Post by DR. QUIST on Mar 7, 2010 13:55:29 GMT -5
An interview with Director Darrol Blake
Conducted by Marcus Hearn originally in Timescreen Spring 1992
Retyped by Scott Burditt
“I’ve always enjoyed variety, and I enjoy doing a variety of things,” claims Darrol Blake, and one look at his directorial credits over the years leaves you in no doubt that he certainly enjoys his work. Although his career has recently seen him specialise in soap opera — “You name one and I’ve probably done it!” he quips - the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies saw him work on some of the most meorab1e and controversial British telefantasy ever made.
However, the path he took to becoming a director was a long and unusual one. “I went to evening classes and got in on the bottom rung of the design department at the BBC. Unofficially, I was working as an assistant to a marvellous designer called Stephen Taylor who worked on “QUATERMASS 2” I can remember sitting in the gallery with him and Nigel Kneale, or Tom Kneale as he was known then. He was making frantic notes because the script was quite technically complicated and the actors, particularly John Robinson and Hugh Griffiths, had a great deal of technical stuff.”
Added to the difficulties John Robinson faced when playing Professor Quatermass was the fact he had to step into the role at very short notice following the sudden death of Reginald Tate, who had portrayed the character in the first series. Darrol explained how the team coped, “John Robinson had a clip board on which he had most of his lines because they were so complicated! However, at the time I didn’t know about the casting difficulties because I was only a very junior designer. As you know it was of course black and white and live. At one point Quatermass and his sidekick (Pugh) go off in a rocket and land on some planet. Stephen was very famous for spending all his budget on one set and having to bodge up the others. I said to him “What are you going to do about the surface of the planet?” and he said, “Oh, I’ll think of something…” Come the day in the studio he got some old tarpaulin and some nesting chairs which were piled up at the side of the studio. He strewed the chairs about and threw the tarpaulin over them and we had the surface of this planet. In black and white with a bit of dry ice this was pretty convincing.
“There were a series of control panels in the rocket and, because it was quite small in the studio, the camera couldn’t get in close. We had duplicate panels on the side of the studio which another camera could look at. One camera would see the actor switching about and another camera would show the assistant floor manager who would be actually pressing things on this duplicate panel. I had to get the electrician to couple up this panel on the side and I forgot. I was more than halfway home before I suddenly realised. I sat at home and watched this show go out. When they cut to this close up of the duplicate panel when the hand pressed things nothing happened! After this I never ever let myself go home before I’d finished the list of jobs to do.
“It was certainly interesting and exciting. We were doing things that had never been done before but then so much of television was like that. I thought that life was always like this - straight into new areas every day.”
Further innovations, albeit of a somewhat different nature, also occurred in other areas of his work as a designer. “Until I worked on it, “BLUE PETER” had little box sets on which they had all the items in separately. I swept all that away and gave them a cyclorama that went all the way round the studio. I also gave them a few shelves and a bit of rostrum which you could stack up. They’re still using the same approach a hundred years later.
“One of the last things I did as a designer was three episodes of “ADAM ADAMANT LIVES!”. There had been a pilot made which was not transmitted. When they decided to go for a series Verity Lambert, who was the producer, didn’t like a number of things about it. One was the slab of ice Gerald Harper was supposed to be found in at the beginning. I can remember doing a reshoot at Stage Two in Ealing using a tank in a cellar or something. I made a perspex slab of ice which he was found in. One or two other things were reshot from the pilot and I have a feeling the girl was changed. I remember Verity also wanted to change the titles - I think somebody’s face had to be removed for contractual reasons.
“I remember they rushed about the West End with hand-held cameras filming tarts in Soho and that sort of thing. Some of that had to be reshot at Ealing because the girl who was a great friend of my wife’s suddenly turned up on the set playing a streetwalker. She said to me, “I’ve got a line! I’ve got a line!”. When I asked her what it was she said, “It’s ten bob dearie,“ so I said, “I think you should demand a rewrite!”
“For one episode (“The Last Sacrifice”) I remember a stately home which I tried to do with trick photography. The director, the late Philip Dudley, didn’t really understand much about it.
“I was never actually assigned to give a ‘look’ to the series, you’re never talked to in that way. People just say that they want it cheap and they want it Tuesday. I could give you some very silly stories about the way people brief designers and I hope that now I’m a director I behave more sensibly than some people did in my day.
“I remember at this time I was sharing a flat with Rid1ey Scott in Barnes. He was a step ahead of me in that he’d been put on the directors’ course by the BBC. He was already doing “Z CARS” and things like that and Verity was looking for directors for “ADAM ADAMANT LIVES”. So I said to her “What about my friend Rid?” and he actually did a few. He was my best man when I married twenty-five years ago. The two of us wanted to direct feature films. We both vowed we’d never go to the cinema again until we both made a film!”
Darrol was given his first official chance to direct by Ned Sherrin on the Saturday evening satire programme “BBC3”. Going freelance in order to pursue his new career full time, he became a director in 1965. ‘By 1970 I wanted to get into drama so I wrote to Terry Dudley. He wrote back saying he didn’t have anything for me at the moment but that he’d been watching my career with interest. He asked me to keep in touch and I saw him in the bar about a fortnight later and he said he had something for me. It was, of course “DOOMWATCH”.
He was very much a theatre professional, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense as we were working in television. He’d been an actor, writer and producer and had theatre companies on his own. I’d first met him when I filled in for someone on a night shoot for “MOONSTRIKE”. He was wonderfully supportive and encouraging but I think he knew by then that I knew enough about television just to get on with the job.
What was extremely important about the development of “DOOMWATCH” at this stage was that the first season had been so enormously successful; the BBC seemed to be breaking new ground and words like ‘environment’ and ‘pollution’ came into the language. They rushed ahead with a second season and there was a falling out between Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis and Terry Dudley. By the time I arrived to do two episodes in the second season Pedler and Davis had already gone. I vaguely remember Gerry still being around but he’d packed his bags and went about the time I arrived.
“The BBC has never known how to deal with success; they either run it into the ground or let it languish. For instance they decided to produce the second season six months after the first season had been completed. That meant they had to find writers fast. I think that was one reason for the mediocrity of the second season compared to the first one. In addition to this Kit and Gerry had gone.
“I was given a script called “No Room For Error” by Roger Parkes. I discovered later that others had disliked it and refused to do it, which was how it had suddenly come into my lap. However I rushed into it as my first piece of drama. I had a very strong cast, the guest lead being John Wood who is now stratospheric at the RSC and Hollywood movies. He breathed life into this rather simple-minded script1 in fact so much so that I won a second chance at “DOOMWATCH” which we did in January. It was called “Flight Into Yesterday” and was about jet lag. I remember Robert Urquhart as a rather villainous PR man!
“I can’t remember exactly what I felt at the time, but I’m sure I had a feeling that what we were doing in the second season was way below what had been achieved by the first season. We didn’t seem to be breaking any new ground and there didn‘t seem to be an air of excitement about the scripts of the show. If the creator and the script editor, who have become a team, have parted company with the show then I think something was bound to go out of it. The initial impetus was gone and the creative spark which made bugs in plastic exciting was gone.”
Before work started on the next season, Darrol turned his hand to the popular thriller series “PAUL TEMPLE” and became one of the establishing directors of “THE ONEDIN LINE”. “The third season of “DOOMWATCH” didn’t go into production for eighteen months, as I remember, I had been contracted to do four episodes, subjects unknown. I can remember being extremely disappointed when some of the scripts actually turned up. We shot “The Killer Dolphins” first, then “Sex and Violence”, “Without the Bomb” and finally “Deadly Dangerous Tomorrow”. “Without the Bomb” was the one about the contraceptive that tuned out to be an aphrodisiac. I christened it ‘JOYNE’ as we decided it had to have a commercial name. I remember I couldn’t cast the lead. I offered it to a marvellous Irish actor and he wrote back saying he wouldn’t possibly do such filth. I ended up with Brian Peck, and Antonia Pemberton who played his wife very well.”
One of the more memorable episodes of the third season was Martin Worth’s “Deadly Dangerous Tomorrow” the initials of which spell the name of the insectiside which was the subject of the story. Darrol recalled some of the embellishments be brought to the portrayal of the Indian slum family brought to England by Ridge. “When we were preparing it we had a marvellous PA called Phillipa Clauson. I said to her “Wouldn’t it be marvellous if during the scene when the band came round the corner they were playing ‘Rule Britannia’ or something like that we could cut the Indians sequence to.” So she said, “Yes it would be lovely, I’ll have a word with Daddy and see what I can do.” Anyway I’d forgotten all about it until we came to shoot the piece with the camera on the Victoria Memorial. The guards band came round the corner playing ‘South Pacific’ or something like that, and as they passed where the railings start outside Buckingham Palace they changed effortlessly to ‘Rule Britannia’. Obviously ‘Daddy’ had a word, with somebody who’d had a word with somebody!”
Was the shot at the beginning of that episode where the camera reveals the slum family to be living in St James’s Park, also one of his ideas? “No, that was certainly in the script. I’m one of those boring directors who does what’s on the page. 1 don’t eff about with what the writers put there. It wasn’t St. James’s Park though. It was supposed to be but the family were actually on a bit of waste ground in Surrey, there was a cut after this was established. I have very little input into scripts. Drama series then, and certainly soaps now, were very much production lines The director is hired late in the day and you have to start finding locations, casting, etc. Obviously you have a script conference and a certain amount of input with the producer and the writer if you’re lucky. The situation in drama series at that time was that the producer and script editor had often rewritten the script between them and they often didn’t want you to talk to the writer because they hadn’t bothered to give him the rewrites. I would always ask to speak to the writer because I found that more useful than anything really.
“In that period I did two scripts which I thought were outstanding and they were both by the same man, Stuart Douglass. One was an episode of “The Regiment” called “Wine and Retribution” and the other was the “DOOMWATCH” episode “Sex and Violence”. As you say, and which I think everybody said then, this was somewhat out of the mainstream for “DOOMWATCH” stories but nevertheless seemed to hit the mood of England at that time. I think this was something we had to do, stand up for our rights to see films, read books, paint pictures and do whatever you like. I’m afraid that stance has to be taken and that fight fought every two or three years if not every month. Terry Dudley knew this and that’s why I suspect that he defended that script up hill and down dale, certainly against his immediate masters who numbered Andrew Osbourne and, I think, Shaun Sutton. Eventually that middle management didn’t have any confidence in “Sex and Violence” and so referred it right upstairs. As I understand, it was pulled from transmission at the last moment.
As soon as Andrew saw those words (penis and vagina) on the first page he said we couldn’t do it. Later on what I think they were afraid of was that we’d put Mary Whitehouse on the screen and portrayed the Lord Longford commission which was the subject of enormous scandal and concern in the country at that particular time. The pop star (‘Dick Burns’) was of course supposed to be Cliff Richard who was on the committee. I think Stuart Douglass was bearing all those people in mind when he wrote that script because the reality was enormously publicised and the public would know what they were looking at when they saw the episode. Of course they didn’t. Had it gone out a fortnight before they reported and come to the same conclusion, then I think it would have made the series. I think we were all quite pleased when the Longford Committee came up with the same verdict our lot did.”
The reason for the non—transmission of “Sex and Violence” is nowadays often given as being the inclusion of genuine execution footage which the committee watch to study the effects of viewing violence. “I chose the execution scene, which had been transmitted twice on “24 HOURS” and shown on another programme as well. It must have been or I wouldn’t have known about it. It was BBC stock footage so the excuse that it was pulled because of that was nonsense. I got the evidence I needed to put It into “Sex and Violence” with no problem at all. What I couldn’t get was any soft porn footage and I talked directly to a number of producers in Wardour Street who did these things and they were all to a man disgusted that I wanted to transmit something like that on BBC1 at a peak hour! The double standard of it was really quite funny. In the end I just had to take some extras to a hotel near London Airport and shoot this stupid runaround. They all kept their underwear on and it was daft, but then again it was meant to be.”
The third season saw only occasional appearances of regular cast member Ridge, played by Simon Oates. Between seasons two and three Oates had been playing John Steed in the short—lived “THE AVENGERS” stage play. Did this symbolise his wish to distance himself from “DOOMWATCH”, and did Darrol believe he was tiring of the programme? “What happens in all series, if you’re not careful, is that somebody comes up with an idea for a script, the story for which suggests whatever research has been done. He may create a scientist, a wife or whatever and somewhere along the way he must ‘sew in’ the regular characters. They come in and ask questions, lean on the filing cabinet and have coffee. However, if you’re not careful, that’s all they do. If you’ve done twelve of those, you’re called Simon Oates, you’re six foot four and you come in, lean on a filing cabinet and ask questions, you can get rather bored. He became known in the papers as “the one with the shirts” and that’s something he always used to quote me. Every now and then he was given something to do, but holding the world to ransom (in “Fire and Brimstone”) was crude beyond belief! An actor gets tired of that and wants out which was probably why he wasn’t in much of the third season. As I remember he didn’t want to do the third series at all but Terry persuaded him to do four episodes.
“Terry was a gentleman and didn’t show emotions or irritations until you knew him a bit. If you watched him you‘d realise the edges of his thumbs were raw from where he’d been tearing at them with his fingers. Every week you’d check his thumbs to see how stressed he was.”
Can the diminished location filming and fewer episodes in season three be taken as an indication of a lower budget? “Cutbacks were rife throughout the BBC at that time and things were shrinking down to nine or ten episodes per series. Presumably the money was staying more or less the same but was capable of producing fewer episodes.”
In 1972 Darrol’s freelance work also took him to Thames TV and the three-part “ACE OF WANDS” story “Sisters Deadly”. “I was on holiday at the time and I was asked on Thursday if I could come down to Teddington to start on a Monday because somebody had been taken ill. It was the first children’s television I’d done and although the scripts were aimed at a particular audience, as far as I was concerned I was still directing adults. I really don’t remember much about it except I wanted a thatched cottage for these seemingly harmless old ladies to live in. The edict was that it had to be no more than thirty miles from Teddington. The man who was searching for it came back with some appalling photographs of bungalows with steel windows and things. As I walked to work I passed the most wonderful cottage on Barnes Common so, as I had become so impatient with this man coming back every day with nothing, I went into the garden and tapped on the door. It was opened by Joseph Cooper, who was very well known in those days for doing music programmes on television. I explained who I was and what I wanted and he told me the cottage had been used many times before for filming and he didn’t mind. We did a day’s work there but of course Barnes Common is in an air path and by a main road. I quickly realised that only one line of dialogue was shot outside this cottage so I decided to shoot it mute and got twenty slates done by lunchtime. We dubbed on footsteps and cars arriving later.
“As a result of “ACE OF WANDS” I did two years work at Thames. I did about eight hundred of the pre-school thing, “RAINBOW”. During these two years Darrol continued to direct children’s television: this time the somewhat less fondly remembered “THE TOMORROW PEOPLE” “Roger Price had the notion of a junior “DOCTOR WHO” type thing. He didn’t say that of course but what he devised seemed to me to be something that had things pinched from “DOCTOR WHO, STAR TREK” and anything that was going at the time in the science—fiction area. I thought it was the con of all time. I was called and asked to do it but when I read it I thought it was dreadful, I said I wasn’t going to do it and I said I thought an audience deserved something better. Roger and Sue (the head of department) giggled at that and thought it was rather funny but I was deadly serious. Paul Bernard actually took it on but I think it was adapted a bit. I think Roger got in a writer (Brian Finch) who actually knocked it into shape a bit and elbowed out some of the obvious cheats and pinches from other shows.
“The studio at Teddington couldn’t cope with it. The vision mixer’s desk couldn’t do what you had to do for that sort of show; the special effects weren’t there. They had nothing like a special effects department of the sort the BBC has and it was all very hard work for poor old Paul who directed the first season.”
Ironically, for someone who had worked on “DOOMWATCH” it wasn’t until Darrol came to direct “THE TOMORROW PEOPLE” that he met Kit Pedler. He visited the doctor, who was by now working at the National Physics Laboratory, for technical advice on the studio—bound “A Rift In Time”. “By the time they made the second season the story they offered me seemed to be reasonable. It was a historical time travel story and history has always fascinated me so I decided to do it and enjoyed it. I remember Michael Standing played one of the regular characters and he broke his leg immediately before my episode. I replaced him with Christopher Chittell who played the pop singer in “Sex and Violence”. Five years ago I put him into “EMMERDALE FARM”; he’s a great mate of mine.
The chief amongst the Tomorrow People was Nicholas Young who was very photogenic but as an actor, I think, limited. He’s now a successful agent. I also remember Peter Vaughn Clarke (who played Stephen) who was apparently very popular with the ladies. The voice of Tim, the computer, was Philip Gilbert; he was an ex-Rank starlet.”
Darrol‘s last telefantasy work to date was as the director of the hundreth “DOCTOR WHO” story, “The Stones of Blood” in 1978. “DOCTOR WHO” was in some respects, almost the bottom rung of the drama ladder. People who were just promoted from being trainee directors were often given “DOCTOR WHO”, as in those days at the BBC there were no fast turnover soaps. Nowadays you would cut your teeth on “EASTENDERS”. The sort of fifty—minute dramas I used to do in the Seventies just don‘t exist anymore. I suppose programmes like “BERGERAC” or “ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL” are, if you like, the remnants of what we’ve been talking about. Nowadays things are either soaps, finite serials or mini series. The middle ground doesn’t exist in the quantity it did. I suppose it’s quite sad but life’s rolled on. At least it’s solved the problem of having filmed locations arid video interiors which I always disliked. At least that seems to have bitten the dust and things are now made either all on film or video which is the way it should be.”
Our final topic is his current work directing “BROOKSIDE” and he explains what some of his contemporaries are currently up to. Conversation inevitably turns to his old friend Ridley Scott. “Yes” he smiles “Ridley’s escaped!”
Conducted by Marcus Hearn originally in Timescreen Spring 1992
Retyped by Scott Burditt
“I’ve always enjoyed variety, and I enjoy doing a variety of things,” claims Darrol Blake, and one look at his directorial credits over the years leaves you in no doubt that he certainly enjoys his work. Although his career has recently seen him specialise in soap opera — “You name one and I’ve probably done it!” he quips - the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies saw him work on some of the most meorab1e and controversial British telefantasy ever made.
However, the path he took to becoming a director was a long and unusual one. “I went to evening classes and got in on the bottom rung of the design department at the BBC. Unofficially, I was working as an assistant to a marvellous designer called Stephen Taylor who worked on “QUATERMASS 2” I can remember sitting in the gallery with him and Nigel Kneale, or Tom Kneale as he was known then. He was making frantic notes because the script was quite technically complicated and the actors, particularly John Robinson and Hugh Griffiths, had a great deal of technical stuff.”
Added to the difficulties John Robinson faced when playing Professor Quatermass was the fact he had to step into the role at very short notice following the sudden death of Reginald Tate, who had portrayed the character in the first series. Darrol explained how the team coped, “John Robinson had a clip board on which he had most of his lines because they were so complicated! However, at the time I didn’t know about the casting difficulties because I was only a very junior designer. As you know it was of course black and white and live. At one point Quatermass and his sidekick (Pugh) go off in a rocket and land on some planet. Stephen was very famous for spending all his budget on one set and having to bodge up the others. I said to him “What are you going to do about the surface of the planet?” and he said, “Oh, I’ll think of something…” Come the day in the studio he got some old tarpaulin and some nesting chairs which were piled up at the side of the studio. He strewed the chairs about and threw the tarpaulin over them and we had the surface of this planet. In black and white with a bit of dry ice this was pretty convincing.
“There were a series of control panels in the rocket and, because it was quite small in the studio, the camera couldn’t get in close. We had duplicate panels on the side of the studio which another camera could look at. One camera would see the actor switching about and another camera would show the assistant floor manager who would be actually pressing things on this duplicate panel. I had to get the electrician to couple up this panel on the side and I forgot. I was more than halfway home before I suddenly realised. I sat at home and watched this show go out. When they cut to this close up of the duplicate panel when the hand pressed things nothing happened! After this I never ever let myself go home before I’d finished the list of jobs to do.
“It was certainly interesting and exciting. We were doing things that had never been done before but then so much of television was like that. I thought that life was always like this - straight into new areas every day.”
Further innovations, albeit of a somewhat different nature, also occurred in other areas of his work as a designer. “Until I worked on it, “BLUE PETER” had little box sets on which they had all the items in separately. I swept all that away and gave them a cyclorama that went all the way round the studio. I also gave them a few shelves and a bit of rostrum which you could stack up. They’re still using the same approach a hundred years later.
“One of the last things I did as a designer was three episodes of “ADAM ADAMANT LIVES!”. There had been a pilot made which was not transmitted. When they decided to go for a series Verity Lambert, who was the producer, didn’t like a number of things about it. One was the slab of ice Gerald Harper was supposed to be found in at the beginning. I can remember doing a reshoot at Stage Two in Ealing using a tank in a cellar or something. I made a perspex slab of ice which he was found in. One or two other things were reshot from the pilot and I have a feeling the girl was changed. I remember Verity also wanted to change the titles - I think somebody’s face had to be removed for contractual reasons.
“I remember they rushed about the West End with hand-held cameras filming tarts in Soho and that sort of thing. Some of that had to be reshot at Ealing because the girl who was a great friend of my wife’s suddenly turned up on the set playing a streetwalker. She said to me, “I’ve got a line! I’ve got a line!”. When I asked her what it was she said, “It’s ten bob dearie,“ so I said, “I think you should demand a rewrite!”
“For one episode (“The Last Sacrifice”) I remember a stately home which I tried to do with trick photography. The director, the late Philip Dudley, didn’t really understand much about it.
“I was never actually assigned to give a ‘look’ to the series, you’re never talked to in that way. People just say that they want it cheap and they want it Tuesday. I could give you some very silly stories about the way people brief designers and I hope that now I’m a director I behave more sensibly than some people did in my day.
“I remember at this time I was sharing a flat with Rid1ey Scott in Barnes. He was a step ahead of me in that he’d been put on the directors’ course by the BBC. He was already doing “Z CARS” and things like that and Verity was looking for directors for “ADAM ADAMANT LIVES”. So I said to her “What about my friend Rid?” and he actually did a few. He was my best man when I married twenty-five years ago. The two of us wanted to direct feature films. We both vowed we’d never go to the cinema again until we both made a film!”
Darrol was given his first official chance to direct by Ned Sherrin on the Saturday evening satire programme “BBC3”. Going freelance in order to pursue his new career full time, he became a director in 1965. ‘By 1970 I wanted to get into drama so I wrote to Terry Dudley. He wrote back saying he didn’t have anything for me at the moment but that he’d been watching my career with interest. He asked me to keep in touch and I saw him in the bar about a fortnight later and he said he had something for me. It was, of course “DOOMWATCH”.
He was very much a theatre professional, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense as we were working in television. He’d been an actor, writer and producer and had theatre companies on his own. I’d first met him when I filled in for someone on a night shoot for “MOONSTRIKE”. He was wonderfully supportive and encouraging but I think he knew by then that I knew enough about television just to get on with the job.
What was extremely important about the development of “DOOMWATCH” at this stage was that the first season had been so enormously successful; the BBC seemed to be breaking new ground and words like ‘environment’ and ‘pollution’ came into the language. They rushed ahead with a second season and there was a falling out between Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis and Terry Dudley. By the time I arrived to do two episodes in the second season Pedler and Davis had already gone. I vaguely remember Gerry still being around but he’d packed his bags and went about the time I arrived.
“The BBC has never known how to deal with success; they either run it into the ground or let it languish. For instance they decided to produce the second season six months after the first season had been completed. That meant they had to find writers fast. I think that was one reason for the mediocrity of the second season compared to the first one. In addition to this Kit and Gerry had gone.
“I was given a script called “No Room For Error” by Roger Parkes. I discovered later that others had disliked it and refused to do it, which was how it had suddenly come into my lap. However I rushed into it as my first piece of drama. I had a very strong cast, the guest lead being John Wood who is now stratospheric at the RSC and Hollywood movies. He breathed life into this rather simple-minded script1 in fact so much so that I won a second chance at “DOOMWATCH” which we did in January. It was called “Flight Into Yesterday” and was about jet lag. I remember Robert Urquhart as a rather villainous PR man!
“I can’t remember exactly what I felt at the time, but I’m sure I had a feeling that what we were doing in the second season was way below what had been achieved by the first season. We didn’t seem to be breaking any new ground and there didn‘t seem to be an air of excitement about the scripts of the show. If the creator and the script editor, who have become a team, have parted company with the show then I think something was bound to go out of it. The initial impetus was gone and the creative spark which made bugs in plastic exciting was gone.”
Before work started on the next season, Darrol turned his hand to the popular thriller series “PAUL TEMPLE” and became one of the establishing directors of “THE ONEDIN LINE”. “The third season of “DOOMWATCH” didn’t go into production for eighteen months, as I remember, I had been contracted to do four episodes, subjects unknown. I can remember being extremely disappointed when some of the scripts actually turned up. We shot “The Killer Dolphins” first, then “Sex and Violence”, “Without the Bomb” and finally “Deadly Dangerous Tomorrow”. “Without the Bomb” was the one about the contraceptive that tuned out to be an aphrodisiac. I christened it ‘JOYNE’ as we decided it had to have a commercial name. I remember I couldn’t cast the lead. I offered it to a marvellous Irish actor and he wrote back saying he wouldn’t possibly do such filth. I ended up with Brian Peck, and Antonia Pemberton who played his wife very well.”
One of the more memorable episodes of the third season was Martin Worth’s “Deadly Dangerous Tomorrow” the initials of which spell the name of the insectiside which was the subject of the story. Darrol recalled some of the embellishments be brought to the portrayal of the Indian slum family brought to England by Ridge. “When we were preparing it we had a marvellous PA called Phillipa Clauson. I said to her “Wouldn’t it be marvellous if during the scene when the band came round the corner they were playing ‘Rule Britannia’ or something like that we could cut the Indians sequence to.” So she said, “Yes it would be lovely, I’ll have a word with Daddy and see what I can do.” Anyway I’d forgotten all about it until we came to shoot the piece with the camera on the Victoria Memorial. The guards band came round the corner playing ‘South Pacific’ or something like that, and as they passed where the railings start outside Buckingham Palace they changed effortlessly to ‘Rule Britannia’. Obviously ‘Daddy’ had a word, with somebody who’d had a word with somebody!”
Was the shot at the beginning of that episode where the camera reveals the slum family to be living in St James’s Park, also one of his ideas? “No, that was certainly in the script. I’m one of those boring directors who does what’s on the page. 1 don’t eff about with what the writers put there. It wasn’t St. James’s Park though. It was supposed to be but the family were actually on a bit of waste ground in Surrey, there was a cut after this was established. I have very little input into scripts. Drama series then, and certainly soaps now, were very much production lines The director is hired late in the day and you have to start finding locations, casting, etc. Obviously you have a script conference and a certain amount of input with the producer and the writer if you’re lucky. The situation in drama series at that time was that the producer and script editor had often rewritten the script between them and they often didn’t want you to talk to the writer because they hadn’t bothered to give him the rewrites. I would always ask to speak to the writer because I found that more useful than anything really.
“In that period I did two scripts which I thought were outstanding and they were both by the same man, Stuart Douglass. One was an episode of “The Regiment” called “Wine and Retribution” and the other was the “DOOMWATCH” episode “Sex and Violence”. As you say, and which I think everybody said then, this was somewhat out of the mainstream for “DOOMWATCH” stories but nevertheless seemed to hit the mood of England at that time. I think this was something we had to do, stand up for our rights to see films, read books, paint pictures and do whatever you like. I’m afraid that stance has to be taken and that fight fought every two or three years if not every month. Terry Dudley knew this and that’s why I suspect that he defended that script up hill and down dale, certainly against his immediate masters who numbered Andrew Osbourne and, I think, Shaun Sutton. Eventually that middle management didn’t have any confidence in “Sex and Violence” and so referred it right upstairs. As I understand, it was pulled from transmission at the last moment.
As soon as Andrew saw those words (penis and vagina) on the first page he said we couldn’t do it. Later on what I think they were afraid of was that we’d put Mary Whitehouse on the screen and portrayed the Lord Longford commission which was the subject of enormous scandal and concern in the country at that particular time. The pop star (‘Dick Burns’) was of course supposed to be Cliff Richard who was on the committee. I think Stuart Douglass was bearing all those people in mind when he wrote that script because the reality was enormously publicised and the public would know what they were looking at when they saw the episode. Of course they didn’t. Had it gone out a fortnight before they reported and come to the same conclusion, then I think it would have made the series. I think we were all quite pleased when the Longford Committee came up with the same verdict our lot did.”
The reason for the non—transmission of “Sex and Violence” is nowadays often given as being the inclusion of genuine execution footage which the committee watch to study the effects of viewing violence. “I chose the execution scene, which had been transmitted twice on “24 HOURS” and shown on another programme as well. It must have been or I wouldn’t have known about it. It was BBC stock footage so the excuse that it was pulled because of that was nonsense. I got the evidence I needed to put It into “Sex and Violence” with no problem at all. What I couldn’t get was any soft porn footage and I talked directly to a number of producers in Wardour Street who did these things and they were all to a man disgusted that I wanted to transmit something like that on BBC1 at a peak hour! The double standard of it was really quite funny. In the end I just had to take some extras to a hotel near London Airport and shoot this stupid runaround. They all kept their underwear on and it was daft, but then again it was meant to be.”
The third season saw only occasional appearances of regular cast member Ridge, played by Simon Oates. Between seasons two and three Oates had been playing John Steed in the short—lived “THE AVENGERS” stage play. Did this symbolise his wish to distance himself from “DOOMWATCH”, and did Darrol believe he was tiring of the programme? “What happens in all series, if you’re not careful, is that somebody comes up with an idea for a script, the story for which suggests whatever research has been done. He may create a scientist, a wife or whatever and somewhere along the way he must ‘sew in’ the regular characters. They come in and ask questions, lean on the filing cabinet and have coffee. However, if you’re not careful, that’s all they do. If you’ve done twelve of those, you’re called Simon Oates, you’re six foot four and you come in, lean on a filing cabinet and ask questions, you can get rather bored. He became known in the papers as “the one with the shirts” and that’s something he always used to quote me. Every now and then he was given something to do, but holding the world to ransom (in “Fire and Brimstone”) was crude beyond belief! An actor gets tired of that and wants out which was probably why he wasn’t in much of the third season. As I remember he didn’t want to do the third series at all but Terry persuaded him to do four episodes.
“Terry was a gentleman and didn’t show emotions or irritations until you knew him a bit. If you watched him you‘d realise the edges of his thumbs were raw from where he’d been tearing at them with his fingers. Every week you’d check his thumbs to see how stressed he was.”
Can the diminished location filming and fewer episodes in season three be taken as an indication of a lower budget? “Cutbacks were rife throughout the BBC at that time and things were shrinking down to nine or ten episodes per series. Presumably the money was staying more or less the same but was capable of producing fewer episodes.”
In 1972 Darrol’s freelance work also took him to Thames TV and the three-part “ACE OF WANDS” story “Sisters Deadly”. “I was on holiday at the time and I was asked on Thursday if I could come down to Teddington to start on a Monday because somebody had been taken ill. It was the first children’s television I’d done and although the scripts were aimed at a particular audience, as far as I was concerned I was still directing adults. I really don’t remember much about it except I wanted a thatched cottage for these seemingly harmless old ladies to live in. The edict was that it had to be no more than thirty miles from Teddington. The man who was searching for it came back with some appalling photographs of bungalows with steel windows and things. As I walked to work I passed the most wonderful cottage on Barnes Common so, as I had become so impatient with this man coming back every day with nothing, I went into the garden and tapped on the door. It was opened by Joseph Cooper, who was very well known in those days for doing music programmes on television. I explained who I was and what I wanted and he told me the cottage had been used many times before for filming and he didn’t mind. We did a day’s work there but of course Barnes Common is in an air path and by a main road. I quickly realised that only one line of dialogue was shot outside this cottage so I decided to shoot it mute and got twenty slates done by lunchtime. We dubbed on footsteps and cars arriving later.
“As a result of “ACE OF WANDS” I did two years work at Thames. I did about eight hundred of the pre-school thing, “RAINBOW”. During these two years Darrol continued to direct children’s television: this time the somewhat less fondly remembered “THE TOMORROW PEOPLE” “Roger Price had the notion of a junior “DOCTOR WHO” type thing. He didn’t say that of course but what he devised seemed to me to be something that had things pinched from “DOCTOR WHO, STAR TREK” and anything that was going at the time in the science—fiction area. I thought it was the con of all time. I was called and asked to do it but when I read it I thought it was dreadful, I said I wasn’t going to do it and I said I thought an audience deserved something better. Roger and Sue (the head of department) giggled at that and thought it was rather funny but I was deadly serious. Paul Bernard actually took it on but I think it was adapted a bit. I think Roger got in a writer (Brian Finch) who actually knocked it into shape a bit and elbowed out some of the obvious cheats and pinches from other shows.
“The studio at Teddington couldn’t cope with it. The vision mixer’s desk couldn’t do what you had to do for that sort of show; the special effects weren’t there. They had nothing like a special effects department of the sort the BBC has and it was all very hard work for poor old Paul who directed the first season.”
Ironically, for someone who had worked on “DOOMWATCH” it wasn’t until Darrol came to direct “THE TOMORROW PEOPLE” that he met Kit Pedler. He visited the doctor, who was by now working at the National Physics Laboratory, for technical advice on the studio—bound “A Rift In Time”. “By the time they made the second season the story they offered me seemed to be reasonable. It was a historical time travel story and history has always fascinated me so I decided to do it and enjoyed it. I remember Michael Standing played one of the regular characters and he broke his leg immediately before my episode. I replaced him with Christopher Chittell who played the pop singer in “Sex and Violence”. Five years ago I put him into “EMMERDALE FARM”; he’s a great mate of mine.
The chief amongst the Tomorrow People was Nicholas Young who was very photogenic but as an actor, I think, limited. He’s now a successful agent. I also remember Peter Vaughn Clarke (who played Stephen) who was apparently very popular with the ladies. The voice of Tim, the computer, was Philip Gilbert; he was an ex-Rank starlet.”
Darrol‘s last telefantasy work to date was as the director of the hundreth “DOCTOR WHO” story, “The Stones of Blood” in 1978. “DOCTOR WHO” was in some respects, almost the bottom rung of the drama ladder. People who were just promoted from being trainee directors were often given “DOCTOR WHO”, as in those days at the BBC there were no fast turnover soaps. Nowadays you would cut your teeth on “EASTENDERS”. The sort of fifty—minute dramas I used to do in the Seventies just don‘t exist anymore. I suppose programmes like “BERGERAC” or “ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL” are, if you like, the remnants of what we’ve been talking about. Nowadays things are either soaps, finite serials or mini series. The middle ground doesn’t exist in the quantity it did. I suppose it’s quite sad but life’s rolled on. At least it’s solved the problem of having filmed locations arid video interiors which I always disliked. At least that seems to have bitten the dust and things are now made either all on film or video which is the way it should be.”
Our final topic is his current work directing “BROOKSIDE” and he explains what some of his contemporaries are currently up to. Conversation inevitably turns to his old friend Ridley Scott. “Yes” he smiles “Ridley’s escaped!”