In ‘Alien’ human beings are horrifically subjected to the life cycle of another species in the same way as some wasps paralyse their prey so that they can act as hosts and nourishment for their larvae. In the film the humans are kept alive in a living death as part of a pulsating larder. In recent years the same has been done to BBC Drama. Still nominally alive and on our screens it is no longer an end in itself having been subjected to the requirements of social engineering and political activism. Watching the 1976 BBC series, ‘The Glittering Prizes’, free on Forgotten British Television on Youtube one understands the heights from which BBC Drama has fallen. Lord Oi Oi invited me to re-watch a series I watched first time round as a 17 year old and to write a review. So here goes.
I remember being rather dazzled by the often coruscating wit of the piece while being confused by much of the content. I hope I now have a better grasp on the latter. It seems to me that the series was often brilliant. It was a sociological and politico-historical record of the age it depicts. Rewatching it now I realise that much of it also approximates to televised two-handers of taut Scandinavian drama proportions. This is especially true of Episode 3 where Adam Morris interviews Stephen Taylor (played by Eric Porter), an Oswald Moseley facsimile, who has been frothingly washed up on the shore by the tide of the Second World War like our own Ezra Pound. In Episode 4, a brash and successful Australian from their Cambridge days (are there hints of Clive James?) exposes a prig who has needlessly subjected his family to penury by working in a rural Reform school for pious and high-minded reasons. This has real psychological and moral depth and the complexity and subtlety of the relation between the two men is very satisfying.
The series is flawed by certain contradictions though. The author, Frederick Raphael, was born in Chicago to well-off Jewish parents. The British father’s job with Shell Oil brought Raphael to Putney when he was seven just before the War. The boy was educated to a high degree at Charterhouse and Cambridge. It is fairly obvious that the series is a working out of autobiographical issues to do with Raphael’s Jewishness and the Cambridge milieu he swam in. Adam Morris, excellently portrayed by Tom Conti is his alter ego. The wit is Cambridge razor sharp but erring on the side of being over self-regarding. It seems there is nothing you can’t be ironic about and this fact becomes one of the problems Raphael struggles with; where is real seriousness located? Does real seriousness exist? Is it embarrassing to believe that it does? As an atheist Jew in an observant family in the swinging 60s how do Adam and Raphael (presumably in the same predicament) address the issue of their Jewishness?
These two problems come together at the beginning of Episode 6 where the wit is so sharp it cuts itself. Morris, now a successful author, addresses the small audience of some kind of Jewish society. He radiates heartless anti-Zionist contempt towards the audience, even to an elderly Auschwitz survivor, criticising them for their selfishness in demanding a homeland for post-Holocaust Jews while not demanding a homeland for Gypsies who also suffered in the Holocaust. The audience sensibly argues that the Jews have an ancient history in Israel and a religious culture while Gypsies do not. One could point out to Adam something that he seems to overlook, that Gypsies, by definition, are travellers without a homeland; a strange thing for one so clever to overlook. Then, later in the same, final, episode we discover that Adam carries around a photo of a Jewish schoolboy in school uniform with his hands up as he is being herded by Nazi soldiers. Suddenly seriousness intrudes and the constantly scathing and subverting ‘wit’ evaporates.
I think the problem was that Raphael was too 20th century and this made him conflicted. The wit is a simulacrum of the fierce adherence of the 20th century to a fashionably absurdist (Modernist?) outlook that undermines simple things or feels guilty about them; a clever, distancing wryness about them must not be abandoned. In spite of this his success, his happy marriage and his pleasing bourgeois life-style overwhelm him in the end and he has to embrace the lovely simplicity of it all. In spite of himself and his guilt in doing so, he is compelled to look on creation and say that it is good, even in reverse in condemning the Holocaust without reserve and exhibiting an allegiance to his lineage. He accepts his Glittering Prizes no longer able to be ironic about them, distance them or subvert them. He has overcome his guilt about his ‘privilege.’
As a footnote one has to say something about the treatment of women in the series. Raphael comes across as still being a 16 year old boy obsessed with hooters and apparently unaware that a person is attached to them. We constantly get the boys’ locker-room perspective on the matter. A Sociology lecturer casually tells a female student, mid-seminar, that her nipples are excellent before continuing to discuss time and motion studies while the student in question doesn’t bat a mascara’d eyelid. A brilliant academic, now turned alcoholic considers the lack of her cup-size a problem of greater proportion than her unfaithful husband and attempts to strip off in public. We even have a protest led by another female student who goes full topless for us. Women are completely sexually compliant and un-protesting (in spite of that protest!) as they might be in a 16 year old’s fantasy. It’s very seventies in this respect.
