by David Lodge
There followed long lists of the TV and radio programmes, newspapers and magazines, hopefully earmarked for interviews, a proposed book tour of eight major cities, and appearances at the Cheltenham and Birmingham literary festivals which would take place shortly after the publication date. Not all these promises were kept – I don’t recall a champagne dinner at Groucho’s in June, for instance – but most of them were, and several events were added, such as a visit to Guernsey in May to address the Secker sales reps at their annual get-together, and a big drinks party before the dinner on publication day in the atrium of Secker’s new home, Michelin House in Kensington. This kind of lavish expenditure on publicity was characteristic of the era, and seems a historical curiosity now, like the extravagant advances that were paid and never earned out.
While I waited for my publicity programme to begin, I interested myself in the four-colour jacket mentioned in the plan. Gill Sutherland, who conceived the brilliant design for Small World, had left Secker by now, but I had an idea of my own for the front cover of Nice Work which I sketched out crudely with a black felt-tip: two cars passing each other, with a front view of Vic Wilcox’s Jaguar saloon, reg. VIC 100, and rear view of Robyn’s well-worn Renault 5, with the slogan ‘Britain Needs Its Universities’ in its back window. This concept found favour at Secker and was passed to Paul Cox, a gifted artist who straddles the boundary between commercial and fine art with a distinctive loose watercolour style, and has a gift for evoking people and their milieux with sympathetic humour. He produced a vivid evocation of the two main characters in their cars and the Rummidge setting, which Secker later had framed and generously presented to me. Paul provided the cover art for my next novel, and for several paperback editions of earlier and later ones over the next twelve years, including a lovely painting of the façade of the fictional Palladium cinema for the Penguin edition of The Picturegoers, the original of which I also possess and cherish.
Meanwhile the Granada serial of Small World was being transmitted every Sunday evening from the beginning of February. Bob Chetwyn and Howard Schuman had hosted a party in their flat in Eccleston Square towards the end of January to give a video preview of the first episode to the principal actors and other key participants who were able to attend, clustered around a television which was not quite big enough for the purpose and not exactly state-of-the-art. We all applauded loyally at the end of the show, but it seemed to me that the reception was slightly muted, with not as much laughter as I would have expected, and I could not suppress a feeling of slight disappointment myself, without quite being able to put my finger on the reason, unless it was the TV set. I was not totally surprised therefore that the reviews of the first episode when it was transmitted a week later were predominantly negative, especially in the posh papers; but this reception was a blow after the high hopes the project had generated in production. Unfortunately the reviews of a TV serial always focus on the first episode, and the critics refer only fleetingly, if at all, to subsequent episodes unless it is a phenomenal hit, which Small World certainly was not.1 Therefore, although the serial improved considerably as it progressed, containing many memorable scenes and sequences, and certainly had some enthusiastic fans, by the usual criteria of viewing figures and reviews it was not regarded as a success, and it had cost so much to make (something like £4.5 million, a huge sum in 1988) that anything less than success was failure. Granada evidently perceived it as such, for it was never transmitted again in the UK, and as far as I know only once abroad, in Australia. One reason for this, I was told, was that the contracts for the individual artists stipulated excessively generous payments for repeat transmissions, making the latter unacceptably expensive. Nor was the serial ever made commercially available as a videotape or DVD, and occasional plaintive appeals on the internet suggest that bootleg copies are also unobtainable.
So what went wrong? In my own opinion it was, as always in these cases, a combination of factors. While the production was in progress there was a euphoric mood on set and on location. Everybody involved thought it was terrific fun and was going to be a hit, and in consequence there wasn’t enough critical examination of the work in progress. Even I noticed that the visual quality of some rushes from the first episode was disappointing. The serial was shot on film stock, and was often brilliant, but at other times it looked as if it had been recorded on the cheaper and less luminous medium of videotape. The casting was sometimes spot on, sometimes ill-judged. This was a drama all about academics, but I was unable to discover any member of the cast who had been to university, and occasionally this showed. Leonie Mellinger, for instance, who played both of the twins, was appropriately beautiful and desirable as Lily, but unconvincing as the ambitious high-powered intellectual, Angelica. John Ratzenberger chose to play Morris Zapp as a genial avuncular character without the sharp professional edge he has in the novel, which I missed. Of Bob Chetwyn, who died in 2015, I can say candidly that I thought his direction was erratic – sometimes inspired but sometimes lame. As examples of the inspired I would cite the magical street theatre enactment of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in Lausanne into which Persse unknowingly wanders, and the tableau in which Philip and his mistress Joy repose naked in post-coital languor, like figures painted by an old master, in a sunny bedroom overlooking the Bosphorus, and the ominous shape of a Russian tanker slides past the window like a repressed memory of his wife Hilary; and as examples of the lame, two crucial scenes of sexual intercourse in the story – Philip Swallow’s first rapturous embrace of Joy in Genoa, and Persse’s long-delayed possession of Angelica (as he supposes; in fact it is her twin, Lily) at the MLA convention in New York. Both of these scenes were filmed in bright, almost clinical lighting which deprived them of any atmosphere of sensuality and romance. This may have been the fault of the lighting cameraman; but Barry Lynch told me several years later, when I met him in Stratford-upon-Avon where he was playing in Shakespeare, that Bob gave him and Leonie no help at all with their scene, but simply pointed to the bed and told them to get on with it. My only reservation about Howard’s script is that when I watch my tapes again I feel he was too faithful to the novel, especially in the first episode which would have benefited from some cuts and a quicker tempo; but that should have been spotted by others.
It was unfortunate for us that Channel 4 chose to rerun their drama serial Porterhouse Blue over the same period. This was Malcolm Bradbury’s skilful adaptation of Tom Sharpe’s comic novel about a Cambridge college, expertly directed by Robert Knights, who had directed The History Man, and starring two of the most popular actors on British television, David Jason and Ian Richardson. It was first transmitted in 1987 to deserved acclaim, but to repeat it at the same time as Small World had its first airing did us no favours. The two programmes were relentlessly compared in the press as academic satires, to the disadvantage of Small World, though the texts on which they were based were quite different. Tom Sharpe’s novel was a clever farce about political intrigues and sexual indiscretions among the denizens of a fictitious Cambridge college and did not concern itself with the scholarly life of the institution. Small World, in contrast, though comic in tone, and containing some farcical and erotic elements, dealt explicitly with the intellectual preoccupations, arguments and rivalries of the academic characters. In April, after the show had run its course, I was invited to contribute an article to The Listener in a series by writers whose work had been adapted for television, in which I made the best case I could for Small World. I noted that however much one has been involved in the making of such a production there is something subtly different about viewing the actual transmission:
It was not until I began watching Small World at 9.30 p.m. every Sunday that I realised what a bold enterprise it was. Here after all, was a TV drama serial networked on the main commercial channel in prime time on a Sunday evening in which characters were arguing about Structuralism and analysing Keats’ imagery and getting entangled in a street theatre version of The Waste Land and re
citing The Faerie Queene and referring to the Grail legend and Freud and Frazer and Jessie Weston without condescension or vulgarisation, and managing to be funny and entertaining at the same time … With a few honourable exceptions the press did not, I think, give credit to Granada for the daring and difficulty of the undertaking, or the production team credit for their efforts to preserve the allusiveness of the original text.
One effect of observing the production, transmission and reception of Small World was to strengthen my desire to be much more deeply involved in the adaptation of any future novel of mine. The opportunity occurred much sooner than I could reasonably have hoped for, in the spring of this same year. One morning in March I was alone in the house, working in my study, when I noticed that some BBC vehicles were in the street, apparently filming a piece of drama action for which they had obtained the use of one of the houses opposite ours, or possibly just its front door. I recognised the man in an anorak who was watching an actor being filmed repeatedly knocking on the door and being admitted, as Chris Parr. Mary and I had met him for the first time very recently, with his wife Anne Devlin, as fellow guests at a dinner party hosted by David Edgar and his wife Eve. David I had known for a longer period, but for much of it only by reputation as one of the leading radical playwrights of the sixties and seventies. I had seen and admired several of his plays, notably the two-part adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby for the Royal Shakespeare Company, which was a global hit, and Mary Barnes, his powerful dramatisation of a woman’s account of being treated for schizophrenia in R.D. Laing’s controversial therapeutic community, which I saw in the Rep’s tiny Studio theatre before it moved on to other stages. David and I had been aware of each other’s presence in Birmingham for some time without actually meeting, and we recognised each other one evening in 1983 when returning home from London on the same train. I sat down opposite him and we had a conversation for the first time. He asked if I had a new novel on the stocks. I happened to have the bulky typescript of Small World in my briefcase, as I had spent much of that day going over the text with John Blackwell for a final review before the copy-editing stage, and I pulled it out to demonstrate that it was finished. We made a pact that he would buy my novel when it was published in the autumn, and I would see his next play when it was produced. That was Maydays, an ambitious work about the ups and downs and divisions of left-wing political factions over five generations, premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in their London home at the end of that year. We both kept our promises.
David and Eve, who was a prominent Birmingham Labour councillor, were at the centre of a network of leftist political, intellectual and creative folk who mainly lived in the inner suburb of Moseley. They entertained frequently and gave a large Boxing Day buffet lunch party annually to which we were invited, but the dinner early in 1988 was the first occasion of its kind for us. Chris Parr and Anne Devlin were newcomers to Birmingham from Belfast, and new members of the Moseley circle. Anne was a writer of plays and short stories, born and brought up as a member of the Catholic Republican community in Northern Ireland, the daughter of Paddy Devlin, Social Democrat and Labour MP at Stormont. She had recently had a television play about the Troubles, Naming the Names, produced for the BBC in Belfast by Chris, who was of English and German parentage and had been Artistic Director of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh before moving into television. He was now a producer at Pebble Mill, the BBC’s Midland regional headquarters, working under Michael Wearing, who had made his department a highly esteemed source of television drama with serials like The History Man and The Boys from the Blackstuff. We ate in the big kitchen of the Edgars’ house and David cooked and served a tasty dinner while participating in the conversation, which became increasingly animated when he sat down and the wine flowed. Anne was a feisty young woman with strong opinions strongly expressed, while David liked to provoke people with elegantly composed ripostes coolly delivered from his great height, and between them they ensured a lively evening.
Cut to the morning when I observed Chris Parr in the street outside our house. Some time later he rang the doorbell and asked if he could come in for a brief chat. The BBC vans and crew had all departed. I led him into my study where he told me that he and Mike Wearing wanted to produce a drama serial which would do for Birmingham what The Boys from the Blackstuff had done for Liverpool: i.e. tell a story set in and around the city that would reflect its life truthfully, topically and entertainingly. They had looked at my two Rummidge novels and Chris had gathered from David that I had some experience of writing plays and screenplays. They wanted to know if I would be interested in writing such a script, and if so, would I think about a possible storyline and let them know so that we could meet to discuss it. Grinning all over my face I told Chris I already had the very thing, and gave him a copy of the typescript of Nice Work to take back to Pebble Mill. I had not mentioned this novel at the Edgars’ dinner party, or indeed said anything much about it to anybody, as I am rather secretive about work in progress.
Chris Parr and Mike Wearing read the novel and liked it. After just one meeting, in April, I was commissioned to write the complete script, without first submitting a treatment or the draft of a first episode, as was customary then and is mandatory today. This was an extraordinary act of faith on the part of Mike and Chris (who was to be producer of the serial) in a writer who had had no success so far in this form of writing. It was only possible because regional drama departments had a good deal of autonomy in those days: they were given an annual budget and were fairly free to use it as they wished, exercising their own judgement. Today the script of every significant drama production has to be approved at a series of development stages and management levels until the man or woman at the top, usually in London, gives it the green light. The consequence has been a considerable thinning and narrowing of the range of television drama.
Another reason for Pebble Mill’s rapid commitment to the project was that all concerned were aware that it was highly desirable that it should be broadcast when its picture of Britain under Margaret Thatcher was still recognisable. The winter–spring calendar of the story required that filming would have to start by the beginning of February 1989, or be postponed for another year and risk losing its topicality. This in turn meant I would have to produce a complete and approved script by the end of the present year. I was confident of doing that, but I did not begin work immediately. I waited until I had received and corrected the proofs of the novel, and seen the revises, so that the text was beyond my control to emend it before beginning the screenplay. I thought of the novel and the TV serial as two essentially different treatments of the same story and I wanted to be finished with the first before I started on the second.
I was surprised by how quickly the activities and preoccupations of the Birmingham English Department receded from my consciousness once I became a freelance writer. I had feared that I might miss the human contacts academic life provided, because writing novels is a lonely, introspective activity, but I found that other areas of my work, like the adaptation of Nice Work for television, and continuing efforts to get my play ‘The Pressure Cooker’ produced, had a collaborative dimension which compensated for the loss of academic collegiality. Also I now had several friends and acquaintances in or near Birmingham who were freelance writers, and in the spring of 1988 I conceived the idea of organising a regular lunch for such a group, like the one I knew existed in London which included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Craig Raine and others of that generation. When I sounded out the writers I knew well I got a very favourable response, and the project soon got off the ground. We had a trial lunch at the Chung Ying restaurant in Birmingham’s Chinatown which specialised in Dim Sum (ideal for sharing) and had big round tables suitable for conversation between a dozen or more people, and we agreed to meet there every six weeks or so, on a Friday. I undertook to act as secretary and confirm the date of the next gathering. The pool of participants, some of whom travelled a considerable distance to atten
d, but not all of whom were at every lunch, grew quite quickly, and included in addition to myself: David Edgar, Anne Devlin, Andrew Davies, the novelist Jim Crace, the poet Roy Fisher, the playwright Joyce Holliday, the playwright Stephen Bill, novelist Richard Thornley, screenwriter Hugh Stoddard, and Mary Cutler, a regular scriptwriter for the BBC’s seemingly eternal radio serial The Archers, which is produced in Birmingham. Spouses and partners were not eligible unless they were professional writers too, like Roy Fisher’s wife Joyce. Later additions to the group included Vayu Naidu, an Indian storyteller, and the novelist and poet William Palmer. The lunches were always lively and sometimes contentious, lubricated by Chinese tea and numerous bottles of the house dry white. In due course we decided to invite a guest to the occasional lunch to add some variety to our gatherings, sometimes taking advantage of a visiting writer’s engagement in Birmingham. Among the guests we entertained over the years were Fay Weldon, Will Self, Jonathan Coe (born and brought up in Birmingham, but based in London), Craig Raine and Malcolm Bradbury. Simon Rattle, charismatic conductor of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, also responded enthusiastically to an invitation. These lunches continued into the late 1990s, by which time several members of the original group had moved away from Birmingham and the attendance of the remainder began to fall off to a point when we decided the institution had come to the end of its natural life. But in its heyday it enhanced our individual lives, and several friendships formed through it survived its demise.