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Rediscovered among a collection of British television drama material
recovered from the US Library of Congress, the Granada Television series
The Victorians was long thought lost. Happily all eight of the 50-minute dramas
recorded by Granada in 1963 were found.
'The Silver King' was recorded almost entirely in Granada's studios in Manchester, except
for one short exterior scene shot on Outside Broadcast video (an early example
of the use of OB for drama recording which Granada pioneered). The seventh of
eight episodes originally transmitted from May-July 1963, 'The Silver King' was
written by Henry Arthur Jones and Henry Herman and directed by the veteran
Granada director Herbert Wise, who later directed the BBC's I Claudius (1976).
The episode is intriguingly plotted and the framing of Wilfred Denver
(Charles Kay) for the murder of Geoffrey Ware (Barrie Ingham), together with his
subsequent disappearance and reappearance ten years later as the now wealthy
'silver king', is well-handled. The performances are excellent, especially that
of Charles Kay (who 22 years later made a memorable appearance as Pendleton in
Troy Kennedy Martin's Edge of Darkness, BBC, 1985) as the wrongly accused
murderer whose lament following his fortuitous escape from the train crash after
fleeing the scene of the crime - "Oh God put back thy universe and give me
yesterday" - elevates his predicament to that of a Shakespearean tragic
hero.
As an example of Granada's 'quality' period drama from the early 1960s, often
presented within themed anthology series, many of them, like this one, produced
by Philip Mackie, this episode of The Victorians is a valuable addition not only
to the Granada catalogue but to the long and distinguished history of British
television costume drama.
Les Cooke
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1. A murder (3:56)
