Television
Overlapping worlds
Martyn Harris
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (ITV, 8.30 p.m., Tuesday) is about secrets, handily symbol- ised by a pagan fertility doll, the `Melpham Idol', found in 1912 in the coffin of a 17th- century Christian bishop. Does it mean that the Dark Ages and early Christianity overlapped and interpenetrated — which would be a major upset to accepted theo- ries? Or is it a cheat, planted by the archaeologist's son to embarrass his father — and which, if exposed, will embarrass whole generations of academics, relatives and ex-retainers?
The key line is spoken in the first episode by historian Gerald Middleton (Richard Johnson): 'Unless I can under- stand what really happened all those years in the past I will be incapable of change in the present — and I want to change.' Ger- ald is, in the author Angus Wilson's brisk summation: 'A family man who had neither the courage to walk out of the marriage he hated, nor the resolution to sustain the role of father decently. An ex-professor of mediaeval history who had not even ful- filled the scholarly promise • of studies whose general value he now doubted. A sensualist who had never had the courage of his desires .. . A 60-year-old failure, in fact, and of that most boring kind, a failure with a conscience.' He is a man in need of a change.
Gerald enters the action by falling from a motor car and spraining his ankle — and so is metaphorically crippled from the start but he also possesses the diffident dogged- ness of the mediaeval knight once decided on his quest. His search for the truth/idol/grail takes him to worlds removed from his comfortable house in Montpelier Square and the dusty doings of the Historical Society. There is his charlady Mrs Salad, for instance, and her homosexu- al grandson Vin: 'He's a lovely boy. Shame he can't seem to settle now he's out. You should see him stripped! Skin on him like a peach blossom.... ' When Mrs Salad is arrested for shoplifting Gerald turns up in court to support her and meets Vin's land- lord, Mr Rammage, who also turns out to be the landlord of Larry Rourke, the rent- boy lover of Gerald's son John. And to give things another twist Mr Rammage is the same Rammage who helped unearth the Melpham idol 40 years before, and was the illicit lover of Canon Portway who first dis- covered it. . . .
The story, expertly adapted by Andrew Davies, is full of these dizzying intercon- nections, and I was glad I had the novel, the cast list and a rewind button to follow it all. It is a drama of different worlds existing side by side: the Edwardian erstwhile of Gerald's youth with its sun-steeped brick
`You've got an appointment with destiny at 3.30.'
and long tennis skirts and exhaust smoke, blue as memory; the stolid 1950s 'present' of Humber cars, bullseye TV sets and tulip skirts; and the demi-monde of Rammage, rent boys, extortion and murder. My own favourite world, for private reasons, is the mock-Lutyens mansion occupied by Inge, Gerald's estranged Danish wife (wonder- fully played by Elizabeth Spriggs). Huge, flaxen and flouncing, she is a monster of bullying joviality and instantaneous self- pity.
As in much of English life, Wilson's fic- tional worlds run on parallel tracks hardly noting the existence of the other until Ger- ald begins to ask his awkward questions and they begin, disastrously, to intersect. Their integrity depends on their privacy, just as Gerald's integrity depends on dis- turbing it. Secrecy is corrosive, but is at the heart of social stability — a perception with special resonance for the homosexual Angus Wilson who spent much of his own life in the closet, imprisoned by one of the most persistent and pernicious of Anglo- Saxon attitudes.
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