The person who uploaded Curriculee Curricula onto Youtube says in their description that ‘this might be the most painful 50 minutes of television ever produced’. That’s harsh, but this campus-set rock opera collaboration between Alan Plater and composer/keyboardist Dave Greenslade will likely appeal mostly, as a footnote-level curiosity, to those with an interest in 1970s TV and/or prog rock. I reckon most viewers today will share the same question, namely: how on earth did this come to be made in the first place?
We can find a partial answer in Doggin’ Around, the memoir that Plater published in 2006. Within a broader discussion of the various musical collaborators he had worked with over his career, he clarified that it was David Rose – the BBC’s Head of Drama (English Regions), and based in Birmingham – who suggested that he and Greenslade should collaborate. According to Plater, this was very much in keeping with Rose’s method of taking a ‘couple of people from different areas of the business’, throwing them together and seeing what happened (p.92). They would thereafter collaborate again on Plater’s standalone TV drama Night People (1978), for which Greenslade supplied an evocative background score and also a song for the cast to bop around to.
As prog-rock aficionados will know, Greenslade had been associated with the jazz-rock outfit Colosseum from the late 1960s onwards, before branching out with the Greenslade band, and also releasing albums under his own name. His career as a writer of TV scores/themes began with the original Play for Today drama Gangsters (1975), which spun off into a series (1976-78). Of particular interest to cult TV fans is his work on Artemis 81 (1981) and A Very Peculiar Practice (1986). In fact, the latter is rather neat, given that Andrew Davies’ essential campus comedy would have the same Birmingham filming location as Curriculee Curricula.
As for the origins of Curriculee Curricula, the Plater archive at the University of Hull contains a production file with a charmingly specific description of the moment of inspiration. In a memo to Greenslade and Rose dated 24 May 1977, Plater outlined his proposal for a piece with the working title of ‘Spanners Across the Campus’. He writes:
After our very enjoyable meeting in Brum, when we discussed locations like sports halls, auditoria etc, I was sitting in the canteen, thoughtfully over my shepherds pie, when I looked out of the window and saw THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM.
I love this humdrum representation of a Eureka Moment in the BBC canteen. Plater goes on to say that a university campus has all the things they were looking for: a variety of indoor and outdoor spaces, plus lots of free extras in the shape of real students, and perhaps minimal location costs too. It didn’t necessarily have to be set in Birmingham – indeed, Plater wondered whether they could go instead to one of the visually interesting modern campuses, such as the one in Norwich – ie, the University of East Anglia. However, they went for the University of Birmingham in the end, meaning that the programme has historical fascination to those like myself who have largely derived their sense of UK geography from academic work trips, often to out-of-town campuses that end up being more familiar and homely than their host cities themselves.
Plater determined early that a plot would concern an ‘outsider’ figure let loose among the dreaming spires – a ‘Gulliver to have some Travels’. This would be a guileless workman sent to the university to retrieve a set of spanners left somewhere by his gaffer. Plater saw the potential for culture-clash comedy, via a series of musical encounters between the workman and characters representing the academic community of staff, students and management. He imagined, for example, a group of scholars singing a madrigal over sherry. With regard to casting, the singer Chris Farlowe – a long-time collaborator with Greenslade – was pencilled in as the spanner guy from the start, and Plater was also extremely keen to include Gaye Brown, who had appeared in his Trinity Tales (1975), as a ‘bespectacled Sociologist’ undergoing transformation from earnest academic to raunchy chanteuse in the scope of a single number.
Other names bandied about that didn’t make the final cast list included Elkie Brooks, Julie Driscoll and Mike D’Abo. Maggie Bell seems to have the favourite for the love interest for Farlowe’s character, but the part eventually went to Sonja Kristina, vocalist of Curved Air, and described by the director Alastair Reid in correspondence among the creative team (dated 5 January 1978) as ‘the sexiest thing on the rock stage at the moment’. Michael Aldridge eventually took the role of the university vice-chancellor, who gets to perform a Gilbert and Sullivan ‘I am the very model’ pastiche number, but Plater wondered initially if they could employ a proper G&S opera performer like Peter Pratt. There was also a desire to sprinkle in some music-hall expertise through the casting of a ‘battle-scarred vaudevillian’ to play the role of the ‘boilerman’ overseeing the university’s heating system; suggested names included Billy Dainty, Nat Jackley and Max Wall. Oh, if only they’d cast Max Wall.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, Plater was often drawn to academic settings and scenarios in his writing. In a more fleshed-out proposal dated 10 November 1977, he explained the satirical vision behind the overall plot of the simple workman Benny spreading confusion among the campus body as he searches for his missing spanners. Plater explains that the innocent Benny manages to destabilise the status quo simply through his repeated admissions that he knows nothing. As Plater puts it, this is ‘intellectual dynamite on a campus, where the accepted rule is to know very little, but pretend that you know a lot’. The musical would finish with Benny being hailed as a new intellectual Messiah. He doesn’t say as much in his proposal, but I suspect that this was an allusion of sorts to the rock-opera vogue for ‘messianic’ subject material – as found not only in the era’s religious-themed stage/film musicals, but also in The Who’s Tommy, with its story of a young pinball wizard turned messiah.
The score for Curriculee Curricula was recorded on 28 and 29 January 1978 after a week of sound rehearsals. Following two more weeks of preparation, shooting took place, on video, in the week of 13 February, in various chilly-looking locations on the Birmingham university campus (which include Muirhead Tower, University Square, the Great Hall and the boiler rooms). Incidentally, as I discussed in my blog on Billy Two-Sheds (2006), the same campus also featured in one of Plater’s final TV dramas, and another commission from BBC Birmingham.
The programme’s musical numbers have differing degrees of flair and interest. If you’ve heard Chris Farlowe’s rendition of the Gangers theme tune (a prior collaboration with Dave Greenslade), you won’t be surprised at his level of vocal commitment, but he’s not exactly a relaxing screen presence when miming along to the pre-recorded soundtrack. The performers with more ‘stage musical’ chops - Sonja Kristina (who was in Hair), Richard Barnes and Gaye Brown - slot in better, but the Scottish comedian Chic Murray, playing the university ‘boilerman’, struggles to maintain momentum in some long-take sequences shot in the bowels of the campus. There’s also an awkwardly-shot ‘gavotte’ number involving professorial caricatures, where Plater’s witty lyrics are hard to process; likewise, the Vice Chancellor’s patter song is an uneasy listen.
It’s noteworthy, though, that the original BBC2 TV transmission went out simultaneously with a stereo broadcast on BBC Radio 4 – meaning that a proportion of the audience may have heard but not viewed it. I wonder if they had a better experience, as the only two reviews of Curriculee from contemporaneous on the IMDB allude to memories of contemporaneous audio-taped recordings.
The story culminates with Benny being chased onto the stage of the Great Hall, where the Vice-Chancellor is about to introduce a guest speech by none other than Sir Patrick Moore, who makes a brief cameo after the final credits have rolled. There’s some befuddlement, and Benny ends up taking Moore’s place on the podium – delivering a short speech and then being conferred his honorary degree. We finish with a raucous, fun medley recapping the key tunes from the play, sung by Farlowe and fellow characters with a full rock band (including Greenslade) behind them, whilst various other performers boogie in the background, and the ‘real’ students in the audience storm the stage - which in Doggin' Around, Plater says was a genuine and unscripted response to the performance. According to the notes in the archive, Plater envisaged a more complex final number, with Farlowe’s character leading a call-and-response with the audience restating his philosophy of ignorance as bliss.
In the show as broadcast, we also get the journalist/presenter Magnus Magnusson playing the role of a narrator, framing and occasionally commenting on the action. His final observations are as follows:
A young man arrives at a university campus and conquers all that stand before him. Well, it’s a point of view. Not necessarily mine. But let’s listen to the music and to hell with points of view.
As a plea for an experiential rather than intellectual response to the preceding 40 minutes or so, this works fine, but the plea for us to ‘listen to the music’ is the earliest example I’ve found of an idea that will find expression in numerous Plater writings from this point onwards. Whether or not you’re willing to hear the music of Curriculee Curricula may depend on your tolerance levels for cut-price rock opera, and perhaps how groan-worthy you find the title's pun on the similar-sounding Neapolitan song.
I’ll admit to finding it a struggle to watch in one sitting, partly because Chris Farlowe sets my teeth on edge. Perhaps if Plater had been more engrossed in that BBC canteen shepherd’s pie, the inspiration for a campus musical would never have struck, and he and Greenslade may have ended up producing something set somewhere else – like a bingo hall.
Actually, that’s quite plausible, given that I’ve seen a throwaway reference in the early paperwork to how a university setting would likely be ‘cheaper than Mecca’ – which I take to mean that the bingo chain had been a realistic contender for a musical at some point. Plater would later look back with great nostalgia on this era – a time of leeway and power for the TV writer, fostered through close working relationships with trusted and trusting commissioners such as David Rose.
Fast forward ten years, and it’s hard to imagine that a television drama would now emerge in this way, out of a simple notion of ‘throwing’ a couple of creative people together to see what happen. Or that the ideas that came in a flash of inspiration over a shepherd’s pie would more or less make it to the screen unfiltered within a year. Indeed, do they even serve shepherd’s pie in the BBC canteen these days?