The Reviews of Some Women, BBC1 - August 1969. Sunday Times

 

Sunday Times 31/8/69

Maurice Wiggin

Television – True to Life

I wish to write with respect and mystification, with delight and a touch of awe, about two items of exceptional force and magnetism. They were wholly dissimilar – one charged with an intensity of tragic beauty, one suffused with irremediable pathos. Both gripped the attention irresistibly; each raised an interesting point – the identical point, for all their unlikeness of provenance and probity.

The programmes were Some Women, by Tony Parker (BBC1), and The Goshawk by David Cobham (BBC2).

Mr Parker talked with four women who had all been in and out of prison (or, in once case, reformatory). Originally there were five, and the result of Mr Parker’s investigations was to be presented as a Wednesday Play. I’m glad that someone had second thoughts. Though far more fascinating than the majority of plays, this was removed from strict documentary actuality by one dramatic device only. Though Mr Parker’s women had (and have) a real existence, though every detail of their revelations was true to fact, four actresses impersonated these victims of fate. They had no script; but, having soaked themselves in the documentary material, they reproduced it, “playing the parts” in re-staged interviews with Mr Parker.

A legitimate device? I think so. I’m always concerned about the tendency to smudge the distinction between fact and fiction, and could not have accepted this as a play, which manifestly it was not. But the alternative would have been a “Man Alive” type of recording, with that dreadful feeling one gets of eavesdropping intolerably, of gloating over private grief, and inadequacy. The reconstruction with actresses removed this inhibition and made it seem humanly decent to listen, and look. And, no doubt, by their art they eliminated the tedious tracts of inarticulacy, the repetitions and hesitations, which disfigure so much of real conversation (and which some smart-alec playwrights are so keen to drag into their scripts, under the impression that verisimilitude is a substitute for intrinsic interest).

Whatever may be the rights and wrongs of that debate, it cannot be doubted that the result was mesmeric. There is a touch of Frank Marker in Parker. Though by no means ingratiating, he plainly has the gift of sympathy, is a born listener to whom these poor women opened the secret places of the heart. He exorcised complacency. I do not share his optimism: I believe that actual wickedness exists: that it animates criminals against whom society must defend itself on behalf of the innocent. It follows that I do not find the social implications quite so clearcut as Mr Parker, who is all compassion. But how poignantly he brought out the haplessness of these habitual petty offenders – lonely, weak, pitifully inadequate; entirely without moral sense or any sense of having a relationship to society or to time. This strange experience that was not a sermon, was reporting raised to the level of art; it was a sort of ‘breakthrough’. But let all who would rush to follow ponder the indispensable integrity of the pioneer.

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

 

The Times 28/8/69

Television

Henry Raynor

Tony Parker’s Some Women, originally called Five Women and written as a Wednesday Play more than two years ago, emerged on BBC 1 last night a character short. Mr Parker wants us to admit – as we come to know his people – that there, but for the grace of God, go we. The character omitted is not, it seems, necessarily the most shocking, but the one least likely to compel this admission.

Some Women  is a series of four talks between Mr Parker and women who have been in prison. They are played by actresses who worked out their own scripts from his book. Tony Garnett’s production treated what emerged as a series of interviews punctuated by the noises outside the interviewees’ homes. The sense or reality flags only at Fionnuala Flanagan’s unexplained changes of dress in a series of meetings presented as a continuous session.

Mr Parker’s characters are defeated by life. One repeatedly commits the same crime in the same inefficient way: since she was in a prison mental hospital 20 years ago she has not seen a psychiatrist. The others were rejected by parents; one when she was 12, was the victim of an incestuous father. A half-caste girl imprisoned for repeatedly escaping from approved schools is the only one who does not accept an unhappy fate. Cleo Sylvestre failed to catch or convey the hysteria her words suggested. Edith MacArthur, Natalie Kemp and Fionnula Flanagan disappeared entirely into the parts they played.

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

 

Daily Mail 28/8/69

Peter Black

‘A sad view of the women who can’t keep out of jail’

Tony Parker’s controversial film about women and prison, Some Women, turned up late on BBC 1 last night after being taken out of the Wednesday Play slot it was destined for.

The BBC decided that its use of real people and their words, albeit spoken by actresses, took it across the line that ought to separate plays from documentaries.

This decision was right, but not the decision to show it at an hour when it would be preaching mostly to sympathizers.

Parker hates imprisonment as a cruel, wasteful and medieval form of punishment, and his patient, gentle interviews with these women asked the question we should all ask: How much effect does putting people in prison really have?
All four had been in jail and would probably go back. One of them, an illegitimate half-coloured girl, had committed no offence other than to run away from the institutions they’d put her in: but she ended up in prison for it.

SHOCKED

The link between them was an unlucky start in life coupled with the characteristics of all recidivists, an inability to make the connection between breaking the rules and getting punished that keeps most of us in order.

Miss McDonald, a respectable and well-spoken woman of 40, brought up fatherless, when she was 20 obtained a suit on approval, left her name and address and promptly took it round the corner and sold it. She got a month in prison and ended that year in a mental hospital.

Periodically, she repeated the offence, but does not consider herself a thief. When Parker asked if she had ever considered giving the shop a false name she was shocked. ‘Mr Parker, I am not a liar.’

Janie Preston’s last sentence (her 16^th conviction) was eight years for stealing a tankard with £55 in it from a pub. Typically, she was caught because she went back to the pub a fortnight later.

She was regularly raped as a child by a man she afterwards learned was her father. She agreed with the judge that society had to be protected from women like her, thought she wouldn’t mind being deported to Java instead of going to prison.

She once saw a picture of a leper colony there and it stuck in her mind as a place where she might be of use.

The fourth, Dianne Richards, remembered her father shouting at her after her mother’s death (she was six): “Why don’t you die too?” Her speciality is in stealing savings books and cashing money from them. She is always caught.

It was wretched to think of the lives laid waste. If there is wickedness it is not so much in these women as in the system that knows how futile and unfeeling prison is as a punishment for such, and goes on sending them there because it can’t be bothered to think of a better way to render them harmless.

I realise that prison survives because punishment has to be what most people will recognise as punishment, but this sad film must have added to the  numbers of those who wonder if it isn’t the Government’s duty to lead opinion rather than follow it.

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"