#training ground for young scriptwriters who might then advance to more respectable productions. it's also perhaps the worst served in terms | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mariocki · 3 months ago

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Thirty Minute Theatre: Not Counting the Savages (BBC, 1972)

"I didn't look round, of course, but when I went round to tidy the other side of the grave, I... became aware of a man standing up against the wire fence. At first I thought that he'd caught his handkerchief or something white on it, and then I realised what it was."

"What?"

"He was exposing himself. Exposing himself to me."

"Well, you've seen one before."

"But I was... I was terribly upset. You can't know how distressed I was! I still am."

"Why? You're an old woman. Why should you be upset? It was play-acting. You're an old woman."

#thirty minute theatre #not counting the savages #b.s. johnson #single play #1972 #mike newell #hugh burden #brenda bruce #william hoyland #fiona walker #of all the drama anthologies to come out of the 60s and 70s (arguably the golden age of the form) Thirty Minute Theatre was perhaps the #most experimental; its short format lent itself to producing less safe material by untested writers‚ and it was described as a kind of #training ground for young scriptwriters who might then advance to more respectable productions. it's also perhaps the worst served in terms #of archive holdings: of the 291 episodes broadcast between 1965 and 1973‚ some 241 are missing‚ considered forever lost in the great yellow #skip of discarded tv material. so it's something rather special to have one of the comparatively rare survivors made available for viewing #even if (as in this case) the circumstances of its survival have rendered it quite a sad looking specimen. Savages exists thanks to an off #air recording made on its first (and probably only) broadcast in 1972; home video was an extremely rare and costly thing then‚ and not as #technologically advanced as it would become‚ but a copy of this play survived in the effects of its author‚ the great postmodern novelist #BS Johnson. it's rough looking‚ a slightly faded black and white tape (it would have transmitted in crisp colour) and bears some #significant damage in places as well as a persistent humming on the soundtrack. but it is a miracle. it is a surviving piece of work from #a hugely significant artist who made precious few works before his untimely death. the play itself is a challenging one‚ an enigmatic but #sometimes frustratingly opaque piece about a family filled with resentments and hatreds that are never explained. Burden (whose casting #apparently deeply upset Johnson‚ who felt him entirely wrong for the role‚ and led to a rift between writer and director Newell) is what #we might call our protagonist‚ a husband and father who has somehow earned the enmity of his children and whose own strange behaviour (he #eats nearly constantly through the play‚ in a quite unpleasant manner; he's also needlessly dismissive of his wife's anguish over an #encounter with a flasher) alienates the viewer. there are subtle seeds planted of possible abuse in the children's history and of financial #disagreements in the present‚ but Johnson denies us a clear context for the attitudes and behaviours of his characters and in doing so #produces a work that is as uncomfortable as it is fascinating. a final reveal that Burden is also a skilled and humane surgeon only muddies #the waters further‚ challenging our view of the grotesque figure we've seen casually fencing with his family members (who are themselves #none too sympathetic figures). this was Johnson's penultimate work for tv before he sadly took his own life. what pure joy that it exists

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