Ian Curteis
Dramatist whose play about the Falklands conflict was controversially dropped by the BBC
IAN CURTEIS, the dramatist, who has died aged 86, was commissioned by the BBC to write a television play about the Falklands War of 1982 only for it to be dropped, so he maintained, because it showed the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, in too favourable a light.
Declaring his politics to be moderately Right of centre, Curteis was largely supportive of the Establishment, an outlook that distinguished him from most television dramatists of the 1980s. An experienced TV playwright, he had written episodes of The Onedin Line
and pioneered a new dramadocumentary format, exemplified in 1979 by a play about the Suez crisis.
In late 1982 he floated the idea to the BBC director-general Alasdair Milne of preparing a similar play about the Falklands War and was surprised when Milne commissioned it. Having signed a contract in April 1983, Curteis set to work, but with the BBC under attack over its news coverage of the conflict, it was decided to shelve the project.
Work started again in 1985, with a view to transmitting the finished play on the fifth anniversary of the Argentine invasion of the Falklands in the spring of 1987, and Curteis delivered the fourth draft of his script in April 1986. But, according to Curteis, in June the BBC’S new Head of Drama Peter Goodchild requested – and subsequently demanded – that the script be changed.
The alterations included scrapping a scene in which Mrs Thatcher exhibited private grief over the loss of British servicemen and rewriting others to have ministers discussing the positive effect winning the war would have on the next election. (Peter Goodchild has disputed this account.)
According to Curteis, he insisted that there was no evidence that such discussions had taken place, and as his contract (which gave him right of veto on all major casting and production decisions) made him responsible for the play’s veracity, he refused to include such “politically loaded changes” in case they might be considered libellous.
In September 1986 the three-hour production was cancelled, with Milne declaring it would be wrong to show it with a general election in the offing. The matter was raised in Parliament, and when Curteis delivered a dossier on his travails to the BBC’S new chairman Marmaduke Hussey, Hussey referred him to Milne, who dismissed Curteis’s claim of “dubious political machinations” as “nonsense”.
In January 1987 Hussey forced Milne to resign as director-general.
A few weeks later Curteis wrote two articles for The Sunday Telegraph
which, according to Paul Johnson in The Spectator, exposed “the shoddy way in which the BBC is run nowadays: its mendacity, hypocrisy and duplicity, as well as its obvious political bias”.
The ensuing controversy was exacerbated when production of Charles Wood’s anti-establishment play Tumbledown (1988) went ahead. “The problem was that much of the BBC loathed Thatcher and still does,” wrote The Spectator’s radio critic Michael Vestey.
By the time The Falklands Play
– with Patricia Hodge giving a commanding performance as Margaret Thatcher – was finally broadcast in 2002 to mark the 20th anniversary of the conflict, Curteis had been obliged to cut the script by half to fit the only time slot available on BBC Four.
Most of the scenes involving members of the Argentine junta were lost, along with all those featuring Pope John Paul II, prompting Curteis to note: “I’m sorry he had to go because the Pope had some rather good jokes.” Otherwise the script was largely unchanged from the version published in 1986.
The son of a bank clerk, Ian Bayley Curteis was born on May 1 1935 and educated at Slough Grammar School, where, aged 14, he decided to become a writer. After reading English at London University, he joined Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in the mid-1950s and went on to act in, direct and produce plays in theatres all over Britain, supplementing his income by working as a script reader for the BBC and Granada Television.
He joined the BBC as a trainee director in 1963, working on episodes of Z Cars from 1964 before turning to full-time writing on series including Doomwatch (BBC, 1970-72) and The Onedin Line (BBC, 1971-80).
His aptitude for biography and historical reconstruction led him in 1970 to script lives of Beethoven and Sir Alexander Fleming, followed in 1972 by an episode on Mr Rolls and Mr Royce for BBC Two’s The Edwardians. In 1977 his Philby, Burgess and Maclean for Granada reconstructed the story of the three Cambridge spies.
Curteis’s epic three-hour Churchill and the Generals (BBC, 1979), depicting
Winston Churchill’s often stormy relationship with his military commanders, starring Timothy West as the prime minister and Ian Richardson as Montgomery, was followed later the same year by Suez 1956 about the failed Anglo-french attempt to take over the Suez Canal after nationalisation by the Egyptians.
Written five years earlier, but shelved as too controversial, this play depicted the machinations of the prime minister Anthony Eden and his cabinet during the Suez crisis. Curteis had not intended it to be an impartial account of events but a “defence of Eden’s position… a case which is rarely heard”.
He had next planned a biographical drama about Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists, aimed at restoring Mosley’s reputation to some degree, but abandoned the project when the Home Office withheld documents from him. Then in 1983 came Milne’s commission to write a play about the Falklands war.
Curteis’s response to its cancellation was grounded more in sorrow than in anger. “I am sad beyond words that a great institution like the BBC should be reduced to cancelling meticulously researched historical plays because they do not coincide with the political views of the television establishment,” he declared. “There can be no other explanation for their decision.” In 1987 his script was published in book form, with an introduction in which he gave his account of the play’s cancellation.
When in 1995 he pitched another idea, for a drama documentary project about the 1945 Yalta conference, the
BBC pulled out, claiming that funding could not be raised in time for the event’s 50th anniversary, while Curteis complained that the BBC had axed the drama on political grounds, though his radio play dealing with Yalta and the role of the spy Donald Maclean was broadcast in 2014.
He continued to write for television, adapting his second wife Joanna Trollope’s novel The Choir for the BBC and JB Priestley’s Lost Empires for ITV. In 1991 he dramatised William Shirer’s The Nightmare Years, about 1930s Germany, for the American HBO channel. His stage play The Bargain
(2006) speculated on what happened when Mother Teresa and Robert Maxwell met in 1988, while Lafayette
(2015) concerned the eponymous hero of the American Revolution.
His Philby, Burgess and Maclean, the British entry at the 1978 Monte Carlo Festival, was nominated for a Bafta, as were Suez 1956 and Churchill and the Generals, which was voted best programme of 1980 at the New York International Film and Television Festival.
He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 2011.
Ian Curteis married, in 1964, Joan Macdonald, née Armstrong, an Australian actress, with whom he had two sons. The marriage was dissolved, and in 1985 he married the novelist Joanna Trollope. When this marriage also ended in divorce, in 2001 he married Lady Deirdre Hare, a daughter of the 5th Earl of Listowel and widow of the 7th Baron Grantley MC.
His third marriage brought him new responsibilities as a conservationist. Working together, the couple continued long-term work to restore Markenfield Hall, the moated medieval Grantley family seat near Ripon – once the home of John de Markenfield who, with his uncle, Richard Norton, joined the Rising of the North in 1569, when Catholics revolted against Elizabeth I.
In 2008 they won the first annual restoration award sponsored by Sotheby’s and the Historic Houses Association for their work on Markenfield’s 13th-century Great Hall, which had been described as “forlorn” in a 1999 architect’s report, having barely been touched since 1570.
When the Prince of Wales paid a private visit to see the restoration work the same year, Curteis observed: “The last Prince of Wales to have visited Markenfield was very likely the one who later became the disastrous Edward II in 1307. We have been trying to raise the tone ever since.”
Ian Curteis is survived by his wife, by the two sons from his first marriage, two stepdaughters from his second and two stepsons from his third.