A Very Peculiar Practice

Before I get to the main business of this newsletter, I have some matters arising that have come to our attention since the latest podcast (the video version is also available through Patreon free of charge) was released, and you might be able to help us with one of them. Firstly, we mentioned in the podcast that Barbara Flynn wasn’t the first actor to play Rose Marie, and that some work had been done on A Very Peculiar Practice before the part was recast. This is confirmed in the DVD commentary for the series, but the identity of the original actor is not revealed. However, Neil noticed something odd in the Radio Times issue (17^th May 1986) that launched the series. Alongside the billing for the series there’s an image that purports to include the four leads identified as “Drs McCannon, Buzzard, Rose Marie and Daker” but the image of Rose Marie is definitely not Barbara Flynn.

Neil and I think it looks like Philippa Urquhart, who plays Helen Furie in the episode “Wives of Great Men” but we’re not sure. What do you all think? This mysterious image also raises some interesting questions. Is it just a simple error at the Radio Times and they called up the wrong image, or were they supplied with early cast information and not informed that Barbara Flynn was the new Rose Marie? Could the actor in the photo in fact be the original Rose Marie, and if it is Philippa Urquhart, was she given the role of Helen Furie to make up for the disappointment of losing a leading part? Unlikely maybe, but who knows? Please drop us a line on BlueSky if you have any insights into this.

Secondly, we’re indebted to Valentine Birkby on BlueSky who pointed us in the direction of the wonderful BBC Motion Graphics Archive (hosted by Ravensbourne University) which features an early version of the opening credits for A Very Peculiar Practice. The original credits include a tower in the campus silhouette that was later removed. Valentine surmises that this was because the University of East Anglia had a similar tower and when that university refused permission for the series to be filmed there it was removed from the credits. However, I can’t immediately find any reference to such a tower at UEA, but if you know better, or recognize the tower from elsewhere then, again, please drop us a line. Even more fascinating are the storyboards (scroll down the page) for the original concept for the credits in which some malevolent-looking crows sing along to the theme tune. Thanks again to Valentine for alerting us to these riches.

These things aside, in today’s blog I mainly wanted to draw your attention to the two novelizations of A Very Peculiar Practice adapted from his own screenplays by Andrew Davies. The publication history of the first book is unusual. The Bookseller magazine of the 25.01.1986 noted that the novelization would be published in paperback by Coronet on the 20^th February to coincide with the series starting transmission on the 28^th of the same month. The book was indeed published in February, but for reasons unknown the series was delayed, and eventually aired at the end of May of the same year, which gave the reading public ample time to find out about every aspect of the series well in advance of viewing. Somewhat unusually the book was republished in hardback by Methuen in November 1987, and shortly afterwards in March 1988 the second book – A Very Peculiar Practice: The New Frontier – was published after the second series had started to air.

Both books are funny, readable, and very faithful to the series with each chapter corresponding to a TV episode. The big difference, however, is a much larger role for the writer Ron Rust, who as we mention on the podcast is an obvious alter-ego for Andrew Davies himself. Rust gets several pages at the end of every chapter, and the reader is effectively given a fictional representation of Davies’ experience of both the commissioning and writing of A Very Peculiar Practice. Davies is careful to cover himself though, and in an author’s note at the start of the first book states “Rust does not exist, though he thinks he does. And ‘Jonathan Powell’ and ‘Ken Riddington’ are fictional characters, nothing to do with the real people who bear those names. It’s just a story. All right?”

Despite his caveats, one thing that exactly corresponds to reality in the books is Davies’s portrayal of Shepherd’s Bush and its environs in the late 1980s. It was an odd place, and considerably more down at heel than the Westfield-dominated hot spot it is today. The general weirdness was mainly down to the fact you couldn’t walk more than a few yards without passing a pub that had strippers on at lunchtime, then seeing an unpleasant number of tramps exposing themselves on the Green, before wandering by a building owned by the BBC.

In contrast, when I was a kid, Shepherd’s Bush seemed to be an impossibly glamourous place, and it was mentioned so often by presenters and continuity announcers (as in this pastiche from Look Around You) that for me it was easily a rival to Leicester Square as the most famous place in London. By total chance, I ended up living there for a while in the very early 1990s, just when the BBC was starting to shed its properties. The BBC TV Theatre, famous for hosting Wogan three times a week, closed down the month I arrived, and the venerable Lime Grove Studios similarly shutdown just a few weeks earlier. I used to walk by the derelict premises every day, and I’d often choose a route just so I could see a couple of other buildings that the BBC had kept going – Threshold House and Union House.

They were part of a fairly hideous office block on Shepherd’s Bush Green which incorporated a Post Office on the ground floor. It was leased by the BBC as overspill offices for Television Centre which was a few hundred yards away on Wood Lane. BBC employees allocated there regarded it as punishment for crimes unspecified, but some saw it as an opportunity for hi-jinks because they were out of sight, out of mind and free from interference from their bosses back at “the Centre.” For me, Threshold House had a certain grubby allure because that was where the Doctor Who production office was based, so it’s a pleasure – if a niche one – to see it brought to life in Davies’s book as a backdrop to Ron Rust’s wrangling with his Ken Riddington over scripts. You half expect Doctor Who producer John-Nathan Turner to pass them in the corridor resplendent in an Hawaiian shirt. Other locations of interest include Rust and Riddington drinking in the thinly-disguised Bush Hotel, a terrible pub back then which had a theatre of note in the upstairs room, and Julie’s restaurant in Holland Park which was much beloved by media types, and where Jonathan Powell takes Rust for a meal in the honeymoon phase of their working relationship.

But there’s much more in the books to interest normal people as well as nostalgic old former West London residents like me, including a lot of insight into the writing process even if Davies has his tongue in his cheek. He was blocked when trying to write the second series of A Very Peculiar Practice, and Rust is similarly afflicted: “Writer’s block is like terminal constipation.” Against expectations, Powell wants to commission a third series, and Rust deliberately tries to capsize it to Riddington’s fury:

“I mean he’s killed half his characters. He’s destroyed the whole fucking university. I mean how are we going to get a third series out of this?”

Davies then ends the book with a strong suggestion that Rust himself is going to die, but as we mention in the podcast, he in fact returned in Davies’ book Dirty Faxes, and Lowlands University itself crops up in “Thanks Anyway” one of the stories in the same collection.

So, there’s a lot of fun to be had in the Davies multiverse, and you come away with the feeling that the writer’s postmodern side could only find expression in works like these, and his own original scripts, rather than in the more restricted form of literary adaptations for television. I suppose it would have been hard for Davies to justify Ron Rust hoving into view behind, for example, a damp Colin Firth, but it’s a shame he didn’t give it a go.

The novelizations of A Very Peculiar Practice are available in paperback for peanuts via your preferred second-hand book suppliers.