In Two Minds

On his return to the UK in April 1964, he was immediately back on Tonight, chatting about his time abroad. Then in June, in one giant leap of faith, the BBC announced his appointment as the new editor of Monitor.²

In the history of British televeision, Monitor stands as the seminal arts magazine programme. Established in the 1950s by the presenter and former war hero Huw Wheldon (OBE, MC), it was a revered national institution.³ That said, by 1964 some TV columnists considered Wheldon old-fashioned, and he had become extremely busy, running the documentary and music department. Humphrey Burton had briefly taken over the fortnightly Monitor slot but was, in turn, needed to help manage the new channel, BBC2. So both of them were racking their brains for a talented replacement when a knock was heard at the door. Although Miller portrays his life story as just succumbing to invitations to ‘come out and play’, he can be far more proactive. As he neared his thirtieth year, he was seeking out Wheldon to enquire about preliminary training as a TV director.

The following months were hectic to the point of hair-raising. He needed to be up to speed, planning and producing the new autumn–winter series, however, he had already promised, to return to New York for two months that summer, in order to stage The Old Glory, a trilogy of plays by Robert Lowell. Becoming jumpy, Wheldon insisted that the newcomer make a trial programme before vanishing to the USA. Unscheduled access to studios and cutting rooms had to be sought in a race against the clock and, in this brief interim, Miller became extremely anxious about his stammer.⁵ He asked for an alternative presenter to be hired but that didn’t work out, so a fortnight’s delay in transmission was negotiated while he readied himself and found a way to address the camera without stuttering – squeezing a friendly-faced assistant in beside the lens.⁶

His appointment caused a flurry of excitement in the press. Writing in the Spectator (and happily letting the Private Eye spat lie), Christopher Booker welcomed him as a bubbling spring of innovation, perfect for the director-general Hugh Carleton Greene, who wanted less stuffy programming.⁷ While laced with a kind of nervous laughter, Miller’s own public pronouncements had the cheeky, combative arrogance typical of the era’s Young Turks. ‘Après Huw le deluge,’ he declared, noting that it was like taking over from General de Gaulle, except he was only competing with himself, ‘because’, he said, ‘I’m the only person worth competing with. All I can do is hope people like my Monitor. If they don’t, tough on them.’⁸

One of his production team, Anne James, recalls: ‘Jonathan wanted to toss the camera in the air and do amazing things. I mean if he’d been a musician he would have been one of the Rolling Stones.’¹¹ In his editorial role, he certainly proved that he could be an inspiring gang leader within an institutional framework, and the spirit of intrepid camaraderie was further encouraged by his office being almost beyond the official, a hut perched on the roof of Lime Grove Studios. With retrospective pride and some defensiveness, he argues that everything about the new Monitor was different, right from the opening credits where Wheldon’s ponderous signature tune was subversively jazzed up and hummed by Dudley Moore.

The idea that the series was wholly groundbreaking under his editorship needs some qualification. Wheldon had not been entirely averse to trendy topics, and the young Ken Russell had already made a controversially way-out Monitor feature, Pop Goes the Easel, about Peter Blake and other pop artists.¹² Handheld cameras were being used by French ciné-vérité film directors in the early Sixties. In 1962, That Was the Week That Was had incorporated shots exposing the mechanics of its TV studio, and Ready, Steady, Go! introduced radically jerky camera angles in 1963. That was a youngsters’ pop music show on independent television though, not a highly prestigious BBC arts programme.¹³ As Miller underlines:

I sat down on a couch with Susan Sontag, a Jewish woman no-one had ever heard of in England, and we discussed kitsch in the very first programme . . . I shot [the programme] in a way that had never been done before and that got taken up afterwards by all sorts of people – even soaps now. Of course, the shit hit the fan. Bernard Levin came down on me like an ounce of bricks. He got into a tremendous transport of rage, and others attacked it for its pretentiousness.

The ex-Fringer was, nonetheless, instantly targeted by his old pals. He was now the satirist satirized, the born-mimic being mimicked. Spouting Millerese, John Bird lampooned him – with Eleanor Bron impersonating Sontag – on Ned Sherrin’s BBC show, Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life.¹⁵ Moore and Cook spoofed Monitor’s handheld cameras in their new series Not Only . . . But Also, with their guest star John Lennon lurching around in ludicrous, arty slo-mo on a kid’s swing.¹⁶ Even Bennett seemed to be laughing up his sleeve a little. After contributing to Miller’s series (on the subject of Virginia Woolf), his own hit sketch show On the Margin was launched, featuring a faintly Monitoresque mockumentary about northern working-class artists with a deadpan commentary:

We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner . . . I suppose in a very real sense, I’m a miner writer.¹⁷

That was only a glancing blow, and Miller happily participated in On the Margin, showing off his beaky profile in a Roman skit, playing a centurion named Copius Mucus, opposite Bennett’s laurel-garlanded Spurious Umbilicus. The trouble was that the parodies of Monitor were only the tip of the iceberg. The debate on kitsch caused blazing rows among BBC executives and, over the ensuing months, the TV critics became increasingly incensed. The camerawork was judged distracting and Sontag was derided for posing and spouting banalities. She was, indeed, appallingly pretentious, lolling around in dark glasses in the Warhol feature.

Some thought Miller had been Americanized and now wanted to import the USA’s culture wholesale. By January 1965, the Sunday Times had declared his editorial style, at best, schizophrenic: beatnik one moment, old-school the next.¹⁸ A former colleague from the Spectator, Alan Brien, condemned the interviews for their ‘egg-head back-scratching’, and Christopher Booker retracted all his anticipatory praise, slating the incomer’s ‘own fevered brand of uncritical cultural sycophancy’ as worse than Wheldon’s. Booker has gone so far as to say that it was as if England were going out if its mind, now seeking novelty in an excessive frenzy, a welter of nervous energy and handheld cameras behind which, in all directions, lay nothing but dust.¹⁹

Miller’s pre-publicity drive had been asking for trouble, sounding arrogant to some while raising others’ hopes too high. Unable to resist talking up his big ideas in advance, he had (not for the last time) prompted reviewers to compare and contrast the theory with the end product. He evidently found the critical shelling traumatic, for he comments:

I think most of my sort of paranoid suspicion about what the English think of me was generated by the response to Monitor. I could do no wrong during Beyond the Fringe . . . Then I did Monitor and the house fell down around my ears . . . Around me was secreted this reputation of being a blabbering ‘pseud’. That was the first time I came up against ‘too clever by half’. I’ve never been able to eliminate that, and I’m now endlessly suspicious.

Dear Sir,

It has become fashionable . . . to take indiscriminate pot shots at MONITOR . . . Mr J. B. Priestley writing last week in your columns . . . [says it] has got bogged down on the corner of Madison Avenue and 57th Street. This is the sort of rash half-truth which passes for criticism which we have been forced to grin and bear for the last year. Now the grinning has to stop.20

What was, in fact, abruptly curtailed was his own two-year contract, and Monitor itself. Even as his letter was going to print, the programme was terminated, officially being absorbed into BBC1’s new arts slot, Sunday Night.²¹

He acknowledges that he made mistakes, having to take many decisions in a rush. Humphrey Burton remarks dryly: ‘Jonathan helped to close it down – “scuppered” is another word for it.’²² Nevertheless, he concludes, ‘Doing Andy Warhol was very adventurous . . . and, with hindsight, I don’t think of [that final leg] as a failure at all. I think of it as a noble and very exciting experiment.’ Melvyn Bragg, who was a relative fledgling on the production team, thinks Miller was tremendous, just badly placed by the Corporation. ‘Monitor was very formal. Jonathan was rangy and omnivorous,’ he observes. ‘His utter, undoubted, original brilliance was a shot in the arm which television needed . . . but he needed a looser format.’²³

Jackie MacGowran [the participating Irish actor] told us that Beckett had loved Jonathan Miller in Beyond the Fringe, never missed Monitor, and would love to be on the programme . . . and when the bill [for the meal] came you weren’t to put your hand in your pocket, for God’s sake, because Sam was the soul of generosity . . . So when the bill came, we all waited and waited, and Beckett was, like all artists, totally tight-fisted, he hated what we were doing and had never heard of Jonathan! . . . We nearly killed Jackie MacGowran.²⁵

Memorably too, Anthony Burgess came into the studio to contribute to a strand of prerecorded interviews on provocative subjects. He chose to talk (as you do) about sexual neuroses in Malay, not least the primitive fear of one’s penis vanishing up one’s anus. Everybody on set treated this with complete seriousness and thanked the great man politely as he departed. Very businesslike, Miller stepped back in front of the cameras, just to round off, saying: ‘Well, that’s all from Monitor tonight. Next week –’. Then with a demure ‘Would you excuse me’, he launched into an explosive parody, pretending to madly hammer his penis to his thigh and imitating Burgess remorselessly until the cameramen were shaking and howling with laughter. ‘We actually had to stop recording and come back another day,’ says Garland. So, on one level at least, Monitor died laughing.

To its great credit, the BBC immediately opened another door to Miller, engaging him as a producer-director of screenplays for the Sunday Night slot. He was transported straight from recording Monitor’s final programme to arrive in the village of Wicken, on the border of Buckinghamshire, at midnight on 11 July. At nine the next morning he began filming The Drinking Party, a dramatization of Plato’s The Symposium, in the nearby grounds of Stowe public school. Shifting away from the avant-garde and going to work on a canonical (though not well-known) text in the Arcadian English countryside was a wise move, one likely to soothe most conservative viewers.

Several of his old satirical colleagues were among his cast, most of them lodging with him at the Old Rectory, a bed-and-breakfast run by Wicken’s Reverend Hoskins. Alan Bennett, John Fortune, the sketch-writing actor Robert Gillespie and the ex-Footlighter Julian Jebb were on board, along with Michael Gough and Leo McKern.26 Thus, to an extent, The Drinking Party was to continue Miller the comedian’s slant on philosophers, investing dusty passages with sly humour.²⁷ He was, however, making a thinking man’s film here, not a skit, and his fellow wits from Oxbridge were proving their credentials as serious actors.

The Drinking Party additionally saw Miller, the emergent director, developing two strategies that were to become recurrent trademarks. First, he chose to convert a non-dramatic script (The Symposium being a philosophical dialogue but not a play in any full sense).²⁸ Second, he changed the setting to an unexpected point in time. Ditching the togas was a stroke of genius (perhaps subconsciously inspired by Ken Russell’s Debussy Film, which set its historic subject in a Sixties frame). Miller knew that The Symposium had been recited informally in Renaissance intellectual circles, and he wanted to have it spoken and discussed in a comparable modern-day setting. The solution was to have a reunion of public school scholars, honouring their Greek and Latin master at a black-tie dinner. By way of postprandial entertainment, they would all take on the roles of Plato’s characters – who variously define the nature of love – with their teacher (McKern) playing the sage Socrates.

Miller’s old headmaster, R. L. James, must have rejoiced at his star pupil’s return to the classics, though The Drinking Party actually looks more like a nostalgic nod to the Cambridge Apostles, or to St Paul’s Mr Pask and his set of bright boys.²⁹ Certainly, Miller united the academic and the pastoral with exquisite elegance, filming the dinner al fresco on the portico of the Queen’s Temple, a neoclassical folly in one of Stowe School’s leafy glades.

His years of avid cinema-going stood him in good stead, with discernible influences including Alain Resnais’ art-house movie Last Year at Marienbad (from 1961).³⁰ Having not been a director on Monitor however, he was again having to learn on the job. His cameraman, Charles Parnall, was a superb guiding light and Miller soon picked up the jargon, happily mucking in with the technical crew in a manner that was to become characteristic. He may have been raised in a household with a cook, nanny and chauffeur, yet he is never sniffy about craftsmanlike practicalities, in fact decidedly relishing the idea of such hands-on work.

The weather was harder to deal with, as he faced six rainy days out of ten. Resourcefully, he embraced the added naturalism, recording one downpour and creating continuity by spattering his actors with a watering can when the afternoon turned out dry.

The TV critics were highly impressed when the film was broadcast in November 1965, putting Miller back in their good books. The Sunday Times said there had never been a programme more likely to start a philosophy boom. The FT applauded his directorial imagination and dexterity, and even the tabloids loved how Socrates’ ruminations sounded new-minted.³² Jubilant viewers called for more, declaring it one of the finest things they had seen on television. One letter particularly catches the eye in the BBC’s archives:

Dear Jonathan Miller,

The Drinking Party was wonderful. Wonderfully conceived, organised, directed, played. And that text! I have to tell you it was a triumph. Thank you.

Harold Pinter

Malcolm Muggeridge sent a telegram saying ‘UTTERLY ENCHANTED’, and the in-house congrats from Wheldon read: ‘At long last, I really feel that things are going to work. I was delighted with the symposium [sic].’ What was truly remarkable, the executive producer Stephen Hearst noted, was that film directing normally took years to learn, but this was masterly.³³

On the night The Drinking Party was transmitted, Miller was in another BBC studio, helping out as a panellist on Call My Bluff. He soon became a regular on the dictionary-definition game show, smoking like a chimney alongside Frank Muir. The accounts department was dreadfully confused, not knowing how to categorize this celebrity guest/on-staff director – fish and fowl. That winter he also appeared, half portraying himself and half caricaturing a Gloucester Crescent champagne socialist, in a TV sketch called ‘Camden Town Tramp’, written by Bennett. This was based on an actual incident when an aged down-and-out had knocked at the Millers’ door, thinking it was still a rooming-house. In the fictional version, Miller and his chum were seen inviting the tramp in for a superficially humane chat then bundling him into their Rolls, saying they were off to the starry Caprice restaurant but could easily drop him at a doss house. In real life, Miller and Bennett – feeling rather more guilty about the district’s gentrification – had driven the old man around in Bennett’s Mini searching for cheap lodgings before trying to deposit him at a hostel. Presuming to jump the queue, they nearly got themselves lynched, eventually leaving the poor geezer at the police station.34 Bennett would, of course, later surrender his front drive in the Crescent to Miss Shepherd, the batty bag lady who became famous via his autobiographical play The Lady in the Van.

From the seed of ‘Camden Town Tramp’, Bennett developed Life and Times in NW1 in the form of sketches for his TV series On the Margin. The neighbourhood’s chatterati were depicted as poseurs, addicted to casual-chic dinner parties and stripped-pine floors, adopting left-wing stances while owning weekend cottages or getting black home-helps to do their chores. Bennett’s characters were rapidly turned into a strip cartoon in the Listener. Drawn by Marc (aka Mark Boxer), Bernard Goldblatt was NW1’s academic TV presenter and looked distinctly like Miller: a lanky, curly-haired fellow with a pointy nose who subjected soccer matches to anthropological analyses and got critically panned for his hip arts programme.³⁵ The Millers, furthermore, were the model, at least in part, for the Life and Times couple called Nigel and Jane Knocker-Threw, having converted their basement flat into an open-plan kitchen.

Karl Miller, as Rachel’s brother-in-law, naturally appreciated the send-up when he took over the Listener’s editorship in the mid-1960s.³⁶ Another neighbour, Nick Tomalin, wrote humorously about the street’s inhabitants in his Sunday Times ‘Atticus’ column, and there was even a short-lived soap opera called The Cres, like some upper-middle-class Brookside or North-WestEnders.³⁷

The Millers enjoyed the collective joke, but bleak news arrived on the November day in 1965 when ‘Camden Town Tramp’ was being filmed in the street. Rachel received a phone call which informed her of Betty Miller’s death, then she had to bear those tidings, interrupting the jocular proceedings out in the Rolls. The bereaved son’s reaction was simply to go on working. Refusing to stop may have been his way of suppressing the shock, or a cold response to the demise of a parent whom he had long regarded as insufficiently loving. He says that he never really grieved for her.

It should be explained that he had already, in a way, lost the sparky mother with whom he had bonded as a teenager because Betty had succumbed to early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, or presenile dementia, which was little understood and more commonly just called ‘senility’ at the time. She only lived to the age of 55. Her biographies of Tennyson and Kipling were left unfinished.

The first indication of her illness, which Rachel had noticed, was when she almost dropped the newborn Tom, as if she had forgotten she was holding him. Thereafter, the disintegration was horrendously fast. While Miller was in the States, he relayed to Sacks – in a letter expressing sympathy for the arthritically crippled Emanuel – how his mother was already ‘living in a fly-swarm of fantasy’ and ‘had become floridly deluded and unmanageable at home, assaulting my reasonable, rabbinical old father in the middle of the night like a demented incubus’.³⁸ In these near-surreal incidents, she would enter Emanuel’s room, ‘fully clothed and with hat and umbrella and lie down full length on him while he feebly fought off her dotty advances’, as Miller’s letter explained. He described his father as being ‘in a transport of guilt and grief’, but by the time he and Rachel returned to England, Betty was incarcerated in Friern Mental Hospital, a vast mental institution in north London, formerly known as Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum.

Publicly, he responded by working as the president of the Alzheimer’s Society from the age of 54, fronting their public appeals. He is, today, their president emeritus. He has presented two television series, Who Cares? and Who Cares Now?, and has talked on many other programmes about the disease, about social service provisions, the strains placed on home life, and how families can cope. This has been partially driven by self-reproach because, as he acknowledges, he was ‘not very caring at all’ during his mother’s degeneration.⁴⁰

The television films he made in 1966 were also, perhaps, an oblique form of grieving. Having been invited to direct for the BBC’s Sunday Night, he came up with Mr Sludge the Medium, a drama documentary about Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. Specifically, it portrayed the couple’s interactions with the medium Daniel Dunglas Home, when they were struggling with bereavement. That was the very subject which Betty had tried to turn into a stage play entitled Shadow on the Window. Mr Sludge was recorded just two months after her funeral and Miller admitted that his erstwhile obsession with mortality had returned.⁴¹

He was, of course, not cherishing notions of personally communing with the dead via séances. He openly scorned the resurgent spiritualism of the Sixties as bosh, just as he had ridiculed the idea of ghosts in the schoolboy debates at St Paul’s.⁴² What he was interested in, he said, was the history of ideas. An opening commentary was attached to Mr Sludge explaining why the bereaved in Victorian Britain, where the death rate remained high, sought comfort from mediums. Christian beliefs had fundamentally been eroded by Darwinism.

Not long after that came Whistle and I’ll Come to You, made for BBC1 and extremely spooky. Now classified by the British Film Institute as a masterpiece of economical horror, this short drama was stunningly shot, in black-and-white, around an isolated English seaside hotel and on windswept shores, under lowering clouds. There were shades of Hitchcock here, of Orson Welles and of Bill Brandt’s sinister, dream-tinged photographs.⁴⁵ Coincidentally, Miller was one of Brandt’s subjects in 1966: pictured at home in Gloucester Crescent with a Gothic, morbid slant, a huge gramophone horn snaking out of the shadows behind him and a pickled brain, in a jar, on a bookshelf.

Whistle and I’ll Come to You was Miller’s own comical and menacing adaptation of M. R. James’ short story. A Cambridge professor (played by Michael Hordern) takes a lonely holiday. Conversing briefly with one gentleman in the hotel dining-room, he dismisses the idea of ghosts with smug scepticism. However, having discovered a bone whistle in an overgrown graveyard (cryptically inscribed, in Latin, with ‘Who is this who is coming?’), he blows it and finds himself hounded by a spectre.

Miller’s adaptation was daringly free compared to other TV dramatizations of James’ works in the Sixties and Seventies. Picking up on the author’s comment that Professor Parkins was ‘something of an old woman’, the director altered the character from a precisely spoken young man into a fussy, aged bachelor. He wrote the dialogue himself, departing from James’ original exchanges and adding droll philosophical pedantry, a little like his old Bertrand Russell skit.⁴⁶

Generated without luxurious special effects, the phantom in Whistle is shroud-like and peculiarly terrifying. For its first appearance, on a deserted beach, the technical crew hung a soaked, tattered cloth from an invisible string. Keeping themselves out of shot, they brought it swooping towards the camera as it twisted in a gale. Combined with a magnified soundtrack, the footage was stretched out by printing every frame twice. This created a slowed-down and simultaneously jerky effect: a blurred image of turmoil that was disturbing, glutinous and aggressive.

The ghost ultimately sends the professor demented. In the closing shots, we see him lurching from his bed in the small hours, aghast and staring as a sheet rises up and takes on a violent, writhing life of its own, like a half-waking nightmare. Parkins loses the power of speech, regressively sucking his thumb as he lets out a wordless wail, like a patient in a mental hospital ward.⁴⁷ The Sunday Times called the climax ‘as powerful as anything Hitchcock ever did’. Many years later, viewers would rank it among the 100 most petrifying moments ever shown on screen.⁴⁸

Whistle functions as a more straightforward ghost story too, portraying an intellectual sceptic shattered by a paranormal experience. When pushed, Miller admits that the supernatural has always drawn him. He does not believe in it, he says, yet is scared by the idea of it, by its incomprehensibility, by the notion that ghosts hover unclassifiably between life and death. As with Parkins, there are parts of his mind which his reasoning cannot reach for he would, he confesses, be afraid to spend the night in a reportedly haunted room.⁵¹

What the psychosexual and supernatural readings of Whistle have crucially overlooked is that Hordern is being symbolically haunted by death. The ghoul on the beach resembles a cowled Grim Reaper, suddenly coming for Parkins like the wind: an image surely charged with some personal horror for the director, given his recent experience of Betty’s galloping dementia and early grave.

As for the practicalities of making Whistle and Mr Sludge the Medium, the recording sessions for both had become somewhat fraught. Miller had prepared no shooting script for Whistle: a hair-raising approach that demanded improvisation then major structural work in the cutting room. Meanwhile, Kenneth Haigh (who famously portrayed John Osborne’s angry young Jimmy Porter) was playing Daniel Dunglas Home in Mr Sludge and fuming because this required single takes of impossibly long monologues.⁵²

The audience response to Mr Sludge was uneven, with some viewers enthralled and others complaining about prolix lectures in period costume.⁵³ Truth be told, the real drama had occurred prior to filming when Sam Rosenberg – the original co-author of Betty’s play, Shadow on the Window – more or less accused Miller of plagiarism and threatened legal action (alarmingly like Bridget Riley before). Writing to Huw Wheldon, Rosenberg warned that the BBC would proceed at its peril and explained how, having become friendly with Miller in the USA, he was shocked to drop in at Gloucester Crescent and learn, from a fellow guest, that their host was now working on his own TV drama about Daniel Dunglas Home. He suspected this would crib its characters, milieu and much more from Shadow on the Window which he and Miller had previously discussed with a plan to see it belatedly produced.⁵⁴

Miller almost had to bring Alan Bennett home in a coffin, racing out to Sardinia to help save his life just when The Death of Socrates was going through its final edit. ‘Fringe Boy in Deathbed Drama’, shrieked the Daily Mirror.⁵⁷ Bennett had been holidaying with Rachel and another friend when, suffering from internal bleeding, he had been rushed to a hospital in Olbia. This institution, Rachel soon discovered, was run by staggeringly incompetent monks who appeared to think blood-loss meant the patient had a surfeit. When Miller arrived to support his beleaguered wife, he dashed off a letter to the Death of Socrates team from the inappropriately named Jolly Hotel. Dated ‘Friday the God knows what’, it concluded, ‘Alan remains in jeopardy though the language, the facilities and so on make it almost impossible to know how ill he is . . . I suspect very.’⁵⁸

Whether or not he got on his old co-star’s nerves was irrelevant for the time being, though he is notably absent from Bennett’s account of this episode in Untold Stories (2005).⁵⁹ Miller just recalls that he stayed up all night, frantically cross-matching blood. At least his boring stint at Addenbrooke’s, specializing in that, proved invaluable.

He and Rachel insisted on setting up a bed alongside the patient so they could provide round-the-clock supervision of the Fate Bene Fratelli, the brethren whom, with gallows humour, they rechristened the Fate Male for being so deleterious. Bennett’s depiction of clueless quacks, in The Madness of George III, may well have germinated in Olbia. Luckily, the invalid survived and returned to England to be in Miller’s absolutely superb Alice in Wonderland.

‘Wanted: one girl with no stage experience, not very pretty but curiously plain, sallow and a bit priggish, Rossetti-like rather than Tenniel.’ A nationwide search was on for Alice, and the BBC was placing other quirky adverts in the British press.⁶⁰ They were seeking a mildewed vicarage (for scenes of Alice at home), an incredibly long corridor and freelance hedgehogs.

There was a time when meadow, grove and stream

The earth, and every common sight, to me did seem apparelled in celestial light

The glory and the freshness of a dream . . .

It is not now as it hath been of yore . . .

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.⁶²

No commercial film companies were brave enough to run with the director’s vision, but the BBC rose to the occasion and backed it to the hilt, providing a production budget of £25,000, an unheard-of amount for a single drama at that time. This was peanuts, all the same, for what Miller envisaged, which was as good as a movie. After the spartan Death of Socrates, his Alice was to evoke what he termed the hallucinatory realism and bursting, fatal ripeness of the Pre-Raphaelites. It was to be ‘sunlit’ and simultaneously ‘stuffed’, as if containing the entire visual contents of the child’s mind, every object and surface she had ever seen and forgotten.⁶³

The BBC’s head of scenery sent an incredulous query to Humphrey Burton asking what on earth would be left for Ken Russell’s film on the Pre-Raphaelites, given the props request from Miller’s designer.⁶⁴ Julia Trevelyan Oman asked for around 5,000 items – cheval mirrors, glass-domed clocks, Arum lilies, prams, Bath chairs, butterfly nets, taxidermically preserved animals – and she went on to build wonderful sets at the Ealing Studios. Giant and tiny versions were constructed of the passageway where Alice grows and shrinks as she tries to get through the door to the rose garden. A vast tiered courtroom began to materialize as well – merging elements of a chapel, playhouse and hotel – for the climactic trial scene, when the heroine faces the death penalty for growing up(wards).

With his fame and eloquent charm, he persuaded a stack of star players to appear in Alice for diminutive pay packets (£500 tops): Peter Sellers was the King of Hearts, Michael Redgrave the Caterpillar, and Wilfrid Brambell (from Steptoe and Son) a darting White Rabbit. As the Mock Turtle, John Gielgud danced the Lobster Quadrille at the seaside – on Winchelsea’s Camber Sands – with Malcolm Muggeridge’s Gryphon (a remarkable debut for the sexagenarian journalist). Alison Leggatt played the axe-happy Queen like a snappy, tyrannical Victoria.⁶⁶ Signing up again were Leo McKern (bizarrely perfect as the Ugly Duchess), Peter Cook (the Mad Hatter), plus Michael Gough, John Bird, Julian Jebb and Alan Bennett with side-whiskers (respectively cast as the March Hare, Frog Footman, Young Crab and pedantic Mouse). Close scrutiny of the caucus race even reveals the young Eric Idle – subsequently of Monty Python fame – cavorting like a loon around the choir stalls of a bare, ruined chapel.

Having Carroll’s characters played in period costume but without animal masks, Miller was analytically decoding the author’s dreamwork, exposing what Oxford types the fantastical creatures really represented. At the same time, bringing out Gielgud’s inherent turtlishness or how John Bird had a frog in his face had a peculiarly oneiric effect. After all, a dreamer can see a person and be aware that this individual is somehow, simultaneously, a white rabbit or a playing card.⁶⁷

Alice was portrayed by the unknown Anne-Marie Mallik, a dignified schoolgirl of Indian-French stock with a mane of dark hair. Miller knew she was perfect as soon as he spotted her photograph in a pile of 700 others, almost all of them hopelessly jolly would-be starlets. Having her own growing pains, Mallik was unhappy in her remarried father’s household (run by Victorian-style staff) and was suffering from a frosty housemistress at school. However, she flourished that summer with Miller and his troupe of actors. He was gently amicable with her and generous with his time, as her chaperone recalls.⁶⁸ The verbal pyrotechnics he saved for the grown-ups.

Mallik herself, who went on to become a barrister, says it was marvellous to be treated like a young adult by everybody. The director cherished her flat-toned voice and encouraged her to sustain an air of expressionless indifference, envisaging a solemn infanta in a stiff silk frock. He was influenced by European cinema’s penchant for radically low-key acting and non-professional performers (as in Pasolini’s Gospel According to St Matthew from 1964).⁶⁹ He emphasized that Alice’s detachment – looking on from the periphery of the action – specifically captured the trance-like serenity of a dreamer.

Peter Sellers could be a pain in the neck. He improvised absurd Carrollian lines for the dim-witted King superbly, but then delayed the shoot with starry sulks and baloney about his astrological signs being inauspicious. Planes from a nearby air base disrupted the recording of the meadow scenes for the start of the film, where Alice is seen lying down and drowsing. The whole production briefly ground to a halt, moreover, when Tony Palmer got excited about emergent colour TV technology, forcefully arguing that all the black-and-white footage should be reshot.⁷² With Sellers being unavailable for a remake, they stuck to monochrome, and Miller took the other snags in his stride.

The noisy planes were obliterated with a spellbinding tabla and sitar score composed by Ravi Shankar, who was just emerging as an international star and influencing the Beatle, George Harrison.⁷³ Miller handled Sellers so well that he was rewarded with a top-of-the-range camera, a token of appreciation from the moody luminary.⁷⁴ The ex-Fringer appeared to be getting on with Peter Cook as well. During breaks, they concocted comic fantasies about a preposterous English scientist named Geoffrey Hovercraft.⁷⁵ Eric Idle remembers Miller and Bennett being, likewise, on good form. ‘That was one of the best times I ever had!’ he exclaims. ‘Suddenly there I was filming with my hero [as my director] . . . on this Magical Mystery Tour of country houses, and I went bowling with Jonathan and Alan Bennett which was hilarious . . . They’d do these great [jokey] grumbles, you know, with Alan saying, “You’re only winning because you’re Jewish!”’⁷⁶

Freda Dowie, having played Alice’s nursemaid in an early scene, even enjoyed splashing around up to her neck in the Pool of Tears. Miller crouched at the edge, dispensing slugs of brandy and encouraging everyone to look daft while they swam round and round in Victorian garb. Dowie reminisces: ‘I got drunker and drunker and was the last one in because I did look very dotty. Then I was bundled out – because I was starting to shiver – into a hot mustard bath and wrapped in huge towels, and Jonathan came rushing in and gave me a huge hug. That was giddy and super. One would’, she says, ‘have done anything for him because of his enthusiasm.’

The pre-publicity was flying high with Lord Snowdon taking photographs on location for Vogue, and with Life magazine making Alice its cover story.⁷⁹ Even the Swedish, French, Italian and Yugoslavian press were writing about the production. Described by one colleague as ‘not shy about putting himself forward’, Palmer was marketing the film like crazy, in a manner not to everybody’s taste. He had visions of BBC merchandise ranging from Mad Hatter tea-sets to a pop version of the soundtrack’s hymn, ‘Immortal, Invisible’. He also, as Burton wryly recollects, kept plastering BBC Television Centre with enormous promotional photographs and removing all other productions’ pictures in the middle of the night, a tactic that was creating ‘something of a sensation’.

Perhaps aggravated by the colour-film crisis, Miller had a bust-up with him at the editorial stage. Harbouring mixed feelings about his ex-boss, Palmer says Miller convinced himself, with ‘a demented sense of insecurity’, that his junior had a better degree than his own. ‘It became a complete obsession, as well as the fact that it’s always the assistant director who gets the girls,’ Palmer remarks, and he adds:

I finally got demoted to production assistant after I shouted at him . . . I really harangued him about just giving the film to an editor [Pam Bosworth] . . . I kept saying, ‘You know there’s wonderful material going straight down the tubes and you really shouldn’t allow that to happen.’ It was my attempt really to boost his confidence, but he took this as criticism . . .

I was told by Huw Wheldon that, later on, Jonathan had to write a report on me and it was the funniest thing he had ever read . . . Apparently I was someone who had lashed out with criticism at every conceivable opportunity. I was completely irresponsible in my use of criticism and so on . . . I actually did confront Jonathan with that at one point [and he said]: ‘Oh no, I didn’t mean it as badly as that!’

Palmer relates how he introduced Miller to Shankar’s music as well, driving him to a concert and noting, en route, how he sank into his seat at every traffic light to avoid recognition.⁸⁰ He continues:

So we arrive at the Festival Hall, and Jonathan sits at the back of the box, I thought rather ostentatiously reading a book. In a sitar concert they tune up for an age . . . Jonathan couldn’t see. All he could hear was this tuning-up noise. And he leaned forward to me and said: ‘That’s it. That’s the music we need.’

He was very energetic and enthusiastic, then when I edited the film and gave my first private showing of it, he was discovered sloping around the corridors of the East Tower [at the Television Centre] telling people it was an unmitigated disaster . . . I had a row with him about it. He seemed rather shamefaced but was already on the edge of realising his own ambitions and he became a rather successful film director.81

He goes on to recount, with amusement, how Wheldon responded to the rough cut, first nodding with appreciative gravitas and calling it magisterial. When its creator contended that it was still a bit too long, Wheldon sagely shook his head. ‘No, no, it’s not a bit too long,’ he opined. ‘It’s DISASTROUSLY too long!’ Miller took that criticism in good heart as he went back to work and completed the final cut.⁸² Alice in Wonderland was then all set, scheduled for broadcast, in an afternoon slot, on Christmas Day.

In the interim, jumping continents, Miller turned up in the US to have another stab at staging a lucrative show in the commercial theatre, undeterred by the previous meltdown of World War Two and a Half. The sex comedy Come Live with Me, by Lee Minoff and Stanley Price, was big news for it was to mark the Broadway debut of Soupy Sales, a hugely popular TV comic. There was even a televised press conference when Sales signed his contract under a barrage of flash-bulbs, declaring that this collaboration with Miller would be a blast.⁸³

By the time the show was due to come into town, feature writers who had sneaked a glimpse of rehearsals were reporting a chalk-and-cheese calamity. The pairing was surely a bad joke, the equivalent of Peter Brook directing the Three Stooges. Sales was out of his depth and floundering wildly, streaming sweat, forgetting his blocking and asking endless questions. The esoteric answers which he received from Miller – referring to emotional tropism and the stereoscopic merging of actor and character – were as obscure as a Delphic oracle to the slapstick clown. ‘This rehearsing is driving me nuts!’ he howled. Miller maintained a remarkably diplomatic front, insisting this was not complete hell or intellectual slumming. He really appreciated Minoff and Price’s unpretentiousness, or so he told the press. By opening night he had bolted nevertheless, saying that his wife was expecting another baby and it was arriving sooner than planned.⁸⁴

This was a fib. His departure was premature rather than his daughter Kate’s arrival in February 1967, albeit that the pregnant Rachel had needed some nursing to get over bronchitis. The papers quoted one of Miller’s Manhattan associates saying his professional fickleness might relate to his excessive juvenility or ‘the very confused little boy in Jonathan’.⁸⁵ He himself now freely acknowledges this project was not his bag and was a complete catastrophe: a classic case of a disastrous try-out in New Haven followed by frenzied rewrites in Philadelphia, with people pacing round smoke-filled rooms at 4 a.m., trying to invent new characters and muttering, ‘I mean, Christ, she’s got to have a mother!’

His narcissism bled all over the play . . . and he was, certainly, very unpleasant to me, as if he was mad at me because I was a playwright . . . [or] was envious because I was younger or better looking . . . Jonathan ruined the play and, when he saw it was ruined, he wanted out, and took his name off it.86 He was so terrible. During one of the performances, he was sitting on the stairs of the theatre in Philadelphia. I came in and he said ‘What’s going to happen to me? Nobody knows you, but the whole world knows me’ – and he was practically weeping. It was a huge mistake for me to approve him and to allow Soupy Sales to be in it . . . It is one of the biggest regrets of my life. I have never been able to get over it.

Minoff, who later became a psychotherapist, may have felt slightly better after he slipped a satirical portrait of Miller into the Beatles’ animated film Yellow Submarine, which he co-scripted. The hyper-intellectual cartoon character Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. (or Nowhere Man) blathers away in Latin-strewn gibberish, boasting of his learned multi-tasking and manically typing his own reviews, but fundamentally being a sad nobody. ‘Yes,’ says Minoff, ‘I based Jeremy Hillary Boob on Miller, an intellectualizer who knocks people left and right . . . a great talker who says nothing.’

Back in England, Alice had been rescheduled. That may sound inconsequential but the adjustment sparked an amazing outcry, with the furore spreading as far as Parliament. Wheldon had simply decided this was a grown-up take on Carroll’s book and shunted the broadcast to after 9 p.m. on 28 December. Immediately, aggressive traditionalists of the Mary Whitehouse brigade were up in arms, supporting her adamant new Clean Up TV campaign. They assumed, before seeing the film, that Miller must have sacrilegiously tampered with this little national treasure, turning it into some kind of Freudian nightmare, especially since Dennis Potter’s BBC biodrama Alice, shown the previous year, highlighted the original author’s unsettling obsession with Alice Liddell. Peter Cook probably didn’t help, quipping on The World at One that Miller’s piece had been renamed Analysis in Wonderland.⁸⁷

Not amused, the Conservative MP James Dance raised a hopping-mad motion in the Commons, deploring the perversion and violence being imposed on nice children’s stories by the Corporation. Labour’s William Hamling cried that he wanted to be left with his illusions. The Daily Mail’s front-page headline screamed that Miller’s Alice was X-rated.88 It was as if he were being subjected to a surreal judicial system inherited from the Queen of Hearts: sentence first, verdict afterwards.⁸⁹

The matter was so avidly debated that, when it came to the critics’ preview, a capacious West End cinema had to be booked to cope with the demand for seats. When broadcast, the film drew twelve and a half million viewers. Some members of the public rang the BBC to insist that it was a blasphemous travesty, the worst programme ever aired.⁹⁰ One spluttered that Mr Miller should be committed to Broadmoor. For the young star, Mallik, there was a particularly bitter twist. Her old-fashioned stepmother, having submitted Anne-Marie’s photograph in the first place, joined the ranks of the outraged. ‘It was very difficult and upsetting. She hated the film,’ Mallik recalls, ‘and was determined all contact was going to be broken with everybody . . . although Jonathan wrote to me for a while at school.’

Miller remembers the press reaction being dreadful, but most reports indicated, positively, that the previous uproar had been insane. If there was sexual symbolism or menace, it was hardly obtrusive: a man sitting in a bath by a path, completely ignored by Alice; a hole in a window pane; a drag Duchess. A few TV critics declared the production plain dreary. Others realized that the former Fringer and TV presenter had morphed into an astoundingly assured art-house film-maker. In the Sun, Nancy Banks-Smith described the production as ‘fascinating and fearful, beautiful and mad’, while the Guardian and Observer hailed it as Miller’s apotheosis, in a class by itself, and a likely festival prize-winner were it on the big screen.⁹¹

Viewers also phoned the BBC, praising it as sheer genius, the best thing it had ever broadcast. A 1970s poll, ascertaining the most authentically dreamlike films of all time, would place Miller’s Alice in the top five along with works by Ingmar Bergman and Fellini, and its influence was to seep, later, into Peter Greenaway’s films.⁹²

At the time, Gielgud sent a letter of warm congratulations, saying it was ‘an enormously bold thing to have conceived and carried through’ and some shots were ‘as beautiful as the best of Resnais and Antonioni – only really English . . . I am very proud to be in a corner of it.’ For its imagery, its sinister undertow and dreamlike disjunctiveness, Miller’s film might be compared to other classics, from Cocteau’s Orphée to Orson Welles’ The Trial or Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (those last two both being from 1962). The BBC’s director-general, Hugh Carleton Greene, instantly deemed it a near-masterpiece, and his colleague Stephen Hearst, looking back four decades later, said: ‘It now strikes me as a total masterpiece.’⁹³ It truly is one of the best things Miller has ever done and, being on film, it will probably stand as his chef-d’oeuvre for perpetuity. Even Tony Palmer underlines, ‘Many of the things about Alice in Wonderland – including the things that he and I argued about furiously – are absolutely wonderful.’⁹⁴

Fundamentally, Dodgson’s 1860s satire – for such it was, amusing youngsters by sending up old, sententious types – tallied with the spirit of the 1960s. Thus the perceptive viewer of the film was able to see double: the two decades translucently overlaid, though a century apart, as if there were a pleat in time. Redgrave’s Caterpillar is, for instance, an aged scholarly fellow of Alice Liddell’s epoch, in pince-nez and embroidered smoking-cap. Simultaneously, as Mallik tosses her head, challenging his authority and sanctimonious dictums, one senses that he represents the establishment geriarchy at which the young Miller bridled. Fingertips pressed lightly together, he momentarily evokes St Paul’s High Master. Perhaps this Caterpillar’s book-lined study even has a touch of Emanuel’s consultation room, as Redgrave puts Mallik under his magnifying glass but fails to solve her growing pains.⁹⁶

The extremely long corridor down which Miller’s Alice runs may have harked back to St Paul’s, together with the reverberations of the school hymn ‘Immortal, Invisible’. Alongside that, Nanny Morgan surely surfaces, transformed into Dowie’s sinisterly whispering servant and McKern’s infant-thwacking Ugly Duchess, who wears a nursemaid’s uniform.⁹⁷ By the director’s own admission, the long Chekhovian silences at the Mad Hatter’s tea party were based on his childhood memories, ‘those hot summer afternoons when people were sitting around in the garden . . . conversation just simply seemed to seep away into the grass and there was nothing left to do at all’.⁹⁸

His location-seeking treks across England, envisaging angels ripening like dragonfly larvae under the vegetation, sound like a trip back to his wartime years as an imaginative little boy in the countryside. The summer meadow scenes, when permeated with an urgent tabla beat, are not so far off the Wye Valley with its ‘drugged’ heat and the cuckoo’s ‘morse’, pregnant with menace during World War 2. Also, as Mallik walks more serenely though leafy woods and beside pastoral streams, Sid Pask’s rural Field Club expeditions spring to mind.

This is a biologist’s Alice, its mise-en-scène scattered with stuffed animals, some in glass cases, like the Natural History Museum or Great-Aunt Brenda’s house with its display cabinets.⁹⁹ Anatomical drawings are strewn around, and the trial scene’s crazy zoological soundtrack has Miller reverting (not for the last time) to his childhood chicken impersonations.

This film may, moreover, be haunted by memories of Betty, indirectly. Friern Mental Hospital, where she ended her days, was a mid-Victorian edifice like Netley, known for having Britain’s longest corridor. Stepping away from the pool of tears, Mallik is suddenly surrounded by a menagerie of muttering, squawking and cackling characters, as if she were paying a visit to a dementia ward.¹⁰² Or is she herself losing her mind? When she first slips into the dreamworld – drifting off in the meadows – loud insects buzz on the soundtrack, like that ‘fly-swarm of fantasy’ which Miller said engulfed his mother. In Wonderland, Mallik’s Alice seems to hear voices in her head and, while maintaining a phlegmatic air, combs her hair over her face like a mad woman. She keeps sensing she has changed, says that she’s not sure who she is anymore, cannot remember verses she once knew, muddles them up when the Caterpillar tests her recall.

For sure, those mix-ups may be regarded as oneiric, garbling everyday matters as dreams do. Or Mallik’s Alice can be seen as becoming wayward because she is hitting adolescence. However, the confusions are accentuated in Miller’s adaptation and they start to resonate with the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease when you consider that Betty died, non compos mentis, only the winter before this film was made.

The director might well resist any such reading. If this film is Miller in Wonderland, the elements of his own life have been encrypted in the creative and, no doubt, often subconscious process. He underlines that his script (apart from small ad-libs) was faithfully drawn from Carroll’s words, the period detailing was scrupulous, and the elegiac slant (‘It is not now as it hath been of yore . . . / The things which I have seen I now can see no more’) was a quintessentially Victorian lament for childhood’s ephemerality. A parallel can, nonetheless, be inferred between Carroll’s Alice growing up disconcertingly fast and Betty’s almost surreally accelerated senescence. Miller would later compare Alice and King Lear, as two curiously dishevelled odysseys about growing older, and he was already, at this point, sharply aware of life’s transience and the pains of growing old.¹⁰³ Aged just 29, he had written to Sacks about being in ‘transports of despair’ over his own ageing, lamenting his own sagging and stooping frame even as he celebrated Tom’s infantine joys. That was in the very letter which dwelt on Betty’s chronic deterioration – the fleeting ages of man in a nutshell.104

Picking up on the hint of morbidity in Carroll’s original title, Alice’s Adventures Underground, the film’s sets are suffused with intimations of mortality. They show signs of decay or are crammed with Gothic furnishings and macabre trinkets (not least an animal skull strung from a dressing-table mirror, like a memento mori). Mallik’s flat voice and expressionless face are ghostly, drained of life, in these faintly sepulchral interiors. Or one might perceive another oblique analogy for the limbo of Alzheimer’s disease, which Miller has described as a living death. The passageway where Alice finds herself trapped, unable to squeeze through the tiny door to the rose garden, feels like a funeral parlour’s waiting room.¹⁰⁵

Less morbidly and more nostalgically, with Dick Bush’s superlative camerawork evoking early photography, Alice is a vision of daguerreotypic loveliness as she glides down other airier corridors. As she wanders through English summer landscapes too, this film cherishes the fading memories of a sunlit childhood and a girl from a past age.¹⁰⁶ If that, in any way, reflects private mournfulness concerning Betty, the emotion is very restrained. It adopts an air, like Alice, of cool detachment.

Many fans, meanwhile, have assumed that Miller’s vision was a Sixties psychedelic trip, inspired by LSD or puffing on joints. The Cheshire Cat’s head floating in the sky looks as if it might be drug-influenced. However, the Caterpillar doesn’t even have a hookah or mushroom in this version. Essentially, Miller’s adaptation sprang from his relish of three phenomena which mess up the normal orderliness of life: the nexus of laughter-inducing comedy, psychological disorders and dreams.¹⁰⁷

Finally, by way of a coda, Miller once had a vision, in his sleep, of Alan Bennett transmogrified into something like Carroll’s ungainly White Knight. The playwright Peter Nichols recalls a dinner party at Michael Frayn’s house, in the late 1960s, where Miller recounted this dream. The two ex-Fringers were descending a staircase on high-horseback when Bennett became hopelessly entangled with the banister and calmly bid adieu. Miller then found himself riding the actor Patrick Wymark down a grassy slope, discussing whether he had the quintessential Cromwell stoop for his forthcoming interregnum movie.¹⁰⁸

Nichols exclaims that he wishes Frayn’s guests had included a Freudian. Miller, by contrast, dismisses the notion that dreams symbolically express suppressed thoughts, saying:

My interest in dreams has nothing to do with Freud. I just don’t think they work in that way, as desires in disguise. I think they are sort of computational consequences of having a consciousness momentarily denied access to current experiences. What has always struck me is the rich combinatorial character of dreams . . . the new and strange, composed of elements drawn from reality . . . Though I have never fully dreamed about a place that I haven’t seen . . . all my dreams are unvisited elsewheres.