June 2003 saw the publication of two weighty biographies—Gordon Bowker’s George Orwell and DJ Taylor’s Orwell: The Life—only one of which came with a television spin-off. As David Taylor remembers it, the book “was fixed up in about 1999” with a September 2002 deadline for submission. “As soon as 2002 came along, and I was actually writing the book—which had to be written at quite a lick—I was fishing around to get a TV thing on the back of it.”1
London Weekend Television’s The South Bank Show, the long-running arts magazine program hosted by Melvyn Bragg and broadcast on ITV on Sunday nights, seemed a sensible port of call. “I’d known Melvyn on and off for years and he’d always been very supportive,” says Taylor, “although I did try one or two independent production companies. I had some dealings with Wall to Wall, but they were making that drama-documentary with Chris Langham that came out around the same time. In fact, I managed to get some money for advising them on that, so I did quite well.
“I suppose what I was trying to achieve was to put a mini-biography of Orwell on screen, talk to the people who were still alive … it was over 50 years since his death, so they were all getting on a bit. Ventilate a few new discoveries: people I’d found, things I’d discovered, people I’d talked to. And, I suppose, just put my own spin on it. The really unfortunate thing was that one or two of the people I’d found by that point were just too old, too decrepit, even to appear on screen. There was a wonderful old gentleman called George Summers who actually fought with Orwell over a woman in the early thirties on Southwold Common, but by the time we got to making the film, he was 93, and he died soon afterwards. It would have been great to have got him there in front of the camera, saying: ‘I hated his guts, I thumped him.’”
Bragg—“an Orwell nut,” in Taylor’s words—lent a tremendous amount of support and encouragement to him and his director, Leo Burley. He had, after all, made The Road to the Left 32 years earlier. “His line was, ‘You’ve written it, you have these theories, go ahead and do your thing. We will guide you and if we think we have to, we will rein you back.’ It was immensely kind of him and I was more or less given my head.”
Taylor, who was born in 1960, was roughly the same age as Burley and the two “had similar cultural interests, shall we say. In the book, there are some little musical jokes: the chapter about when he was working at the BBC is called London Calling—you know, the Clash song. And as you doubtless know, the Jam once did a song called The Eton Rifles. In doing the soundtrack, we tried, in a very tongue-in-cheek way, to work up the idea of the ‘punk Orwell.’”
This meant that in the original rough cut, the sound of The Eton Rifles livened up newsreel footage of the 1921 Eton wall game. “And then when we had wartime stuff, we had the Clash doing London Calling. I remember walking up the steps of the studio in Soho, hearing this blasting out and thinking, ‘We’re never going to get away with this.’ Of course, we didn’t. Melvyn heard it, said: ‘What is all this crap? We’re not having all of this.’ And so we started with Holst or something like that. I tried, and we had some fun. There was this kind of punk Orwell trying to surface, but he was squashed by Melvyn when it got to the production stage.”
Often referred to as The Real George Orwell—a phrase used by Bragg in his introduction, but never spelled out on screen—the program2 assembles a cast of characters both familiar and new, along with clips from the BBC spanning 30 years.3 To begin with, Taylor eulogizes Orwell at his grave in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. He was, says the biographer, “a piece of moral litmus paper,” part of the popular consciousness, and so influential—so prescient, it seems—that in 9/11’s aftermath, pundit after pundit asked: “What would George have thought?”
Equally important, he tells viewers, is the question of how George thought—which takes us to the Orwell Prize ceremony in London. As the newly knighted Sir Bernard Crick mingles with journalists and publishers, The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee makes a speech. The real strength Orwell showed was his “searing eye for cant,” she says, and while it may be tempting to second-guess him on issues such as Iraq, it’s essentially a futile act. In the audience, one of the judges listens with interest. It’s Alan Plater.
Across London, Taylor drops in on UCL’s Orwell Archive, where Peter Davison, editor of George Orwell: The Complete Works, doesn’t envy his attempts to find new biographical material. Out on the road, he meets Orwell’s one-time drinking buddy, the novelist Peter Vansittart, who says his friend used to use the phrase “let’s have a pint” to sound more working class; Dora Hammond (née Georges), the daughter of a Greek Cypriot in Southwold, to whom a lovestruck Eric Blair wrote the sadly lost Ode to a Dark Lady; and Susannah Collings, whose mother spurned the “too cynical” Eric in favor of his friend Dennis. In a Collings family photo album, a previously unknown snap of Orwell on a beach leaves Taylor goggle-eyed.
Another segment dissects Orwell’s questionable opinions about Jews and speaks to Denzil Jacobs, a Jewish Londoner who at 19 was part of the same Home Guard platoon as Orwell. From conversations they’d had, Jacobs considered the man an ally, so was “quite amazed” after the war to read some of his less guarded opinions. Davison points out that many Britons in those days were “careless about the way they spoke of Jews.” Adam Phillips, a psychoanalyst, accepts that Orwell is “running the risk of being antisemitic,” but defends him on the basis that he’s interested in prejudice. He’s asking questions about why antisemitism has persisted.
Back at UCL, Taylor boggles at one of Orwell’s razor blades and a homemade Christmas card from son Richard, who’s on hand to talk about his father’s love of tobacco. Once, on Jura, Orwell casually handed him a lighter and let him puff on a pipe, putting the boy off smoking until his adolescence came around. And it’s to the Hebridean island that the film goes next. “He was quite sure that there was going to be an atomic war,” says Jacobs.
Happily, the producers have hired Ronald Pickup to read the show’s literary extracts—and here he is on screen, in scenes from The Crystal Spirit (or Orwell on Jura, as it’s titled here). Inside Barnhill, Taylor confides that he’s always been suspicious of writerly presences, but that “here on Jura, Orwell’s scent is very strong.” He guides us through the house, lingering in the room where Orwell wrote; and at Downing College, Cambridge, meets David Holbrook, one-time boyfriend of housekeeper Susan Watson.
The writer, poet and Emeritus Fellow, who’d clashed with Orwell in 1946, thought him a “self-destructive” man who “destroyed everything that connected him with the mainland…. It was a very strange atmosphere.” He is by no means an admirer of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he glimpsed on a typewriter when its title was The Last Man in Europe. “It seems to me paranoid,” he says, a little wearily. “I suppose some of it’s come to pass.”
While filming at Barnhill, biographer David Taylor started to understand the bleakness of Orwell’s last days on Jura (photograph by David Ryan).
Looking back now, Taylor becomes animated at the memory of Jura.
“You just got an idea of the remoteness and the sequestration of it, and I suppose the bleakness of it too,” he says. “We were there on a summer’s day and it was absolutely flooded with rain, and you had some idea of what it was like to have lived there. Sitting there in winter in the bleak little back bedroom, with the paraffin heater on, chain-smoking Capstan Full Strength and dying while trying to write this—forcing yourself to write this.
“He needn’t have flogged himself like that. I’m not saying he could have saved his life, but he could have lived longer if he hadn’t, you know, literally killed himself to finish it. If he’d sat out the winter and waited for somebody to come and type up the second draft under his supervision, he needn’t have put himself through all that. Have you read the diary entries of late 1948? They’re absolutely appalling: it’s all kind of, ‘Pain inside very bad. Pain inside very bad. Tried to walk in garden. Typed all afternoon. Pain inside very bad.’
“When he came out of hospital in the middle of 1948, the doctors thought he wasn’t in too bad a shape. They thought they’d patched him up quite well and there was a possibility of his being what the medical people called ‘a good chronic.’ If he’d taken it easy and done a little bit of work here, a little bit of work there and not agitated himself, he could have lived a few years longer, possibly, but he didn’t. He forced himself to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four. Finished typing his final version and then literally opened a bottle of wine and then collapsed and was taken away to hospital. There’s a kind of fatalism about it, which is very typical of Orwell.”
The show went out on 27 July 2003. Five weeks later, news broadcaster ITN4 announced that South Bank Show researcher Phil Windeatt and associate producer Jonathan Levi had discovered the first confirmed footage of Orwell, playing the Eton wall game, in the Pathé news archive.5 Taylor acknowledged this in an afterword to his paperback edition, reworked as an article for The Guardian the following February. More than one of his interviewees, he added, “found that a television camera acted as a powerful stimulant to memory.” Vansittart, for example, recalled his history master taking him to a 1939 conference, organized by pacifists and attended by the likes of Orwell, Richard Rees and Rayner Heppenstall.6
By and large, making the documentary was “very knackering but rewarding,” says Taylor. “The South Bank Show is an hour, so that’s 52 minutes of film.7 I’m telling you, we shot 13 hours of film, which I gather is standard for the format. It seemed to me extraordinary. The director would say, ‘Oh, we need some more stuff from so-and-so in Southwold, we’ve got to go down there.’ So you’d spend a day going to Southwold, doing an interview, coming back and then none of it would be used. But this is how TV works. I’ve had similar experiences with the BBC, where you think, ‘How can they spend all this?’”
Still, the reaction pleased him. He was especially flattered when the writer Beryl Bainbridge, in a piece for The Observer to mark The South Bank Show’s move to Sky Arts in 2009, named it as one of the highlights of a 30-year run on ITV.8 “I think a million people watched it,” says Taylor, “which is pretty good, I was told, for a Sunday night in August about somebody literary.”
From time to time, film clubs ask him to attend screenings of the documentary. “I’m glad it’s still there,” he says. “It’s another brick in the Orwell path, I suppose.”
The South Bank Show, season 26, episode 19
Written and presented by: David Taylor
Produced and directed by: Leo Burley
Edited and presented by: Melvyn Bragg
Extracts read by: Ronald Pickup