Murderers and Other Friends (24 page)

And then he remembered, as Harold Acton had, relics of the heyday of Oscar Wilde and the friends and enemies who survived him. ‘Lord Alfred Douglas was a beautiful young man who ended up sour and ugly. Can you believe this? He was at the first night of
The Importance of Being Earnest
, so I asked him how it was played. Was it done as satire or as a comedy of manners, and how broad was the comedy? Do you know, Douglas just couldn't tell me! He was Wilde's closest friend and he couldn't remember anything about the production at all.'

John Gielgud went to bed early, long before we finished work on the other scenes. It was five o'clock in the morning, the nightingales in the villa garden had fallen silent and there was an increased sense of urgency. The night scene had to be finished quickly before it was flooded with the cruel light of day and would become completely unreal.

Poor times are good times for the countryside. Bankrupt developers are unable to pollute what they like to call ‘greenfield sites'. The eighties brought a curse which some people called prosperity. It was the age when self-respect went with two cars and owning your own house; if you had less than these minimum requirements you might well be living in a cardboard box. House prices in our valley spiralled to dizzy heights; a cottage with a leaking roof and a handkerchief of a garden could cost as much as a sizeable London house. Motorways were built and seemed in instant need of repair, so travellers who might have been speeding along in trains crawled, at the speed of a slow nervous breakdown, among the cones. Market towns, which had boasted wide streets, Georgian town halls and ancient churches were developed, operated on and degutted. Dreary and lifeless pedestrian precincts and shopping centres were inserted like useless pacemakers into their hearts. In such centres the wind blew empty Coca-Cola tins among concrete pots in which shrubs died, and the shops sold nothing anyone might want – such as fish, meat or ironmongery – but specialized in ‘gifts', padded coathangers and embroidered knicker-bags, and greetings cards. These shops rapidly went bankrupt and the pedestrian precincts became places where the outcasts of the monetarist society might urinate and sleep, or where pupils from the local polytechnic, now called a university, could deal in more or less harmless drugs.

Henley, a small riverside town, suffered from the current malaise. It has a handsome bridge, decorated with sculptured masks of Thames and Isis; a fourteenth-century chantry house; the Red Lion, where Coleridge was billeted when a dragoon; and a small Regency theatre where, it's said, Sarah Siddons once acted. Cavaliers and Roundheads fought a battle in Duke Street. William Lenthall, the Speaker of the parliament that defeated Charles, was born there and Prince Rupert hanged a spy on a tree outside the smaller post office. In the eighties, rapacious landlords made its tradesmen's lives impossible, useful shops vanished and an ever-changing assortment of boutiques and pine furniture stores took their place. The small shops not only had to struggle with their landlords but with the local supermarket, part of a prosperous chain, which planned to grow enormously in size and pull down the cinema.

Some people said we had a greatly exaggerated affection for the Henley cinema. It was a 1930s building, but perhaps not to be mentioned in the same breath as the Hoover building or the Odeon, Leicester Square. However, it had one of the finest cinema organs in the land, which rose up miraculously from the bowels of the earth in a beam of changing purple, green, orange and scarlet light. At the end of the recital (‘Deep Purple', ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes' and ‘The Isle of Capri'), a disembodied voice would tell us that ‘All the music played at this performance is available from Messrs Woolworths.' I first saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers there, and Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour and Bing Crosby, and Greta Garbo in
Queen Christina.
I saw, and shall never forget, a film called
The Mummy
in which some long-entombed Egyptian prince left his hieroglyph-covered case and slowly crossed the room, trailing his bandages behind him. On the way home I pretended to be asleep in the back of the Morris Oxford in order that I might be carried up to bed, where I lay for hours with my eyes open, terrified of seeing a trail of mouldering linen curling round the door.

The fight for the Henley cinema was protracted. We gave star-studded concerts in the theatre, law-suits were financed and, at one mass rally, the marketplace looked, for a glorious moment, something like Wenceslas Square at the collapse of Communism. Waitrose Ltd and the South Oxfordshire District Council proved, however, harder nuts to crack than the red peril and were quite unwilling to surrender to any velvet revolution.

Fighting for the countryside broke out on all fronts. Bands of developers, buying options on land from greedy farmers, were constantly seeking to build new towns. One such scheme was suggested near Thame, which would have swallowed up a number of villages and village churches and caused even more traffic confusion. Any person wishing to provide housing, which is no doubt needed, could have built a new town on the outskirts of Cowley. Of course greenfield sites were cheaper and the developers applied for permission for Stone Bassett – soulless urban sites are always given charmingly rustic names such as Broadwater Farm and Blackbird Leys, a god-forsaken housing estate where stolen cars are raced and then burnt.

The fight against Stone Bassett cost the local villagers, who had never invited it, huge sums of money. Michael Heseltine, the member for Henley-on-Thames, gave evidence in support of the view that Stone Bassett would do great harm to the district. After the case was won, I congratulated him on behaving extremely well. He thanked me but begged me not to repeat my kind words in public. Any praise from me, he was convinced, would ruin his chances in the Conservative Party. He seems to be one of the few remaining politicians with anything like a personality, so I assured him I wouldn't breathe a word in his praise. I went further. I promised that if he went on behaving admirably, I would write a scathing attack on him. He seemed grateful for that.

It took over a year to make
Paradise Postponed,
which filled eleven hours of television. In time, if nothing else, it was like writing the three parts of
Henry VI
or a couple of pretty hefty Wagner operas. Michael Hordern, who had made
The Dock Brief
a success, played the comfortably off left-wing vicar. There were memorable performances from Jill Bennett, Zoe Wannamaker, Peter Egan, Annette Crosbie, Paul Shelley and many more. The production was not entirely happy. The director was Alvin Rakoff who had done
A Voyage Round My Father
very well. I was delighted when he said he'd do the series. Then things began to go wrong. He quarrelled with Jacquie Davis, the gentlest of producers, who, as always, was desperately anxious that every detail and every performance should be exactly right. The enormous schedule took its toll and the days often ended in tears. However, the shooting ended without any serious casualties. The greatest embarrassment was caused to the business man who rented part of his converted vicarage as Michael Hordern's home. During the Easter break he invited a Conservative politician to dinner without telling him that he had hired out some of his house for filming. On his way back from the loo the politician stumbled into a room we had dressed as the vicar's study. He was astounded to see a bust of Karl Marx, numerous CND posters and Left Book Club hardbacks next to bound copies of
Tribune.
He came to the conclusion that our landlord was a closet lefty of the most dangerous variety.

The discovery was David Threlfall and the credit for it must go to Alvin. I had only seen Threlfall as Smike, the ill-used, put upon and pathetically grateful victim of Dr Wackford Squeers in
Nicholas Nickleby.
I had no idea he could play that political rottweiler the Rt Hon. Leslie Titmuss, MP, and his performance only emerged slowly. At the read-through the older actors sat on one side of a long narrow table, referred to by Michael Hordern as the ‘generation gap', and the younger actors sat on the other. The gap was immediately apparent when the reading began. Older actors perform, are audible, rush to meet their characters with open arms; the young ones give a muttered rendering that is little help to the author and take care not to give away what they plan to do.

Nothing emerged from David in the first days, but the performance, when it came, was extraordinary. The cold, classless, carefully ironic voice, the pale intensity, the unremitting tension and moments of sarcastic delight – David Threlfall became Titmuss in the way Leo McKern became Rumpole. When he acted, it was impossible to think of the part being played by anyone else.

I thought it might be interesting to follow the fortunes of Leslie Titmuss past the Falklands War, when
Paradise Postponed
ended, into the late Thatcher years. I thought we might see Titmuss in love. And then Nicholas Ridley, a cabinet minister who always expressed himself as being passionate for freedom from government restrictions, was found to have been just as passionately in favour of the planning laws when there was a building development threatened near to his Georgian country house. I thought of facing Titmuss with a similar dilemma. All we had gone through trying to save the cinema and stop the new town should provide ample scope for comedy.

To make the television version of
Titmuss Regained
and our subsequent productions, Jacquie and I started a production company and became, if not complete converts to the Titmuss view of life, at least entrepreneurs, mini-capitalists running a small business. The risks we took were not enormous. Thames Television provided the money, but we had the responsibility of spending it; we could engage the performers and technicians and we had to keep within our budget. On the first day of filming we looked at the great army we had recruited – the Winnebagos for stars' dressing-rooms, the make-up and wardrobe vans, the catering lorry, the honey wagon, where the army could pee, and the huge bus where they could sit and eat breakfast, elevenses, lunch and tea (unlike schools, television companies still have to provide free dinners) – and I, at any rate, felt a certain terror. I have absolutely no head for figures and, when a barrister, always avoided fraud cases for that reason.

One small piece of money was well spent. I'd seen Kristin Scott Thomas in a film of
A Handful of Dust
and I thought she
was
just the right wife for Titmuss. She could be beautiful and vague, determined to avoid, if possible, any uncomfortable reality such as his character. And he would be utterly confused by the delicacy of her feelings. Finally, he would even reject forgiveness because such behaviour was not in his nature. We found Kristin living in Paris with a French gynaecologist husband and two children. She'd had a strange career. She was doing a stage management course at a London drama school and she said she wanted to be an actress. Apparently she was greeted with some such caustic phrase as ‘
You
, an actress!', at which she not only gave up her course but gave up England, went to Paris and studied acting there. After the Waugh story, she had been in many French and German films. Jacquie, the director Martyn Friend and I took her out to lunch in a restaurant near the Sorbonne and she was clearly the character I'd written. She acted it perfectly, looked beautiful and would be a great star if only we had a film industry.

The organizations which seek to protect the countryside are sometimes fatal to it. No doubt when the South of England is mostly under concrete, with motorways joining new towns, car parks leading to more car parks, with a maze of pedestrian precincts weaving between them, there will be some green areas. Those will be left for the ramblers' associations, where the senior citizens' ‘nature walk opportunities' will be clearly marked and children may be allowed to pick wild flowers on the first Thursday of every month. This is the urban attitude to country living: the longing to tidy up the country and make it less alarming. It leads to hunt saboteurs and the RSPCA endangering animal farming in Southern England by endless prosecutions. The country flourishes on neglect and has to do with dark woods, where fallen trees are left to rot and crawl with life, where animals hunt and are hunted, where life and death, birth and decomposition are not interfered with or inspected too much.

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet

wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins, who had never even seen a multistorey car park or a pedestrian precinct.

Titmuss Regained
begins with a scene in which a couple are making love in an uncultivated meadow, beneath a stretch of woodland. They are interrupted by a furious and bearded warden, who says they might be crushing a stone curlew's egg and shouts, ‘Can't you lot read? . . . This place is reserved for nature!' The couple who performed this on a cold October day did it well enough, but such scenes, now mandatory in all television plays, are often better left to the reader's imagination. I discovered that these performances are sometimes taken extremely seriously. An actress, whom I'll call June, told me that she was asked to do a ‘struggling-about-in-bed' scene with a male star. The star said to her, ‘We don't go in for this type of work, do we, June?', and she agreed. So male and female stand-ins (or lie-ins) were engaged to do the rough work in their place. The male stand-in, not realizing that June wasn't to be his partner, came up to her in the canteen and said, ‘How'd you like me to play our scene, dear? Full erect, half erect or limp?' I suppose it's a talent of a sort to have such range.

For one moment during the filming, truth intruded on fiction. We staged a protest march in the valley, where the road leads down to the double gables of Fingest church. We had a large number of extras carrying placards saying
SAVE OUR VALLEY
and
SAY NO TO FALLOWFIELD COUNTRY TOWN.
Commuters, on their way to work in London that early morning when we were filming, stopped their cars, got out and asked if they could sign the petition.