Guardian, 28/8/69
Television
Robert
Waterhouse
Some Women
“Some Women”, shown on BBC1, was made in those heady days two years
ago when Tony Garnett and Roy Battersby were creating a new kind of TV verité.
Conceived, like “Cathy Come Home” as a Wednesday Play, it was originally held
back because of internal BBC objections that it crossed the borderline between
drama and documentary. Recently a new introduction was added by Tony Parker, on
whose book it was based, and one of the five interviews with women “criminals”
was dropped.
In fact Parker’s interviews with the women (played by actresses who
had read his book and then tried in their own words to relive the true stories
in it) were anything but heady. Parker goes as near as any social worker to
thinking aloud for the subject simply by staying around, listening carefully
and asking primary, unchallenging questions. In this way he has won the trust
of a naturally distrustful breed, and got as near as anyone to recording
experiences that actually happened. Even in the slightly bastard form of “Some
Women” the integrity of the operation was never in doubt.
Shot in deliberately flat, anonymous surroundings, the film demanded
a great deal from the four actresses to re-live these parts of the lost,
detached women they represented. The four cases chosen were habitual petty
criminals, who had all done time, and could most probably look forward to doing
more – and the actresses responded credibly to Parker’s serious manner, filling
the pauses he is prone to as best they could. Because of his dry sympathy, his
unwillingness to ask leading questions, we had to be content with repetitious
life histories and to draw our own conclusions about the kind of society which
produced them – probably the point of the exercise. Like verbatim court
reporting it was incontrovertible, yet somehow unsatisfactory.
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