Falklands play

SIR – May I offer some context to the controversy over The Falklands Play by Ian Curteis (Obituaries, November 26).

I was the controller of BBC One at the time and read the script in early draft. I judged it nowhere near good enough yet to justify investing a lot of licence-payers’ money. I had no problem with Curteis’s pro-thatcher point of view at all, but it needed a lot of rewriting, not least the dialogue.

For example, I recall General Galtieri being required to gaze out of the Casa Rosada window exclaiming that Margaret Thatcher “embodied the spirit of Elizabeth the First and Winston Churchill”. Another example had Willie Whitelaw saying: “Argentina, isn’t that where the nuts come from?” Really?

In the somewhat highly charged political atmosphere of the time, Ian mistook every script suggestion as an attempt to get him to change his point of view. I asked him to clarify his view of the sinking of the Belgrano, as this wasn’t clear in his script. He publicly described my call as an attempt to get him to condemn the sinking.

There was an important play in there somewhere, which the normal process of script editing and development could have delivered. Tumbledown, the film by Charles Wood (starring a very young Colin Firth), to which I gave the green light at the same time, was about how disgracefully Commander John Lawrence, who had the top of his head blown off in the conflict, was treated by the Army establishment on his return. It was not anti-falklands, anti-thatcher or political in any narrow sense.

Ian Curteis was an iconic television dramatist to whom we owe the “historical docu-drama” genre. I greatly regret his politicisation of the normal editorial process that made it impossible to develop his script into a work to match his previous groundbreaking efforts.

Lord Grade of Yarmouth

London SW1