On the Introduction page, I argued that the television single play formed a kind of ‘studio system’ in which directors could develop; nobody grasped this better than Alan Clarke [i] . His work for Play for Today epitomises W. Stephen Gilbert’s description – in an obituary after Clarke’s untimely death from cancer at the age of 54 – as ‘an unswerving champion of the individual voice and the noncomformist vision’[ii]. The ‘individual voice’ refers to the hearing given to characters – often unsympathetic ones – who are given a fair hearing in his films: underdogs, the institutionalised (A Life is For Ever, A Follower for Emily, Funny Farm, Scum) and the brutalised (Nina, Psy-Warriors). If Clarke’s style were an anonymous, selfless articulation of such voices, it would be commendable enough; however, this was allied to a ‘noncomformist vision’, a distinctive voice of his own which made him one of British cinema’s most consistent innovators and stylists. On Play for Today he developed his own style and became, in the phrase of David Hare, a ‘driven filmmaker’, motivated to speak ‘on behalf of people whom he feels are getting a raw deal [and] by a passion to express what he doesn’t see expressed anywhere else in the culture’.[iii]

Clarke was born in Wallasey, and, like several other key writers and directors of television’s ‘golden age’, came from a working-class background and passed his Eleven Plus to go to grammar school. Taking an unorthodox route into television, Clarke emigrated to Canada in 1957 (after National Service), and, according to the Questors Theatre’s newsletter Questopics, had a ‘masterfully improvised’ career: ‘furniture remover, income tax assessor, miner, railway brakesman and chain-ganger, baker’s assistant, dance M.C. and a disc jockey at a skating rink’.[iv] Between 1958 and 1961 he studied Radio and Television Arts at the Ryerson Institute of Technology in Toronto, a pioneering course which gave him ‘training in broadcast methods’, including opportunities to make ‘closed-circuit productions of which several are taped and kinescoped during the year for further telecasting by co-operating private television stations’.[v] Returning to Britain after graduation, Clarke worked as an Assistant Floor Manager at ATV and later Associated Rediffusion, on various productions including Ready Steady Go. Between 1962 and 1966 he also directed various plays at the Questors Theatre in Ealing, and gained his first television credit when a touring production of James Saunders’s Neighbours was broadcast late at night in Berlin. Finally gaining entry onto a director’s course, Clarke served an apprenticeship directing Epilogues. At ITV between 1967 and 1969 Clarke directed various plays for the strands Half Hour Story (1967-68), Company of Five (1968) and Saturday Night Theatre (1969-71), and several episodes of series: the Ian Hendry vehicle The Informer (1966-67), the hugely acclaimed serial A Man Of Our Times (1968) and the massively publicised hit The Gold Robbers (1969). His early work is surprisingly distinctive, particularly his plays with Alun Owen; indeed, ITV awarded him Director of the Year for 1967.

As with all great film-makers, there is a temptation to draw correlations between the director and his films: like some of his protagonists, Clarke was an individual who collided with institutions, whether being arrested for extra-curricular activities or protesting at the BBC’s cuts to Funny Farm. It remains difficult, as Howard Schuman puts it, to ‘disentangle the man and the artist: to paraphrase Made in Britain, Clarke was in it for life’.[vi] He was described as ‘his own man’, just as Roy Minton described the lead character of Scum: ‘Carlin is his own man, not one of the shadows of this world. You meet him and you remember him’.[vii] For Trevor and the social services in Made in Britain, or Carlin and Borstal warders in Scum, read Clarke and the BBC. For the dissident Yuri in Nina, welcomed into a different class group in which his causes are empathised with but ultimately patronised and marginalised, read Clarke the director and defender of the banned Scum. For Trevor hurling a paving stone through a Job Centre window, or the anarchistic poetry of hooligan activity in The Firm, read Clarke, often with writer Roy Minton, trashing restaurants or being arrested barely hours into arriving on location in Halifax (see Richard Kelly’s biography for these and other stories).[viii]

Whether in film or television, realist innovations are often associated with the extension of representation to previously neglected social groups, and, according to Stephen Frears, Clarke was attracted to the medium because ‘one of the things that television told was the history of ordinary working-class people in England’.[ix] Such concerns made Clarke synonymous with a gritty, sparse observational style, and the visceral social realism and unyielding concern with institutional life that drove Scum. And yet, his work was strikingly varied. He brought a masterful surety of tone to the collosal, mythic Penda’s Fen, the intimate emotion of Diane and Nina, the disorienting multi-camera conceptualising of Psy-Warriors and Stars of the Roller State Disco, or his stunning stagings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Love-Girl and the Innocent, Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death and Bertolt Brecht’s Baal. Belying his reputation is the professionalism required to build such a vast output – David Hare speaks for many of Clarke’s collaborators in saying that ‘Underneath Alan’s apparently casual manner – often late, often saying he didn’t know what he was doing, scruffy, apparently undisciplined – hours and hours of thought had gone in, mostly at night, where he’d been working on the script in bed at three o’ clock in the morning’.[x]

He has been praised and cited as a major influence by his often glittering alumni (including Tim Roth, Gary Oldman and Danny Boyle) and namedropped by important young film-makers like Harmony Korine and Chloe Sevigny, prompting one critic to argue for him as the ‘father of NYC cool’. However, in the wider film culture his work has been shamefully ignored – only now that Gus Van Sant has attributed sequences in his Columbine film Elephant (2003) to the technique of Clarke in his original Elephant (BBC2, 25 January 1989) has Clarke’s name appeared in such film magazines as Cahiers du Cinema.[xi] BAFTA names their Outstanding Creative Contribution to Television award after him, but never honoured any of his plays during his lifetime (and the conventional choices who have been given the award increase its hollowness). There have been barely a handful of articles on him, though these are polemical and perceptive summations of his work, particularly Thomson’s didactic defence in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, in which some sacred cows of Hollywood and British cinema fare rather less well. Kelly has initiated an upturn of interest, compiling a book of interviews and overseeing a two-month retrospective at the National Film Theatre in 2002, the point of both being to argue for Clarke as ‘the most important British film-maker to have emerged in the last thirty years’.[xii] Mark Shivas bemoans the lack of acknowledgement during Clarke’s lifetime, remembering that he told Clarke that ‘had he been called Clarkovsky rather than plain old Alan Clarke, he would have had an international reputation’.[xiii] Like Ken Loach, this commentator on Britain was more appreciated abroad, winning various international television prizes.

One of the possible explanations for Clarke’s relative obscurity amongst critics may be the perceived ephemerality of the television play – most of these productions remain much harder to get hold of than cinema films from the same time, regardless of the fact that they would have been seen by far more people (only two of Clarke’s television plays, and two cinema films, have ever been commercially available, and none of his television plays have been repeated on terrestrial television since 1991). It’s contradictory to the nature of Clarke’s work and the way it engaged with audiences that we can only view his work in isolation in film archives, or at cinema screenings, as wonderful as the global retrospectives of Clarke’s work have been. As David Thomson wrote of the NFT season in 2002, ‘if only the season was playing where it ought to be, and where it is most needed – on the television screen’.[xiv] Film critics have not bothered to investigate work which is after all only telly – although the same standard is not applied to other European directors who have taken advantage of television finance, like Bernardo Bertolucci with the excellent The Spider’s Stratagem (1970).

Even critics comfortable with television have found it hard to write about television from the point of view of the director. Howard Schuman has summarised the reasons for this: 

In the context of British television, the title ‘director’ invokes deeply ingrained prejudices. Auteurist critical approaches to the golden age of television drama… usually focus on the writer, because television prided itself on being a writers’ medium. Directors were often regarded as little more than opinionated camera-movers.[xv]

 For the academic respectability of television studies, the use of textual analysis constructed around the ‘author’ became almost a signifier of the medium’s status as art – but this was associated with the writer, not the director. Rosalind Coward argued in an article on Dennis Potter that ‘The only hope which television offers itself for claiming an intrinsic cultural quality is through the notion of the playwright’.[xvi] The role of the director, therefore, lay primarily in facilitating communication between that author and the audience. This is of course a difficult area, even in the case of so widely respected a television auteur as Potter. Responding to Coward, John Cook argued that, despite the agreed complexity of production, this ‘can be seen to resolve itself into a clear hierarchical system of creative power relations whereby traditionally in British television, the writer was privileged in drama production over other creative personnel (for example, over the director who was often relegated to the secondary role of interpreter or realisateur of the writer’s ideas)’.[xvii]

Perhaps Clarke ‘serves’ the scripts of privileged writers, but there is more to these plays than that – although Penda’s Fen is distinctively David Rudkin’s vision, Clarke’s treatment lifts it even higher. Equally, even when Clarke did do work forced on him by television’s ‘studio system’, it helped him develop. As David Thomson argues, Clarke was lucky ‘to be a director in a writers’ medium. Every film school in the world would benefit from seeing how a directorial personality can be sharpened and matured by keeping company with adventurous producers and good writing’. Clarke learnt ‘to acquire versatility with the camera and sure speed with the actors’, and when his ‘own style and preoccupations’ emerged, ‘they were all the stronger in their solid grounding’. Emerge they did. As Simon Hattenstone argues, ‘Although Clarke hardly ever wrote his own films, he was an auteur. He cajoled and teased every nuance out of the scripts, and the finished work always seemed to belong more to him than the writer’. Many others would agree. He has been described by Richard Kelly as ‘the most important British film-maker to have emerged in the last thirty years’[xviii], by Andrew Clifford as ‘a genuine television “auteur”’[xix], and by Danny Boyle, director of Trainspotting (1996) and 28 Days Later (2002), as ‘a visionary’, ‘one of the most gifted, innovative and radical British film-makers’, who ‘transcended the boundaries of his profession’.[xx] Paul Greengrass, director of Bloody Sunday (2002), has eulogised ‘unquestionably the finest body of work created by a British director’.[xxi] Mark Shivas felt that Clarke’s films had ‘an unmistakable individuality and authenticity’ which made him ‘a real auteur in a way that very few British directors are’.[xxii]

This is a fair enough description of Clarke’s later work, a brilliant string of films in the 1980s which dissect Thatcher’s Britain, shot through with formal innovation and his distinctively personal use of Steadicam: Made in Britain (ITV, 10 July 1983), Christine and Road (BBC2, 23 September and 7 October 1987), the Northern Ireland films Contact (BBC2, 6 January 1985) and Elephant, and his final film, The Firm (BBC2, 26 February 1989). His Play for Today work may seem less personal, and some of it is recorded on video on multi-camera and Outside Broadcast rather than critically-accepted celluloid. However, these plays are not simply a foreshadowing of his later auteur period (indeed, the studio Psy-Warriors is paradoxically one of his greatest pieces of film-making).

The balance between the voice and the vision, or, as Mark Shivas puts it, ‘individuality and authenticity’, epitomises his Play for Today work. ‘Authenticity’ sums up the near-to-the-knuckle performances, the researched journalistic drive behind his more overtly crusading pieces, a concern for the everyday realities of lives hitherto unportrayed, and a complex realist style which can balance observation of and a strident invitation to participate with his characters. But, as the list at the top of the page suggests, much of his work is also hugely ‘individual’. Among the thematic concerns of these plays are authority and the inner space of individuals, institutionalisation, and incarceration in both literal and figurative terms. Promoting Beloved Enemy, Clarke identified his interest in ‘boxes – people being somewhere they don’t want to be, or wanting to be somewhere they can’t get into’.[xxiii] It’s appropriate that he should choose the imagery of a box, as arguably only Dennis Potter can rival his dedication to the box - television. In spite of offers from British cinema and Hollywood, Clarke only made three cinema films. He deliberately devoted his career to the medium because of the freedom it gave to him in comparison with commercial cinema, and because it mattered. As a result he leaves behind a body of work without comparison in television, of which his Play for Today productions are an esoteric, spiky and impressive part.

Dave Rolinson

Dave Rolinson is currently (still!) writing a book on Alan Clarke to be published by Manchester University Press.

Revised version, March 2004.