Romola Garai as Anne and Eddie Remayne as Ralph in Stephen Poliakoff's new film Glorious 39
Near the beginning of Stephen Poliakoff’s new film, Glorious 39, a boy goes to see two old men. “What do you want to ask both of us, Michael?” says one. The boy pulls out a family album and starts turning the pages. “I am very interested in history,” he says. No British filmmaker or writer of his generation is more interested in history than Poliakoff. It has been the subject of his best work, not only his latest film but also his great television dramas Shooting the Past, Perfect Strangers and The Lost Prince. Increasingly, though, it seems that Poliakoff is not only more interested in modern British history than anyone else, but is the sole remaining mainstream dramatist engaging with the topic at all.
Poliakoff began his career alongside David Hare, Ian McEwan and Trevor Griffiths as part of a generation of mainly left-wing playwrights, who produced powerful work on central moments in modern British history. Thirty years on, he is the only one still going on the subject. History has not vanished from our screens; what has gone is the central role of writers like these in interpreting the British past. Given the importance that Gordon Brown’s government has placed on the debate over Britishness in recent years—and the problematic and conflicted results the discussion has produced—this feels like an especially glaring lack. As an election approaches, our screens are almost devoid of what was once one of British broadcasting’s richest traditions: popular, politically engaged and intellectually challenging re-imaginings of the historical events underpinning national life.
Poliakoff is also one of the last auteurs of British film and television drama. His work has a distinctive feel, often reworking familiar themes. From early in his career he understood the importance of the techniques used in thrillers. Glorious 39, released on 20th November, is a film about appeasement. In 1939, a young British woman, Anne, belongs to a rich and important family. Her father moves in high political circles. Her brother Ralph works in the foreign office. She comes across a plot to steer Britain away from war with Germany. The appeasers will stop at nothing and only Anne can prevent them. It has the feel of a 1930s Alfred Hitchcock film; it also has first-class performances and a clever weave of references.
What about the history? It seems at first to be a familiar kind of historical narrative. Lots of big country houses, men who work in government, passionate arguments on what to do about Nazi Germany. Like Poliakoff’s other historical dramas, Glorious 39 is set in an exciting and mysterious place in which strange things happen. People in his plays disappear. And when they don’t vanish, they have secrets. At the same time, though, Poliakoff’s kind of history is about things that don’t belong in thrillers at all. He is determined to bring together the past and present, to connect modern British and European history. Often his plays treat the impact of historical change as a kind of catastrophe. Indeed, there is something White Russian about his view of history as a “huge bang,” smashing everything in its wake. The first world war, Nazism, Thatcherism: who can survive such changes intact? No one. It sounds bleak, but isn’t. While he talks about the “big history” of events and wars, he also tackles ordinary lives. And his genius is to have found, in mass audience television drama, a form allowing him to explore such questions.
When Poliakoff started out in the 1970s, there was a powerful impulse to tear down the received wisdom of establishment history. Even the second world war, the crucial event in forging modern Britain’s identity, was subject to demythologising. One of the key figures in the group of emerging writers was David Hare. Born just after the war, Hare was then starting out on his career. “Television,” he later wrote, “was the medium in which everyone wanted to work.” And the subject that fascinated him most was the war, in particular “its violence, its secrecy… its sexuality.” In 1975 Hare’s Teeth ’n’ Smiles appeared at the Royal Court. Hardly a history play, it nevertheless includes a famous speech about the bombing of the Café de Paris in London’s west end in 1941. This speech anticipates later attempts to rethink the second world war. Instead of heroism and the myth of the Blitz, Hare’s character Saraffian speaks of thieves robbing the bodies of the dead.
Three years later, in 1978, Hare developed this dark vision further in two great plays. The first was a BBC television play Licking Hitler, about a black propaganda unit based in an English country house. Better known still was his stage play, Plenty, which opened at the National Theatre three months later. It told the story of a young British woman’s experience working in special operations in wartime France, and her failure to adjust to postwar life. In both, the contrast is between the war and the sense of disillusion that came after. Licking Hitler ends with one of the character’s letters to a wartime colleague: “Over the years I have been watching the steady impoverishment of the country’s ideals, the loss of faith…”
Ian McEwan—like Hare, from a military family—was also born just after the war. His play The Imitation Game was first shown on the BBC in 1980, two years after Hare’s breakthrough works. It is also about a young woman trying to find a role in the war, and meeting only misunderstanding and violence from men. Soon after, McEwan wrote a film for the young Channel 4, The Ploughman’s Lunch. Set against post-Falklands Tory triumphalism, an ambitious young journalist is researching a book on the Suez crisis; he takes a revisionist right-wing tone to please his publishers. The point of the title was how our sense of our history can be fabricated: the ploughman’s lunch, with its connotations of country pastoral and wholesomeness, was thought up by marketing men.
Perhaps the greatest of all these works was Trevor Griffiths’s Country, shown on the BBC in 1981, and directed by Richard Eyre, a major figure in this British new wave. Griffiths was then at the height of his career: the author of the acclaimed ITV political drama series Bill Brand, as well as a number of major plays including Comedians (revived in October this year at the Lyric Hammersmith). Country was about a right-wing brewing dynasty worried about whether they can survive the 1945 election. At the end of the play, as the father watches working-class voters celebrate, he asks his son: “Is it a funeral?” “I rather think it is,” his son replies. “They have not yet noticed that the grave is empty.” Even 1945, the high point of Labour in the 20th century, becomes an empty moment that anticipates the disappointments of the 1970s.
Watching and reading these plays today is like entering Tutankhamun’s tomb. The riches are breathtaking. But while there is fine writing, acting and directing, the political context is crucial. All were written during the crisis of old Labour and the heyday of early Thatcherism. All revisit history to tell a story about a present of defeat and failure—defeat of the working class, wartime ideals, and postwar disillusion. Britain’s greatest moments are now in shadow. Here the influence of new left historians of the 1960s and 1970s is also clear, especially Angus Calder’s revisionist book, The People’s War: Britain 1939-1945 (1969), acknowledged both by Hare and McEwan. Just as important was the role of television itself; in this era the left dominated BBC drama. While not necessarily a good thing per se, it made possible these works.
It is no coincidence that the last of these left-wing history dramas, Alan Bleasdale’s The Monocled Mutineer (1986), created a furore, attacked by the right-wing press for its heroic portrayal of a working-class mutineer. After that the BBC, cowed by successive battles with the Thatcher government, abandoned this kind of history. In the fight for ratings, genre programmes—cops and doctors—were more popular, as was mainstream history, or human interest dramas, whether Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads or Jimmy McGovern’s The Street.
***
Of that generation of writers, only Poliakoff still writes primetime television single dramas and films. McEwan turned to the novel, where he had more freedom to address historical issues, most famously in Atonement (2001). Hare turned to the theatre, and to plays about the present, most notably his “state of Britain” trilogy. Other notable figures of 1970s drama like Howard Brenton and Tony Garnett became successful in genre television, the former writing for Spooks, the latter producing series like Between the Lines. Jim Allen, author of Days of Hope (1975), an acclaimed historical series about working-class militancy between the first world war and the general strike, later wrote three screenplays with Ken Loach.
There have been hugely successful novels, films and television plays set in the past in recent years: Mike Leigh’s film Vera Drake, Howard Brenton’s Harold Macmillan play, Never So Good, or the adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s book War Horse. But not one of these use recent history to tell a political story about the present. They are stories about individuals, not about society and its hopes and failures. Nor are they about the battle between different versions of history.
The decline of such drama has been part of a larger intellectual decline on the left. By contrast, the vision of the British past that has arisen on the right over the past ten years—in the hands of Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and Michael Burleigh, among others—has proved both robust and influential. All write well and accessibly. They produce popular histories about great events: Waterloo, the world wars, the British empire and the 1960s. Their tone is often opinionated and revisionist. In his Channel 4 series on the British empire, Niall Ferguson took on its critics, arguing that ours was a “significantly more liberal empire than the other major European empires.” He acknowledged that “I would never deny the downside of empire… But, there were also really quite remarkable achievements, which people today tend to forget,” singling out free trade, international development, the spread of legal norms and fighting the Nazis as significant.
It is hard to think of a single equivalent left-wing historian today, a dramatic shift from the 1960s and 1970s, the heyday of Marxist and new left social history, of EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill. Distinguished contemporary historians like Linda Colley, Peter Clarke and David Cannadine have had a huge impact on modern British historical thinking, as have David Kynaston, Paul Addison and Boyd Hilton. But none have been given major television series.
Disillusioned by new Labour, the left has turned inward. Gone are the milestones of 1914, 1926, 1945, 1956, replaced with an interest in difference, in the under-explored histories of women, ethnic identities, sexuality, witches and madmen. While these are important, the left has given up the centre ground and the mass audience. Of course, there are television histories of Britain by liberal figures, historians like Simon Schama and broadcasters like Andrew Marr. But Marr’s new BBC2 series, The Making of Modern Britain, stretching from the death of Victoria to the end of the second world war, shows the problem this kind of television history now faces.
Whereas television dramas of the 1970s and 1980s challenged familiar stories, Marr repeats them. His series plods along like an AS-level history textbook. Here are our old friends the Taff Vale judgment, the people’s budget and the suffragettes. The language is just as familiar. When Queen Victoria died, “it felt like a world was over.” It was a time of great inequality, of “fabulous wealth” but also of “shoeless children.” And no programme on the first world war is complete without Edward Grey’s “the lamps are going out all over Europe…” Worse still, Marr’s series is full of leftish pieties: aristocrats barely appear without being chided for excess, and there is much hand-wringing over eugenics. There is little to hold these four-minute stories together. The point is not to single out Marr, who has set out to make modern history accessible. But his series is symptomatic of a larger failure: a lack of confidence, a failure to produce new accounts of the past, or to make connections between the past and present.
Signs of this wider failure to think about Britain’s past appear across our culture. Recent television adverts for BBC News show the revolutions of 1989, Nelson Mandela’s release and the election of Barack Obama. Great moments, but would it have hurt to have had one image from recent British history? No wonder Jack Straw, Chris Huhne, Bonnie Greer and Sayeeda Warsi had such problems on that Question Time in October. They stood for decency, tolerance; all the virtues of multicultural Britain. But beyond that, what vision of the nation, past or present, did they offer that could combat Nick Griffin’s talk of Churchill and the battle of Britain?
It is not all gloom. A body of drama has emerged in recent years which is set in the 1970s and early 1980s. The screenplays of Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon, The Queen), David Peace’s Red Riding quartet and The Damned United, the books of the late Gordon Burn and the BBC series Life on Mars suggest an exciting way forward, rediscovering contemporary Britain in its strangeness, often moving away from London to look at the north. Yet these are clearly less political than the screenplays of Hare, McEwan and Griffiths; they are tied to personalities and the trappings of history (pop music, cars and flares), rather than bold attempts to reimagine and rethink the recent past. If Poliakoff remains in television it is only because three great works in rapid succession made him a byword for what the BBC should be about. They simply don’t dare cast him aside.
The great political dramas of the 1970s and 1980s were produced by screenwriters who knew that there are shared landmarks, that the past matters and needs to be fought over. As we approach an election year, it is worth asking who now has a vision of Britain, past and present, that has the capacity to inspire and to connect with voters
Near the beginning of Stephen Poliakoff’s new film, Glorious 39, a boy goes to see two old men. “What do you want to ask both of us, Michael?” says one. The boy pulls out a family album and starts turning the pages. “I am very interested in history,” he says. No British filmmaker or writer of his generation is more interested in history than Poliakoff. It has been the subject of his best work, not only his latest film but also his great television dramas Shooting the Past, Perfect Strangers and The Lost Prince. Increasingly, though, it seems that Poliakoff is not only more interested in modern British history than anyone else, but is the sole remaining mainstream dramatist engaging with the topic at all.
Poliakoff began his career alongside David Hare, Ian McEwan and Trevor Griffiths as part of a generation of mainly left-wing playwrights, who produced powerful work on central moments in modern British history. Thirty years on, he is the only one still going on the subject. History has not vanished from our screens; what has gone is the central role of writers like these in interpreting the British past. Given the importance that Gordon Brown’s government has placed on the debate over Britishness in recent years—and the problematic and conflicted results the discussion has produced—this feels like an especially glaring lack. As an election approaches, our screens are almost devoid of what was once one of British broadcasting’s richest traditions: popular, politically engaged and intellectually challenging re-imaginings of the historical events underpinning national life.
Poliakoff is also one of the last auteurs of British film and television drama. His work has a distinctive feel, often reworking familiar themes. From early in his career he understood the importance of the techniques used in thrillers. Glorious 39, released on 20th November, is a film about appeasement. In 1939, a young British woman, Anne, belongs to a rich and important family. Her father moves in high political circles. Her brother Ralph works in the foreign office. She comes across a plot to steer Britain away from war with Germany. The appeasers will stop at nothing and only Anne can prevent them. It has the feel of a 1930s Alfred Hitchcock film; it also has first-class performances and a clever weave of references.
What about the history? It seems at first to be a familiar kind of historical narrative. Lots of big country houses, men who work in government, passionate arguments on what to do about Nazi Germany. Like Poliakoff’s other historical dramas, Glorious 39 is set in an exciting and mysterious place in which strange things happen. People in his plays disappear. And when they don’t vanish, they have secrets. At the same time, though, Poliakoff’s kind of history is about things that don’t belong in thrillers at all. He is determined to bring together the past and present, to connect modern British and European history. Often his plays treat the impact of historical change as a kind of catastrophe. Indeed, there is something White Russian about his view of history as a “huge bang,” smashing everything in its wake. The first world war, Nazism, Thatcherism: who can survive such changes intact? No one. It sounds bleak, but isn’t. While he talks about the “big history” of events and wars, he also tackles ordinary lives. And his genius is to have found, in mass audience television drama, a form allowing him to explore such questions.
When Poliakoff started out in the 1970s, there was a powerful impulse to tear down the received wisdom of establishment history. Even the second world war, the crucial event in forging modern Britain’s identity, was subject to demythologising. One of the key figures in the group of emerging writers was David Hare. Born just after the war, Hare was then starting out on his career. “Television,” he later wrote, “was the medium in which everyone wanted to work.” And the subject that fascinated him most was the war, in particular “its violence, its secrecy… its sexuality.” In 1975 Hare’s Teeth ’n’ Smiles appeared at the Royal Court. Hardly a history play, it nevertheless includes a famous speech about the bombing of the Café de Paris in London’s west end in 1941. This speech anticipates later attempts to rethink the second world war. Instead of heroism and the myth of the Blitz, Hare’s character Saraffian speaks of thieves robbing the bodies of the dead.
Three years later, in 1978, Hare developed this dark vision further in two great plays. The first was a BBC television play Licking Hitler, about a black propaganda unit based in an English country house. Better known still was his stage play, Plenty, which opened at the National Theatre three months later. It told the story of a young British woman’s experience working in special operations in wartime France, and her failure to adjust to postwar life. In both, the contrast is between the war and the sense of disillusion that came after. Licking Hitler ends with one of the character’s letters to a wartime colleague: “Over the years I have been watching the steady impoverishment of the country’s ideals, the loss of faith…”
Ian McEwan—like Hare, from a military family—was also born just after the war. His play The Imitation Game was first shown on the BBC in 1980, two years after Hare’s breakthrough works. It is also about a young woman trying to find a role in the war, and meeting only misunderstanding and violence from men. Soon after, McEwan wrote a film for the young Channel 4, The Ploughman’s Lunch. Set against post-Falklands Tory triumphalism, an ambitious young journalist is researching a book on the Suez crisis; he takes a revisionist right-wing tone to please his publishers. The point of the title was how our sense of our history can be fabricated: the ploughman’s lunch, with its connotations of country pastoral and wholesomeness, was thought up by marketing men.
Perhaps the greatest of all these works was Trevor Griffiths’s Country, shown on the BBC in 1981, and directed by Richard Eyre, a major figure in this British new wave. Griffiths was then at the height of his career: the author of the acclaimed ITV political drama series Bill Brand, as well as a number of major plays including Comedians (revived in October this year at the Lyric Hammersmith). Country was about a right-wing brewing dynasty worried about whether they can survive the 1945 election. At the end of the play, as the father watches working-class voters celebrate, he asks his son: “Is it a funeral?” “I rather think it is,” his son replies. “They have not yet noticed that the grave is empty.” Even 1945, the high point of Labour in the 20th century, becomes an empty moment that anticipates the disappointments of the 1970s.
Watching and reading these plays today is like entering Tutankhamun’s tomb. The riches are breathtaking. But while there is fine writing, acting and directing, the political context is crucial. All were written during the crisis of old Labour and the heyday of early Thatcherism. All revisit history to tell a story about a present of defeat and failure—defeat of the working class, wartime ideals, and postwar disillusion. Britain’s greatest moments are now in shadow. Here the influence of new left historians of the 1960s and 1970s is also clear, especially Angus Calder’s revisionist book, The People’s War: Britain 1939-1945 (1969), acknowledged both by Hare and McEwan. Just as important was the role of television itself; in this era the left dominated BBC drama. While not necessarily a good thing per se, it made possible these works.
It is no coincidence that the last of these left-wing history dramas, Alan Bleasdale’s The Monocled Mutineer (1986), created a furore, attacked by the right-wing press for its heroic portrayal of a working-class mutineer. After that the BBC, cowed by successive battles with the Thatcher government, abandoned this kind of history. In the fight for ratings, genre programmes—cops and doctors—were more popular, as was mainstream history, or human interest dramas, whether Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads or Jimmy McGovern’s The Street.
***
Of that generation of writers, only Poliakoff still writes primetime television single dramas and films. McEwan turned to the novel, where he had more freedom to address historical issues, most famously in Atonement (2001). Hare turned to the theatre, and to plays about the present, most notably his “state of Britain” trilogy. Other notable figures of 1970s drama like Howard Brenton and Tony Garnett became successful in genre television, the former writing for Spooks, the latter producing series like Between the Lines. Jim Allen, author of Days of Hope (1975), an acclaimed historical series about working-class militancy between the first world war and the general strike, later wrote three screenplays with Ken Loach.
There have been hugely successful novels, films and television plays set in the past in recent years: Mike Leigh’s film Vera Drake, Howard Brenton’s Harold Macmillan play, Never So Good, or the adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s book War Horse. But not one of these use recent history to tell a political story about the present. They are stories about individuals, not about society and its hopes and failures. Nor are they about the battle between different versions of history.
The decline of such drama has been part of a larger intellectual decline on the left. By contrast, the vision of the British past that has arisen on the right over the past ten years—in the hands of Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and Michael Burleigh, among others—has proved both robust and influential. All write well and accessibly. They produce popular histories about great events: Waterloo, the world wars, the British empire and the 1960s. Their tone is often opinionated and revisionist. In his Channel 4 series on the British empire, Niall Ferguson took on its critics, arguing that ours was a “significantly more liberal empire than the other major European empires.” He acknowledged that “I would never deny the downside of empire… But, there were also really quite remarkable achievements, which people today tend to forget,” singling out free trade, international development, the spread of legal norms and fighting the Nazis as significant.
It is hard to think of a single equivalent left-wing historian today, a dramatic shift from the 1960s and 1970s, the heyday of Marxist and new left social history, of EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill. Distinguished contemporary historians like Linda Colley, Peter Clarke and David Cannadine have had a huge impact on modern British historical thinking, as have David Kynaston, Paul Addison and Boyd Hilton. But none have been given major television series.
Disillusioned by new Labour, the left has turned inward. Gone are the milestones of 1914, 1926, 1945, 1956, replaced with an interest in difference, in the under-explored histories of women, ethnic identities, sexuality, witches and madmen. While these are important, the left has given up the centre ground and the mass audience. Of course, there are television histories of Britain by liberal figures, historians like Simon Schama and broadcasters like Andrew Marr. But Marr’s new BBC2 series, The Making of Modern Britain, stretching from the death of Victoria to the end of the second world war, shows the problem this kind of television history now faces.
Whereas television dramas of the 1970s and 1980s challenged familiar stories, Marr repeats them. His series plods along like an AS-level history textbook. Here are our old friends the Taff Vale judgment, the people’s budget and the suffragettes. The language is just as familiar. When Queen Victoria died, “it felt like a world was over.” It was a time of great inequality, of “fabulous wealth” but also of “shoeless children.” And no programme on the first world war is complete without Edward Grey’s “the lamps are going out all over Europe…” Worse still, Marr’s series is full of leftish pieties: aristocrats barely appear without being chided for excess, and there is much hand-wringing over eugenics. There is little to hold these four-minute stories together. The point is not to single out Marr, who has set out to make modern history accessible. But his series is symptomatic of a larger failure: a lack of confidence, a failure to produce new accounts of the past, or to make connections between the past and present.
Signs of this wider failure to think about Britain’s past appear across our culture. Recent television adverts for BBC News show the revolutions of 1989, Nelson Mandela’s release and the election of Barack Obama. Great moments, but would it have hurt to have had one image from recent British history? No wonder Jack Straw, Chris Huhne, Bonnie Greer and Sayeeda Warsi had such problems on that Question Time in October. They stood for decency, tolerance; all the virtues of multicultural Britain. But beyond that, what vision of the nation, past or present, did they offer that could combat Nick Griffin’s talk of Churchill and the battle of Britain?
It is not all gloom. A body of drama has emerged in recent years which is set in the 1970s and early 1980s. The screenplays of Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon, The Queen), David Peace’s Red Riding quartet and The Damned United, the books of the late Gordon Burn and the BBC series Life on Mars suggest an exciting way forward, rediscovering contemporary Britain in its strangeness, often moving away from London to look at the north. Yet these are clearly less political than the screenplays of Hare, McEwan and Griffiths; they are tied to personalities and the trappings of history (pop music, cars and flares), rather than bold attempts to reimagine and rethink the recent past. If Poliakoff remains in television it is only because three great works in rapid succession made him a byword for what the BBC should be about. They simply don’t dare cast him aside.
The great political dramas of the 1970s and 1980s were produced by screenwriters who knew that there are shared landmarks, that the past matters and needs to be fought over. As we approach an election year, it is worth asking who now has a vision of Britain, past and present, that has the capacity to inspire and to connect with voters
