Edge of Darkness

If you’ve listened to the latest podcast – and if not why not? - then you’ll have realised that Neil and I are huge fans of Edge of Darkness. We always try to be positive about the programmes we cover, but in this case, we were talking about one of our all-time favourite series, and so I thought I’d balance things up a bit by looking at some of the criticisms of it that have emerged over the years.

Although Edge of Darkness was very heavily reviewed during its original transmission, not everyone was wild about it. Hugh Hebert of The Guardian was highly critical and took a number of opportunities to say so. He described the first episode as “the biggest collection of thriller cliches and Thoughts for the Day you could sweep off a committee room floor.” Later in the run, he complains that “the screen time is filled out with endless, supposedly atmospheric shots of…people opening and shutting car doors, people staring meaningfully…doing anything in fact but getting on with the narrative.” Hebert’s complaint is not just about Edge of Darkness however, and it’s clear from the sub-heading of the article “narrative inflation is ruining television drama” that he has a wider concern. Yes, this article is bemoaning the undeniable shift of prestige taking place at the time, away from the single play, and towards serial drama. Hebert, a single play advocate, was nursing a grudge.

Other contemporary critics loved the early episodes of the series but became disenchanted as it reached its climax “the penultimate episode was pure Bond, with anonymous men in radiation suits appearing to be killed as neatly as in a fairground shooting range…with one bound, our heroes will be free” complained Byron Rogers in the Sunday Times. He was even more furious the following week, claiming that the episode was “an insult to its considerable following” and that with regard to the way Craven and Jedburgh escaped Northmoor, Troy Kennedy Martin was guilty of doing “what no writer of children’s comics would ever do.” Many other critics expressed similar concerns, and so it’s reasonable to say that the end of Edge of Darkness was regarded at the time as a bit if a disappointment. But not in my house.

More recent criticisms have focused upon the role of women in the series, and it’s worth quoting from John Caughie’s BFI book about Edge of Darkness at length, as he summarises these concerns well:

…the role of women in Edge of Darkness is highly conventional – even, in the case of Clemmy, who seems to be an object of exchange between Jedburgh and Craven, highly regressive. Emma…cannot influence the action from beyond the grave, and certainly cannot change…While the working out of the heroic function plays quite subversively with the conventions of the genre – and even with the conventions of masculinity – the function of the woman – wife, mother and lover – remains safely conventional.

I think what’s notable about this summary is that leaving aside the specific character names, it could have been written about many television series from the so-called Golden Age, which were creatively dominated by men, and often featured representations of women that were either limited or downright weird. It can be a real weakness about a whole swathe of material from the 60s onwards.

Caughie’s comments certainly irritated Tory Kennedy Martin, and he opens the book’s afterword rather defensively:

I don’t think the women who went into Northmoor looking for the hot cell thought of themselves as anything other than scientists. Clemmy, who fought with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, was assigned to Craven for his protection not comfort. In fact, the only progressive characters in the story are women – which does not mean that they lacked compassion. One of the most moving scenes is Sue Cook’s interview with Craven on Crimewatch. I could go on…

Deploying a Sue Cook cameo in your defence is a move worthy of Alan Partridge, and although I sympathise with Kennedy Martin a little, I sense a level of awkwardness there that stems from the simple truth that male writers of his generation tended to focus on male characters and struggled to write women well.

On a happier note, one of Kennedy Martin’s earlier pieces of writing has held up rather better. Kennedy Martin’s manifesto Nats Go Home is less readily available than you might imagine but there’s a PDF of it lurking in this blog entry. It’s hard to overstate how influential this article has been over the years, and indeed Lez Cooke in his 2007 book about Kennedy Martin describes it as “one of the most cited articles in the history of television studies.”

As well as the article itself, I recommend reading a couple of pieces that engage with it. One is Billy Smart’s 2016 article ‘Nats Go Home’: Modernism, Television and Three BBC Productions of Ibsen (1971–1974) which looks at three Ibsen productions through the prism of Nats Go Home, and the other is John Hill’s chapter in Experimental Television Drama which specifically focuses on Kennedy Martin’s Diary of a Young Man, a drama serial which, as was briefly discussed in the podcast, puts the Nats Go Home theory into practice.

On another topic, we had a diversion during the podcast discussion with a brief mention of David Rose and his time as Head of BBC English Regions Drama. We’ll be returning to him in future podcasts when we cover some of the astounding work that came out of BBC Pebble Mill during the 1970s and 1980s. In the meantime please do check out Andrew Martin’s great overview in the BBC Genome blog about Rose’s career which rightly states that “David Rose’s long career in television and film is almost a potted history of innovation in British television of the last 60 years.”  Rose was not just admired but deeply loved by friends and colleagues, and this is deftly captured in the estimable Simon Farquhar’s obituary of Rose in The Times, which he made available on the BBC Pebble Mill tribute site.

Next time: Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and its antecedents.

Sources in chronological order:

Troy Kennedy Martin, Nats Go Home!: First Statement of a New Drama for Television, Encore 48, March-April 1964, pp. 21-33

Hugh Hebert, Portion of low fibre serial, The Guardian, 5 Nov 1985, p.21

Hugh Hebert, Long with the wind, The Guardian, 19 Nov 1985, p.11

Byron Rogers, Is the Craven image too good to be true?, Sunday Times, 8 Dec. 1985, p. 41

Byron Rogers, Beasts at the last supper, Sunday Times, 15 Dec. 1985, p. 36

Lez Cooke, Troy Kennedy Martin, Manchester University Press, 2007

John Caughie, Edge of Darkness, British Film Institute, 2007

John Hill, A ʹnew Drama for Televisionʹ?: Diary of a Young Man In Experimental British Television, edited by Laura Mulvey and Jamie Sexton, pp. 48–69, Manchester University Press, 2007.

Billy Smart, ‘Nats Go Home’: Modernism, Television and Three BBC Productions of Ibsen (1971–1974), Ibsen Studies, 16(1), pp. 37–70, 2016. There’s also an open access version available.

Many thanks to Tom May for his help with audience research.