Was this the worst idea the BBC’S ever had?
It was meant to be a seminal series, but turned into a comedy of errors. Dominic Cavendish recalls 1978’s ‘Bardathon’
Forty years ago, on Dec 3 1978, as the country shivered through the Winter of Discontent, the BBC launched its biggest ever tribute to Shakespeare. To a trilling fanfare, the corporation unveiled Romeo and Juliet, the first in a canon-spanning cycle that took seven years – and cost £7million – to make, a Herculean undertaking.
No commemorative programme or flurry of repeats marks the anniversary, in stark contrast to the buzz that surrounded the arrival of what commentator Clive James dubbed “the Bardathon”. But there is a reason for this lack of celebration. What should have been a marriage of true minds between the world’s most famous playwright and its oldest broadcaster proved a star-crossed match.
From the very beginning, the BBC Television Shakespeare fell short of its lofty ambitions. The inaugural production was supposed to be Much Ado About Nothing, starring Michael York as Benedick and Penelope Keith as Beatrice. The powers that be saw it, thought it second-rate and shelved it. It had cost £250,000 (nearly £1.5million in today’s money) and, although a copy is believed to exist in the BBC archives, it has never seen the light of day.
The replacement, Romeo and Juliet, threw up its own issues: its newfound star Rebecca Saire, then a schoolgirl just turned 15, used her press interviews to complain about director Alvin Rakoff ’s treatment of her character as too childlike and asexual, and was swiftly taken off the interview circuit by a horrified publicity team. When it was broadcast, it met with critical disdain, led by James, then The Observer television critic.
Though the production boasted illustrious names (John Gielgud as the Chorus, Celia Johnson as the Nurse) its artificial ambience combined with its profusion of men in tights and codpieces created a mock-elizabethan halfway house in terms of style. James quipped: “Verona seemed to have been built on very level ground, like the floor of a television studio… You were in that semi-abstract, semi-concrete, wholly uninteresting city which is known to students as Messina.”
This was a snide reference to the series’ instigator Cedric Messina, a gregarious South African-born television producer who had pushed for the “complete works” project over the heads of his colleagues in the BBC drama section, gaining the green light from the top brass. He was adept at raising funds from American backers (a triumvirate, including Exxon, that provided £1.5million), but that came with strings attached: the plays had to be set in Shakespeare’s time or the period of its events, not exceed two-and-a-half hours and have “maximum acceptability to the widest possible audience”.
However, problems arose in the US, too. Even as ambassadors for the series were being greeted in the White House in January 1979 by the First Lady – Rosalynn Carter – there were howls of outrage that American actor James Earl Jones was being blocked from playing Othello by British Equity (Othello was eventually made in 1981 with Anthony Hopkins “blacked up” as the Moor of Venice).
In fact, casting had proved to be an issue from the offset.
The RSC was unhappy about the original plan for a repertory of actors to appear throughout the entire series because it considered itself the national repertory. Its concerns were then echoed by the UK actors’ union, which had the power to veto the proposal.
Messina scored some early successes with casting – Derek Jacobi as Richard II, later Hamlet, and Felicity Kendal as Viola in Twelfth Night. However, he struggled to find a Duke of Venice for Measure for Measure – after Alec Guinness turned it down, a further 31 actors declined the role before Kenneth Colley accepted the part.
Meanwhile, tensions around the traditionalist template grew. An early bid, soon abandoned, was to shoot the plays in external locations. For the first of these, As You Like It, Messina had chosen Glamis Castle in Scotland as the location. However, the natural backdrop overwhelmed the actors (including Helen Mirren as Rosalind) and the verdant splendour of the grounds seemed distinctly unmenacing when meant to convey the brutality of the Forest of Arden in winter. One critic described it as “more an upscale camping expedition than exile”.
Richard Eyre, future artistic director of the National Theatre, was then working at the BBC on its Play for Today strand, and was in an office next to Messina’s. He witnessed the morale slump within the corporation regarding the series. He recalls a joke about how, if your TV screen was too narrow, Messina’s name would be truncated, reading: “Shakespeare produced by Cedric Messin’.
After two seasons, Messina was tactfully edged aside and the series restructured to allow in other producers. Men from the BBC flew out to Vienna to recruit Jonathan Miller, then directing A Midsummer Night’s Dream on stage. That appointment, in 1980, had a galvanising effect and brought new intellectual kudos to the endeavour.
“He created a kind of think tank within the BBC,” says Miller’s protégé, the director Elijah Moshinsky, who helmed five productions, including a visually ravishing A Midsummer Night’s Dream starring Mirren as Titania that was directly inspired by Rembrandt’s Danae.
Eyre concedes that Miller “rescued the series with some probity” but argues that he was fighting a losing battle: at heart the series was “misconceived. The idea of sending a version of every Shakespeare play round the world was a post-imperial project, as if there was an inherent artistic virtue in doing the Complete Works. The trouble was that much of it just looked like bad theatre. Its legacy was that Shakespeare became a no-go area for TV for many years.”
The erratic scheduling that afflicted the two Miller seasons suggests the corporation lost faith in the venture. When the BBC’S erstwhile head of drama Shaun Sutton took over as the final producer in 1982, there was a sense of limping to the finish. “Everyone was tired,” notes Susan Willis, an American academic who wrote an in-depth book about the series in 1991. “The exuberance of beginning paled by the finish, which in
‘The legacy of the series was that Shakespeare became a no-go area for TV for many years’
itself was an exercise in discipline more than enthusiasm.”
Messina died in 1993. Even if his brainchild yielded a mixed bag, riffling through the collection today is not wholly a case of love’s labour’s lost. Though the reliance on multicamera capture – then standard – now looks dated, a curious paradox is that the “olde worlde” period trappings liberated the aesthetic from fastdating modernity.
Jacobi – whose Hamlet marked his farewell to the role after years of success with it on stage, brought to an end by a bout of stage-fright – still cherishes the intimacy the camera allowed. “In a theatre, the actor has to fill a huge space, make it real for people 30ft away. The wonderful thing was being able to scale everything down.” He addressed his soliloquies to camera.
“It was easier to internalise the speeches instead of making sure everybody got it.” He believes the series succeeded best when it trusted the text most. “Rather than trying to help people understand what was going on by making the settings as familiar as possible, they went ‘We’ll go with what is being said, what is being thought’. They took the audience inside the characters’ heads.”
If the BBC Shakespeare series was a flagship failure, was it not a noble one? “Only the BBC had the guts and resources to do it,” says Moshinsky. “To complete it was fantastic. I just wish TV had that intellectual ambition today.”
Now it seems that the BBC has learnt its lesson, bestowing more resource and greater star power on more manageable chunks of the canon: The Hollow Crown (2012 and 2016), based on the two History cycles, and a modern-dress King Lear (2018) exerted a fluid, cinematic grip and wowed the critics. Forty years on, the curse of Shakespeare on the small screen has finally been lifted.