Film Review
Remember the 'Swinging 60s'? The decade of the mini-skirt, The
Beatles, the first lunar landing and a flurry of cultural and
technological revolutions that would transform western society in the
twinkling of an eye. In Britain, it was a time of unprecedented
hope and change.
Everyone was eager to bury the past and embrace
a future that promised so much new and exciting stuff. Then, in
the winter of 1968/9, the nation succumbed to a bout of collective
nostalgia, the like of which had never been seen before. The
cause: a prestigious BBC television series entitled
The Forsyte Saga. Adapted
from John Galsworthy's six Forsyte novels, first published between 1906
and 1928, the series followed the fortunes of an upper middleclass
family from the 1870s to the mid-1920s. For 26 weeks, from
September 1968 to March 1969,
The
Forsyte Saga was compulsive Sunday evening viewing, attracting
an audience of 18 million viewers for its final episode.
The series became so popular that the pubs were deserted and church
services had to be re-arranged. It even influenced fashions, with
designers adopting Victorian styles and motifs from the 1920s to
capitalise on the
Forsyte
craze. The series was not only a hit in the UK, it was widely
exported around the world, and was famously the first program the BBC
managed to sell to the Soviet Union. It is estimated that the
series was watched by 160 million people around the world. This
is the show that re-established the classic serial as a major genre in
British television and set a new high standard for programme making
which the BBC and its rivals at ITV had to work hard to maintain (ITV's
Upstairs, Downstairs, which
began in 1971, is an obvious close cousin of the series). It
also re-awakened interest in Galsworthy, a writer who, despite winning
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932 for his
Forsyte novels, had been all but
forgotten by the 1960s. This may have been a decade of heightened
political awareness but the issue that polarised Britain most in the
winter of 1968/9 was not a political one, it was whether you sided with
Soames or with Irene, the two central protagonists in
The Forsyte Saga.
What makes this outbreak of Forsyte mania so hard to fathom is that
this was not the first time the series had aired on British
television. The series had originally been commissioned in 1965
for the new channel BBC 2, which had started broadcasting in April 1964
and was struggling to attract an audience. For almost a decade,
Donald Wilson, the Head of Serials at the BBC, had lobbied hard for a
prestige adaptation of Galsworthy's family saga; his efforts were
frustrated by MGM's unwillingness to surrender the rights to the first
novel in the series (
The Man of
Property), which the studio adapted in 1949 as
That Forsyte Woman (with Errol
Flynn as Soames, and Greer Garson as Irene). When the BBC finally
acquired the rights to the novels, Wilson immediately resigned his
position and dedicated himself to the production of what was to become
the most ambitious drama series so far undertaken by the
corporation. His one regret was that he had to make the series in
black and white; if he had waited one more year, it would have been
made in colour. Ironically, BBC 2 began broadcasting regularly in
colour on 1st July 1967, the day on which the original transmission of
The Forsyte Saga on that channel
ended.
With a budget of a quarter of a million pounds at his disposal (an
astronomical sum at the time), Wilson was not only able to hire some
big name actors, he could also call upon all the creative resources
available to him at the BBC. The series took fourteen months to
make and had a total screen time of 21 hours and 40 minutes, divided
into 26 fifty-minute length episodes. As BBC 2 could only be
received by around nine million viewers at the time, it was a huge
gamble, but the gamble paid off better than anyone could have
imagined. Following the broadcast of its first episode on
Saturday 7th January 1967, its audience soon grew to six million,
ensuring a repeat on BBC 1 the next year.
Headlining the series in the role of Young Jolyon Forsyte, the likeable
maverick of the family, was Kenneth More, who had been one of Britain's
leading film stars in the 1950s. By the mid-1960s, More's
popularity as an actor had waned considerably and the series provided a
welcome boost to his flagging career. Eric Porter, one of
Britain's finest character actors, was an ideal choice for the part of
Soames Forsyte, the most complex character and the only one to appear in all 26 episodes, whilst
the role of Irene, the main female character, went to up-and-coming New
Zealand actress Nyree Dawn Porter, who would later star in the popular
thriller series
The Protectors.
Complementing these established performers was a brace of bright young
things - Susan Hampshire (perfect for the role of Fleur), Nicholas
Pennell, Martin Jarvis and Michael York (
Logan's Run (1976)) - and an impressive roll call
of exceptional character actors: Fay Compton (
Britannia Mews (1949)), Margaret Tyzack (
Quatermass (1979)), Cyril Luckham,
Terence Alexander, Joseph O'Conor, Jenny Laird (
Painted Boats (1945)), Derek Francis and John Bennett.
Few other television series can boast such a colourful and
distinguished cast, and, above all else, it is the performances that
make the series so utterly compelling. Susan Hampshire
would take the lead role (that of Lady Glencora) in another
prestigious BBC period drama,
The Pallisers (1974).
Whilst Galsworthy's novels were intended as a critique of English
bourgeois society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they
touched on themes that were highly relevant to a 1960s audience, and
this may be one of the reasons for the series' success. Episode
Six concludes with what was, at the time, the most shocking thing to be
seen in a British television drama, Soames' frenzied rape of his wife
Irene. This at once ignited a polemic as to whether a husband had
a right to assert his marital rights or whether by doing so he was
committing a criminal offence. More generally, the series
appeared to have a pro-feminist slant (the women characters are
generally stronger, more sympathetic and far more pro-active than their
male counterparts), reflecting society's growing pre-occupation with
women's rights. Predictably, the left-wing press were quick to
dismiss the series as 'stockbroker soap', but the eagerness with which
the British public took to it, across all age groups and all social
strata, was a sign that it had universal appeal and dealt with concerns
that were very much a part of the 1960s Zeitgeist.
At a time of burgeoning materialism, Galsworthy's preoccupations with
possession could hardly be more relevant - possession not only of
things, but also of people. Each of the main protagonists in the six
volumes that make up
The Forsyte Saga
and
A Modern Comedy is driven
by a desire to possess someone or something, and in almost all cases
the desire is frustrated and leads to a nasty outcome. The most
obvious example of this is the attempt by Soames, a dour, unromantic
lawyer, to possess the beautiful and passionate Irene. He cannot win her through
love so he negotiates a kind of business transaction with her: he
agrees to let her go freely if the marriage fails. When the
marriage does, predictably, fall apart, Soames buys himself a second
wife (a calculating little French number named Annette), so determined
is he to have a son and heir. This scheme also backfires and
Soames is left with a daughter, Fleur, who, spoiled brat though she is,
turns out to be the instrument of his redemption.
Another theme that runs through Galsworthy's novels is the
depressing notion that the
errors of one generation will inevitably be repeated by the next.
Individuals may learn from their mistakes, but humanity as a species
cannot. Fleur turns out to have inherited her father's possessive
streak and so her life is also ruined by the failure to possess
something she should not, her cousin Jon Forsyte (who just happens to
be Irene's son...). By marrying Young Jolyon,
Irene makes herself a Forsyte in both name and deed. Her own possessiveness asserts itself in
her desire to protect Jon from Fleur; this is what leads her to drive a
wedge between the love-struck youngsters, thereby creating the
circumstances for the tragic series of events that follow, culminating
in Soames's own dramatic demise. The only Forsyte who is capable
of loving selflessly is Young Jolyon, a liberal minded drop-out of the
kind that a 1960s audience could easily identify with. Amiable
and right-thinking as Young Jolyon is, he is just about the least
interesting character in the saga. He is the ideal modern man and
therefore is incapable of improvement. It is Soames, Irene and
(later) Fleur who monopolise our interest and compel us to watch the
series through to the end, these flawed representatives of a society
which acts as if human relationships were a commodity like any other,
to be traded and possessed like a house or an item of objet d'art.
Whilst few regard John Galsworthy as a literary genius (of the calibre
of Thackery or Dickens), his novels still have a broad appeal, partly
because the characters are so well-drawn,
partly because the narrative has so much interest,
but mainly because they deal
with fundamental truths about human nature. The strength of
Donald Wilson's adaptation of Galsworthy's best known work is that it
recognises these qualities and builds upon them, adding depth to the
characters and tightening the narrative structure to make it a far more
coherent and satisfying work. The lack of dialogue in
Galsworthy's early novels must have provided a challenge to Wilson and
his team of writers, but it also allowed them to develop the characters
more thoroughly, making it easier for us to relate to them. The
first four episodes serve as a prologue to the first novel in the saga, fleshing out
the characters of Young Jolyon, Soames and
Irene so that we are better placed to comprehend their motivations and
less inclined to judge their actions. If there is a flaw in
Galsworthy's novels it is that Soames's redemption at the end of
A Modern Comedy fails to be
entirely convincing. Through a combination of meticulous writing
and an outstanding performance from Eric Porter (which won him a
BAFTA), this flaw is removed and the saga concludes in a way that is
both natural and exquisitely poignant. As the credits ran
for that final episode, accompanied by an extended version of the
by-now familiar theme (taken from Eric Coates' suite
The Three Elizabeths), a nation
could hardly help mourning the passing of Soames Forsyte. Television
drama would never be the same again.
© James Travers 2013
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