"How Shall I Show My Love?"

PLAY FOR TODAY - PENDA'S FEN (1974)

Interviewed in the Radio Times at the time of PENDA'S FEN's original broadcast, David Rudkin commented " ... it was conceived as a film and written visually. Some people think visual questions are none of the writer’s business - that he should provide the action and leave it to the director to picture it all out. For me, writing for the screen is a business of deciding not only what is to be shown but how it is to be seen ..."

BRITAIN is a land of foreboding subterranean terrors, isolated woodlands and remote islands. It is a country that, to a certain extent, still follows its ancient boundaries, pathways and quirky lore. Beneath the decomposing topsoil of British film, a richer, weirder substance pervades. It is a material of the past that permeates the present and future, mineral horizons darker in tone that exist within our celluloid. If the moving image itself is the greatest ghost story, this secret property teems with a surreal catalogue of customs and practices, and an engaging alternative to urbanisation. In this semi-forgotten Albion, film has seen human nature fighting its demons in WITCHFINDER GENERAL and BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW; Ben Wheatley's phantasmagorical nightmares KILL LIST and A FIELD IN ENGLAND; and old religions explored in THE WICKER MAN and THE BORDERLANDS.

Written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke on the writer's insistence, the BBC's PLAY FOR TODAY showcase PENDA'S FEN is a major example of this exponent for television, and a ninety minute sermon on identification. During his last boyhood summer Stephen (Spencer Banks) awakens a buried force against the backdrop of the Malvern Hills. His sexual, mystical and political growing pains are played out against a past and present England, where he encounters angels, demons, Edward Elgar and King Penda ("Be secret. Child be strange, dark, true, impure, and dissonant. Cherish our flame.") His confusion is further heightened by his pastor father's doubts of orthodox Christianity, and the revelation that his is adopted "with foreign blood."

"Unnatural"; in a constant flux between adolescene and anguish, at the height of a homosexual yearning Stephen awakes in his bed to find a gargoyle perched over him.

Under a minimal sound design from the Radiophonic Workshop, the play mirrors the elemental struggle between pagan values and the modern "machine." Clarke himself has admitted that he didn't fully understand its meaning (Stephen's "waking dream" of a man cutting off the hands of willing children is particularly perplexing), but Banks portrays a character as pompous as much of the dialogue. Its focus on myth sits out-of-place with Clarke's usual social realism, and in Rob Young's 2010 book Electric Eden, the author labels PENDA'S FEN as a psycho-geographical toolkit: " ... the occult history of Albion – the British Dreamtime – lies waiting to be discovered by anyone with the right mental equipment." It would be hard to see Rudkin's pastoral hybrid commissioned today; in fact, its slow-burning theories and ideas must have been a test even for seventies audiences.

"Mine shall inherit"

A GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS - THE ASH TREE (1975)
A GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS - THE SIGNALMAN (1976)

Jolting nudity in THE ASH TREE, an extraordinary tale 
reminiscent of WITCHFINDER GENERAL.

THESE BBC ghost stories - both directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark - hit the ground running with their ambience of curses, bleak moorlands and impending doom. THE ASH TREE - from M.R. James' 1904 Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - tells of eighteenth-century nobleman Sir Richard Fell (Edward Petherbridge), who inherits a stately home dominated by an old Ash tree. The seat has been cursed since the day his ancestor Sir Matthew (played in flashback by Petherbridge) condemned Mistress Mothersole (Barbara Ewing) to death for witchcraft. More a tale of resurrection and an exploration in the aching loss of fertility, writer David Rudkin energises James' prose by discarding the original set of narrators in favour of a singular descent into madness, and emphasises sexual awareness with Fell's free-spirited muse Lady Augusta (Lalla Ward). The species of Ash has inspired numerous myths: in British folklore it is said that ill children could be cured by passing through the cleft of the tree; here it is a vessel that acts on the sorceress' battle cry ("Mine shall inherit"), as its branches unleash grotesque spider-babies into Sir Richard's bedroom.

Based on a Charles Dickens' short story first published in the 1866 Christmas edition of All the Year Round, THE SIGNALMAN was greatly infused with the writer's own involvement with the Staplehurst rail crash of 1865. The most critically acclaimed of all the BBC ghost stories, Andrew Davies' script creates a strong sense of foreboding, where the phantom is a time displacement which portends the death of a signal operator (Denholm Elliott). Very much the embodiment of the Victorian innocent, the signalman tells his story to a traveller (Bernard Lloyd) who initially scoffs at the premonitions. If James' ghosts aim to infiltrate and scar, Dickens' spectre is one that personifies overwhelming fate; the systems and technology that man creates also can suffocate and lead to unfathomable dread to come (such as the railways leading to Auschwitz).

The fleeting appearance of THE SIGNALMAN's open-mouthed phantom mimics the railway tunnel and forewarns the terror to come.

If the signal operater is a tortured soul, the mystery of the traveller adds more spice to the story. Taking a cue from Dickens' original text, Davies' line "I've been confined but now I am free" leads the viewer to surmise if the character is referring to his working background, a spell in prison, or even he has escaped a stifling marriage; as David Kerekes states in Creeping Flesh Volume 1, "maybe there is something in the latter, given that Charles Dickens wrote The Signal-Man following his own escape from a bad train wreck ... in the company of his mistress." The television adaptation is at times so ambiguous and in limbo it adds to its surreal vacuum; even the inn where the traveller is staying is shrouded in fog, and no other guests are present. Lloyd's role may well be "the straight man," but by the end his face takes on the attitude of the phantom, perhaps signifying that the traveller himself is a visitation and harbinger of death.