Main NI Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From Socialist Worker, No. 100, 7 December 1968, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
DAVID EDGAR’S television piece (SW November 23) deals with an episode of Softly Softly by another writer, one I admire, though I didn’t see the piece in question, and from this basis he embarks on a general attack on the show, with the phrase ‘patronising crap’, sticking, if that’s the best word, in the mind.
People are welcome to say this about my work, but I’m not obliged to agree, and I don’t.
His main complaint is that the characters are ‘honest, straight and lovable’ so that when one of them, Inspector Watt, comes out with reactionary talk, the audiences lap it up as ‘God’s truth’.
Why David Edgar assumes that all the viewers, himself excepted, should indulge in this lapping is unclear but it seems dangerously near an arrogant assumption about respective intelligences.
The question is a simple one. Does the writer of a police series assume that his subject is lovable and animal-fond, or does he assume that he is a sadistic planter of pot and demonstrator hater?
The answer is equally simple, in my case anyway: neither. Because, sad as it may be for lovers of the Instant Category, there is no such thing as a typical cop.
I know a policeman who loves his kids and mine too, I know another who is a socialist (which is unusual) and is forced to play his favourite game of whist at the Conservative Club (for practical reasons) but wears a red tie to do so.
Neither is typical, any more than David Edgar is a typical critic, student or socialist.
Let us examine the lovable theory a stage further, in terms of my own recent contributions to the series. If Mr. Edgar watched these with the same care that enabled him to spot two slighting references to students within five minutes, he may also have noticed a (lovable) copper beating up a suspect and getting a winking reprimand from his superiors for so doing.
He may have noticed another (lovable) copper advocating painless destruction for men who molest children; he may have noticed a man using his position of wealth, family and position to get preferential treatment from top police officers. He may notice parallel examples in future episodes under my name.
If David Edgar is asking me, as a writer, to make coppers cosy all the time, I will refuse; but if he is asking me to make them all bastards, I will also refuse. The organisation that harboured Challenor also includes the men who dug out, assembled, identified and labelled the bodies at Aberfan.
In fact, it is this very ambiguity, the built in contradictions of the work, that stirs the interest of the writer – and John Hopkins wrote 50 odd stunning episodes for Z Cars and in the process became the best television dramatist in the business, simply because he, too, was fascinated by this ambiguity.
Writers do not make plays out of love for their subject, but out of a mixture of love and hatred: it is a process of defining conflicts, not blowing kisses to any one section of society.
In this connection, I cannot accept the premise that students have a monopoly of human virtue, not the converse that coppers have cornered the market in human vices. Common sense and observation alike suggest they are all fairly evenly spread, and if uniform provides an escape route for the physically violent, it can also be argued that the academic world provides an asylum for the socially irresponsible – though I am not thinking of radical activists; rather the middle-of-the-road bourgeoisie waiting for their pass degrees and superannuation.
I am sure Mr. Edgar will provide a lively and passionate column on television, and God knows, there is plenty for him to go at. But I assure him that the last thing I shall ever be is a PRO for anybody.
I stand by every syllable I’ve ever written: call me a liar by all means, but don’t expect me to agree.
Television writer Alan Plater is also part-author of Close the Coalhouse Door, the record-breaking play about north-east miners.
Main Socialist Worker Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 30 October 2020