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1965
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Stand Up, Nigel Barton
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Transmission Info: First transmitted on 8th December 1965 at 9.40 p.m. on BBC 1 as part of the Wednesday Play series. Approximately 72 minutes in duration. Repeated on 19th September 1966 and again on 19th August 1987 on BBC1. First TV audience was c. 7 million (source Gilbert 1995: 133). As part of its Summer in the Sixties series, BBC repeated the Barton Plays during June 2004. Stand Up Nigel Barton was repeated on Saturday 12 June 2004 11.20pm-12.40am on BBC FOUR. Check this link for details. |
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Nigel
leaves his working class home in a South Nottinghamshire (?) mining
village ("not aggressively Northern, not Welsh") to take up his place
at Oxford. He struggles to come to terms with the cultural distance
he has travelled: a College scout who calls him "Sir" and cleans his
shoes, the pretentious undergraduates with their shallow concerns and
lack of appreciation of the privations and lifestyles of the people
Nigel has left behind.
For them, but not for Nigel, "nothing matters".
Taking an increasingly active part in Oxford politics, Nigel delivers
a "Paper Speech" at the Union against the motion that class no longer
matters in Britain. After the debate, at a small buffet-supper in the
President's office, Nigel is approached by Norman Conrad, who invites
him to contribute to a forthcoming BBC documentary on "Britain - A Land
of Barriers".
Back at home, the Barton family sit around the TV set to watch the programme
as it is transmitted and the full extent of Nigel's apparent disloyalty
to and betrayal of his background becomes clear.
Potter's non-linear style moves the viewer backwards and forwards between
Nigel's present experiences at Oxford and earlier scenes which are drawn
from his schooldays, evoking similar betrayals and drawing attention
to the tightrope Nigel has walked between the two cultures.
I remember, I rememberThe school where I was born;I remember, I remember,The school where I was ..... torn. |
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Nancy
Banks-Smith (1965) television, The Sun, 9th December. Radio Times, December 2, 1965 - Article by Tony Garnett, available at http://www.action-tv.org.uk/wed_play/wed_ep_03.htm (scroll down) |
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Although this was the earlier of the two Barton plays to be transmitted, it was not, according to Potter (1967: 8), the earlier to have been completed. The earlier piece, Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, had been withdrawn by the BBC only seven hours before it was due to go out on the air. "It was, they said, 'not ready' for transmission." (Potter 1967:17) Stand Up, Nigel Barton was, thought Potter, "a much better play although, perhaps, just a trifle too confusing in structure." (Potter 1967:19) In this introduction to the Nigel Barton plays which Penguin published the scripts of in their Modern Playwrights series (No. 6), Potter tells us how he "wanted, needed" to be able to dramatize "the whole trajectory of a young man who, by accident and examination, had been dragged so far up the educational ladder that he fetched up in that medieval enclave called Oxford", as, indeed, Potter had done himself - and described his own experience in much the same words on several occasions. For Potter the themes which run through the play are memory and class. A third, perhaps unconfessed, theme which dominates the piece is, in Gilbert's phrase "the intertwining of betrayal and guilt". Potter says of Stand Up, Nigel Barton, "It was built that way in order to illustrate the difficulties and complexities which can beset anyone moving across the minefields of class in this country. 'Environment' is here the crucial factor, but where the central character (Nigel Barton) has moved on and 'up', this becomes translated into 'memory'." (Potter 1967: 19) (my emphasis). He addresses the difficulty of representing memory in convincing televisual terms and explains that, in spite of its degeneration into mere stylistic cliché, the flashback technique had to be made to work. He "chipp(ed) the play up into swiftly moving fragments so that the 'present' was not the norm out of which one lurched cumbersomely back into previous times." But Potter is also swift to point out that memory is not an objective recalling of events but rather the construction of the 'remembering' subject in making choices and interpretations to represent his past. For this reason, Potter deploys the device which he returns to par excellence in Blue Remembered Hills, of using adult actors to play the parts of children, emphasizing the connexions between what had happened to him and what he now was. The question remains as to what part of Nigel's memories are indeed derived from Potter's own memories; the biographical parallels between the two are close indeed. In Potter's own words, "I had been placed in circumstances which meant that I had thought a lot about television drama and I had a 'story' to tell in which personal experiences could obviously hone the cutting edge." (Potter 1967: 16) Potter's main justification for working within the medium of television in order that this 'story' be told relates to what he saw as the democratic and openly accessible and intimate nature of television. "With Stand Up, Nigel Barton I knew that in small family groupings - that is, at their most vulnerable - both coalminers and Oxford dons would probably see the play. This could add enormously to the potency of a story which attempted to use the specially English embarrassment about class in a deliberately embarrassing series of confrontations. In the theatre - or, at least, in the West End - the audience would have been largely only on one side of this particular fence. There is no other medium which could virtually guarantee an audience of millions with a full quota of manual workers and stockbrokers for a 'serious' play about class." (Potter 1967: 21)
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Dave Evans 1994 - 2005