Post by michael on Jul 3, 2010 14:46:07 GMT -5
Industrial relations, Rhodesian sanction busting, the dignity of working class man, suspected left wing ties. All very 1960s kitchen drama themes. Hear No Evil uses all this and, once again, the sanctity of privacy. Although this episode was recorded in 1970, it was a very late 1960s script with its working men's clubs (albeit one that had embraced the glitz and glamour of a TV night club, according to the script) into which even women are allowed and heavy industry. And what is the Doomwatch involvement? A spot of espionage.
People have been eaves dropping on undesirables in some shape or form since, well, forever. From letter opening to hijacking your computer. The most famous line in Peter Wright's Spy Catcher is 'We bugged and burgled our way across London.' And he was talking about the 1940s and 50s. And it wasn't just Russians and foreign embassies they targeted. Suspected communists and trade unionists, although this is disputed by some historians. Wrights' claims are still controversial. Some completely dismissed. However, we now know that bugs were inside 10 Downing Street at the request of Harold Macmillan in 1963 and were allegedly still there by the time of the Callaghan government which ended in 1979, casting a little light into Harold Wilson's dismissed paranoias of being monitored!
Normally in these kind of stories, the espionage comes from Outside, whether it's another firm or country or the secret services and police on us. Industrial espionage was touched upon in Train and de-Train where Toby Wren's clumsy attempts to acquire a sample of the pesticide suspected of exterminating wildlife in Somerset backfires somewhat. Here, Wren is tape recorded issuing threats to George Baker's character and this is used successfully against him. This time it is used against two Yorkshire trade unionists Reid and Owen. And ironically, they work for a firm that builds microphone detectors and probably the microphones too! Employers will watch you, monitor your internet use if you have it at work (cleaners often don't), sometimes they will put in a hidden camera to spot the thief or whose urinating in the soup. Some will even monitor your Facebook page when you're off sick. But bugs in the bedroom, to destroy your reputation? In Hear No Evil, it is about trying to neutralise two employees they cannot fire without causing a damaging wild cat strike and allow mass redundancies or a 'productivity deal.' .
Industrial relations had been a major problem in the UK for some time, and was reflected as a major theme in television drama. And here it is in Doomwatch. A good Doomwatch takes a contemporary social or scientific (or both) concern and then exaggerates it and gives it a frightening science fiction twist. Dealing with Trade Union activism? Bug your workforce! Except this isn't very science fictiony. Doomwatch keeps it real. The Prisoner had television spies everywhere, watched by people on see-saws and huge screens. Doctor Who's The Invasion (initial ideas by Kit Pedler) has a huge electronics firm (again!) International Electromatix guard the workforce inside an armed compound and converts most of the workforce into proto-Cybermen.
In these days of new age man, unskilled, short term jobs and no local industries to speak off, it is difficult to recognise a time when the opposite was true. In 1970, men were still 'real' men and their wives stayed at home and away from Working Man's clubs. Unless you were a stripper or a singer. The Female Eunuch was published in 1970...
A job was a job for life, and your job was you and the trade union movement protected your job. Men settled their differences with punch ups. Of course this wasn't always strictly the case. Redundancies were common, Trade Unions, sometimes, put up a fight. Falken's prejudice towards Owen and Reid is that they are illiterates who don't attempt to earn more than they do. This is actually undermined by Cook's response that they earn a little more than that, is ignored. It also ignores the fact that until recently a Man, and it was normally a man, was DEFINED by his job, his trade or his skill. Take that away and he is no longer a Man, providing for his family, etc. An episode of Z Cars called Thursday Afternoons (repeated on BBC4 a few years ago) featured a redundant panel beater who saw that as his trade and did not want any job other than what he had been trained for. A job was once seen as a job for life, and we may look back at some of those unpleasant jobs and wonder how they could stick at it, overlooks the meaning of the job. And people will fight to preserve their way of life. Especially a well paid one. By cleaner standards anyway. It is difficult accepting redundancy as good for the national interest... Reid speaks of being young in the 1930s and having suffered 'no boots or beef.' He also talks about how his father - who presumably remembered the Great Depression of the 1920s - thinks his son hasn't been born because he has a car and a fridge, things his father would never have even thought possible in the depression!
In a country that was still largely defined by class and trade, Reid's back story is of feeling belittled by having to go through a particular door whilst white collared teenagers used another made him feel like an inferior, or regarded as one because he got his hands dirty, no matter how long he or his fellows had been there at the firm. Bradley suggests that as shop stewards, they cannot be bought. This unionised him and gave him his dignity that he felt was eroded by the three door canteen system. (Incidentally, when Falken learns this summary from Cook via recorded conversations, he suggests removing the three doors for blue, white and executive collars. Cook replies it wouldn't do much good. They would still sit in the same places...)
The Trade Union movement was always suspected of being a hot bed of open or closet communists who, therefore, take their orders from Moscow in much the same way as a Catholic looks to Rome and regards them as a higher authority. Any strike was often seen by more extreme right wingers, as a communist plot to bring down the country. This paranoia will be at its strongest in 1974. The right of the Labour Party also shared similar views about communists. They suspected subversion from within their own ranks. It had long been suspected that trade unionists were bugged and that the security services just never bothered to tell the Minister of the day responsible, especially if he was a Labour Home Secretary. Whether this is true or not is immaterial for the purposes of this little review but this is what was in the air especially in the 1960s and 70s. This is why Owen was on several people's files, as Wren discovers but there is no blatant left wing leaning to him. To belong to a trade union did not mean you are automatically a Labour supporter - even in the 1960s and 70s. Two years before this episode was transmitted, the Labour Government had attempted to regulate industrial strikes with a new act entitled IN PLACE OF STRIFE. At the time it was HUGELY controversial, although compared to what happened to the unions in the 1980s, very mild indeed! A few years before that there was the Seaman's strike where a young trade unionist John Prescott was involved. Harold Wilson, the then Prime Minister declared in Parliament in parliamentary language was that the strike was a Communist inspired plot. The biggest fear was always for another National Strike leading to a revolution. This is reflected in some of the dialogue.
The bugging, presumably, was not an unofficial government 'sanctioned' programme of spying. This was internal to the company. The government would have been scared stiff of such an idea. Even a Conservative one. Especially a Conservative one! No amount of denials from them would cut much mustard in the Trade Union movement! There were no scenes in this episode of Quist bristling with indignation before a relevant Minister, angrily leaving the office before the Minister reaches for a phone and speak to Falken... Terrance Dudley would not have let pass an opportunity like this in the following seasons... But we had already have had enough similar scenes in The Plastic Eaters or Burial At Sea. The Secret Services, on the other hand, would have unofficially approved. Any intelligence on potential subversives on their files, yum yum. Having said that though, industrial espionage would have been seen as in the National Economic Interest...
Reid and Owen are not militants, communists, nor subversives... For the purposes of the story they are trying to protect jobs, Men, a core Trade Union activity. A big firm takes over a smaller one with a troubled past and wants to slash jobs. We are not supposed to take sides in the dispute, dramatically it is the pre-text behind the drama. Your position follows your views: you either pro or anti union. The issue is: do the means justify the ends? They could have exposed the bugging to all and sundry, but they didn't, something Quist approved of. He wants industrial peace in the country. Imagine, though, had they been militants... What an episode THAT would have been! A two-parter, surely! Quist reacts as strongly to the business as he did in Project Sahara which also touched upon intrusive vetting procedures in Whitehall for similar reasons. He doesn't want to stoop to Falken's 'dirty methods' but very swiftly decides if Reid and Owen's private life is a fit matter for bugging, then so is Falken's! He echoes Reid's feelings about having his throat cut if this happened to him. Quist in full passionate oratory is always a highlight. Here we get it with the volume cranked up!
As usual in a Season One Doomwatch, the victims life has been turned upside down. Reid's initial reaction was of anger and fury, he felt that his throat had been cut. It becomes worse: Falken's methods had exposed an affair that his much younger wife had been indulging in with his friend Owen! It was planned to use this tape during the strike and destroy both men's standing with their fellows and ultimately neuter the trade union movement. No doubt Reid's marriage is either in serious trouble or is over in much the same way as Llewellyn's was destroyed by his employer's carelessness in The Battery People. The dignity of Man was destroyed there as well. This time sexual powers were destroyed, thus male pride.
As for Falken, we are not given a background to him. He is the villain of the piece, something that Terence Dudley alludes to in his objection to Kit Pedler's style of story telling. He isn't really three dimensional. His motivation is very straight forward, simple and comprehensible. Falken's parent company Voltmixer bought up Jedders the year before and there had been a strike. He has softened the workforce with generous offers of free decoration for their homes and their club. A good cover to fit in the hidden microphones. The script describes his office as the sort only to be used two or three times a year and he does not know who Reid and Owen are. Presumably he is only there to implement the redundancies and the productivity deal that has been planned since the take over. We can also presume his home which we only see the outside of, is close by. We get no tangible details of his private life. Voltmixer have factories in Manchester too. Are their homes and factories bugged as well or is it just Flyingdales?
To prove Falken's villainy, he is a sanction buster! One of sanction busting's modern day equivalents is the end user agreement for arms suppliers. A British firm may not be allowed to supply Country X with arms or technical material of a certain nature, so it ships parts to Country Y who then sells it on to Country X who is the name on the agreement by a different firm who is normally linked with the original firm. It's normally much more complicated than that but in the 1980s and 90s the Iraq super-gun affair, and Matrix Churchill boil down to the same things. Accusations are made that the British government or the Establishment including the Civil Service either turns a blind eye to this sort of thing or actively supports it when it is in their economic interest (ie supplying arms to Iraq against Iran in the 1980s.). It was very lucky that sanction busting WAS going on otherwise Quist's superb stand off with Falken at the end of the story would not have worked so well...
There were plenty of supporters of White Rhodesia in the 1960s who would have approved sanction busting in this case. The Monday Club, a small but influential section of Conservative MPs and business supporters was created to oppose the erosion of colonialism in 1961 had many White Rhodesians and South Africans amongst their support. In a similar episode today, it would have been some black listed country we are not supposed to sell arms or components to now. Falken is in no doubt a member of that club. He would also have signed up to the Freedom Association too.
Then we come to the Consultant Industrial Anthropologist. Cook doesn't seem to have much concern about his methods. No doubt he sees his subjects as just that: specimens. He is another in the line of immoral scientists who has a chance to put his theories into practise. This is the sort Kit Pedlar despised. Cook didn't sell his soul, as he didn't really have one to begin with. There is no sign of antagonism between Falken the boss and Cook the henchman- as there is between Fielding and Whitehead in Spectre At The Feast, although Falken was happy to have Cook fired when he realised Quist was serious in his threats. And he likes to bug birds as well - the feathered kind with his parabolic microphone, which pre-echoes the Budgerigar Reid's wife has in her living room. But for Cook, knowledge is power. The unnamed Operator who listens in, is presented as a voyeur, quite salacious.
Work place psychology is a very popular theme these days - how to get the best out of your staff etc. and there were a number of blue spined Pelican books on industrial psychology. It is very sensible in a workplace to understand your workforce and defuse tensions where powerful personalities can destroy moral. I'm sure we've all experienced or witnessed bullying in the workplace, perhaps even unknowingly contributed to it. But I don't think bugging my bedroom is going to help matters.
And how clever to set the episode in the shadow of 'the biggest bug of all' - the Flyingdale listening station. It would be interesting to know if they actually filmed on the moors near the location. But the implication in the story at the end is there. We have no privacy.
It is always a pity that there are lost episodes. Sometimes, it is a tragedy. This is another tragedy. This is the only episode of the first series to give Colin Bradley something more to do than supply information, fuss over the computer or get nibbled by rats. It gives us a regional visit – this time Yorkshire. We get a little background on the man but not much of his attitudes, though. He isn't allowed to be side lined as the episode progresses and gets the last, ominous words.
Coincidence lies at the front of the story telling. Brad returns home, uncovers a scandal fit for Doomwatch and inadvertently meets one of its architects on the moors!
It's long been known that the working title for this episode was The Black Room, that presumably was the Recording Room. Voltmixer is also called Voltimer in the opening page of the script. Bloody typists.
The script leaves it up to the director as to what entertainment is on stage in the working man's club. Davis suggests a singer or a stripper for the first scene. There has to be a microphone in the second set for Brad's detector to be tested on. A stripper is credited. So the question is, do we see tits? A working committee has been set up to investigate the matter and a report will be thumped on my desk in the morning before I send it off to the Minister. The second set suggests another singer but stage directions mention the word 'bingo' and later dialogue imply it may even be a working man';s comedian telling 'clean dirt' compared to the 'blue boys...' Plus the fight between Owen and Reid is not scripted. The camera directions suggest a good punch is thrown by Reid and they end up fighting on the floor. Dialogue hints that Owen is knocked out cold as he is 'laid up' in the next Quist scene.
No doubt Peter Miles played his character with his usual icy precision, recently seen in Doctor Who's The Silurians, whilst Reid's wife, Tessa Shaw, was the UNIT female sergeant in the first episode of Spearhead From Space. Were Owen and Reid played subtly? 'Course they probably were. Their dialogue at the shop stewards' meeting is written with lots of t'other day type dialogue but that is soon dropped. Michael Ripper (Reid) was a Hammer Horror inn landlord of some note.
Watching Quist allowing Ridge to bug Falken's home and his ultimate stand off with the man himself would have been a joy.