Man in a landscape, talking

Byron Rogers

exits left, as abruptly as the bird that flew any man,' said Hotspur chattily. `Buts, into into the Saxon hall out of the storms. That, they come when you do call for themt, wrote Bede, was the sum of human life on Alas, no. You can no more enter the earth. mind of mediaeval man than you can the the murders and the old films, it is the sum boys actually believed in Hell-fire: it is at of human history on television. They can- perspective so staggering that to subseclue,11 not be allowed to listen, at least not to generations they must turn forever li'Le words. Something has to move. So, one by great cold stars. 'Give me three strokes,' the one they come and go from right to left, the Earl of Worcester requested of his coca-

fluent and the bland, the men in the land- tioner, 'in honour of the Trinity.'

scape, talking. For a week I was one. When they were annoyed they killed each This year BBC Wales decided to make a other (mediaeval Oxford, it has been programme on the 700th anniversary of the calculated, was 14 times more violent than killing of Llywelyn, the first and last Welsh modem Detroit, and they did not have Prince of Wales, or rather the last to be ac- cepted by the English state. I was to be its `Wasn't it called Smith a few months ago?' But to millions now, becalmed between mind of the cat that sits by your fire. The

hand-guns in mediaeval Oxford). Politic! was war. Fame was war. Thrones totter when the killing had to stop. What else was there?

How did their grandees put up with it in

the murderous intervals between the seed- times and the harvest? Did they dream ° eir quiet old age? We will never know. The fussy bureaucratic letters written in isles names give nothing away. The chronicles are hearsay, recorded in cloisters after sonle /1 garrulous traveller had called, far from tilte scene of events, or, in the case of the Weis', by poets with beady eyes on the next mewo CA great number of the English we t t,. sleep with the daylight in their eyes.' ma`h ton pie, please, squire). It is history thr°14 ttahteoresy. like eyes of recluses and sports comolell- And then Llywelyn. There is nothing

him in English history, the great failed hero, the last prince, the visionary, the founder of a state, at the mention of whose

name the eyes of men in libraries grow mis- ty. Yet in his lifetime he was accused of conscripting boys of under 14 into his ar- mies, and by his death most of his court cir- cle had betrayed him. More than half the arnlY which destroyed him consisted of his °wit countrymen who had experienced the taxation and the ruthlessness. Taxes under Elizabeth I, wrote Sir John Rhys, were a fraction of what they had been under the Princes. What do you make of a man who is Mourned more in 1982 than he was in 1282? But a script got written. 'What can I .show on screen?' groaned the producer. there is no seal, no effigy, no description ?f the man. Castle ruins. A grass mound. The viewers are really going to have to like You,' muttered the producer grimly. ‘, The script got cut. His wife, said the pro- ducer, did not understand it. Simplify. ,iniplify. A TV script has to present as few ?fficulties as the balloons in a comic strip, for a viewer is a busy man, and at his back he always hears Quincy and Dallas hurrying ti,ear. 'Archbishop Peckham, the General 21g of his day, came to negotiate . . . that had to go, said the producer, though the Falklands were still in the talking stage; he,

his wife and his department head, nought it a reference to the old Field- Marshal.

, _But then nobody ever got poor, wrote '‘Iencken through underestimating his au- , thence.

The first day of filming was at Aberffraw in Anglesey, ancestral home of the Princes, a small sad village in the rain and ?00 acres of sand dunes. 'People coming here expect to see something,' said the schoolmaster, 'and there's nothing.' He honour got his pupils to write long essays in `ionour of the last prince. One began, 'The 111, °st important person in the reign of 1-1Ywelyn II was Llywelyn I.' A show- stopper, that. The essays were all in Welsh, the schoolmaster not having a single mono- glot English child in any of his classes. In spite of this some poet had written 'English Out' on the bridge at Aberffraw. It rained all day and we sat in the pub, the camera crew reflective about BBC wales. Ninety per cent of their time, they said, was spent shooting castles. Someone ‘tnentioned a film being made about Herod. Was he Welsh then?'

In the breaks of rain I stood in an overgrown bit of garden asking questions of Lille archaeologist Richard White, White 'lving excavated the garden. It is the one moment the man in the landscape has corn- 1344, when there is an expert. A question. Some neat replies. All the Ian in the landscape has to do is look fascinated, and grunt. I became very proud of MY grunts. I saw a future in which I took over from Jimmy Connors as the most ar- ticulate grunter on television. More rain. We crowded into a damp passageway. White under the lights poin-

ting out a stone far too grand for a cottage- wall. Taffy was a mason, Taffy was a thief. The lost palace of the princes. Magical mo- ment, but the sound-man was shaking his head. CUT. A car had changed gear in the street outside.

We filmed in the village square, White elegiac on the glory that had passed. The villagers showed no interest at all. But then TV crews are part of life's rich pattern for Welsh-speaking Welshmen: their Wales is so small and BBC Wales so introspective that in time they all appear on television.

Not so the English. On the following day I was the man in the landscape for the first time, and in Caernarvon town a group of skinheads crowded round to see something quite amazing, a lunatic talking to himself about the Middle Ages. Fluffed lines. CUT.

A bus passed. CUT. Someone shouted something like 'What we want is more old films and sport'. CUT. I got the choreography wrong and walked six instead of eight steps. CUT: Unobserved, someone had parked his car in shot. CUT. After an hour of this the tension and the sheer thum- ping embarrassment had mounted like water in a glass. Felt guilty about thinking unkind thoughts in the past about Jonathan Dimbleby. The next day we were at Dolbadarn, sinister little castle near Llanberis, which Llywelyn had bunged up his brother and co-ruler for 20 years. Man in the Iron Mask. This was where I got to do something really difficult. I had to walk and talk. Jesus. Felt very guilty about thinking unkind thoughts in the past about President Ford.

It was a long line of stone steps up the side of the keep. 250 words. 20 steps. The choreography was that I should pause on a certain step for emphasis, then go on and moon sorrowfully at the top about a young man on whom the gates had clanged. Slip- ped on stone. CUT. I walked too fast. Stood at the top gabbl- ing like Patrick Moore. CUT. I talked too fast. Stood blankly at the top looking down with nothing in the world to say. CUT. Then everything went well. Step Ten. Step Eleven. CUT. A plane had gone over. Start again. Perfect. Eighteen, Nine- teen, Twenty. Blast of sorrow. CUT. Sound not working. Take Number 17. Aber. On the coast, five miles east of Bangor, another of Llywelyn's halls (like all mediaeval rulers lacking a bureaucracy he was obliged to eat his way round his do- mains like a great weevil). This was where Archbishop Peckham, the General . . . sorry, the great negotiator of his day, came to stop the war. A grass mound in the corner of a small holding, sheep and mud holding illimitable dominion over yesterday's headlines. Two wrecked cars at the foot of the mound. This time it was a walk from the stream, through the gate, to a stone in the field. No skinheads anywhere.

Twenty words. CUT. Have put hands in pockets and threaten continuity. Start again. Thirty words, forty. CUT. A plane Start again. This time straight through. Oh God, I can't see the stone. I can't see the stone. A man in a field turning frantic little circles. CUT.

`But there was another man, a man who had never felt himself constrained by the decisions of law courts, Prince Gerald . . Prince Gerald? CUT. The crew was falling about amidst the machinery. Gerald was the cameraman's name.

There had to be easier ways of making a living, I told the producer. He looked thoughtful. He said he wished I could manage to look happier. Adopted terrible rictus grin. CUT.

In the afternoon I was to climb the mound, talking. A steep mound. I held on- to a root. 'And here for a moment history stopped . . .' Who wrote this stuff? You did. CUT. Hesitation. 'And here for a mo- ment . . .' The root had given way and I was sliding slowly out of sight, still talking. CUT.

Back home I went to see the village doc- tor, and asked to have my blood pressure taken. I was, I informed him, under strain. Doctor as bored as Welsh-speaking villagers. Blood pressure normal.

Sat down at typewriter, resolved never to belly-ache about A. Chancellor, J. Anstey or any editor again. All men of infinite taste. Typewriter old friend suddenly.

In the morning the producer rang. Had seen rushes. Broke news gently. Pro- gramme cancelled. No more walking and talking. No more continuity. Asked to see rushes, as spectacle of human misery always diverting.

The producer refused. 'I get the impres- sion that you do not have a very high opi- nion of television,' he said sadly. CUT.