Imagined Communities - sight & sound 93
Tony GamettÕs track record stretches from the current ÔBetween the LinesÕ to major 60s televisioi plays such as ÔCathy Come HomeÕ How have his convictions shifted over the years? By James Sayn

IMAGINED COMMUNITIES

Some months ago, a small ad appeared in The British MedicalJournal and The Lancet. it appealed for hospital folk to contact a telev~ston producer who was formulating a new drama series about the health service. But the producer didn~t just want consultancy help on the show: he wanted someone to conceive and write it. The ad was placed by Tony Garnett, and demonstrated that this formidable empowerer of talent - once the canny, crusading architect of a populace drama which threw stage-crafted TV fiction out on to the street on its neck Ñ was still up to his old tricks, even in the over-industrialised television of the 90s.

Nearly three decades after he joined the BBCÕs epoch-defining The Wednesday Play. Garnett remains committed to sourcing drama at the workface Ñ no matter that the screenwriters heÕs been considering of late have been doctors rather than dockers. There is, he bluntly persists, no mystique to writing for television, whatever career aesthetes might tell you. (As a result, Cardiac Arrest, a series provided by a West Midlands medic, is going into production for the BBC.)

This is welcome news for those who might have been wondering what had happened to the great realist roundhead of yore Ñ the pioneer of ardently demotic and engage works such as Cathy Come Home, Days of Hope, The Spongers and Law and Order Ñ whose name over the past decade became attached to a much dippier miscellany of output, from the films Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird (1985) and Earth Girls Are Easy (1988) to the spoofy television polyfihla of The Staggering Stories of Ferdinand de Bargos. Of course, there has also been Between the Lines, a dirty-glossy police procedural about the internal affairs department of London~s finest, currently enjoying a second run on BBCI.

This has been partial confirmation that Garnett is back as a stirrer-upper of television formulas and social complacencies, following a ten-year Stint in Hollywood.

Between the Lines is the first long-running television series Garnett has attempted. "The odds are against original work being done in serials," he declared in 1970, a time when Single films were still the only hope for interventions that were both meaningful and popular. Now he says: "Theres an element in television today that has the smell of art-house preciousness about it, where people are making one-off films which they hope will win awards at some film festival. IÕve never wanted to make films where you come out humming the lighting. ThatÕs One reason I wanted to plunge into the world of popular series, where there are still large audiences." (This mirrors the latest thinking of Ken Loach, who now believes that working on soap operas would be the best way of affecting ordinary peopleÕs lives.)

If GarnettÕs puritan populism remains unchanged, if rechannelled, what of his famed political puckishness? He canÕt help twinkling that the format of Between the Lines also means we can have corrupt police officers on the screen every weekÕ, while relishing how the latest series tackles relations between the boys in blue and one of his former adversaries, M15.

But Between the Lines is essentially a Hill Street Blues-style, post-leftist cop show. It certainly sympathises with the police a good deal more than GarnettÕs 70s shocker Law and Order, which presented the Met as an irredeemable sink of iniquity. The new show is concerned with moral ambiguities", in GarnettÕs phrase Ñ a hall of mirrors of classless ethical dilemmas to do with lying and truthing in the name of a greater good which remains teasingly undefined Ñ rather than with the stark, us-versus-them, issues of his work of the 60s and 70s.

"My politics haven~t changed," maintains Garnett. who describes himself as a social democrat. "ItÕs just that now I look back on my youthful arrogance. I suppose, and realise that things are more complicated. Not that things have got more complicated Ñ just that I used to think they were simpler. The answers are not as pat and easy as I once thought."

The Carnaby Street left

Curiously, there is something pat and easy Ñenough to warm the heart of any biographer -in the way GarnettÕs career falls into decades. For Garnett, the 60s were the years of radical challenge; the 70s of creeping stagnation; the 80s of free-market sink-or-swim; the 90s of some kind of balming consolidation.

Now aged 57, Garnett is a no-nonsense, bighearted, remarkably ego-free individual, who still dresses in denim and looks like a slightly startled ex-member of The Shadows. He used to describe his relations with the BBC as "warm and combative" Ñ which also goes for many of the programmes he has made, and for his personal style. A forceful intellect, generally put at the service of material problems rather than attitudinising, goes along with a communitarian self-effacement and dislike of personal publicity. He doesnÕt keep copies of his own films.

In his heyday, this mix of humanity and rigour made Garnett a producerÕs producer anda socialistÕs socialist. Even allowing for his self-lowered profile and the poor cultural status of television, he is BritainÕs most influentin film facilitator of the past 30 years Ñ building largely single-handedly the British realist tradtion that followed Free Cinema. Directors including Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Roland Joffe, Les Blair, Jack Gold, John Mackenzie and Roy Battersby owe their key career breaks to him; a do writers including Jim Allen, Barry Hines, Nevilie Smith and G. F. Newman7; as do cinematographers induding Chris Menges, Nancy Crosby, Tony Imi and Charles Stewart.

Garnett was born ir~ Birmingham in 1936 the son of a toolmaker. After finishing school he ran away to become an actor in repertory theatre, and then took up a place at London University, in 1957, to study psychology. But he kept up the acting, so that by the time he graduated, his teddy-boyish features were making regular appearances on the grey-green television screens spreading throughout the land.

He featured in Troy Kennedy MartinÕs first television offering, Incident at Echo Six (1958), in the BBC Shakespeare marathon An Age of King (1960), and in two plays by David Mercer. H was often typecast as a delinquent or a neurotic CND undergraduate. Ken Loach, fresh into the BBC, directed him in the play Catherine (l963) written by BBC script editor Roger Smith, who was impressed by GarnettÕs unactor-ish grasp of television politics and theory

This was a time when the studio-bound single play was on its deathbed - racked by low audiences and targeted for euthanasia by the BBC chief of programmes Donald Baverstock. A drama clique called the Langham Group had earlier tried to breathe new life into the form though the cycle of more experimental work they inspired was now playing itself out. In 1964, writer Troy Kennedy Martin issued a manifesto calling for more non-naturalistic research, a cry which fell on deaf ears.

But by now, the BBCÕs pugnacious head of drama and one-time sultan of kitchen single drama Sydney Newman was seeing off Bavenstock and gearing up for a renaissance of realist plays, taking full advantage of the BBCÕs comfortable resource base and new liberal dimate James MacTaggart was one of two producers put in charge of the new strand of Wednesday Plays; Roger Smith was his story editor, and Smith hired Garnett Ñ who had become allergic to acting as his first marriage broke up - to be his assistant.

These last two, archetypal young turk in Hugh GreeneÕs swinging BBC, scavenged fiercly for a raft of new writers, not least the reject tray of their own departmentÕs readersÕ room. (One project lodged there was called The Abyss, thrown out by a traditionalist on the grounds that "The Wednesday Play is not a political platform". it later saw the light of day as Cathy Come Home.) The sagacious MacTaggart was their indispensable patron and protector.

Smith recalls: "The department had to be turned upside down, really. We used to challenge people, ÔWrite us the play you think we wonÕt do.Õ There were a lot of first-time writers - Dennis Potter among them - where you werenÕt quite sure whether theyÕd have another play in them. But they certainly had one play, and that was the one you wanted."

Newman and MacTaggart saw no problem with running a new wave of Paddy Chayefskyan problem plays out of the electronic studio, but Garnett and Ken Loach were soon rejecting this whole classical notion of Ôthe play'Õ They had seen the future of television drama, and it was A bout de souffle mated with World in Action. While MacTaggart was away, they booked up as much off-base filming as they could for a television version of Nell Dunn~s book, Up the Junction. a mouthy compendium of South London lower-class lore.

"At that time, you were allowed about four days filming Lwith cumbersome 35mm equipmentl just to show a car pulling up or driving away, says Loach. "So we used those four days to whizz round and shoot half the script with a hand-held 16mm camera - about 35 to 40 minutes of screen time." The remaining studio scenes were dubbed from tape on to film so that the whole thing could be collaged together in the cutting room, with Loach deploying all manner of neo-Godardian time leaps and wild-track effects.

MacTaggart was appalled on his return, but gave Garnett his head. Up the Junction (1965) became a sensation, and won Garnett the space to concentrate on film work when he was given full producer stripes in 1966. (MacTaggart left at this time to concentrate on directing.) GarnettÕs first Wednesday Play under his new status was LoachÕs even bigger hit, Cathy Come Home (1966), a drama-documentary about a homeless family being torn to pieces by welfare regulations. It reprised many of the tough-cut, interruptive devices of Up the Junction, bolstered by even greater amounts of objective material Ñreal-world vox pops and statistics on poverty.

Cathy Come Home sealed the almost Siamese twinning of Loach and Garnett - two figures of identical age. social background, temperament, creative ambition and, most of all, politics. It was a partnership which was to continue over nine more projects until a disastrous movie venture Blackjack in 1979.

Garnett took advantage, with the nicest possible ruth1e~sness. of the near-total freedom for BBC producers to develop and make whatever they wanted. "1 never had to ask a head of department to put a script into production," he recalls. "I was never once asked who was going to be in anything, or who was going to direct it. They really believed then in producer power, and the system of Ôreferring upwardsÕ: if you had a problem, refer it to the senior management. But my opinion was always that the management were probably terribly busy people, and I didnÕt really want to bother them.

"You could also blind them with science a bit. If they asked to see something, you could say were neg~cutting or mixing the tn2cks, which some of them didnÕt understand. I would always make a point of not showing it to them until after it had been billed in the Radio Times. That way, if they were going to stop it going out, they would have to stop it very publicly."

Garnett had a rumbustious love-hate relationship with the BBC; in turn, figures like Sydney Newman and the head of television Huw Wheldon gave him rueful licence. Blood covered the walls, but it was often let in a ritual fashion. Garnett remembers one screaming row that took place between him and Newman all through the corridors of Television Centre. "But imagine this," Garnett marvels. "First, he was the head of drama, and yet wasnÕt afraid of this massive public row. And second, he let the film go out without showing it to the management." (The film was LoachÕs 1967 in Two Minds by David Mercer, a mockumentary about a dysfunctional family which drew on the ideas of psychiatry guru R. D. Laing.)

In the 60s, Garnett and his set Ñ known as "the Carnaby Street left" Ñ tended to network at the Cromwell Road fiat of influential talent agent Clive Goodwin. Salon members included Dennis Potter, John McGrath and Troy Kennedy Martin. The Loach-Garnett world view was leaning ever more towards Trotskyism at this time. (For instance, Garnett once advocated in an interview that TV bosses Ñ plus, perhaps, producers Ñ should be subject to elections.) But it was hard to know on which side of the reformism-or-revolution debate Garnett stood.

"That one was difficult to figure out." says director Roy Battersby. a long-time friend who tried unsuccessfully to woo Garnett into far-left activism in the early 70s. "He was much more to the left than mere Ôdemocratic socialism~ but he always had one foot in a kind of political reality that some of us didnÕt. He was more circumspect about the sort of authoritarianism that emerged a bit later on.

Garnett and Loach soon came to repudiate their biggest popular triumph, Cathy Come Home, on the grounds that it over-individualised issues and offered a middle-class society too great a compassion alibi. Or as Garnett put it: "(What) we didnÕt do was to show some relation between that family and the necessity to nationalise the land." Today, he reflects: "I suppose the film was a bit soft politically. Looking now at the result of Cathy, the tough response is that there are a lot more people homeless today than when we did the film. Meanwhile, all of those who were concerned with making it are living in very nice houses.

Foggy purgatory

Jean-Luc Godard once said: "You can either start with fiction or documentary. But whichever you start with, you will inevitably find the other." Garnett once tried to work with Godard. but found him an impossible flibbertigibbet. The SwisswizardÕs dictum, though, sums up well the formal conundrum experienced by Loach and Garnett, perhaps more than any other international film-makers, during this period Ñ a time when the word ÔdialecticÕ seemed to spring from every pore of their work

They operated in a neo-realist traditions stretching from the Soviet cinema of the 20s, through the American Ôliving newspaperÕ theatre of the 30s, the Humphrey Jennings semi-staged documentary of the 40s, the Ôstory documentaryÕ of BBC televisionÕs Gilchrist Calder in the 50Õs, to the theatre of Joan Little wood in the 60s. When Gamett had trouble convincing sceptical BBC management, anally anxious about "the blurring of fact and fiction", of this heritage, he would try pointing out that The Archers had started life as drama documentary.

Garnett had only been aware of John Grieson as a grizzled Scotsman who used to introduce documentaries from Scottish Television. But there were several striking similarities between them: both founded formally innovative realist traditions, though were only occasional directors; both were very collaborative workers; both pursued slice-of-life films tha were highly didactic; both operated within state-run systems that allowed them relative autonomy. GriersonÕs definition of documentary Ñ the creative interpretation of actualityÕ- seemed a pretty appropriate handle on Gar nettÕs drama, not that Garnett ever had much inclination for such theorising.

"We wanted viewers to stop thinking of the films as fiction, but to think of them as havinig a factual point," Loach says. To this end, they cast ordinary people from a given locality as much as was practicable. Loach made then extemporise around the script during the course of endless takes (shooting ratios were a high as 25 to 1), after which news-style interviews and pieces of commentary might be added. The lithe, quotidian texture of LoachÕs films - via ÔnaturalÕ lighting, direct sound, undemonstrative vocalising, longish takes, longish lenses and a general air of winging it is the composition - came uncannily to characterise the work of other directors Gamett brought on (notably Jack Gold, Les Blair an Roland Joffé).

The writer Jim Allen acted as the biggest purifying agent on Loach-Garnett politics an aesthetics. Allen was a former building workes miner and blacklisted labour activist. He had scripts produced by Garnett Ñ The Lump (196Õ The Big Flame (1969), Days of Hope (1975) and The Spongers (1978) Ñ featured working-class communities stymied by the fraud and violence of the state and by the class betrayals of their own vanguard. In his work, AllenÕs anarcho-syndicism went along with a great pounding heart or maybe a breaking one.

By the mid-70s, the extreme naturalism of the Loach-Garnett-Allen films Ñ snatched, clutered and intense, like an impromptu left-cacus meeting Ñ had become the centre of much academic debate. Many, from a broadly po Brechtian position, condemned the style in making the viewer empathise meekly with all-too-convincing melodrama of defeat. Raymond Williams perceived that the chopped highly reproductive look of pieces like The Big Flame (which imagines a failed workers occupation of the Liverpool docks) was accompanied by certain moments of more dynamic, more self-conscious mise en scene. The jagged edge between, the two modes was something that Brecht, after all, might have appreciated. (Gamflett. incidentally, had a go at Brecht head-on in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, directed for the BBC by Jack Gold in 1972. The main alienation effect here seemed to stem from the Chicago-set saga being shot in a patently recognisable Home Counties.)

The Man in the Mac

For me, AllenÕs work was most striking for the breadth of its spirit, despite its narrow ideological agenda. His analysis of the relations between systems and individuals was remarkably effective. There was some sort of deeplevel sad empathy with the agents of oppression Ñ mine-owners, politicians, welfare officials, army people Ñ who were treated without maliciousness. They were more like objects of pity trapped in a foggy purgatory on the wrong side of the class struggle. It was by creating an imaginative understanding of these boss-dass factotums that, paradoxically, the system could be thrown into the sharpest relief as the only available culprit Ñ precisely what Garnett and Loach were after in their post-Cathy voyaging.

In 1970, Gamnett sensed that the voyage was hitting rougher waters. A new implacability was coming over BBC management, and he predicted: "Expect more problem plays about au pair girls and phoney historical romances.

After 1968, he had been jinxing in and out of the BBC Ñ also supervising single dramas for London Weekend Television and theatrical movies under the Kestrel Films banner. (This company was really just a shell for freelance work.) LoachÕs Kes (1969), based on the novel by Barry Hines, was about a Yorkshire school-leaver whose passion for a kestrel doesnÕt fit with the drone-like role allotted him by society. Loach, influenced by the Czech new wave, had found a much cooler style; his curious mix of quietism and anger seemed perfectly in balance. The film did well at the British box office, though only after distributors had dithered over it in fear of its north of England accents. A second Loach-Garnett movie, Family Life (1971) - a remake of In Two Minds that Gamnett had insisted they do to satisfy a personal obsession with the subject of "schizogenic" households Ñperformed less successfully, destroying their bankability with British film financiers.

By the mid-70s, Gamnett was worrying whether some of his earlier work had been Ôtoo Stalinistic" and musing, "We should be enlarging our politics and our films." The 411-minute costume drama for the BBC. Days of Hope. about left-wing living between 1916 and 1926, was certainly an enlargement of sorts. It had a number of conventional narrative gratifications. and you almost came out "humming the lighting". It was also somewhat shapeless, collapsing in the fourth segment (about the General Strike) into non-stop re-enactments of labour rallies and bargaining talks. Still, it was one of the high points of the television decade, mem~rab1y described by the Daily Telegraph as "the most prolonged commercial the comrades have received since the media was invented".

A kind of McCarthyism was all the while taking hold at the BBC. At one point, an MIS vetter of corporation staff had tried to prevent GainnettÕs contract from being renewed. Later, the same figure Ñ known internally as The Man in the Mac - blocked the appointment of Roland Joffe, previously associated with far-left politics, to direct The Spongers, a film about the welfare state hitting the buffers. Gamnett went along to see the television service boss. Alasdair Mime, and threatened to make the issue public. Mime poured him a malt and called up The Man in the Mac. JofféÕs contract came through; The Spongers, winner of the Prix Italia, was one of GamnettÕs best works.

As was GamnettÕs BBC swansong, the four-part Law and Order (1978), a swingeing indictment of all aspects of criminal justice written by G. F. Newman and directed with a grim, sardonic minimalism by Les Blair. Its producer surpassed himself in subverting the systems of both the BBC and the Home Office, who offered no research help. Renegade detectives and members of the underworld were hired to act as consultants and even appear in the films (participants were paid in used readies from the BBC cash office). The director and designer were secretly smuggled into Scotland Yard. As usual, the BBC was kept in the dark until the last minute. Les Blair claims that management didnÕt even know the subject of the final film (the prison service) until after the first one had been transmitted.

In addition to his work for television, Carnett has written and directed two feature filmsÑ the British Prostitute (1980), a piece of industrial anthropology researched, financed and made with some furtiveness; and the American Handgun (aka Deep In the Heart, 1982). Shot in Dallas, this was an intriguing mix of a rape-revenge exploitation pic and a low-metabolism, verismo study of Texan gun culture. Its only US theatrical outing was several days in a New York cinema during snowstorms.

"One of the things a producer does is put a toy store together so that the director can play with the train set," Gamnett remarks. And after a few years I thought. I wouldnÕt mind having a play with the train set. But, you know, itÕs boring. Working with the actors is always fascinating, but most of the rest of it is boring Ñ all that standing about on cold street corners. I donÕt know how directors bear it."

Gamnett had left for the US in 1980, amid feelings of creative burn-out and political disillusion, plus unspecified personal problems. Family concerns drove him back to Britain in 1990. (He has bee,n married and divorced twice and has two sons.) Gamnett isnÕt talking much at the moment about the 80s, though he says his Hollywood odyssey was invigorating in some ways. The only movie of substance he produced there was the 1989 Shadow Makers (US: Fat Man and Little Boy), a sprawling Roland Joffe history of Los Alamos starring Paul Nex%-man, its release unfortunately timed to miss the Cold War by the odd few months.

Gamnett himself was missed over here in the SOs, says Ken Loach: ÔThe failure of people making television fiction to respond to the early Thatcher onslaught was very marked. I certainly didnÕt come up with the right ideas. The opportunity was there - particularly with the arrival of Channel 4 - and if he had been producing in Britain he would have taken it."

Waiting to be called

In British television of the 90s Ñ a very top-down system compared with the freewheeling commissioning set-ups of the past Ñ Gamnett runs a company called Island World Productions. Opinions are divided on whether heÕs a happy camper. One friend says: "He was always a very hands-on producer, and his present job isnÕt exactly that Ñ itÕs more of an executive role. He says he learnt a lot in America. but I think he also found it a very painful experience. His great quality is having a sense of something thatÕs right for the occasion, rather than the rigid story sense that tends to be Hollywood."

To talk to, Garnett seems chirpy enough. Just occasionally, though, thereÕs an undertow of weary nostalgia. "IÕve had this fantasy lately," he confesses. "IÕd love the idea of going back into Spotlight, and of someone giving me a cameo role in a little film. IÕd learn my five lines and go along to the location. And IÕd sit there with a book - a cookbook, which is what I read mostly Ñ watching the producer and director getting harassed. Just sitting there, waiting to be called. I think IÕll do that."

ÔBetween the LinesÕ is on BBCI on Tuesdays at 930pm

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