The Reviews of Some Women, BBC1 - August 1969. Daily Mirror

Daily Mirror 27/8/69

Jack Bell

Women behind bars break out

It has taken more than two years for the BBC to get round to screening “Some Women” (BBC-1, 10.40 tonight), writes Jack Bell.

This controversial programme is about four women who have been in prison. It is produced by Tony Garnett, who was responsible for “Cathy Come Home.”

Garnett, who is now producing plays for the rival channel through his Kestrel Productions’ tie-up with London Weekend TV, had intended “Some Women” to be seen in the Wednesday Play slot.

Originally called “Five Women,” it is based on Tony Parker’s book of the same title, featuring interviews with the women.

Garnett and director Roy Battersby dispensed with a script.

BLURRED
Instead, they asked five actresses first to read the interviews, meet the ex-prisoners who provided them – and then give their own dramatized versions of these true-life stories in front of the cameras.

But then BBC chiefs decided not to screen it as a Wednesday play. They felt it ‘blurred the border between fact and fiction.’

Now, after two years, the programme has been taken over by the Features Department and now goes out as a documentary.

Playing the parts of the four ex-prisoners are Fionnula Flanagan, Edith MacArthur, Cleo Sylvestre and Natalie Kemp.

The Reviews of Some Women, BBC1 - August 1969. Daily Express

Daily Express 28/8/69

Martin Walsh

Who listens when the judge passing sentence asks the prisoner in the dock: “Have you anything to say?”

Prison visitor and social worker Tony Parker did – and he took his tape recorder to listen for hour upon hour to what women who have spent lives in and out of prison had to say.

But for nearly two and a half years the television re-creation of his interviews, “Some Women,” made but  never shown as a Wednesday Play, gathered dust in a BBC vault while programme controllers argued if it was drama or documentary, or indeed fit ever to be screened at all.

SCAPEGOATS
Last night the debate finally concluded. It was shuffled on at the end of the evening’s viewing, cut by 20 minutes – and I suspect somewhat emasculated in the process – and with an apologetic introduction by Mr Parker hurriedly attached.

It was easy to understand the BBC’s predicament. This was no programme that could be safely pigeon-holed and labeled. With actresses playing the parts of real women prisoners, it fitted neither the Wednesday Play nor the Tuesday Documentary. The programme was a moving, often harrowing, commentary on society’s need for scapegoats.

The women just sat there in a Balham bed-sitter, and talked. It was hard to remember that they were actresses – the effect was of the real dramatic truth. The offences were tragically petty; some shillings from the stolen Post Office book, a few pounds from pawning unpaid-for goods.

They seemed to will themselves to be caught. One aging woman who stole for beer money thought she ought to be deported to a leper colony, another always gave her right address when committing fraud because, “I’m no liar.”

Yet it told only half the story of crime and punishment. These women were the little failures, not the big villains, the sad rather than the bad people.

And of the original five interviews one was left behind on the cutting-room floor. The BBC explained it was because of time. But it also just happened to be the one with the least sympathetic character, a lesbian drug-taker.

Get the feeling we were being got at?

The Reviews of Some Women, BBC1 - August 1969. Guardian

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.

A letter to the editor, Radio Times Feb 13, 1969, p2

"Readers of RADIO TIMES may be puzzled by the recent article (Jan 16) 'Keeping Faith with the Viewer.' For many people who work in television it is also very disturbing. Because beneath its bland, sweet reasonableness, which is the house-style of BBC bureaucracy, there is a warning.

The warning is this: if you refuse to take our gentlemanly hints, we shall censor or ban any of your programmes which deal in social and political attitudes not acceptable to us. The odd rebel may be allowed to kick over the traces, occasionally. Provided this is an isolated event, and not part of a general movement, it only helps us to preserve our liberal and independent image. But enough is enough.

The important thing for the viewers to understand is that this is an argument about content, not about form. We are told that 'what he sees must be true to fact or true to art' but there is no acknowledgement of the fact that the screen is full of news, public affairs programmes and documentaries, all delivered with the portentous authority of the BBC and riddled with argument and opinion. It is a question of which argument and what opinion. Some are acceptable; some are not.

And the gloves are really coming off in the traditionally safe area of drama. Why? If we go back to our article we are told that it is a question of the techniques used, the conventions established. 'Throuh a different set of conventions the viewer knows ... that this kind of programme (drama) will not be a photographic record of real events. It will be art presented as art.'

Over eighteen months ago a Wednesday Play called Five Women was completed. Everyone who has seen it (a very privileged few because the BBC won't allow viewings of material that it bans - despite a written request from twenty-five writers, directors and producers) agrees that its artistic merit is beyond doubt. But it used actresses to tell the stories of women who had been in prison. Used them so convincingly, that despite the end credits to artists, and front titles identifying it as a Wednesday Play by an author and a RADIO TIMES billing doing both, the BBC decided that viewers might be misled into thinking it was real! And worse, that the style might be imitated until viewers wouldn't know whether to believe even the News (good point: should viewers believe the News?)

The BBC has never given a clear reason for banning this show. After more than twelve months of conversations and correspondence with the BBC, the writer, the director and the producer are still mystified. Was it the form, were the actresses just too convincing (but what else do we ask of art?) or was it the possible uses to which this approach might be put?

What is clear is that the objection to mixed forms is only introduced when the content is found offensive by our guardians. Much humdrum television drama contains some example of 'real events' in the use of stock film and sound effects. In fact the BBC regularly exploits so-called fiction as a matter of policy - the Archers constantly peddle hints to farmers from the  Ministry of Agriculture and it is, after all, some years since listeners sent wreaths to Grace Archer's funeral. When Till Death Us Do Part filmed Alf Garnett and his son-in-law in the middle of a real football crowd no-one in the BBC was worried that this was not keeping faith with the viewer.

A documentary called Hit, Suddenly, Hit was also banned last autumn - again with no public explanation. Its form was conventional but its argument was not. It contained people like Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Stokeley Carmichael, Allen Ginsberg and Adrian Mitchell. The BBC found it 'unbalanced.' So it's not just form. It appears that the poor viewer shall only be selectively protected - and the areas selected are sensitive ones where social and political assumptions might be upset. This is spelled out almost innocently in the finger-wagging pay off to "Keeping Faith with the Viewer.'

'In the history of protest about broadcasting trouble' (ah, yes, trouble) 'has most frequently been caused when the audience got - not what it did not want - but what it did not expect.' Are the quietists not aware that the worst thing about most television is that you get exactly what you expect? It is as predictable as the grave. 

Tony Garnett, Jim Allen, Roy Battersby, Clive Goodwin, Ken Loach, James MacTaggart, Roger Smith, Kenith Trodd, London, W8"

Blurb for FIVE WOMEN at South London Theatre

Five Women - adapted from the book by Tony Parker

Tuesday January 24 to Saturday January 28, 8pm Prompt Corner

In February 1963 five women were released from Holloway prison and agreed to talk to author Tony Parker about their lives. Parker's unique style of listening led to five extraordinary stories each one surprising in a different way from the others. Janie Preston, 60, who spent her life stealing cash to buy beer and who insists on a hard punishment for her wrong doing. Miss McDonald, 40, who always gave her name and address in exchange for the goods she had no intention of buying because, as she said, "I am not a liar, Mr Parker".  Joe Bishop, 30, who felt at home in Holloway prison nearly as much as she did in the lesbian clubs of Soho. Diane Richards, 24, whose happy go lucky philosophy brought her no luck, and even less happiness, though it gave her three, no four, children and led men to try to look after her. And Millie Jackson, who was sent to prison for running away from the orphanages and care homes but who had committed no crime at all. Our play presents these five women's monologues using the real words, phrasing, and facts from the real women of the past. They are at times funny, sad, puzzling, shocking, but always fascinating, moving and thought provoking.

This is only the second time this work has been performed. The first time was as a BBC Wednesday play produced by Tony Garnet (Cathy Come Home) and Directed by Roy Battersby. Originally scheduled for 1967, it provoked such angst amongst senior management at the BBC that it was delayed, cut, and broadcast in the middle of the night 2 years later after an of letters between artists (letter is signed by Tony Garnett, Jim Allen, Roy Battersby, Clive Goodwin, Ken Loach, James MacTaggart, Roger Smith, Kenith Trodd, 13th Feb 1969, p2) and management (an anonymous piece entitled Keeping Faith With The Viewer, 16th January, 1969, p4) in the Radio Times. 

Five Women at South London Theatre, 24th-28th January 2012

The play is cast, the rehearsals have begun, and we find ourselves talking about the truth of the text and the place of the writer between these women from the 1960s and the audience of today.

Both Tony Parker and Roy Battersby have spoken about the amount of repetition and editing that is necessary in preparing a final text or programme. This meticulous working and reworking is an essential part of our endeavour too. We have read the book and watched the BBC TV Play, and are steadily working our way through the text to find our own version for our performance in January. The actresses are incarnating the words, choosing ways of speaking, ways of moving, and deciding what to can be left unsaid.

Our aim is to find something of the truth of each of these five women, most of whom must surely be dead now. Each of them poses quite a different question to us both about what it was to be a woman in the decades around the second world war, and also about the function of prison from the point of view of punishment, prevention, and of humanity.

In spite of the editing undertaken both by Parker and by us, the words spoken in the play are only those of the women in question. Nothing is added, the phrasing, vocabulary and sentence structure belongs to them.

Five Women - a performance of an early Parker book.

It occurred to me that a good way to really understand Tony Parker and the way he worked would be to put on a play based on one of his books. I belong to an excellent local theatre club, and enjoy the repetitive reading that is required in the production of a play. Parker’s emergence into the public domain was also through a kind of public performance. His conversations with Robert Allerton (a man he had met through voluntary work as a prison visitor in the 1950s) were taken up by Paul Stephenson, BBC Talks Producer, and turned into a radio programme. It was this performance that set the scene and propelled Parker towards his status as an extraordinary writer, and to earn him the accolade of oral historian.

Five Women is Parker’s fourth book, published in 1965 and was turned into a BBC Play for Today by Director Roy Battersby and Producer Tony Garnett. Battersby had hoped to make a drama based on Parker’s second book, The Unknown Citizen, which came out in 1963, but when he approached the publisher for rights, he discovered they had already gone. He resolved not to lose Five Women, and with the rights secured and a BBC commission in his pocket he began preparations for filming in 1967.

I don’t remember exactly how I chose Five Women for my own project, now in 2011, but it had something to do with the belief that there must be a script around somewhere. A chance encounter in the Theatre Club Bar had prompted me to put my thoughts about the play into words and my congenial interlocutor urged me to alert the Theatre Committee to the prospect of my directing it. Although I still didn’t have the script to submit, the Committee was warm in its response, and so we proceeded in the hope that it would soon materialize.

My enquiries led me to the BFI archive where a 16mm copy of the televised play is carefully kept in case people like me want to watch it. They had other scripts by Parker (in fact he went on to write 172 TV scripts!), but not this one. Julian Petley is Professor of Screen Media and Journalism at Brunel University, and as luck would have it was in the office and able to take my call – I knew him from some years ago when I also worked at Brunel. He gave me a gentle push in the direction of producer Tony Garnett whose work he had recently been involved in reviving, and this was enough to open the door to Roy Battersby. Both men were willing to discuss their work with Tony Parker (this is quite typical and is witness to the great esteem people still hold Parker in), but the news was unexpected: there is no script. They had improvised the play from the book.

Well, the idea of improvisation at the local theatre club is exciting in principle, but bewildering in practice, and when Battersby went on to describe how the editing process had taken three times longer than expected, I knew I had to stick to the text. I sat down at the keyboard with the book, and found it surprisingly easy to turn the chapters into five wonderful monologues to start us on the process.

As it turned out, however, there are six women in Parker’s book, and four women in the BBC televised play. How does this fit with the title? Battersby had shrugged and suggested there was poetry in the title, then launched into a fascinating story. The film he originally contracted to make did indeed involve five women but the BBC management got cold feet and cancelled the broadcast. They explained this in terms of the blurring of fact and fiction. Here were five actresses speaking the words of real women; the traditional reference points were blurred they said, truth was being messed with. Huw Wheldon was reduced to arguing that if the public watched this and then watched the BBC News, they wouldn’t know whether to believe what they heard. The argument is weak to say the least, but it functioned as a wedge and forced an exchange between artists and managers in the letters page of the Radio Times. Finally the managers conceded – they proposed to cut the play (one woman disappeared completely), and show it at a less popular time.

This is how the Five Women became Some Women (broadcast on 27 August 1969), and Joe Bishop (played then by Bella Emberg) hit the cutting room floor. We are reinstating Joe for our production, scheduled for production at the South London Theatre, 24-28 January 2012. Carol Dean, the character Parker chose to open his book with, never even entered the original cast list, and I also found it easy to overlook her in our production. Why do these two women present problems for us? Roy Battersby struggled to find a word to sum up the difficulty the BBC had with Joe Bishop. He said there was a ‘ghastliness’ that the BBC was somehow unable to be associated with.

I think this is an excellent way to begin our exploration of Tony Parker’s work. I’d like to try to sum it up now like this: Parker was someone who dedicated himself to listening to difficult things, and to bearing witness to people who had to endure difficult things. Both through the act of listening and the act of writing, and sometimes through both, he achieved a kind of transformation which made it possible for a truth to be heard, and to be taken in. Surely, this is the mark of an artist.