#Jana Shelden

[denimbex1986]

'Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer has been grabbing plenty of headlines and dollars this week but the BBC has turned the clocks back to a different retelling, making its classic series available on iPlayer.

The BAFTA-winning series aired on the BBC more than 40 years ago and is available from today as a boxset on the VoD player.

Sam Waterston was the Cillian Murphy of the series, starring as the titular scientist as he led the weapons laboratory of the Manhattan Project, all the while under constant surveillance by the FBI because of his left wing politics and association with communists. As with Nolan’s movie, the show followed his role in developing the world’s first nuclear weapons and his rivalry with Edward Teller, through to being stripped of his security clearance by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s. David Suchet, Kate Harper, John Carson, Christopher Munke and Jana Shelden also starred.

The show catapulted Waterston to fame, as he went on to land roles in Law and Order, The Newsroom, and Grace & Frankie. It aired in the U.S. on PBS’ American Playhouse and won three BAFTAs including Best Drama Series, while being nominated for seven.

The BBC’s move comes as Oppenheimer tears up the global box office alongside Barbie. Deadline’s latest box office report had Universal’s opus at $405.6M global and more is expected this weekend during the second ‘Barbenheimer’ holdover.

IPlayer has been continuing to add classic series of late including Colin Firth-starrer Pride and Prejudice.'

[helmstone]

Oppenheimer comes to iPlayer (not that one!)

Oppenheimer comes to iPlayer (not that one!)

Not the Cillian Murphy film, but the BBC’s own 1980 series of Oppenheimer is now available to watch on iPlayer. The series stars Sam Waterston as atomic bomb creator J. Robert Oppenheimer. The Bafta-winning seven-part series originally aired on the BBC in 1980. Waterson plays the titular scientist as he leads the weapons laboratory of the Manhattan Project, all the while under constant…

[kwebtv]

Oppenheimer - BBC - October 29, 1980 - December 10, 1980

Historical Drama / Biography (7 episodes)

Running Time: 420 minutes

Stars:

Sam Waterston as J. Robert Oppenheimer

John Carson as Narrator

Christopher Muncke as Colonel Kenneth Nichols

Jana Shelden as Kitty Oppenheimer

Kate Harper as Jean Tatlock

Edward Hardwicke as Enrico Fermi

David Suchet as Edward Teller

Manning Redwood as Lieutenant General Leslie Groves

Peter Whitman as Robert Serber

Matthew Guinness as Hans Bethe

Bob Sherman as Ernest Lawrence

John Morton as Robert Wilson

Garrick Hagon as Frank Oppenheimer

Liza Ross as Jackie Oppenheimer

Barry Dennen as Isidor Rabi

Peter Marinker as Haakon Chevalier

Phil Brown as Lewis Strauss

Sarah Brackett as Priscilla Duffield

The series aired on PBS' American Playhouse from May 11, 1982 to June 22, 1982

[mariocki]

The Sender (1982)

"I said something stupid before, didn't I? About your parents?"

"You said I had a father."

"Did he leave you? Or die?"

"I never had a father."

"Like Jesus?"

"That's right. Like Jesus."

"That's gonna be a problem. There's this other guy here, he thinks he might be Jesus. What am I gonna tell him?"

[denimbex1986]

'LONG before Cillian Murphy there was Sam Waterston, and long before Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer there was Peter Goodchild’s Oppenheimer (BBC4, Friday), which is being reshown for the first time in decades.

Goodchild, who was interviewed by Variety last month to coincide with the film’s release, started his BBC producing career in radio drama and later moved to television with the science documentary series Horizon.

When Horizon diversified into science docudramas in the 1970s, Goodchild, who holds a chemistry degree, got to combine his two interests in a successful series about Marie Curie.

It was his idea to make a seven-part miniseries about J Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, played by Waterston. First shown on BBC2 in 1980, Oppenheimer was a big hit with viewers and critics, winning three Bafta awards. It also garnered Emmy and Golden Globe nominations after it was shown on PBS in the United States.

The budget of £1.5m (about €7.5m today) – 90pc of it coming from the BBC, the rest from WGBH Boston – might seem like a grain of New Mexico sand compared with the £100m price tag of Nolan’s Imax epic.

Back then, however, it was a huge spend for a British drama.

A huge physical production, too, with scrupulous attention to detail. For maximum authenticity, Goodchild, now 83, told Variety, the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory was recreated on a purpose-built set in Colorado Springs, complete with water tower and replica bomb.

The supporting cast was made up almost entirely of American actors based in Britain.

Two notable exceptions were future Poirot star David Suchet as the excitable, voluble Hungarian physicist Edward Teller and Edward Hardwicke (Dr Watson to Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes) as his Italian colleague Enrico Fermi.

Viewers who have grown used to watching even modestly budgeted dramas shot on HD video that mimics celluloid film may find the switch from Oppenheimer’s interior scenes, which were mostly shot on videotape in a studio in the UK, to the ones shot on film in America a little jarring at first.

But the story is so engrossing you cease to be aware of the contrast after a while.

What’s remarkable is how well Oppenheimer, which was written by Peter Prince and directed by Barry Davis, holds up 43 years later.

There’s none of the slowness or staginess you sometimes see in dramas from the period. Friday’s opening two episodes positively zipped by.

They spanned the years 1938, when Oppenheimer was at the University of Berkley, to 1942, when Lieutenant General Leslie Groves (Manning Redwood), ignoring warnings about Oppenheimer’s long associations with active communists and championing of left-wing causes, put him in charge of the Manhattan Project, which was to be housed in a high-security facility in Los Alamos.

Waterston, just four years ahead of his best actor Oscar nomination for playing Siydney Schanberg in The Killing Fields, is fantastic as Oppenheimer.

You can see why the BBC was prepared to pay him well above the normal rate for appearing in one of its dramas and to put him up in a luxury hotel during filming.

He conveys Oppenheimer’s charisma, intelligence, brilliance and charm, especially to women.

But we also see his ruthlessness and arrogance.

When we meet him, he’s romantically involved with psychiatrist and communist Jean Tatlock (Kate Harper), who suffered from clinical depression (she died by suicide in 1944), yet thinks nothing of casting her aside when he sets eyes on his future wife Kitty Puening (Jana Shelden), who at that time is married to someone else.

They tumble into an affair. In one particularly cruel moment, he humiliates Jean by turning up at a dinner party at her home with Kitty on his arm.

Even at this stage, the seeds of Oppenheimer’s downfall are being sown. Naively unconcerned about the dangers of having communist friends, he doesn’t realise he’s already under FBI surveillance.

A terrific drama from a far more creative age of TV.'