Prisoner
1975–1979
From Manchester shipping clerk to service in the Royal Air Force and 30 years as manager of Elsham Lime Works, Harry Lewis had always provided for his family. A respected member of the Barton business community, he was known as a quiet, modest man who smoked his fags, liked a pint or two, and enjoyed working in his garden and watching Manchester United on the telly. His son, by the time he was 30 years old, had achieved the kind of success and earned the kind of money which Harry, had he thought about such things, would have dismissed as fanciful. Now, at the age of 34, Ted Lewis was returning to Barton to live under his parents’ roof. Recently discharged from a psychiatric unit, virtually penniless, almost certainly an alcoholic, with a failing marriage and daughters he adored left behind in Suffolk, there was nothing positive in the decision to move back home.
Those closest to Lewis are in no doubt coming back to Barton brought with it a sense of failure, made worse because he’d effectively compartmentalised his life. Now everybody knew the extent to which things were unravelling. He wasn’t looking well, appearing gaunt and haggard. When he ran into Martin Turner, his old friend barely recognised him. ‘He’d done that much drinking, he’d changed. He spoke to me and I had to think, who’s this? It took a moment before I realised.’
Nick Turner admits he might have seen more of Lewis had it not been for the reputation that preceded him. ‘I was busy, occupied full time with my own circle and it didn’t include Ted. I would have wanted him to be a part of it for his sake, but not with what he was doing.’ There’s more than a dash of understatement when John Dickinson says it wasn’t a happy time. In truth, Barton responded with indifference. ‘He picked up with some old mates, but no one in the street would have known. He wasn’t viewed as a great writer. He came back because he had nowhere to go.’
Dickinson did more than anyone to reintegrate Lewis, introducing him to his group of friends. The difference in him hadn’t seemed so obvious in Framlingham, but back in Barton, Dickinson could see he was drinking far too much and the impact it was having on his health. ‘It was difficult, but I did talk to him about it. The problem was, apart from the odd jazz club, if you wanted to go out, you’d go to the pub.’ Lewis seemed to have lost any sense of optimism. ‘He was sad that he wasn’t seeing his kids. I used to say, “Get yourself sorted out and then you can get a relationship with your children.” And he’d say yes, wouldn’t he? And he’d be off in the Swan or wherever.’ Alan Dickinson met him for a few drinks in Barton; they started in the Volunteer Arms:
‘He was essentially the same person, but life had given him a few knocks. On the other side, he was very successful, so you got the two extremes. He was upset about the divorce, but then it was his own stupid fault that it came about. He couldn’t understand how people couldn’t accept his way of life to a degree, probably his brain was in his trousers at times. I don’t think he could resist the temptation. He was always upset about it afterwards, but he still went ahead and did it.’
Booze had always been Lewis’s way of overcoming shyness and bolstering confidence; now it played an essential role in loosening his inhibitions sufficiently to write. It’s difficult to say for certain when social drinking drifted into alcohol dependence and addiction but, at some point between 1971 and 1974, alcoholism took a firm hold. There’s no doubt Lewis knew he was trapped in a cycle of dependency for some time before others realised. Jo maintains it was as a result of the stress of mortgage payments on Hill Farm and the pressure of having to write the next book, always striving to live up to the success of Get Carter. Interviewing Lewis’s friends, colleagues and associates, you realise the story was similar for countless graduates of the 1960s and 70s drinking culture prevalent in advertising, media and the arts. Gil Potter had drink problems, as did Keith Riseam. Neville Smith, who’d adapted his own novel for the cult British detective film, Gumshoe, released almost at the same time as Get Carter, found himself in a similar situation to Lewis. Brian Case paints a vivid picture of his friend’s struggles with success. ‘It looked good, but it knocked Neville off his feet, to the extent that he had to go into an alcoholics’ ward. I can see how that can happen – too much success too quickly – like a pie in the fucking face. Obviously, Ted’s decline took longer. It’s hard when you’ve done it once and you don’t again.’
And that was the point: Lewis couldn’t seem to do it again. For friends like David Elvin, observing at a distance, the decline was difficult to fathom. ‘I really couldn’t understand it. He just wobbled. He had the writing, the TV work, but he faded. I lost contact with him when he moved back up north. Someone said to me, “Don’t bother going to see Ted, he’s not worth seeing at the moment.”’
Lewis maintained contact with Jo and the girls. They spent the Christmas after the separation together, relaxed in each other’s company for the first time in a long time. Jo remembers Harry and Bertha’s absence came as something of a welcome relief. ‘We never, ever – and I did used to resent this sometimes – we never had a Christmas, we never had an Easter, a Whitsun, a two week summer holiday without them. They were there all the time. At Hill Farm we’d be sitting by the window and they’d walk by and Ted would joke, “Here come doom and gloom.”’
Living in the remote Suffolk village of Monks Eleigh, Jo was dependent on her car, a Mini. ‘On one occasion, Ted came to see the girls. I wasn’t working and he said, “Can I borrow the car for the weekend, I want to see Gil and Doreen?”’ She hadn’t realised he’d be drinking and driving. ‘He was a shocking driver anyway. He turned a corner, the car went into somebody’s garden and he didn’t dare tell me.’ Gil Potter phoned to explain about the accident. Jo was devastated. ‘My car was a lifeline. I ended up having to get a job at a local factory because there was transport that stopped outside the house.’ Doreen Potter remembers that weekend as the last time she and Gil saw Lewis. ‘He asked if he could stay with us. He’d been up to see his parents and written off Jo’s Mini. So he stayed for one night. He had a bottle in his pocket when he arrived. When I went to clear his room up there was the empty bottle.’ For Doreen, it made it easier to understand the divorce. ‘He was a very complicated man, difficult to live with. He had moods as well. I think Jo suffered a lot with him. When the divorce came, that didn’t help him, and it didn’t help him not seeing the kids.’
Lewis’s second story for Men Only was published in March 1975. ‘With This Song, Baby, It Don’t Matter’ is a violent and bloody tale of sex, drugs and betrayal. Stretching the bounds of credulity, the ‘trek around Europe, a few deaths, more than a little intrigue and one very cool blonde’ is entirely in keeping with the successful Men Only formula. In terms of its geography, the story was based on a trip Lewis and a group of friends had made to the south of France. Gil Potter’s memory is of ‘eight blokes, four in each car. A day down, a day back, a week there. Not many solids. It was total madness. We’d go over to Calais, put the cars on the ferry and straight to the bar.’ The Potters moved to the Camargue around this time, living in the small city of Manduel for over 20 years.
‘With This Song’ opens with sometime private investigator and debt collector, Brian Armstrong, driving south on the raised stretch of autoroute through Lyons, musing that it is like ‘being on a conveyor belt in the upper reaches of Hell’. Armstrong relates the circumstances of the trip and the task he has been commissioned to carry out, explaining that his paymaster, ‘Toby’, painted as a gullible, love-struck playboy, has sent him to keep an eye on his fiancée, ‘Lesley’, whom he suspects of being unfaithful with the mysterious ‘Max’. On arrival, Armstrong encounters Lesley who, in Lewis’s hands, becomes the archetypal Men Only 1970s fantasy stunner. His half-hearted interrogation is interrupted by the appearance of Max, evidently and stereotypically a gay man, with a white poodle and a ‘half-caste’ boy called René in tow. Armstrong and Lesley drive to a bar in Nîmes to get drunk. When they return, having picked up a local lad, Jean Pierre, Lesley invites Armstrong to bed. He considers his moral obligations to Toby, before concluding, ‘I was pissed and I wanted to.’ When Max and René return, Lesley follows them to the bedroom. Armstrong searches her car, discovering a stash of heroin she is smuggling for Max. In the morning, Toby arrives as planned. Armstrong fills him in on the details. Toby beats Max into unconsciousness, shoots the poodle, then dashes the dog’s ‘quivering and screeching’ body against a stone wall. After a not altogether convincing reconciliation with Lesley, she drives them away with Armstrong following in his own car. He sees them stop to get rid of the drugs then, a few miles down the road, watches helpless as their car accelerates, veering across the lanes into the path of an oncoming tanker. The car explodes, killing Toby and Lesley in a ‘sheet of flame’.
It’s difficult not to read ‘With This Song, Baby, It Don’t Matter’, at least on one level, as a blackly comic tale at Toby Eady’s expense. For some time, Lewis had given friends the impression he felt let down, suggesting there were promises made that were undelivered. What they were, beyond wanting more money and greater recognition, isn’t clear. Eady was spending more time in America, but maintains Lewis was well served. ‘We looked after him, this agency did, particularly Nicola Boyle, because I was living in America then and going and coming back and forth, but he sort of cut off from everyone.’
On one occasion, shortly after his return to Barton, Lewis encountered his former headmaster, Norman Goddard, on the Humber ferry. Goddard made a comment about how gratifying it was to see one of his old students doing so well. Lewis could find nothing to say in response. If there was any doubt that the incident with Goddard continued to affect him, it was confirmed with its prominence in the 1975 novel, The Rabbit. The humiliation he’d endured, its injustice and consequences, continued to play on his mind, and coming home didn’t make it any easier.
Initially, The Rabbit had been part of the burst of creativity that followed art school, the subsequent move to the West Country and then London. In late 1974, presumably in the wake of his return to Barton, encouraged by Toby Eady, Lewis returned to the drafts of the story, supplementing, updating and refining the narrative. Almost 20 years on from the events of summer 1956, he revisited his adolescence with frankness, omitting few of even the most uncomfortable details. He recalled the fights he’d picked, and invariably lost, that had reduced him to tears; the girls to whom he was cruel; the friends with whom he got drunk and fell out; the nature of the town, its people and the surrounding landscape. He brought fresh potency to the characters and conflicts of his youth through art student Victor Graves’ story of a summer vacation flinting at the quarry managed by his father.
A comparison between the 1966 short story and the 1975 novel reveals how the intervening years had honed Victor Graves’ outsider credentials. Lewis must have been reconciled to the fact that it would always be this way. There is additional bite and depth in the novel as Victor reacts against his parents’ prudishness, his father getting undressed only ‘after the light was out’. He reflects on the shame of his own sexual awakenings, discovered ‘playing doctors’ at the age of seven.
Central to the novel is Victor’s awkward struggle for acceptance with the quarry labourer, Clacker, with whom he is paired at work. As the boss’s college boy son, he is set apart. When Victor and his friends drive to a pub in an outlying village, they encounter Clacker and his mates, one of whom, Keith Phillips, had been in his class at school and witnessed the incident with the headmaster. (Lewis did have a friend at school named Keith Phillips, known as ‘Glegger’ or ‘Clegger’. According to those who remember Phillips, he is painted rather unfairly here.) In The Rabbit, Phillips has never allowed Victor to forget the experience, which Lewis retells, locating the events in a classroom:
The memory of the Headmaster slapping my face and the rush of piss shattering on to the classroom floor, uncontrollable because of my illness weakened bladder, the faces of the class as I staggered out of the classroom, the awed voices I’d heard discussing what had happened while I’d stayed locked in the toilets till everyone had gone home, the gauntlet I’d had to run at school the next day, the living down I’d had to do until the very last day at school.
Lewis’s writing of Victor’s painful, often self-inflicted, decline makes The Rabbit the antithesis of countless summer coming-of-age narratives. It might not have been what Michael Joseph expected from their gangster noir author. It was out of place in the contemporary market. ‘They thought they were getting the guy who wrote Carter and, true to form, Ted delivered The Rabbit,’ says Eady. Nevertheless, its earthy brutality and acuteness of observation made it one of Lewis’s most accomplished pieces of writing.
In June 1975, three months before publication of The Rabbit, Harry Lewis died. He had been suffering from lung cancer, retiring from work a little over a year earlier. The Rabbit has the distinction of being the only Lewis novel to feature a dedication: ‘for Harry Lewis’. Ostensibly a mark of respect – Lewis didn’t otherwise bother with book dedications – the reasons for this one are far from clear, particularly given the novel’s unsympathetic insights into Victor’s home life and the mutually antagonistic relationship with his father. Jo’s perspective is that the book suggests an affection between father and son. ‘The thing that made me laugh out loud when I reread The Rabbit was the irritation with his father, and Harry would irritate him, deliberately sometimes.’
On an evening out with his father and Uncle Eddie, Victor is embarrassed by put-downs directed at him by Norman, a character they meet in the town’s Constitutional Club. Victor’s father gives Norman a ‘what-can-you-expect kind of grin’. While the insult appears trivial, Victor finds it impossible to contain his anger at his father’s failure to speak in his defence. He feels he has no option but to stand up for himself, realising, too late, that by rising to the bait, he has played into Norman’s hands.
Old conflicts between father and son had inevitably been reawakened by Lewis’s coming home at a time of ill health. Barbara Hewson believes Lewis wrote The Rabbit ‘to show what he [Harry] was like’. There are those who believe Harry had resented Bertha’s close relationship with her son, and that Lewis had been upset by his father’s relationships with other women. ‘The whole town knew it. It was hard for Bertha, but she had to accept it; there were reasons. Divorce was out of the question.’ It is disquieting to think that Lewis chose the end of his father’s life to lay bare the differences between them, although he must have known his father would never read the book.
Eady remembers The Rabbit sold particularly well on publication, in spite of a largely indifferent critical response. The review in the New Statesman on 19 September said disparagingly that the novel was ‘all a bit of a ramble’. It acknowledged the ‘convincingly reported talk of proles in the Scunthorpe hinterland and the chillingly accurate account of adolescent sexuality’. It was as if Lewis was wilfully out of time, revisiting the territory of Sillitoe, Storey and Braine. The cover claimed Lewis as ‘author of GET CARTER’, but the rural noir of The Rabbit bore no relation to the gangster novel, less still the film. The New Statesman reviewer concluded that, if you cared to ‘wince along memory lane with shots of the Star flick-house manager bawling out troublemakers (‘Seat yourselves in the proper manner’) or the local ’erbert going in for coitus interruptus with a scrubber called Jean in Plaskett’s coalyard, then Ted Lewis is your only man.’ The Guardian review at least recognised the novel’s virtues of pace, characterisation and local detail, all of which made it ‘worth reading’. Taking a potshot at the blurb’s description of the novel ‘“climaxing with… powerfully graphic scenes of sexual confrontation”’, the reviewer suggests the writer ‘hasn’t read much recently’.
Taken as a whole, the reviews are disdainful of Lewis’s working class, non-metropolitan narrative. As if the subject had been exhausted, a hangover from the previous decade. But rereading The Rabbit, there’s a sense Lewis was exploring more profound tensions he and others of the grammar school generation were experiencing in escaping their roots. Education meant you would always be mistrusted, unaccepted by the working class; neither were you welcomed by the class to which you were supposed to aspire. Lewis knows there can be no way back; achieving your ambitions was no guarantee of acceptance. In 1956, Victor can still think of himself as ‘the only one who had got away’. In 1975, the snared rabbit struggling hopelessly against Clacker’s wire noose is an expression of Lewis’s struggle to free himself from the constraints of his upbringing. He could no more embolden Victor to put the rabbit out of its misery in 1956 when the event took place, 1966 when he first wrote about it, or 1975 when its meaning resonated more starkly. ‘I knelt down and tried to release the snare but I couldn’t find the noose because every time I touched the wire the rabbit wriggled, like madness itself.’
In May 1975, Lewis signed with AC Theatrical and Cinema (ACTAC), an agency specialising in representing film and television writers. ACTAC would act for Lewis on issues relating to television and radio work in association with Toby Eady Associates Ltd, which would maintain control over Lewis’s other writing.
With the agent Judy Daish working on his behalf, Lewis agreed his first commission for the BBC: a 50 minute script for the long running police drama Z Cars. A typewritten note on the commissioning brief from series producer Roderick Graham states that, ‘As far as we know Ted Lewis has not written for television but is a successful novelist, one of his novels having been made into a feature film.’ Lewis received the standard fee of £750 for the script, provisionally entitled Prisoner.
Z Cars had been the prototype gritty police drama on British television, bringing social realism to weekly crime stories located in the fictional Newtown, notionally on Merseyside. Devised by Troy Kennedy Martin and first broadcast in 1962, it had broken new ground as a hard-hitting, northern, issue-based drama, with realistic depictions of police officers at work and in domestic settings. Criticised by the Police Federation for depicting police characters with drink and gambling problems, and as perpetrators of domestic abuse, it set a sharp counterpoint to the affable and, by then, anachronistic beat coppering of BBC stalwart George Dixon and Dixon of Dock Green. Where Dixon was cosy, Z Cars packed a punch, using real life casebook stories to deal with contemporary issues.
Troy Kennedy Martin had developed the show with the help of documentary makers Elwyn Jones and Robert Barr. Its writers and directors were pioneers of British television drama, bringing working class language and experiences into millions of living rooms. Many would go on to direct landmark productions of The Wednesday Play and Play for Today; a handful moved into cinema, notably Ridley Scott and Ken Loach, who cut his teeth on uncompromising Z Cars episodes such as Profit By Their Example (1964).
By the mid 1970s, however, Z Cars had lost the vitality of earlier series. Its pre-eminence had been overtaken by harder hitting shows like Thames Television’s The Sweeney. First screened in January 1975, The Sweeney’s depiction of contemporary crime, policing and street violence owed a considerable debt to Get Carter. Naming its main Flying Squad characters DI Jack Regan and DS George Carter suggests someone had made the connection, although the show’s originator, Ian Kennedy Martin, brother of Z Cars creator, Troy, has denied it was intentional. ‘We would have seen it [Get Carter], but I don’t think it affected The Sweeney.’ He does concede that the show’s writers, particularly Trevor Preston, may have been more influenced. (Preston would later collaborate with Mike Hodges, receiving a writing credit for his 2003 film, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.) The parallels were evident to Lewis, especially as the first episode of the first series of The Sweeney featured Ian Hendry as Dave Brooker, a no nonsense villain, second in command of a violent criminal gang. There were technical similarities too: The Sweeney used a fast rehearse and record method; actors taking the script, rehearsing once in situ on set, then going for a take.
Although Lewis would have been better placed and more naturally inclined to write for the hard men of The Sweeney, he was in need of a credible route into television when Z Cars came calling. Produced by Roderick Graham and script edited by Graham Williams, Lewis found himself writing story and dialogue for characters he had not created; nevertheless, Prisoner featured characteristic autobiographical traits. It tells the story of prison escapee Billy Catlin, played by Keith Barron, a petty criminal who has escaped from prison one month short of his parole date. Holed up out-of-hours in an off licence, he coshes one of the show’s regulars, Constable Alec Quilley, and takes him hostage. Catlin handcuffs Quilley to a storeroom rack, surrounded by cases of booze, cigarettes and Golden Wonder crisps. Prisoner director Derrick Goodwin remembers Lewis and the episode well. ‘We spent many hours together getting the script in good shape. I was only recently out of the theatre as a director and Ted seemed to be a little puzzled by that, but we got on fine.’
In early drafts, Lewis’s script had been over-elaborate, detailing shots and camera angles. With Goodwin and Graham Williams collaborating, Lewis delivered a tight, powerful script. Catlin’s references to life in prison owed much to the source material Lewis had shaped for Billy Rags. He enlightens Quilley about life inside:
CATLIN: I’ll tell you what it meant. It meant a stinking sweat from the billet above twelve hours a night. It meant staring at the brickwork to take your mind off what’s beyond it. It meant trying to remember what your girlfriend’s face is like. It meant staying out of the hands of the screaming puffs but at the same time not being able to get away from what they’re up to… it meant thinking about nice boys like you as put me there.
In an atmosphere of mounting claustrophobia, Prisoner also alludes to Lewis’s time in St Audry’s Hospital, as a remorseful Catlin remembers, ‘She always came to see me… I’d ask her, is it still the same?’ As Catlin swigs from a bottle of whisky, his relationship with Quilley deteriorates. ‘What was great about Ted’s script,’ says Goodwin, ‘was that it was more or less a two hander and that’s always a challenge, and also very interesting as it reveals the characters much more than car chases and the usual cop shows.’
A feeble escape attempt by Quilley ends with Catlin, now drunk and unhinged, threatening him with a broken bottle. Quilley taunts Catlin, accusing him of being too drunk to finish him off, telling him he hasn’t got the guts to go through with it. Lewis gives Quilley arguably the script’s most insightful line. ‘Soon as you leave here, the dream’s over. It’s back to reality. No more scotch to make the fantasy seem fact. It’s all over.’ Catlin grabs Quilley by the collar, forcing the whisky bottle against his lips and making him drink. Some goes down his throat, most over his uniform. He rolls onto his side trying not to be sick.
In the final scene, Catlin, in an ‘alcoholic sweat’, walks the streets on his way to Norma’s flat. Police cars screech to a halt and Catlin is surrounded by uniformed officers. He begs in vain to be allowed to see Norma before being arrested. The officers lift him from his knees and put him in the back of a police car. For all his bravado, Catlin is wretched; a hopeless, self-destructive drunk. He stares through the car window, plaintively singing the words to Buddy Holly’s Oh Boy to himself.
As Lewis rejoined the Barton social scene in the spring of 1975, he became a regular at parties within a circle that included a sprinkling of old friends. Among the new crowd were local artist Jill Baxter and her husband, mutual friends of the Dickinsons, whose children were members of the same cub pack. For them, Lewis was an unknown quantity. Jill remembers, ‘We thought it’d be quite interesting because we’d get to meet the guy that everyone had talked about all this time.’ After a few drinks, Lewis held court, telling stories and making people laugh. ‘He was obviously quite weathered,’ says Jill. ‘It was clear that he was a drinker. He had that slightly swollen look to his face.’
Later, they met at a house party. People were dancing to Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain. ‘Ted turned to me and said, “I see they’re playing your song then.” Obviously it was one of his chat-up lines – insult her and she’ll become interested, that was his thing. He offered to lend me a book or something. I went round and his mum was there, and we had a chat.’ Soon afterwards they began seeing each other clandestinely. They discussed moving away from Barton, but decided it couldn’t possibly work, that it would be too unsettling for Jill’s children. ‘We were kind of on and off, should we do it or shouldn’t we? In the end we knew we just had to.’ The relationship was intense from the outset. ‘That’s the way he was and that’s the way he liked things, but it’s difficult to sustain, terribly difficult. I wouldn’t go through that again for anything.’
John Dickinson felt his friend had let him down. ‘I wasn’t terribly happy about that, mainly because of the kids, they were at a vulnerable age.’ He wasn’t the only one to voice concerns. Lewis called Jo and told her he’d met someone; that she had three boys and he was thinking of moving in with her, what should he do? ‘I said, “You’ve got two daughters. You’ve got massive responsibility.” I hadn’t got a car, I was working in a factory and I couldn’t understand Jill taking three young boys into that situation.’
But Lewis’s mind was made up. He found them a large bungalow at Theddlethorpe, near the seaside town of Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast, an hour’s drive from Barton. Isolated, with wide skies and mile after mile of sand dunes and the sea within easy walking distance, Jill remembers the bungalow, one of two set back from the main road into Mablethorpe. ‘It had a large hall with glass doors – I think someone had been going to build a staircase up into the loft. To the right there was a large sitting room with a bay window that went down nearly to the floor, and a fireplace, and then there was a smallish kitchen, two or three bedrooms.’ To minimise disruption to the boys’ school year, it was decided that they’d wait until term ended in July before moving.
The children settled, seeing their father most weekends; but almost as soon as they began living together, Jill was faced with the worst of Lewis’s insecurities. ‘He would analyse everything. You couldn’t make an innocent remark without him questioning it. “Why did you say that?” And “What did you mean by that?” It’s hard to live with because sometimes you don’t mean anything at all.’ She acknowledges their happiness was short-lived. ‘I was feeling really happy that we were together; probably in my naïve, idealistic way I thought it was all going to be lovely, and then realised it wasn’t.’ Lewis seemed resigned to the eventual letdown. ‘He had that, it’s all going to go bad, because it’s wrong, way of thinking.’
If Lewis had moved to Theddlethorpe looking for somewhere to lose himself, he succeeded in doing precisely the opposite, finding himself drawn deeper into a self-destructive spiral. Visiting Theddlethorpe, it’s not hard to see why. The wind whips relentlessly off the North Sea across a vast beach. The landscape is bleak and featureless. Mablethorpe out of season is the epitome of a worn and weary seaside town, shabby and poetic in equal measure. In winter, it feels like the end of the world.
Although Lewis was probably unaware, Theddlethorpe already had literary significance, featuring prominently in DH Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers. As the nineteenth century railways had opened up direct routes to the seaside, each town or city decamped en masse, colonising a section of coast. Workers and their families from Nottingham and Leicester had traditionally travelled to Mablethorpe. For Lawrence’s Paul Morel and Clara, it was Theddlethorpe. Lawrence wrote, ‘In the spring they went together to the seaside. They had rooms in a little cottage near Theddlethorpe, and lived as man and wife.’ In the semi-autobiographical account of Lawrence’s conflicted home life – the relationship with his father with whom he cannot see eye to eye, the mother who dotes on him, and the lovers who shaped his early years – the similarities with Lewis are inescapable.
Lewis got on well with Jill’s sons. They played board games and he introduced them to the films of the Marx Brothers, which they adored. During the football season, they’d watch Match of the Day, sitting on the sofa sharing between them the enormous red and white Manchester United scarf Bertha had knitted.
Lewis was soon well known by the Theddlethorpe locals, playing darts in the King’s Head, becoming friendly with the landlord and the local solicitor who seemed impressed by the writer in their midst. Less so the taxi driver who frequently drove him home and whom he rarely paid. Jill remembers going in for a lunchtime pint. ‘We were both quite good at darts so there was a bit of competition between us. I think he liked being challenged.’ Other times, usually late at night when he’d been drinking, Lewis contrived reasons for an argument, stirring himself to anger. Sometimes the exchanges became violent and Jill would be forced to fight her corner. ‘I just had this sense of submission, because I couldn’t do anything. If he lashed out, I would lash back.’ Lewis was jealous of her past, anything that didn’t involve him. ‘I’d tell him he was being unfair, that it was irrelevant, and what about him? Was he so free of his past that he could go on about me? Then he’d say, “Perhaps you’d better get back to your husband, to your perfect husband who isn’t flawed like I am.” I never criticised Ted at all, he did that to himself.’ When things became too bad, Jill remembers running out of the house. ‘If the children were away for the weekend, I’d go down the road and sit on a wall until I was ready to go back. It was a horrible time really. There were highs when we were laughing and just having a great time, then there were lows that were just deeper than deep.’ Typically, after one of these episodes, by the time Jill went home, Lewis would have fallen asleep. Sometimes he found reserves of energy that kept him going long into the night. She would lock herself in the spare bedroom. In the morning he would be contrite, ashamed. On one occasion, he tore off a dress Jill was wearing, which he had bought her, and threw it on the fire. ‘Afterwards, he said, “Why am I doing this to you when you’ve been so good to me?”’
Lewis had been drinking hard since his art school days and showed no signs of stopping. He was increasingly losing control. On one occasion, Jo asked would he look after Nancy and Sally during the school holidays? ‘I had to keep this bloody awful job and I rang him to ask if he could come for half term so that I could go to work.’ Lewis arrived in Monks Eleigh on the Friday night. He saw Nancy and Sally tucked up in bed, then went to the pub. Later, Jo heard a terrible row outside. She was incensed; they’d only just moved to the area:
‘Ted was in the phone box having a colossal row with Jill. I got him out and I was really angry and said to him, “You can’t ruin our lives here. Nobody knows anything about us.” And he was so drunk that I had to ring Bob, who lived in Felixstowe, and tell him to come and please take Ted back. Bob drove him home to Theddlethorpe the following morning.’
Prisoner was screened on BBC1 on 19 January 1976. It was high drama for a show that went out at twenty past seven on a Monday evening. Lewis was already working on a second Z Cars episode, Juvenile.
Lewis developed a bond with many of the people he worked with on Z Cars and was particularly close to Graham Williams, his script editor. Williams was also a heavy drinker. For some time, he had been working on a concept for a series of one-off plays themed around a contemporary reading of GK Chesterton’s The Club of Queer Trades, a series of stories about the members of ‘an eccentric and Bohemian Club’, the condition of membership of which lies in the candidate having ‘invented the method by which he earns his living’. The members were not to be purveyors of the ‘mere application or variation of an existing trade’, and the trade must also be a ‘genuine commercial source of income, the support of its inventor’. Early in 1976, Williams was given the go ahead as executive producer to commission scripts for the new series to be called The Zodiac Factor.
The series concept underwent further development, presumably with Lewis involved. He was being considered as one of the writers at the initial stage and it seems clear the Queer Trades idea had been discussed at length during conversations Lewis and Williams had whilst working on Prisoner. Williams had Plender in mind. He sent the novel out to BBC readers for comments under the misspelled heading ‘PLUNDER’, adding that he was hopeful for its ‘inclusion in the Zodiac programme, with Lewis adapting’.
As a blackmailer setting up honey traps in gay clubs, by turns manipulative, nasty, violent and frequently in the pay of shadowy right-wing politicians, Brian Plender was an ideal candidate for membership of a contemporary Club of Queer Trades. The BBC commissioning brief went out in June 1976 with the intention to screen each of the 12 plays under a generic title sequence, produced, transmitted and sold overseas as The Zodiac Factor.
Lewis worked on the script at the bungalow in Theddlethorpe or at the bar of the King’s Head throughout the summer of 1976, writing drafts that were sent, or taken by Lewis if he could get a lift, to a secretary in Lincoln for typing. His writing continued to be the one thing he could, on occasion, be optimistic about and he was happy with the work he produced. There remained, however, a simmering resentment, particularly about The Sweeney, which Jill remembers him watching. ‘They’ve taken all my fucking ideas’ was a familiar refrain on Monday nights at 9pm. ‘He was furious about them using Jack Regan and George Carter. He felt it was obvious and it made him cross.’
Life settled into a pattern, with Lewis eating little, drinking slowly through the day, and then building up at night. Jill remembers each day had low points. ‘He’d be miserable around four o’clock in the afternoon before the pubs opened and just sit around in his chair, staring at the telly. Then the first drink, six o’clock down the pub again and he was fine.’ He made occasional trips to London, but found the convoluted train journey interminable. He seemed especially uneasy when he had meetings with his publishers, or at the BBC. Consequently, he drank more. On one occasion, an invitation arrived for the Z Cars wrap party. Jill accompanied Lewis to the distinctly glamour-free affair in a draughty school hall in west London. There was a table with buffet and drinks, but they spent most of the time with Z Cars actor James Ellis and his wife. To the viewing public, Ellis’s much loved character, Bert Lynch, was the series’ moral centre, providing continuity between 1960s and 1970s incarnations. In truth, he’d had his own problems with drink. Lewis wanted to know how he had coped.
At the party, Lewis was witty and engaging, but he had been drinking heavily. The trip is remembered in ‘Mrs Lewis’s diary’, an occasional journal Jill had begun to keep for her own amusement. Inspired by the Private Eye spoof diary of Mary Wilson, wife of then Prime Minister Harold Wilson, between the lines of Jill’s pastiche of Mrs Wilson’s prim prose and bad poetry, there is, she admits, a frank and faithful account of their lives together. Lewis thought it was funny. ‘It was true, it was about our lives.’
She jokes about their plan to stay with ‘nice Mr Dumplings’ – as yet unaware of their intentions – ‘as we can’t risk his being off on urgent business to Alaska, like the last six times we asked to be put up’. Missing the train, waiting six hours at Market Rasen, then 40 minutes at Newark in a waiting room ‘full of morons and young conservatives’, Lewis opened the wine they’d bought for their host. There are more drinks on the train and a pub crawl which leaves them worse for wear before arriving at the party:
I can’t say I enjoyed it tremendously – perhaps because Edward got the idea it was the ‘Sweeney’ party and became rather aggressive. Indeed, he had to be forcibly removed in the end, fighting and yelling: “Haven’t you got any original ideas, you bastards!” The poor partygoers looked most agitated. Bert Lynch even woke up momentarily. What with that, and throwing up over the food table and yelling “Stuff Z Victor one!!” at the producer, I feel he may be jeopardising his chances of writing more scripts.
After a failed attempt to hail a cab in Acton High Street, Jill describes Lewis, patently worse for wear, taking his frustrations out on the staff and customers at the ‘Mambasi Take-away’. As usual, I ate my sausage and chips and Edward threw his against the nearest wall.’ She finishes the entry with a description of a phone call from Jo on their arrival home. ‘His ex-wife has now phoned and I answered by saying he was out, to which she replied, “Where is he then?!” She seems to be becoming increasingly angry and I think I am starting to understand why.’
Behind the humour, the episode is indicative of the kind of chaos into which Lewis’s life was descending. Alcohol fuelled unpredictability, often ending in argument and occasionally a ‘punch-up’. On one occasion he became angry with a friend who he felt wasn’t treating his wife very well. Things came to a head at a party at the bungalow. ‘Ted just punched him and knocked him through the front door. They were okay afterwards. Geoff said, “I shouldn’t have been treating Maureen like that, you’re quite right.”’
Often he was overcome with remorse, knowing his life was out of control and unable to help himself. ‘He would cry about things sometimes. Really, really cry and say, “I’ve messed up my girls’ lives, I’ve messed up your life.” He’d be really upset. If I tried to console him, he’d say, “Shut up, what do you know about it? What can you possibly know about what I’m feeling?” He’d be angry you were trying to understand. Once he got a letter from Nancy and it was really sweet, because she was obviously missing her dad and it upset me a little. He said, “What are you crying for? You don’t know what it’s like.”’
Published by Michael Joseph in June 1976, Boldt marked a significant departure for Lewis. Boldt is a member of a corrupt police department in an unnamed American city which his brother, a presidential candidate, is planning to visit during a forthcoming election campaign. While checking security for the visit, Boldt finds out that one of the country’s top hitmen has checked into the town’s best hotel, and then uncovers a connection between him, the Mafia and the local police.
Even by the standards Lewis had already set, Boldt made a feature of pulpish reductive sex, racist characters, misogyny and overwrought homosexual and black stereotypes. Borrowing from the reactionary extremes of the later Dirty Harry films for its tone – it feels as though this could be New York or San Francisco – Boldt is a short step from pastiche. Lewis, by his own admission, had never visited America and admitted that Boldt was a response to watching the deluge of US cop shows on British TV. Ironside, Kojak, Cannon, Shaft, Starsky and Hutch, The Streets of San Francisco all had regular slots in the first half of the decade. Lewis had never been afraid of writing men who were bastards, but with Boldt and his partner Murdock he took the signature tropes of an orthodox hardnose cop to extremes.
While acknowledging the racism, sexism and homophobia are impossible to ignore, or to accept, it’s possible that Boldt was written as Lewis’s riposte to MGM’s blaxploitation reimagining of Get Carter. A thoroughly nasty revenge job. There’s no doubt he was bitter about the film and Mike Hodges has spoken in unfavourable terms about the deal which saw his film gutted, reimagined and, in his view, cheapened. With Boldt, Lewis turns the tables. There’s a suggestion of wordplay in the title: Bold T. Otherwise, with its silent ‘d’, it seems an odd spelling. This was Lewis testing himself against modern American crime fiction writers, possibly inspired by Douglas Fairbairn’s 1973 macho thriller Shoot. In attempting to cover unfamiliar ground and dragging out 1970s cop show clichés, Lewis sacrificed the most powerful elements of his writing, that of the sense of people living real lives in believable worlds. His interpretation of American English is only partially successful, patched over in places with false notes and banalities.
Nevertheless, Boldt received a sprinkling of positive reviews. The Scotsman acknowledged the introduction of the ‘genuinely tough new US cop partnership of Boldt and Murdock’, and said the book was ‘Good value from Mr Lewis’. The Daily Record concluded that the novel featured ‘wit, cynicism and steamy sex in a powerful mix’. John Roberts in the Derby Evening Telegraph applauded a story ‘as uncompromisingly blunt as the title’. The Times Literary Supplement, published on 23 July, was more considered, acknowledging Lewis’s aim in shifting focus from British gangsters and places he knew well to American cops. ‘Ted Lewis has taken on Mickey Spillane on the latter’s home ground and has gone the full distance with him. The pace is as fast, the sex as explicit, the action as brutal and the characters as vicious as anything in the original. But the novel has lost the individual note of Ted Lewis’s earlier works.’
By the time Boldt was published, Lewis’s creative focus had shifted further towards writing for television. It’s likely he began writing the Thirteen Women script around this time. Possibly as an attempt to place the experience of Framlingham and Hill Farm in some kind of context, and to revisit the debt he owed Henry and Mary Treece. There is no record in the BBC archive of it having been commissioned, so presumably it was written to pitch to BBC producers. It’s interesting to speculate on what they’d have made of Lewis’s social satire of a darkly comic, proto-Abigail’s Party for the rural arts and drinking classes.
Lewis delivered the Plender script for The Zodiac Factor at the end of September. The manuscript was faithful to the novel, each scene described with visual and aural clues. The opening sees Plender, in a scene reminiscent of the opening of Get Carter, viewed behind glass. Behind him, two men dish out a savage beating to a third. Plender is detached, indifferent to the violence taking place a few feet away. Lewis, retaining the novel’s autobiographical undercurrents in a series of flashbacks, depicts themes of pornography, sex, deviance, deception and blackmail unambiguously. It would have been a radical piece of television had it satisfied BBC censorship rules and made it to production. Peter Knott’s regular visits to Peggy’s gay bar, Camille the ‘drag artiste’ and the underlying sordidness of Plender and Knott’s pornographic world were, in terms of television drama, ahead of their time.
As a novelist, Lewis had formidable visual craft. At his best he wrote lean, focused scenes with tough imaginative dialogue. But the Plender script is overlong, written as if only for reading, rather than as a basis for dramatic presentation. Unable to remove himself as author of the source novel, Plender is the clearest evidence that Lewis would have struggled to write a feature length script for Jack’s Return Home in 1970 without considerable latitude from Klinger, Caine and Hodges. Impractical if not impossible, given the pressures of production.
By the end of 1976, Lewis’s relationship with Jill was all but over. Once again broke, he confessed to Jill they’d been living on loans he had no hope of paying back. He declared bankruptcy in order to begin again, riding out the stigma attached to being insolvent, accepting it as part of the inevitability of living his chosen lifestyle. Jill admits she had to take a deep breath and begin her life again with nothing. She applied to social services and received money to feed her children for a week. ‘I got a waitressing job in Mablethorpe. My solicitor said I was better off staying in the bungalow even though I couldn’t afford the rent. You were allowed to do that for six months.’ They met once more while Jill was still at Theddlethorpe. A mutual friend was throwing a party and Lewis took a taxi from Barton determined to see her:
‘My friend Janet, who knew what Ted was like, said, “I think you’d better go upstairs to one of the bedrooms if you need to talk.” So we went up and he was really drunk and it just got really, really bad. I actually managed to drag him into the bathroom – he was getting quite violent – I dragged him into the bathroom and put him into the bath and turned the taps on. I came downstairs and said to Janet, “I’ve put Ted in the bath and turned the bloody taps on him!”’
They realised Lewis was dangerously drunk and called an ambulance. He was taken to hospital, at times incoherent and, in more antagonistic moments, telling the nurses to ‘fuck off!’ ‘In the end, Janet drove me to the hospital and he calmed down a bit. I stayed with him the rest of the night.’ Lewis went home to Barton and Jill tried to rebuild her life, taking out an injunction to prevent Lewis from seeing her. ‘I knew it was never going to get anywhere if we carried on. I found another place, at Marsh Chapel, nearer to Grimsby. I couldn’t take any more. I don’t think he had any notion of what loving somebody really was, that it wasn’t just falling in love, it was caring afterwards and I don’t think he had any idea of that at all.’
In the years following the Get Carter film release, Lewis came to despair of achieving similar success. When he returned to Jack Carter once more, it was almost certainly motivated by money. Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon, published in May 1977, is the least successful Carter novel. Arguably, it is Lewis’s most insubstantial piece of writing, achieving barely more than fulfilling his Michael Joseph contract for a book in 1977. On publication there was little fanfare and there are no records of contemporary reviews. Nor, does it seem, was there much of an effort to create publicity.
The lacklustre handling carried into the presentation of the text itself. The novel patently needed an editor’s and a proofreader’s eye. Toby Eady’s claim in a 2009 BBC Radio interview that Lewis was the only writer he ever handled who ‘hardly needed editing’ falls flat with Mafia Pigeon. The book cries out for input from someone willing to tackle its deficiencies. Perhaps Michael Joseph were simply satisfied that Lewis had produced a manuscript. Clearly, no one thought it worth reading closely. Aside from structural and narrative weaknesses, there are numerous proofing and typesetting mistakes; parts of the text are missing; words are misspelled or wrongly typed, suggesting Lewis’s secretary had misread his original handwritten draft. In the few samples of Lewis’s handwriting in BBC documents, there is a clear deterioration around this time. Either way, it seems no one gave it that much attention.
Jack Carter is the novel’s narrator. Given its not entirely clear place in Jack’s timeline, Mafia Pigeon notionally precedes Jack’s Return Home. It builds on the narrative threads of Jack Carter’s Law, including the relationship with Audrey and the antipathy between Jack, Peter the Dutchman and Con McCarty, once again arriving to rescue the plot in the final act. But it’s almost inconceivable that the character is the same cold killer of 1969 vintage. His voice, littered with mockney dialogue, is more Michael Caine as Charlie Croker than original Jack Carter.
The novel sees Jack despatched to Majorca by the Fletcher Brothers, ostensibly to take two weeks holiday at their villa outside Palma. On arrival he finds himself babysitting D’Antoni, a former Mafia operative hiding out under the Fletchers’ protection. The villa is housekept by ex-con Wally Lomas, retained by the Fletchers to handle their distribution of pornographic movies from Majorca. Via a swathe of backstory, exposition and pages of static dialogue, Jack discovers the true nature of the trip.
Lewis constructs a series of stereotypes: the Brits abroad brothers from Dagenham with matching Ford bomber jackets and frigid wives; the boozing Spanish cab driver; and Wally Lomas, the cringing ‘sewer rat’ functionary, are never far from central casting. With the arrival of Wally’s art student daughter, Tina, closely followed by Audrey, bringing orders from the Fletchers that Jack is to execute D’Antoni, the novel degenerates from bedroom hopping farce to its inevitable bleakly comic shootout. There are cheap shots at the expense of ‘yanks’ and ‘cockneys’. Jack baulks at being called a ‘cockney craphouse’ – ‘I was born in Lincolnshire, friend, not London’. The sex is joyless. Jack and Audrey’s on/off affair amounts to mutual loathing, drunken fucking and beatings, often in the same act. When Carter refuses to do a ‘topping job’ on D’Antoni, Con and Pete arrive in Majorca to finish him. Matters come to a head at the villa at a late night screening of ‘Schoolgirl Rape’, one of the Fletchers’ pornographic movies Wally stores in the basement. Audrey has brought the Dagenham boys back for a party. In a self-conscious imitation of Jack’s Return Home, Wally realises that one of the film’s female performers is his daughter.
Underpinning Mafia Pigeon is the basis of what might have made a good story. In its underlying theme of transatlantic linkups between 1960s London crime firms and the Mafia, the novel has its roots in real events. John Pearson’s The Profession of Violence describes a meeting between the Kray twins and Mafia representatives in London as early as 1964. When Ronnie Kray travelled to the USA in 1968, Pearson writes, ‘Tommy Cowley, one of the shrewdest members of the Firm, had decamped instantly to Majorca.’ Later the Krays would hatch a plan to eliminate a Las Vegas gambler and club owner staying over in London as a way to impress their Mafia connections. Mafia Pigeon had tapped into the idea of ‘hands across the ocean’ relationships, but had done so with a novel reminiscent of a Confessions movie knockabout.
Rereading Mafia Pigeon, it’s fair to assume that Lewis was thoroughly sick of Jack Carter. He needed the money and would have expected the Carter name to add to sales, but it feels like a book too far. Jack’s Return Home had imbued Carter with a degree of dry wit. Here he is boorish, misanthropic and, frankly, a bit of a mug. The novel is a padded, pulpish throwaway that guaranteed Lewis would never be asked to write another Carter book, which begs the question, was that his intention? It concluded the deal with Michael Joseph. For the first time in almost a decade, Lewis was without a publisher.
Written by Ted Lewis, Juvenile was the final episode of Z Cars’ twelfth season, broadcast on 5 July 1977, nestling in the schedule between Sykes and the Nine O’Clock News. The episode told the story of two teenage lads. English student ‘Barry Hooper’ lives comfortably with his family, listens to Elton John records, and has a steady girlfriend, Janet. ‘Ronnie Burnett’ is a ne’er-do-well. When he and Barry bump into each other in the record department of an electrical shop, they clearly know each other. As the Radio Times synopsis explains, ‘While Barry Hooper was in the record shop either a shoplifting was attempted or it wasn’t; he either saw it or he didn’t; and either he was involved, or he wasn’t. So he’s either being very loyal to an old mate, or very, very cocky.’
The underlying message, repeated by PC Fred Render throughout the episode, is that the kids these days are ‘frightened of nothing’. Hooper acts the innocent, apparently drawn into the criminal activity of his wayward friend, and Ronnie is arrested. Inspector Lynch recognises that Ronnie is being manipulated and attempts to persuade him to inform on his mate. Ronnie refuses.
With the newsagent ‘Pop Doughty’ and references to film and family, Lewis plundered his past for story and character, although here he creates an almost parallel universe in which character traits are the opposites of their namesakes. In spite of the arrival of Ronnie’s mother at the police station, an archetypal working class woman with dyed hair, wearing an overall and smoking a cigarette, it’s clear that Ronnie will be charged based on Barry’s statement. It emerges that Barry is at the root of the trouble. His university bound, middle class exterior is an act; he dupes his parents and everyone else, boasting of his ‘natural born brilliance’.
Juvenile doesn’t have the sharpness of script of Prisoner; neither does it have the dramatic intensity of the central relationship between Billy Catlin and PC Quilley. The Barry Hooper of Juvenile is a Plender-in-waiting, a manipulative sociopath conscious that Ronnie Burnett, a working class lad easily manipulated, will be written off as a shoplifter and a thief, because that’s what the police assume working class lads do. Barry knows his friend will go to prison while he and Janet will continue their scam.
At home again in Barton, Lewis was living with Bertha, waiting for the pubs to open. For a while, his local had been the White Swan on the corner of Butts Road and Fleetgate, run by former Hull FC rugby league centre three quarter Colin Ali – Ali later changed his name to Colin Mountain. When Ali wasn’t around, Lewis began an affair with his wife, the pub’s landlady. When Ali found out, he gave Lewis what one friend described as ‘a bloody good hiding’. The bruises were visible for some time afterwards. Lewis started drinking in the Red Lion.
Shortly after morning opening time he’d take his place, usually at the end of the bar with a notebook. Some days he seemed in a world of his own, making it patently obvious he wanted his own company and a couple of quiet pints. Jack Compton had just left the army after 22 years. Between jobs for a few months towards the end of 1977, he spent his lunchtimes at the Red Lion. ‘If Ted didn’t want to talk to you, he’d acknowledge you and that was it, you couldn’t get anything out of him at all. If he was in the mood and wanted to talk to you it was “Oh hello, Jack, how you doing?” He didn’t so much have a conversation with you, he questioned you.’ After a while, Lewis began to open up and the themes were familiar. ‘He said, “I sold my book. I got robbed.” He’d lost a lot of money out of it, he reckoned he didn’t get what it was worth. Once he spoke about his ex-wife. He said, “It wasn’t her fault, it was mine.”’ Often Lewis quizzed Jack about his time in the army. ‘Everything was a question with him. I’d been to a lot of places and he wanted to know what it was like there, what happened there.’ He told Jack he wanted to write something local again.
After Jack started work at Hall’s Barton Ropery early in 1978, he saw Lewis less often. But when he did, he noticed a difference. Lewis had been living with a schoolteacher who lived on Priestgate. Jack lived a few doors down. ‘I’d pick him up when he couldn’t stand. Some nights he was really bad; drunk, crying and banging on her door to be let in and she wouldn’t let him in. Then he’d try to walk off and he couldn’t make it, there was this wall, it was only two or three feet high; he’d sit on it and fall off.’ For the ex-soldier, no stranger to a night on the beer, witnessing Lewis’s decline was shocking. ‘It was terrible to see a bloke in such a state, cryin’ and askin’ for help, it was pitiful. He’d gone, he was in turmoil. I think Sue threw him out at the finish, she couldn’t take it anymore.’ It seemed to observers that Lewis was reaching a stage where he didn’t need to drink to excess. Jack recalls, ‘he’d have a pint or two in the pub at lunchtime, then go home, just topping himself up all the time. His mother went through absolute hell. “I live with me mother,” he’d say, and that was it.’
Throughout this period, Jo did her best to ensure that Nancy and Sally had time with their father. They had little, if any, sense of the chaos of Lewis’s life. When Jo took the girls to Barton to stay with their grandmother, somehow Bertha managed to ensure all was as it should be. Nancy has fond memories of ‘Mr Kipling cakes and pots of tea, all laid out very nicely with doilies’. Bertha had cashed in her not inconsiderable accumulation of Embassy cigarette coupons for a silver tea service. Always made up, dressed smartly with a large handbag and court shoes. There were cabinets of fine china and ornamental cats. Nancy remembers an air of formality about the visits. ‘She used to have these special Pyrex cups with ornate holders and she’d make us a milky coffee in these cups. Very fancy. It was wonderful for us, we felt like we were at a tea party.’ By nature, Bertha was a worrier and having her son at home didn’t make life any easier. ‘She wouldn’t relax,’ says Nancy, ‘even when she watched television, she’d sit up straight. There wouldn’t be feet on a sofa or a footstool; she’d be sitting properly.’
Lewis entertained his girls, making up characters and telling stories. He’d send them beautifully illustrated birthday cards, usually featuring cats and comics he’d drawn, in which they were the characters. Nancy remembers one about a flying bed. ‘It must have been in the days of Bedknobs and Broomsticks and we were the two girls in the flying bed going about having adventures.’ When Sally showed an interest in ballet and began taking lessons, Lewis took the girls to see the Nutcracker at the Gaumont in Ipswich. ‘There were elements of our childhood which he thought about and did things which he thought we would like.’ Sally remembers a picture her father sent. ‘It’s sort of poster sized and it’s of Frankenstein’s monster with a haunted house in the background and me as a six-year-old in my nightdress just holding Frankenstein’s hand and it says, “A little midnight walk.” And I’m perfectly happy and smiley in the picture with my teddy under my arm.’
Often they spent time together by the river. Bertha made the girls’ breakfast and Lewis would have his fried eggs on toast and a cup of tea, then take them to the Humber Estuary, a place he clearly loved. ‘We’d talk about the river,’ says Nancy:
‘At that time the bridge was being constructed, and we would talk about this feat of engineering that was going into building the bridge, but it was just such a massive expanse of water. I just remember it was obviously quite a special place for him – somewhere he loved to go back to. He was funny and he’d make us laugh. He’d tell us funny stories, just make things up and we’d sit and listen.’
On occasion, Lewis took the girls into Scunthorpe. After home and the rolling fields of Suffolk, this was something different. ‘We’d go into the arcades, or into these terrible cafes and have egg and chips. It was loud, exciting.’
Terms of the visits changed after Jo found out Lewis had been looking after the girls whilst drunk. As she told Paul Duncan in an interview for Crime Time in 1997, ‘After about our second year of actual divorce, he was having the children at his mother’s house. I found out that he was drunk in charge so the visits became more supervised. He would come up to Ipswich and stay in a hotel with his mother, then the children would go to see him. I had to make sure the children were safe, you see.’
By the time Lewis was commissioned to write a third Z Cars episode for what would be the show’s final series in the summer of 1978, the producing and script editing team of Roderick Graham and Graham Williams had moved on. On Driver, Lewis worked with Simon Masters as script editor and Ron Craddock as producer.
This time script development was more problematic. On 6 April 1977, Masters wrote to Lewis expressing concern that he hadn’t received a response to an earlier letter outlining ‘various points’ in Lewis’s original draft. Craddock wrote to Masters on 25 May outlining further changes he wished to see, mainly in developing existing conflict within the police ranks and creating a more ‘tidy ending’. Craddock writes that he has also taken out ‘the odd swear word’ and ‘unnecessary camera direction’. On 9 June, Craddock wrote to Lewis with a copy of the Driver script he and Simon Masters had discussed, hoping that nothing more would need doing. BBC files include two pages of typed comments signed by Lewis, sharpening detail, with Craddock’s annotated comments.
Unusually for Z Cars, whose episodes were mostly standalone, pressure for each script to weave several storylines towards a satisfactory conclusion for the final series meant a succession of changes to scripts. On 3 August, Simon Masters wrote to Ben Travers as Head of Copyright to inform him that, given further rewrites, which amounted to 25 pages of a 140-page script, the production team thought Lewis should be paid an additional fee. At the end of October, Masters wrote to Lewis to confirm final dialogue changes. He also wanted to let him know he had read the copy of The Rabbit Lewis had given him, that it was, in his opinion, a ‘fine novel’, and that he looked forward to ringing Lewis, as it had ‘awakened in me things I should love to discuss’.
Masters effectively signed off the script for Driver in a letter to Lewis, dated 16 January 1978, in which he acknowledged that Lewis may have been ‘saddened by things that have had to go’. He emphasised it had been ‘purely a necessity of timing’ and goes on to say, ‘I love this script – always have – and greatly look forward to seeing it made.’ Masters invited Lewis to director Terrence Williams’ initial read through at the end of February and hoped he was able to make it, as Masters was to leave the BBC the following day.
Driver was the first episode in the final series of Z Cars, transmitted on 28 June 1978. The arrangement of the traditional theme, Johnny Todd, which had been given a lame cod-funk makeover for previous series, reprised the 1960s original. It was a good sign. Lewis was writing the kind of story at which he excelled. Driver was darker, grittier. The Radio Times’ synopsis is typically Lewis: ‘Even though Eddie Dancen is an ex-con, he and Quilley are next door to being mates. But Eddie has some information about a major crime and that can put a big strain on friendship.’
The story saw Eddie Dancen, now working as a cab driver, drawn into the world of George and Sammy Armstrong, brothers and underworld operators looking to defend their turf against a London gangster and purveyor of porn magazines and blue films, Joey Goldner. When the body of a dead villain is found in Newtown and investigations make the link to one of Eddie’s fares – two dodgy customers ‘from the smoke’ – the ambitious Detective Inspector Madden orders Quilley, now transferred to CID and promoted to Detective Sergeant, to apply pressure. Quilley knows repeated contact with the police places Eddie in a precarious position. When Eddie’s plea, ‘I don’t see, I don’t want to see’ falls on deaf ears, he turns to drink. Quilley’s disillusion reaches new depths when he has to pull Eddie in for questioning a third time. DI Madden conceives a scheme to draw the Armstrongs into the open, letting them know Eddie has ‘gone QE’ (Queen’s Evidence). He waits for the Armstrongs to act.
Driver set the tone for Z Cars’ final series and the work that went into sharpening the script makes the most of Lewis’s story. The writing is precise and the central characters more credible, particularly Quilley. Joining the series as a breezy beat copper in 1969, played by Douglas Fielding, Lewis invested him with a worldweariness and a neat line in sardonic asides. Between them, he and Eddie Dancen’s everyman cabbie draw out the moral dilemma. In the final scenes, we see a frightened Eddie preparing to go on the run. He tells Quilley, ‘It’s either you or them, I don’t know which is worse.’ In the last shot, Eddie is alone, waiting on a bench in the dark, his suitcases by his side.
Taken in the round, Lewis’s collected Z Cars episodes give an insight to the parts of his life that preoccupied him in the mid 1970s. Prisoner is the story of a frightened, lonely man, drowning in whisky and self-pity with a dark past and a darker future. Juvenile updates the tone of The Rabbit and revisits backstory scenes reminiscent of Plender. Driver sees Lewis refocusing on what he does best in the convincing portrayal of life on the fringes of the provincial underworld – the chewing up and spitting out of small men in the face of ruthless ambition.
The appointment of Lewis’s friend, Graham Williams, as series producer for Doctor Who in 1977 came with the clear direction that he was to bring a lighter tone to the show after the successful, but ultimately controversial, stewardship of Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes as producer and script editor. Complaints from influential campaigner Mary Whitehouse that Doctor Who was unfit for children had brought to an end one of the programme’s most successful periods. Williams’ brief was to make the programme less violent and more humorous.
For what would become the sixteenth series of Doctor Who, Williams brought Anthony Read on board as script editor. Keen to make a series with a running theme, echoing the Saturday Morning cinema serials of their youth, they devised the concept of the Doctor’s search for The Key to Time. ‘We wanted to give it a serial element,’ says Read, ‘something that hadn’t been done before. Creating a quest to run through an entire series appealed to us as adding that extra element.’
The idea of commissioning Lewis came from Williams who knew him from Z Cars and liked his writing. Read knew of Lewis’s novels and admired his skills as a storyteller. The approach typified the producers’ aim to broaden the scope of Doctor Who writers. ‘We were bringing in new writers who had been successful in other fields or other areas of TV. I suspect that Graham and Ted had hit it off personally as two of a kind – both were heavy drinkers bordering on alcoholism.’
They called in Lewis for an initial chat at the end of 1977. The meeting went well. Read liked Lewis’s ‘dry northern humour’ and his professional approach. Lewis was invited to write story outlines for four 25 minute episodes for the Doctor Who series, initially titled The Doppelgangers. Read and Williams had the idea of turning the Robin Hood story on its head. ‘Graham thought Ted might be a good bet for such an approach, but it was more tricky than it sounds, because the general ethos of the series, like most drama, always favoured the rebel, with the authorities as the bad guys. We worked out a basic storyline with Ted, and he went off to develop it.’
Lewis submitted the outline, then a detailed breakdown. In Lewis’s storyline, the Doctor and his assistant, Romana, would encounter Robin Hood in their search for the fourth segment of the key to time, but would discover that the ‘hero’ was, in truth, a sinister villain. On that basis, Willams formally commissioned Lewis to write the four part script for the series, now retitled The Shield of Zarak.
Read remembers that the main problem dramatically with Lewis’s story was that Robin Hood inevitably became the central character and was fundamentally unsympathetic. ‘This may have worked okay in Get Carter, where there are virtually no sympathetic characters, but it didn’t work in Doctor Who terms, where you need to have a hero – apart from the Doctor himself, of course.’
Ron Burnett received a weekend visit from Lewis around this time. He had fallen for one of the production secretaries on Doctor Who and brought her to York to meet Ron and Judy. Ron’s memory is that Lewis and the girl, a devout Christian, went for a walk by the river – Ron and Judy’s home is a short walk from the city near the towpath of the River Ouse. ‘Within 15 minutes she came back and asked when was the next train back to London?’ Ron went outside and found Lewis ‘sitting red faced under a tree, grumbling to himself’. After Lewis had gone home, Ron found an empty Martini bottle under the bed. He was still going to the bar, getting a round in and having ‘a couple of snifters’ while he was there. Still trying to keep it a secret. ‘If we were having a meal,’ says Ron, ‘he’d very carefully just have one glass of wine, then drink afterwards’.
Through the summer of 1978, Lewis worked on at least one major rewrite of the Doctor Who script, looking to overcome the difficulties with tone and narrative, but in Read’s opinion Lewis’s story ‘never really gelled’. It seems obvious in hindsight, but Lewis was the wrong writer for the show at the wrong time. He wasn’t a particular fan of Doctor Who and found himself unable to capture the show’s highly individual style. He was by no means alone. Other writers hit the same trouble. ‘It’s a strange, jokey, semi-sci-fi/science fantasy style which is extremely difficult to grasp,’ says Read. Lewis’s creative imagination worked in a different way and what emerged was not a Doctor Who script. ‘It was just too tough and realistic. I don’t remember the exact details, but we tried to steer him back onto the right track until we were forced to decide that it could not be rescued by any further rewrites.’
The script meetings took place in Read’s office in Threshold House, an anonymous block of offices half a mile down the road from BBC Television Centre on Shepherd’s Bush Green. At their final meeting, Read told Lewis they wouldn’t be using the scripts:
‘We parted on friendly terms, with me commiserating with him and accepting some of the blame for selling him a bum steer in the first place and not succeeding in guiding him out of the hole he had dug himself into, scriptwise. Nobody likes firing a writer, and on the few occasions I had to do it, I always did everything I could to soften the blow by explaining exactly why, and reassuring him or her that it didn’t mean they were a bad writer, just that it hadn’t worked this time.’
Read is at pains to point out that, contrary to some versions of events, he has no recollection of any problem over delivery dates and deadlines; neither was Lewis drunk at their final meeting and thrown out of the BBC. Graham Williams was in on their final decision and was equally sympathetic. ‘Naturally,’ says Read, ‘Ted was a bit glum, but by no means suicidal, more resigned to the situation, though after a few drinks in the pub he probably became a touch bitter.’ Lewis made his way to the Bush Hotel, their regular post-meeting watering hole, and spent some time in the bar loudly slagging off ‘that bastard Tony Read’.
Because Lewis had put so much work into the scripts, Williams arranged for his fee to be paid. Issues with payment dragged into 1979. Lewis’s financial dealings, never wholly conventional, had depended on maximising his BBC income. The UK tax regime was tough; many freelancers incorporated, forming companies to take advantage of lower rates of tax. The Channel Islands operated as a tax haven, but the only way to access funds was by going there in person, drawing out cash and bringing it back into the country in contravention of the currency exchange laws. Tony Read remembers Lewis, like many others, ‘making regular trips to collect hard cash’. On one return trip from Jersey or Guernsey, Lewis carried ‘a neat leather attaché case packed with bundles of banknotes’. As Read says, ‘a real Get Carter touch’.
On 11 January, Williams wrote to Ben Travers, Assistant Head of Copyright, to outline the position regarding Lewis’s final payment. He confirmed that episodes one, two and three were delivered but not accepted. There was no record of the fourth script. Williams’ letter states that the decision not to proceed had been agreed mutually by Lewis and Anthony Read. Ben Travers wrote to Emmanuel Wax at ACTAC explaining that he had authorised a final payment for the rejected scripts. Rights to the work reverted to the author. Travers’ letter has a handwritten note with a ring of finality: ‘TED LEWIS – WRITE OFF’.
The myth which emerged around Lewis’s non delivery of the Doctor Who scripts, that he’d arrived at the final meeting drunk and been shown the door by Read and Williams, never working for the BBC again as a result, seems, in all likelihood, to have emanated from Lewis himself. At the time, producers and editors were largely autonomous, able to commission pretty well whoever they wanted, without restrictions, budgets permitting. ‘There was never any blacklist,’ says Read, ‘or even a preferred list.’ For Lewis, always highly self-critical, perhaps it was preferable to have been rejected for being drunk and unmanageable than to have been seen to fall short as a writer. Read isn’t convinced a successful Doctor Who script would have had much effect on bringing Lewis’s work to a new audience. ‘It wouldn’t have been an original, personal piece of work, simply part of a long running series.’ That said, with viewing figures peaking at just over ten million for the series, it would have been a significant achievement.
In truth, this clouds the issue. Lewis was never a BBC writer in the traditional sense. As the television drama pioneers of the 1960s had moved into film, or earned the creative freedom to write and direct on their own terms, Lewis’s brand of dark, deviant intensity was rare. Reading BBC correspondence between creative and executive staff about commissions, contracts and payments, reveals a structure which is intractably hierarchical, in which craft and creativity are subservient to the Corporation’s public service ethos. That isn’t to say that individual writers, directors, and producers weren’t able to work against the grain, only that the appetite for breaking new ground, particularly in long running series, was measured and controlled. With Z Cars, particularly Prisoner and Driver, Lewis navigated a route through the process, creating a handful of the most sympathetic characters of his career; although, as some of the rewrite notes show, his language, tone, and novelistic structure meant that he was steered towards a safer middle ground, never wholly able to subsume his natural flair for noir. The Doctor Who format of the era wouldn’t accommodate his ideas and Lewis could only compromise so far.
In 2011, I met Jonathan Holloway who had adapted and directed Jack’s Return Home for the stage. The Red Shift Theatre Company production which toured extensively in 2005 was titled Get Carter, its source undeniably Lewis’s novel, rather than Hodges’ film. Holloway gave an insight into the way the film and TV business had worked in the 1970s, explaining the demarcation between the Oxbridge educated BBC establishment which, with a few exceptions, rejected anything they considered low or vulgar or difficult; and, in sharp contrast, those ‘down in Soho’ in the independent film and television industry who skirted the fringes of criminality – Michael Klinger’s Soho blue movie connections are a case in point. ITV and the home grown film industry had long had links with the criminal fraternity, never more so than in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Holloway explained how the cars that picked you up – ‘the transport’ – tended to be owner/driver Mercedes ‘driven by blokes you know have a past’ and recalled the 1970s National Theatre strike, largely instigated by ‘Bermondsey families which managed the backstage scene shifting’.
Lewis did good work for the BBC but, in essence, he was a writer whose instincts were independent, almost always testing the boundaries of what was acceptable. The BBC had demanded compromise and he had produced to the best of his ability. Perhaps there was a desire for the respectability that working for the BBC conferred, but it’s easy to imagine how much better a writer he’d have been for a programme like The Sweeney, or writing original standalone crime dramas. It was his turf. He’d more or less created the blueprint.