CARVER MeD 0 ONE WORE THE KILT
The media: Paul Johnson
on a piece of duopoly cheeseparing
IN THE West Country, there has been some contemptuous sneering at the latest proposal from 'the best TV service in the world'. That leading component of the duopoly, Thames Television, is planning to make a 100-minute dramatised version of R. D. Blackmore's famous novel, Lorna Doone. The drama is being filmed 'on location', as indeed it must be, since the majority of its most exciting episodes occur out of doors. But the filming will not take place on and around Exmoor, where Blackmore set it, but near Glasgow. The idea is to spare the budget by cutting down travelling time. 'Quite frankly,' a Thames Television spokesperson let it be known, it will save quite a bit of money to use a Glasgow-based crew.' Locations near Glasgow were 'very similar' to Exmoor.
I'm not quite sure that I follow this topographical thinking. Near Glasgow there are hilly bits and trees and moors and streams and heather etc, which to a short- sighted, city-based Thames executive might appear rather like Exmoor. But then you could find the same kind of stuff in South Wales and hire a nearby crew in Bristol. Or take one from Manchester or Leeds and put it in the Pennines. Or, for that matter, have a Bristol crew drive to Exmoor. Why Glasgow? But then to a certain type of film maker, 'wild' scenery is ubiquitous. At one time or another, every region of the world has been filmed within 50 miles of Holly- wood. Then outrageous union demands drove the moguls to recreate the universe elsewhere, notably in Spain. Today most epics, irrespective of their original prove- nance, appear to be made in either Canada or Yugoslavia.
A good deal of professional arcana go into these decisions, but not as much as You might think. When we were living in south Bucks, I remember watching in amazement as Ancient Egypt slowly arose beneath the leaden skies of nearby Pine- wood. Intended for the accident-prone, Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton Cleopat- ra, it was then the most expensive outdoor set ever built. As the winter rain poured ceaselessly down, I said to a friend to whom I had been showing it, 'You'd think they would know better than to create
Memphis in the sodden Thames Valley.' 'Oh no', said he, 'you may depend upon it, they have sound technical reasons for putting it here.' A considerable time later, when the set was being dismantled without having produced one foot of film, I heard the latest director who had been hired to salvage the project exclaim in a television interview, 'What I'll never understand is why these smart-asses tried to make a movie about Egypt in the English climate, goddammit.' The truth is, there are usually simple, sensible grounds for staying faith- ful to the original setting.
In any case, the peculiar charm of Blackmore's novel, a mannered work not to everyone's taste, is its intense localism. The story could not have occurred any- where else, or perhaps at any other period. Almost all the places which are described are still readily identifiable. To the discern- ing eye, Exmoor is not in the least like the Trossachs, or the country round Loch Lomond or Iny of the uplands within an easy drive of Glasgow. The farmhouses are quite different. You could not easily con- fuse a West Somerset church with a Scots kirk. There is no place remotely like Dulverton in the Glasgow area. All the settings in the Doone saga have a vivid, individual flavour which can't be repro- duced anywhere else.
Moreover, and this is something I have discovered with delight since I bought a house in the West Country, the whole area has been more resistant, or perhaps imper- 'I've put you in the Alimony Suite' vious, to change than almost any other part of our progress-tortured country. If, for instance, you were filming Arnold Ben- nett's Potteries, and tried to find authentic location shots for Clayhanger or Anna of the Five Towns, you would experience great difficulty. The Hanley and Burslem which Bennett knew, and which were still there when I lived nearby in the Thirties, have pretty well gone now. The same is true of much of Hardy's Wessex or Priestley's Bruddersfield or Jane Austen's Hampshire. But in parts of Somerset and Devon, time has often been held at bay, and not just in the settings of Lorna Doone.
Indeed, if you are reading Richard Holmes's enjoyable new book about the young Coleridge, you can if you choose visit many of the places mentioned in it. The little house where the poet lived with his young wife and child in Nether Stowy is almost intact. So is the house of his benefactor, Tom Poole, and the mansion Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy rented, for £23 a year, in Holford, three miles away. It is possible to trace, step by step, the long walks these young people took together — sometimes accompanied by an enthusiastic Hazlitt and a reluctant Charles Lamb — and which were described in detail in Dorothy Wordsworth's letters. The tiny village in the 'deep, romantic chasm' which helped to provide Coleridge with part of the setting for 'Kubla Khan' is exactly as it was in 1797. The farmhouse where (he claimed) the poem had its genesis in an opium-induced sleep is still on Exmoor. The little port whence the Ancient Mariner emerged has not changed much. I was fascinated to discover that when these events took place, around the turn of the 18th century, the parson who occupied the rectory just behind my house, one William Holland, kept a sharply worded diary in which Coleridge is dismis- sed as 'that Democratick fellow' and his wife Sara as a 'hoyden', `no better than she should be'. He mentions innumerable local places and families. Almost without excep- tion the farms and houses he lists are still there and in many cases the local family names have survived.
If Thames Television, which is, or cer- tainly ought to be, one of the most profit- able broadcasting companies in the world, is going to film much-loved classics like Lorna Doone, it should be prepared to make some effort to achieve authenticity, especially when to do so is easy and comparatively inexpensive. The company's cost-cutting excuses for filming in Scotland seem to me unacceptable. This is exactly the sort of conduct, with its implications of how a company views quality, which the new Independent Broadcasting Commis- sion ought to consider when deciding if elements of the old duopoly are fit to move into the new age of competitive television.
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