From spectral dreamscapes to The Year of the Sex Olympics, a lovingly researched history of British TV recalls the brilliant, the bizarre and the unworldly
In the 1974 cult-classic teleplay
Penda’s Fen, the past holds the key to escaping the catastrophic present. We too can learn from wilder pasts in our confrontations with capitalism today. I remember the first time I ever saw a ghost. I was tiptoeing through the remnants of a burnt-out row house in Washington, D.C., in one of the neighborhoods where, in the 1990s, one could still discern the architectural scars from the urban rebellions meant to avenge the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., thirty years before.
Stepping gingerly over charred beams, scanning the scattered furniture, my eye landed on a toy a doll, lying relatively unscathed amidst the debris. In an instant I saw the house as it had been, in its unburnt serenity. A family had lived there. Children grew up there. Psyches, fortunes, relationships germinated in this place. Fortunes that were not mine, lives given their shape by the monstrous hammers of class and race in America. The image I
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Last modified on Mon 1 Mar 2021 13.19 EST
Philip Martin, who has died aged 82, was a writer whose work for television synthesised gritty, often bleak and sometimes violent subjects with sly, offbeat humour and an innovative approach to the medium.
His groundbreaking series Gangsters (1976-78) began as a one-off Play for Today on BBC1, shot on location in Birmingham, where Martin had embedded himself for weeks in order to authentically capture the city’s underbelly. A revenge story, it had a backdrop of seedy strip clubs and dodgy business deals as Maurice Colbourne, playing the anti-hero John Kline, uncovered a web of crime and illegal immigration. It was a raw, violent work with the odd surreal twist (including a pair of standup comedians acting as a chorus), deftly directed by Philip Savile with an unusually strong and well written array of leading parts for black and Asian actors.