John Gay (1685-1732) was a Devon-born satirist best-known as the author of The Beggar’s Opera, a sort of forerunner of the modern-day jukebox musical, in that the libretto was mostly set to popular tunes of the day.
Gay was born and educated in Barnstaple, but apprenticed to a mercer in That London upon leaving school. Finding the Great Wen most uncongenial, he moved back to Barnstaple, though returned to London once his career as a dramatist took off.
The Beggar’s Opera was, unlike most operas of the day, set among highwaymen and prostitutes. Gay satirised the then prime minister, Robert Walpole. Walpole was said to be distinctly unamused by this, and almost certainly leaned on the Lord Chamberlain to ban its sequel, Polly, where the satire was even more pointed. Polly was not performed until after Gay’s death, and its legacy has not been as enduring as that of its predecessor, which later formed the basis of Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera.
Though Gay was a Tory, and a member of a circle of influential Tory literary figures that also included Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, his philosophy was said to be strongly influenced by the Somerset-born “father of Liberalism”, John Locke. But that’s a subject for another post.
This review originally appeared in wessex chronicle volume 14 issue 3 (autumn 2013)
For those of us who are concerned with localism and regional consciousness, ITV is in a sorry state these days. Local programming is largely confined to an hour or less of news every day, and regions are fewer and larger than they were. But until the last decade or so, ITV genuinely felt like a network, with different regions having their own identity and specialities. HTV was my region growing up in Bristol in the 1970s, and its speciality was fantasy and science fiction shows aimed at a family audience. Coincidentally, Cardiff – which housed one of HTV’s two headquarters, the other being Bristol – is still a hub for such shows, but for the BBC rather than its main rival.
One of the most fondly remembered HTV fantasy shows was Children of the Stones, which thanks to renewed interest, including a radio documentary presented by Stewart Lee, has recently been given a welcome re-release on DVD by the good folks at Network. According to the informative 24-page booklet that comes with the DVD, the ongoing popularity of the show is a classic example of the law of unintended consequences. The 1984 Video Recordings Act, which was crafted in response to the moral panic over so-called “video nasties”, required all home videos, with the exception of those in a few exempt categories, to carry a BBFC certificate. The original video distributor was not prepared to shell out the classification fee for what it saw as a marginal title, and the existing copies were removed from circulation. However, many of them ended up being sold off cheaply before the law came into effect, in order to get rid of them before it became illegal to sell them. Rather than killing Children of the Stones, the legal ban actually ended up boosting its circulation. The series was eventually classified as PG in 2002.
1970s HTV West logo
The DVD itself preserves the episodes very carefully, even beginning each one with the old HTV West “television aerial” logo. The sound of the jingle (known as Waterfall) took me back instantly to my childhood. Regrettably, though, Network has also decided to include the original placement of the ad breaks. These involve the actors having to stand still for an uncomfortably long time while the words “End of Part One” appear on the screen, which creates an unintentionally humorous effect, reminiscent of the end credits of Police Squad! (in color), where Leslie Nielsen and co would pretend to freeze frame as some bit of comic business goes on in the background.
You’ll notice that I haven’t said too much about the series itself. This is because it is one of those cases where the less you know going in the more you’ll enjoy the story. However, if I describe it as “The Wicker Man meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, you will at least have some idea of the tone, if not all the specifics of the plot. It was famously shot at Avebury, here renamed Milbury. The Hardyesque renaming gives the programme-makers an artistic licence that they wouldn’t have had if they’d used real place names. However, the story draws heavily on Avebury’s folklore and history. Producer Patrick Dromgoole was fond of using real Wessex locations in his drama serials, seeing it as compliant with HTV’s legal requirement, which it shared with all ITV regions, to provide regionally relevant programming. How sad that this legal requirement has apparently been lost, leading to an unbalanced representation of the regions on national television, as previously detailed by Jim Gunter in one of our early issues.
I mentioned the DVD booklet earlier, but I do want to return to it, as it really is excellent. It provides a history not only of Children of the Stones, but HTV’s entire telefantasy output, from Arthur of the Britons to Into the Labyrinth. After the latter, HTV’s output shifted to more realistic, non-genre dramas such as Jangles, starring Hazel O’Connor, though they did continue to produce the occasional one-off drama in the fantasy genre, not to mention Robin of Sherwood, which looked outside the HTV region for its inspiration.
Episode title card
Sample episodes of four of the most popular shows appear on the second disc in this 2-disc set, three of them coming from the fertile minds of Bob Baker and Dave Martin, aka “the Bristol Boys”. These include King of the Castle, a show that was originally intended to join Children of the Stones on what would nowadays be called CITV, but was judged too scary for a kiddie slot and shown later in the evening instead. The BBFC evidently agreed, giving the DVD of the show a 12 certificate. Because an episode appears here, this certificate is transferred to the disc as a whole, despite Children of the Stones itself only being a PG. It’s an odd decision, as is the fact that the sample episodes on the disc are almost all episode 2 of their respective serial. Episode 1 of each serial is contained on Network DVD’s sampler disc, which effectively makes disc 2 of this set an advert for an advert! Whilst I consider this a foolish move, I do commend Network for their sterling work in bringing some classic, Wessex-related television to a new generation of fans. Long may they continue
Sebastian is a 1968 cold war thriller from Paramount British, starring Dirk Bogarde and Suzannah York as Oxford-based codebreakers who fall in love. However, Sebastian’s (Bogarde) superiors take an interest after one of his subordinates is suspected of being a double-agent. Donald Sutherland has a small part as an American spy.
The story was by former cryptographer Leo Marks, who had previously written Peeping Tom for Michael Powell. Powell had initially been attached to direct, but Peeping Tom had been so controversial that even eight years later, his name was considered toxic. Eventually, the director’s job went to David Greene, a former member of the Oxford Playhouse repertory theatre. Powell stayed on as a producer, and the screenplay was extensively rewritten by TV writer Gerald Vaughan-Hughes., with Marks only receiving a story credit.
The film received lukewarm reviews upon its release, with a common criticism being that it was three films in one – a codebreaking story, a love story, and a story about the unmasking of the double-agent. Bogarde, who was famously unenthusiastic about promoting his films, agreed to several interviews for US media outlets – but only because he had been on holiday there and ran out of money! Paramount agreed to pay for his plane fare home on the condition that he helped promote the film there.
The promotion does not seem to have done much good. Whilst the film was made in the era before detailed box office records were kept, it does not appear to have been a success. However, it may have something to offer Oxford location-spotters.
Wessex culture in this context does not mean the wider sense of anything to do with the region’s history, heritage or arts scene. Rather, it refers to the early Bronze Age culture of what would later become Wessex.
The term was coined in 1937 by the Hampshire-born archaeologist Stuart Piggott, in an influential paper for the Prehistoric Society entitled The Early Bronze Age in Wessex. Piggott was best known for his part in the excavations at Sutton Hoo, and was portrayed by Ben Chaplin in the Netflix film The Dig.
Wessex culture was characterised by burials in richly-furnished barrows, decorated with gold, copper and amber. It is related to the Hilversum culture of the Low Countries. It is usually subdivided into two phases, from c2000-1650 BC, closely associated with the building of Stonehenge, and from c1650-1400 BC, though this subdivision has been questioned. In the early stages of prehistoric studies, it had been thought that the Wessex culture constituted a distinct material culture, but nowadays, it is believed more to refer to an elite social class.
Regardless of changes in archaeological thought, the prehistoric landscape of Wessex is one of the region’s most distinctive features, and was the inspiration for Tolkien’s Barrow-Downs.
If William Shakespeare was the Bard of Avon, then Philip Massinger (1583-1640) could also lay claim to that title, even though the Avon in question is the one which flows through Salisbury, rather than the one which flows through Stratford.
Massinger was a younger contemporary of Shakespeare, and his family seems to have been long established in Salisbury, since at least 1415, according to the city records. Like Shakespeare, he was a member of the esteemed theatre company The King’s Men. There is no record of him having written with Shakespeare, but he is known to have written with other players associated with him, including John Fletcher, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley.
It has long been suspected that Massinger was a secret Catholic, an accusation also levelled at Shakespeare, of course. Evidence for this assertion comes from the fact that he failed to obtain a degree from Oxford, that the Earl of Pembroke withdrew his patronage, and that his plays sometimes contain Catholic imagery and sympathetic portrayals of Catholic clergy. However, this evidence is inconclusive, and in the case of the plays, complicated by the fact that they were often written in collaboration with other people.
Perhaps Massinger’s most enduring legacy came long after his death. The phrase “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal”, later to spawn many variants, first appears in TS Eliot’s essay simply entitled Philip Massinger, collected in the anthology Selected Prose of TS Eliot (edited by Frank Kermode, Harcourt Brace 1975. ISBN0-15-680654-1.)
