 Philip Saville is one of Britain's most prolific and pioneering television
and film directors. Having started out as an actor, his television career in
Britain continued behind the cameras in 1955. His early work at Associated
Rediffusion contributing to comedy programmes with Richard Lester proved a false
start and he soon left to join ABC. There he rapidly became one of the leading
directors of the Armchair Theatre (ITV, 1956-74) drama strand, for which he
would direct over 40 plays.
Along with a handful of colleagues, Saville pioneered the innovative visual
style for which Armchair Theatre became known, with rapid and intricate camera
movements during the often live productions. This is evident in his surviving
plays of the era, such as 'A Night Out' (tx. 24/4/1960) and 'Afternoon of a
Nymph' (tx. 30/9/1962), both of which involve complex party sequences. Saville's
plays often caused controversy, due to their freewheeling style or sensitive
subjects, with some even failing to make it as far as transmission. 'Three on a
Gas Ring', a play about a single mother recorded in 1959, was considered too shocking
to transmit and, according to some accounts, was banned by the Independent
Television Authority.
On top of its stylistic innovation, Saville's early work was notable for its
expression of his interest in psychological states and subjective viewpoints.
This was nowhere more obvious than in his first work for the BBC, 'The Madhouse
on Castle Street' (Sunday-Night Play, tx. 13/1/1963), a macabre drama about a
disturbed recluse in which Saville cast a pre-fame Bob Dylan. Saville spent much
of the rest of the 1960s at the BBC directing similarly unusual and innovative
dramas.
In 1964 he pioneered the use of videotape for location recording, capturing
the whole of Hamlet at Elsinore (BBC, tx. 16/4/1964) electronically in and
around Denmark's Kronborg castle. It was a spectacular success and earned
Saville the director's award from the Guild of Producers and Directors (the
forerunner of BAFTA). The production paved the way for future adventures with
location video, including Saville's own 'The Actual Woman' (Second City Firsts, tx. 11/3/1974), the drama debut of new lightweight video equipment. Conversely,
Saville's experimental drama 'The Logic Game' (Six, tx. 10/1/1965) was one of
the very first television plays to be made entirely on film. One reviewer felt
that "its style and the measure of its success indicate the possible affinities
of a new kind of expression in television drama". It was this "new kind of
expression" which Saville actively pursued.
Further ambitious pieces followed, including the opera The Rise and Fall of
the City of Mahogany (tx. 28/2/1965) and 'The Machine Stops' (Out of the
Unknown, tx. 6/10/1966), an Edwardian vision of a dystopian future that won
first prize at an international festival of science-fiction films. For 'The Mark
II Wife' (Wednesday Play, tx. 15/10/1969), Saville mixed conventional video
production techniques with those of film, recording the play in the electronic
studio but editing and dubbing on film to allow the realisation of alternating
point-of-view shots, which would otherwise have been impossible.
The 1960s also saw Saville directing feature films, starting with an
Oscar-nominated version of the West End musical Stop the World I Want to Get Off
in 1966. The star-studded Oedipus the King (1967) and the bawdy comedy The Best
House in London (1968) followed.
Saville continued his innovative television work on Play for Today (1970-84),
with the vivid and nightmarish 'The Rainbirds' (tx. 11/2/1971) and the musical
'In the Beautiful Caribbean' (tx. 3/2/1972), among others. Never far from
controversy, he found particular notoriety with 'Gangsters' (Play for Today, tx.
9/1/1975), a vivid tale of sex, violence and racketeering that made good use of
location filming around Birmingham but maintained a non-naturalistic edge. The
colours were garish and gaudy and Saville incorporated freeze frames and
inter-cut footage from old films. While technically unusual, the play was
criticised for its "sex and savagery" and accused of misrepresenting
Birmingham's Asian community. Even so, it spawned a popular series by the same
name (1976-78).
As television technology advanced in the 1970s, Saville was increasingly able
to embellish his productions with all manner of electronic effects. Sometimes
these worked well, as in his lavish Count Dracula (tx. 22/12/1977); on other
occasions, such as 'Rotten' (Second City Firsts, tx. 13/5/1978), the results
were less impressive. Perhaps the most extreme of Saville's experimental pieces
was 'The Journal of Bridget Hitler' (Playhouse, tx. 6/2/1981), for which Saville
purposely brought the whole of the television studio into view. The intention
was to dramatise the production of a television programme about Bridget - who claimed her brother-in-law, Adolf, had spent time in Liverpool in 1912/13 - rather than simply tell her story. Mocking
the propensity of electronic effects to misfire, and including scenes set in the
BBC canteen, Bridget Hitler effectively undermined all the rules of television
naturalism.
1982 saw what was arguably Saville's greatest success when he was assigned
late in the day to direct Alan Bleasdale's grim unemployment saga Boys from the
Blackstuff. He recorded all bar one of the episodes exclusively on video,
recording on location in a way that was closer to film than video production but
exploited video's greater flexibility. This lent the footage a greater fluidity
and immediacy than would have been possible with more traditional methods, and
undoubtedly contributed to the series' immense success. Blackstuff became an
overnight sensation and won a BAFTA award, as did one of Saville's later BBC
productions, the imaginative and disturbing Fay Weldon adaptation The Life and
Loves of a She-Devil (1986).
Subsequently Saville's output slowed and he worked widely across all of
Britain's television networks, with film productions for Channel 4 and the BBC,
and taking work in America. He returned to the big screen with films such as The
Fruit Machine (1988) and Metroland (1997), and more recently directed The Gospel
of John (2003) for the Visual Bible. He continues to work in film and runs the
Philip Saville Studio for aspiring actors at the Royal Academy of Dramatic
Arts.
Oliver Wake
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FILM & TV CREDITS
