I have a quick question for you. What does Alan Plater have in common with Noel Edmonds?
That’s right, they both produced shows that were the inspiration for British theme parks. But if the cursed Blobby Lands of the mid-1990s came and went within about three years, the Flambards attraction in Helston, Cornwall - ‘the great family day out with plenty of great things to do!’ - is still operating today.
Actually, the Flambards theme park predated the Yorkshire Television historical serial of the same name by a couple of years. Wikipedia tells me that the place opened in 1976 under the name of Cornwall Aero Park, but it seems that the owners negotiated with Yorkshire to mount an exhibition of the aircraft models that had been used in the show. I can’t work out the precise chronology, but the Aero Park folk subsequently established a Victorian/Edwardian living museum, which was called the ‘Flambards’ village in honour of the series – but before long the whole operation was rebranded as Flambards, and it eventually transformed into the apparently thrilling family attraction it is today.
I’ve not been, but I would imagine that most visitors to Flambards today will be unaware of the connection. Still, it’s a curious legacy for what might be considered a relatively throwaway project from Plater and his creative colleagues. Broadcast initially in twelve parts in 1979, the series was based on a trilogy of children's novels by K. M. Peyton, about an orphaned teenage heiress called Christina (Christine McKenna) who moves into Flambards, a dilapidated estate in Essex run by her grumpy uncle (Edward Judd).
The first third of the series – based on the first of Peyton’s books – shows the plucky young Christina squaring up to the eligible young men of Flambards: her cousin Will (Alan Parnaby), a weedy chap with aviation aspirations, her other cousin Mark (Steven Grives), a horsey, military type who’s a bit of a bastard, and the mumbling, rugged stable-hand Dick (Sebastian Abineri). There’s a lot of patience-testing atmosphere building in the first couple of episodes, which is likely why ITV decided to conflate them into one 90-minute-long feature for the initial broadcast – although when repeated later, they were shown as separate 60-minute episodes (well, 50 minutes, if you strip away the adverts).
In the middle stretch, based on Peyton’s second Flambards novel, the plot accelerates, with the loved-up Christina and Will eloping to London, Will training as an aviator, lots of references to the Suffragettes and emancipation, characters going to war and dying, and so forth. The final stretch of the series sees Christina returning to Flambards as a widowed mother, buying and transforming the place into a working farm with the help of various characters we’ve met along the way.
Flambards was the second of a cycle of three historical serial adaptations that Plater oversaw for Yorkshire Television in the late 1970s, following The Stars Look Down (1975) and preceding The Good Companions (1980). Whereas Plater scripted all of the other two, he shared writing duties on Flambards with Alex Glasgow and William Humble.
But it also has a noteworthy connection with the BBC’s Tyneside period drama When The Boat Comes In (1976-81). James Mitchell’s soapy saga had been an immediate success after its first series in 1976, but there was controversy when three of its Geordie writers – Alex Glasgow, Sid Chaplin and Tom Hadaway – were unceremoniously dropped from the show.
In solidarity, the producer/director Leonard Lewis – whose connection with Plater went back through Softly, Softly to Z Cars – jumped ship and pitched up at Yorkshire TV, with Flambards becoming his first venture for the station. Along with him came William Humble, who had worked on Softly Softly and When the Boat Comes In as a script editor, and was now cutting his teeth as a writer. Also brought into the show as a writer was Plater’s longstanding collaborator Alex Glasgow, best known as a folk singer-songwriter (I have talked about him elsewhere on this blog). Furthermore, the music for Flambards was written by David Fanshawe, who had arranged Alex Glasgow’s famous theme tune for When the Boat Comes In.
David Fanshawe
Fanshawe’s frankly bonkers score is only one reason why Flambards deserves a better reputation than it has in some quarters as juvenile fluff. For a start, there’s the earworm theme tune, comprised of a whistling motif (by John O’Neale) and a curious ‘mom-mom’ vocal phrase from classically-sounding tenor Nick Curtis. Variations on these persist through the series, and at a few key moments the opening/closing theme is interpolated into an actual song with lyrics by Plater about how wonderful and unique Christina is.
You can see one rendition of it here (via the above clip), when Christina and her beaux Will are looping the loop in their aeroplane, but there’s also a sadder version that crops up after she is widowed. Elsewhere in the score, Fanshawe brings weird or gothic ambience to proceedings with odd combinations out of horns, strings, cimbalom and – most strikingly – an ondes martenot, which sounds a bit like a theremin, perfect for accompanying scenes of dereliction, teenage romantic angst and the butchery of war. In the first episode (scripted by Plater), there’s also a very strange, dreamy moment where the lead character appears to look directly into the camera whilst her name is sung repeatedly.
Although he worked on a few notable – and presumably lucrative – projects for film and TV, the composer David Fanshawe’s reputation rests more with his exploratory choral music and his achievements in international field recordings, most famously showcased in his African Sanctus, first premiered in 1972, and combined ‘ethnic’ recordings with classical instrumentation. I’ve also been listening to his 1975 library-music collection Sound Odyssey (for KPM) while writing this, and it’s pretty far out.
Given the prominence of the musical score – the leading character isn’t the only one with an associated melody or motif – it's perhaps unsurprising that Plater’s follow-up adaptation project for Yorkshire TV would be an all-singing-and-dancing version of J. B. Priestley’s The Good Companions, also done by Fanshawe, albeit in a more instrumentally and harmonically constrained fashion. The success of the Flambards soundtrack album clearly led to presumptions about the popularity of spin-off Good Companions merchandise – this time a songbook as well as a soundtrack album, which didn’t exactly fly off the shelves.
Another slightly troublesome aspect of Flambards is the question of whether it is aimed primarily at a younger or older audience. Peyton’s source books are often cited and analyzed as foundational works of children’s or possibly teenage fiction. But notably, Plater’s version introduces the characters when in their mid-to-late teens, even though they are pre-teenagers in the original. Fundamentally, it’s a story about orphans finding their way in a scary big world of war and change, and there’s a sweetly utopian quality to the final stages, where Christina brings the moribund Flambards estate back to life by violating numerous codes of social and sexual convention – Christina's shacking up with her former stable-lad lover, strategically removing all trace of the toxic male family who used to own the place, and happily hosting egalitarian parties that even include the German prisoner-of-war toiling away in the fields.
The show’s various historical references lead to dialogue of the ‘what’s a Suffragette?’ variety, perhaps suggesting that Christina’s naivety is matched by the core demographic – or maybe the international audience was in mind. It’s easy to find recollections of the show online – such as those on the IMDB page, specifically created fan-pages and social media appreciation groups – from which I can identify that it made a particular impression on women who were pre or early teenagers at the time of first broadcast. Significantly, Flambards was shown in the United States various times from 1980 onwards, and I’ve come across a few recollections of people watching it habitually over a summer period, sometimes (before VHS was widespread) making audio recordings to listen to on repeat, or buying the soundtrack album. There's an interesting comment from the American contemporary writer Meg Rosoff, in a Guardian article celebrating Peyton as her ‘hero’, about how she encountered the show’s ‘perfect evocation of a lost world’ as part of her regular ‘Sunday morning marathon of British TV’.
But Flambards didn’t go out in daytime hours in the UK, but at 7.30pm or 8pm at night – although it was brought forward to 4.30pm for its 1981 repeat, and then was scheduled at all kinds of times on channels like Hallmark and UK Drama in the early twenty-first century. I’m speculating here that if it had been more firmly remembered in the popular imagination as a children’s show, it may have entered the canon of freaky, haunted 1970s kids shows that have since become cult objects. Still, from my very quick scan of the original books, it’s clear that Plater and company ramp up the sex and violence considerably, even if Peyton’s books were considered fairly racy in their time. One of the things that makes the opening few episodes a tad unsettling is the fact that we’ve got child characters, played by actors who are clearly pushing thirty, caught up in all kinds of Freudian malarkey of horse-riding injuries, punished servants, and invalided or dead parents; there’s also the sneery, rotter cousin who enjoys impregnating servant girls.
Plater’s ‘Sing No Sad Stories’ episode, covering the deaths of multiple key characters, has a post-coital scene that most certainly doesn’t appear in the original book. A glowingly satisfied Christina makes a ribald joke in bed to her new husband about how she never has to lie back and think of the empire, because, you know, the sex is good. It’s a poignant, haunted episode – the only one I think I’d want to revisit in future, because of some tonally complex sequences articulating the impact of grief upon its young characters. Plater’s title for the episode is of course an allusion to the Christina Rossetti funeral favourite ‘When I am dead’ - which in fact was performed at Plater's own commemoration service by Tom Courtenay.
Then there’s the question of class politics. Undoubtedly, Peyton’s books were marketed at a young and ‘horsey’ female demographic, and profilers have grappled with the tension in her writing between fantasies of ‘social mobility’ and a certain genuflection to the ruling classes and their traditions of houses, horses and – most problematically today – hunting.
Flambards was scripted by three chaps - Plater, Glasgow and Humble – who have made no secret elsewhere of their socialist or anti-establishment leanings. The second episode, ‘The Blooding’, depicts Christina enjoying her first hunt, replete with the symbolic facial smearing referenced in the title. There are fleeting but important glimpses of the hunt in the final episode, which ends with imagery of a crushed German plane on the Flambards estate, and the implication that the twentieth century is going to be punishing, and rightfully so, for the aristocracy.
Among the numerous online audience recollections of Flambards that I’ve found so far, I’ve yet to encounter any that acknowledge the role of Plater or other writers; but neither have I found any real warmth towards the series from those who identify as Plater enthusiasts. But its legacy is somewhat unique. For a start, there’s the afore-mentioned theme park experience, which arguably foreshadowed the more thorough and strategic integration of the UK tourist and film/TV industries from the 1980s onwards. Much has been made of the emergence of the ‘heritage drama’ phenomenon in that decade, as typified by tourists flocking to stately home used in Brideshead Revisited (1982), or – a bit later on – the rebranding of South Tyneside as ‘Catherine Cookson Country’ as a nod to the massive success of Cookson adaptations.
There was even talk of a Flambards sequel, with Peyton apparently writing a further book in the series so as to provide material for the actors she befriended during the filming process. The show’s lead actor, Christine McKenna, alludes to this in her 1981 autobiographical book Why Didn’t They Tell The Horses, an account of her equine experiences during the making of the show. Not much mention of Plater in there, alas, nor anything particularly juicy about the production process, unless you count a brief anecdote about bonding with the Emmerdale Farm actor Frazer Hines in the staff canteen.
When watching Flambards for the first time recently, I couldn’t shake off an odd feeling of déjà vu, which made me wonder if I had somehow caught a repeat at some point. It took me a while to figure out that it was via a completely different route. Lenghty excerpts were shown as part of the dimly-remembered satirical 2004 ITV comedy show Directors Commentary, which was created by Paul Duddridge. In that series, the comedian Rob Brydon plays the part of a fictional director called Peter de Lane, giving his reminiscences about his involvement in various TV shows; thus, you would see scenes from Flambards and other shows overlayed with Brydon’s whimsical commentary. About twenty minutes worth of episode four of Flambards was used across episodes one and four of Directors Commentary, and Brydon’s mockery of the show’s musical score, acting styles, camerawork, lighting, canera angles, and symbolically loaded use of props and framing, may possibly have planted the idea in my head that the series was over-ripe nonsense.
The episode under scrutiny wasn’t one of Plater’s, but I would have loved to know if he saw the funny side. Brydon’s director character begins by noting that the series was based on books that he had never read: ‘Never wanted to cloud my judgement. For many weeks, I didn’t read the script.... directed on instinct!’ He goes on to compare a slightly cheap-looking fairground scene with the work of David Lean in its scale and scope, draws attention to the latent eroticism of certain moments, and explains that some of the odd camera angles can be explained by the cameraman being a dwarf.
Flambards is easily to find: there’s a DVD release, and at the time of writing the series is available in full on Youtube and on the Internet Archive.
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