Book review: Andrew Roberts (2020) IDOLS OF THE ODEONS: POST-WAR BRITISH FILM STARDOM

This is a fine book. It’s not a gadfly’s project undertaken detachedly for a short time; it’s the result of a lifelong passion for British cinema and screen acting. An especially notable moment is Roberts’s closing comment in the chapter on James Robertson Justice where he asserts the value of the affection we may feel for actors. This deeply analytical and emotive book treats a distinct group of British screen performers as if they are a fascinating, varied but oddly cohesive extended family. Roberts analyses a range of careers and performances, drawing on a vast web of idiosyncratic contextual knowledge.

You could quibble with how relatively few women are featured in comparison to men, but that in itself is a reflection of who we got to see on screen in British films of the 1950s, by and large. Plus, the chapters on Diana Dors, Margaret Rutherford and Hattie Jacques are equally tremendous as the rest on Sellers, Finch, Justice, Wisdom, Terry-Thomas et al.

There are occasional copy editing errors, but not so many to detract from what is an absolutely delightful book. I’ve been making a list of key films mentioned in this book, woeful or fascinating sounding, and indeed some of Roberts’s clear personal favourites which cut so deeply: Genevieve (1953), The Fast Lady (1962), Heavens Above (1963), The Pumpkin Eater (1964) and Smokescreen (1964), among others. His chapters have a tendency towards pithy asides in footnote form, and they often end with what he sees as the most immortal, telling and deeply characterful performance from each actor.

This is a book which reminds me of the delights of The Pleasure Garden (1953) and Simon and Laura (1955), wonderful sui generis films, and I didn’t need much reminding of The Smallest Show on Earth (1957). There’s also an often righteous pleasure in his setting the record straight about how certain films or actors’ images have been traduced and simplified. Roberts has watched, and watches, closely, which hopefully makes us all want to do the same.

The conclusion does a fine job of summarising the book’s spirit and what a spirit: crucially, there is both humour and unabashed – sincere and caustic – value judgements concerning many films. But I do feel that such a rich kaleidoscope of actors and films needed somewhat more drawing together: i.e. with more identification of historical trends and patterns. Much of this is embedded implicitly within all chapters, but making a few key findings explicit would have helped seal the book’s achievement even more.

Reading it, I got the sense that Roberts felt there was a particular configuration of people, places, voices and vehicles – vintage cars are a further special interest of his – in British Cinema circa 1953-64 which made that a special era and that there was then a gradual decline, becoming steeper into the 1970s. Evidently, there are exceptions, and he can be scrupulously nuanced. But he makes a persuasive cumulative case that many performers became marooned in changing times, which sadly involved a decline in the quality of screenwriting and the social vision behind the British films being made, alongside increasingly tatty, bathetic production values. This is a far more rigorous and deeply felt way of making the argument about the paucity of British Cinema in the 1970s than the various 1980s tomes by men called Walker.

There is a moving account of the sad career trajectories of Terry-Thomas, Justice and Jacques, being hemmed in and diminished by changing trends in British cinema and culture. I recall just how painful The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978) is to watch, only very briefly alluded to here in the Leslie Phillips and Terry-Thomas chapter. Roberts also rightly asserts that the same year’s Carry On Emmanuelle is a vile film.

Such incontestable judgements are supplemented by use of a plethora of fine scholarly work on stardom and acting by academics like Melanie Williams, Peter Kramer, Alan Lovell, Geoffrey Macnab, Tom Ryall, Richard Dyer and a brace of Sight and Sound articles by Raymond Durgnat and Lawrence Shaffer. There is an attentiveness to how recurring, persona-based star acting differs from shifting, impersonation-based character acting. But also a sense of how certain actors, in their careers, oscillated between these poles.

This book is deeply scholarly, yet humanly opinionated: it lovingly investigates the past, while avoiding roseate nostalgia. Roberts is a fine neurodivergent writer, who knows this patch of cultural history incredibly well. This has a narrower spatial and temporal remit than Molly Haskell’s assessment of women in cinema or David Thomson’s biographical dictionaries, but it has much the same compendious heft, grasp of complexity, and makes compelling subjective judgements.

It makes a more digressive, personal companion piece to Richard Hewett’s book – also for MUP – on British television acting from the 1950s-2010s.
While I can’t really stand the things in real life, I’d love to see his historical analysis of cars in cinema, including Jacques Tati’s remarkable Trafic (1971) and so many others. Also, hopefully, we will get his BFI Film Classics book on Smokescreen or The Pumpkin Eater before too long. Roberts cites Roger Lewis and Jonathan Meades a few times, which is apt: this work is unapologetically knowledgeable and bursts out of the pages with lively wit and cantankerous invective.

If this sort of thing is out of fashion, then it’s a duller world for it. Never conform.

Book review: Colin Chambers (ed.) (2018) PEGGY TO HER PLAYWRIGHTS: THE LETTERS OF MARGARET RAMSAY, PLAY AGENT

This is an excellent and enjoyable holiday read, sat here in Tuscany, Italy in the dying days of May 2024. This Oberon book is evidently vital stuff for anyone with the slightest interest in immersing themselves in British theatrical culture from the 1950s to 1980s. Ramsay’s vying tones – emotionally baroque and austerely astringent – make this book’s appearance on a certain bookshelf in Rose Glass’s recent British horror film Saint Maud (2019) seem the inspired piece of set dressing it is.

I find Ramsay’s insights and feelings about drama, the purpose of writing, and her advocacy of talent and work over success and status highly persuasive. She has an awareness that writers and spectators are best when they have feelings about the characters they are witnessing. Plays should not merely be a weekend diversion, but should affect how you feel about life, and how to live it, sometimes imparting profound secrets.

While these words can apply fairly well to cinema and television, it is very clear that Ramsay does not seem as interested in those mediums as in theatre or literature, though clearly most of her clients whose correspondence is included here did notably screen work, especially single TV plays. Her tart dismissal of John Hopkins seems a veiled dig at the domestic ‘enclosed room’ nature of certain TV dramas. Interestingly, nor does she seem to admire client Robert Bolt’s lucrative and even OSCAR winning stabs at film screenplays, feeling that these expansive spectacular epics like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) are also taking Bolt away from the intense and direct human communication of theatre.

Interestingly, while Ramsay’s judgements and interpretations seem largely unerring, her perception of the underlying theme of John Bowen’s Robin Redbreast (1970) is a notable snapshot of strange early 1970s attitudes, in taking Norah’s disturbing impregnation as being an event of necessary pagan vitality.

This book of collected letters from a renowned theatrical agent contains an honest waspishness that reveals much about the temper of the times it documents. She doesn’t often pronounce directly on politics, but when she does, there is an utter steadfast morality in the way she urges Alan Ayckbourn and Donald Howarth to do the right thing and join John Mortimer, Peter Nichols, Alan Plater et al in a cultural boycott of Apartheid South Africa by not permitting productions of their plays there. These letters from 1970-71 nobly reflect Ramsay’s later advice to David Hare in March 1974 to ‘Look OUTWARD, my dear child. Don’t muck about picking at your entrails, and shitting on yourself.’

Colin Chambers does an excellent job in selecting telling and entertaining letters, though given the richness of the archive in the British Library, a scholar like myself wishes this had been at least 300 pages, to incorporate even more. Nonetheless, it’s apt that key figures such as Ayckbourn, Hare, Orton and Bolt do constitute the book’s mainstay. Simon Callow’s foreword is exceptionally controlled: distilling the essence of Ramsay’s extraordinary cultural contribution. Implicitly, when reading, we feel the cavernous sense of cultural loss and the closing down of challenging voices and imaginative possibilities that have arisen with Thatcherite philistinism and the linked Blairite view of the Cultural Industries as primarily businesses. Not that Ramsay is not attentive to the financial imperatives for writers, but she realises that material comfort is often a byproduct which comes later, and is far less important than how art changes our minds and helps us understand life.

As notably, Margaret Ramsay’s high standards in her judgement of scripts that clients send her are grounded in her immersion in the European naturalist and modernist canon – Beckett, Gide, Genet, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg – and expressed through her absolute commitment to talented playwrights with distinctive, unique voices.

Book review: Laura Tisdall (2020) A PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION? How childhood changed in mid-twentieth-century English and Welsh schools

Laura Tisdall’s book, published by Manchester University Press, is an aptly comprehensive and deeply thought provoking study of postwar British education. Her work is vastly well read and adopts a probing and careful approach to this unwieldy, mammoth field of study.

The book’s conclusion perhaps undersells its final Chapter’s compelling cumulative argument about the exclusion of people whose identities and behaviours were different from the “normal”. But, this is ultimately a very well researched and argued reflection that the so-called “progressive” era of education in the 1960s and 1970s was a longer term 1945-79 cycle. The overall tendency was to valorise the group over the individual, with utilitarian one size fits all approaches, or expedient “what works well enough” teaching. Tisdall reveals that pupils fitting in and conforming with the crowd was fundamentally encouraged in a preparation for the workplace and to produce people for welfare state Britain. It’s surprising in a way that the historiography here doesn’t include Paul Willis on “the lads” and Philip W. Jackson on the “hidden curriculum” as these ideas very much support Tisdall’s argument.

This non-Utopian progressivism, as defined by Tisdall, is persuasively indicated to be a complex mix of social democratic and conservative ideologies. This may have done some good in some places and been responsive to some local needs, but it clearly discriminated against minorities. This followed a 1920s-30s Utopian progressivism which was more radical, but which didn’t get implemented anywhere near as much. Even this non-Utopian progressivism, largely derived from the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget was piecemeal and only partially believed in and implemented itself by teaches, so was always fused with more traditional chalk and talk methods. But then the promotion of group work and the bias towards producing sociable children did clearly mark a change from the 1940s on, compared to what was there before.

Tisdall grasps complexity: the uneven, varying progressions across time rather than discerning simplistic patterns like some Fleet Street hack would. There’s no definitive indication that progressivism failed, as it was only partially tried. Few, if any, deschooling theories were ever implemented in the 1970s. There’s a sense of a conformist middle ground, where mixed classroom teaching methods were used, with enthusiastic or reluctant incorporation of group work, discovery learning and “child-centred learning”, depending on the school. Tisdall pertinently questions of the related moral panic over teenage delinquency, manifested in “blackboard jungle” fictions and also the later 1960s ‘Black Papers’ claims – or myths – linking radical teaching methods with permissiveness. With no evidence, Cyril Burt et al linked what was basically their dislike of student radical longhairs at University, to earlier 1950s “softer” teaching methods in primary school.

There was more a constructive critique offered by those in the mainstream of teaching, which defended some new methods, but also did pave the way for the mixed blessing of the Thatcher era National Curriculum (1988). Tisdall shows the 1970s as the era when teaching unions got much more militant, understandable given the declining status of a very difficult job. She documents the deeper picture: it’s not simply all a reactionary Black Papers juggernaut conquering all before it, though I feel that key figure Cyril Burt’s role over time needs a bit more ideological analysis and unpicking…

The book’s greatest strength is how Tisdall marshals a vast range of evidence of teachers’ experiences and opinions through oral history interviews and a copious range of education related press publications from the times she is analysing.

Now, there could be more on popular culture’s representations. Such as in pop music, TV (e.g. Scene, Grange Hill), literature and film, or how the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s abstract records were used in classes. The vast area of literature is partially included concerning the Blackboard Jungle myth, and there’s an apt, if brief, citing of Lucy Pearson’s findings about realism. This does get me thinking about the large cohort of Play for Today dramatists who had experienced teaching… Overall, though, this seems an unfair ask, given Tisdall’s focus is squarely on educational history and ethnography, rather than cultural representations.

There could have been more direct evidence of varied people’s memories of teaching styles and approaches in their schooldays, i.e. some interviews and surveys, but also an attention to first-hand diaries, material instances of schoolwork itself and more analysis of documents like individuals’ termly (parents’ evening) reports. The use of HMI reports and other school records is absolutely brilliant, so this would have enabled an even more rounded perspective. this would have assisted the book’s argument, as we do get some crucial findings on people who didn’t fit in, cited via published academic work or reports.

Anyway, this is a fine book, a labour of intensive thought, infused with historical nuance. I’d be utterly flabbergasted if anyone came away from reading this feeling that getting rid of the HMI and replacing them with OFSTED has been a good thing. It also leaves you certain that large class sizes, teachers being overworked and thus relying so often on utilitarian, non-differentiated methods have let the majority of people down who rely on the state system.

Book review: Richard Hewett (2017) THE CHANGING SPACES OF TELEVISION ACTING – From studio realism to location realism in BBC television drama

This book, published by Manchester University Press, seven years ago, is a detailed academic study of TV acting. It provides a clear contextualised historical framework, conveying the progression from studio realism to location realism. With Outside Broadcast video as the transitional technology towards single camera DV/film that we largely now have. Hewett tantalisingly notes some exceptions which have marked a return to multi camera studio live – EastEnders and Corrie live episodes and the live event drama Frankenstein’s Wedding (2011). There’s a great account of the throwback The Quatermass Experiment (2005), which reached a 542,000 peak audience on BBC4, and pointed to some notable possibilities that were being neglected. Here, I feel Hewett could have explored the crucial previous attempt at doing live dramas, Live at Pebble Mill (BBC2, 1983) and engaged with arguments about why there was an unfairly negative critical response to fine dramas like Keith Dewhurst’s The Battle of Waterloo.

Hewett traces how, initially, very gestural stage derived acting styles were still prevalent among some in the 1950s Quatermass cast, like Van Boolen, but that Reginald Tate was pioneering the ‘scaling down’ of performance that would go onto dominate TV acting. He evocatively and economically describes and analyses the subtleties of acting gestures, movement and vocal delivery in impressive detail. In the 1970s, studio realism and restrained performances were very much hegemonic, but in the Survivors episode analysed, Talfryn Thomas using far a more expressive and gestural and large style where the acting performance is very much evident. And viewers were still very much admiring and accepting of this, at this point. Most of the actors were developing a location realism on OB video in real spaces, not created ones in the studio. Perhaps Hewett here could have explored key precursors to this like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966) which began using 16mm film for TV dramas.

This book contains a wealth of reflective analysis of changing training for actors, with a gradual decline in the central of stage training: IMO, which hasn’t really benefited screen acting. There are telling and caustic Broadsides from Tony Garnett and Timothy West that more people should have been listening to. There’s also great and intelligent testimony from actors like Louise Jameson and Denis Lill. While Hewett records how the younger generation of actors feel that some older, more theatrically rooted actors only really act with their voice. This reminds me of Roger Lewis’s significant observation about the stillness of Richard Burton in his excellent recent book.