore, which does have some of that Roy Budd seedy grandiosity… But, perhaps, BBC budgets, as ever, would only stretch so far.
**I hope to publish the transcripts and audio recordings to the British Entertainment History Project.
May's Britain... 