Below the slopes of the Malvern Hills he has encounters with an angel, and with a demon, with the ghost of Elgar, the crucified Jesus, and with Penda, England's last pagan king. In the final image, he turns away from his idealized landscape, to go into the world and adulthood with a value-system more anarchistic now, and readier to integrate the contradictions of experience.

Bookended by news of an American President’s criminal scheming and looming impeachment, it may not have felt like the most imperative, urgent broadcast of the evening schedule, but this would be wrong. Sitting between reportage of Nixon’s folly was a complex, literary and intensely prescient story — its writer, David Rudkin, demonstrating that, like the personal, the parochial was political. It aired only once more on the BBC and, apart from a late-night broadcast on Channel 4 in the 1980s, Penda’s Fen seemed consigned to its status as an obscure footnote in television history. Due to the efforts of a handful of enthusiasts, critics, and now the BFI, however, it is now being recognised for what it is: a masterpiece. Moreover, in this fractious age of populism and identity politics, this erstwhile televisual oddity is only gaining traction in terms of its relevance. The most ambitious of Alan Clarke’s early projects, Penda’s Fen at first seems a strange choice for him. Most scripts that attracted Clarke, no matter how non-naturalistic, had a gritty, urban feel with springy vernacular dialogue (and sometimes almost no dialogue). David Rudkin’s screenplay is different: rooted in a mystical rural English landscape, it is studded with long, self-consciously poetic speeches and dense with sexual/mythical visions and dreams, theological debate and radical polemic—as well as an analysis of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. But though Penda’s Fen is stylistically the odd film out in Clarke’s work, it trumpets many of his favourite themes, in particular what it means to be English in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Aerodrome, The 1 9 8 3 (UK) 1 x 90 minute episode In a futuristic alternative England, the fascist leaders build a mysterious…Matthew Harle is Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Barbican Centre and Guildhall School of Music and Drama. No account of the film’s making would be complete without mention of its commissioning editor, David Rose. Tasked in 1971 by David Attenborough to head a new regional television drama department at Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham, he immediately set about developing adventurous projects – by writers such as Alan Bleasdale, Alan Plater, Michael Abbensetts and Willy Russell – that were steeped in the lore and soundworlds of non-metropolitan Britain. He has described Penda’s Fen as ‘a milestone, if not the milestone, of my career’, though, 40 years after it was first broadcast, he also admitted, ‘I didn’t understand it at all, but that’s as it should be.’ Penda's Fen" is the 16th episode of fourth season of the British BBC anthology TV series Play for Today. The episode was a television play that was originally broadcast on 21 March 1974. "Penda's Fen" was written by David Rudkin, directed by Alan Clarke, produced by David Rose, and starred Spencer Banks. [1] Plot [ edit ] I’ve never taken Honeybone’s name as being anything other than a pretty broad phallic metaphor even though that character may have been based on a real person. I think I’ve read that his first play was based on his own experience of farm work so there’s already a precedent for using his life as material.

Child be Strange, A Symposium on Penda’s Fen is at BFI Southbank on Saturday June 10th Information here This revelation from Stephen crowns Penda’s Fen. It is a final and utter rejection of a cloistered purview and likely an entirely accurate reflection of the typical social ambit of a vicar's son growing up in the Midlands countryside: his world is limited to solitary meditation in his bedroom, the stifling male environment of his school, and lonely bicycle rides in the lonely expanses of the surrounding hills. Moreover, it is an acceptance of Stephen’s emergent homosexuality, that we see glimpses of in his teenage infatuation with his milkman. The more typical adolescent world of drinking and carousing is seen only briefly early in the film—a car full of young revellers pulling over so someone can get out and have a pee—a snapshot of normality that is brutally cut short. However, we never see any of these manifold threads truly tie up. Penda is a film full of interruptions, distractions and incompletions; it demands multiple viewings, as it wanders like the itinerant gaze of Alan Clarke’s camera over the Worcester landscape. It deserves interrogation: Penda is myth, music, ecocriticism, gender and folklore, buried in celluloid. Rudkin’s play wasn’t a one-off, his other work is equally powerful, engaging and fascinating. A later film for the BBC, the wildly ambitious Artemis 81, is three hours in length (!) and explores similar themes, albeit in a less coherent fashion. It also includes Daniel Day-Lewis’s first screen appearance and has Sting playing Hywel Bennett’s angelic object of homoerotic desire. Rudkin’s stage work is fiercely imaginative, using Joycean dialogue to striking effect, and I’m continually surprised that no one seems interested in re-staging remarkable plays such as The Sons of Light. As for Penda’s Fen, whenever a TV executive tries to argue that television hasn’t dumbed down I’d offer this work as Exhibit A for the prosecution. Rudkin and Clarke’s film was screened at 9.35 in the evening on the nation’s main TV channel, BBC 1, at a time when there were only three channels to choose from. A primetime audience of many millions watched this visceral and unapologetically intelligent drama; show me where this happens today. West Country Tales 1 9 8 2 - 1 9 8 3 (UK) 14 x 30 minute episodes This supernatural anthology drama series was… What makes Penda’s Fen particularly prescient is that it locates these hybrid transformations in the English countryside. The 1970s saw a number of artists offering new versions of pastoral – Philip Trevelyan’s The Moon and the Sledgehammer (1971) was a creepy documentary about a family living without electricity in a wood; Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside (1973) introduced readers to what would later be known as edgelands; Jeremy Sandford’s Tomorrow’s People (1974) portrayed the Dionysian longings of free-festival revellers. Rudkin shows rural England to be a place of struggles and heresies, of antagonisms and anguish. The film even turns to etymology, arguing that “pagan”, which originally meant “belonging to the village”, referred to the politics of local governance as much as it did to theological doctrine.Robin Carmody. "Penda's Fen". Elidor.freeserve.co.uk. Archived from the original on 4 September 2012 . Retrieved 5 September 2012. I am nothing pure. My race is mixed. My sex is mixed. I am woman and man. Light with darkness. Mixed. Mixed. I nothing special. Nothing pure. I am mud and flame.” There has to be an Alan Clarke film in this season. Although it’s a real outlier in terms of his body of work, this was a touchstone when I was developing Enys Men. I’d be lying if I said I fully knew what the film means. As with Robert Bresson’s work, I prioritise feeling over understanding. Besides, even Clarke claimed to not really know what it was about. But I didn’t want to think merely of the past—I wanted to open a futuristic window on the landscape, too. So into the story is borne Arne, the embittered neighbour who offers Stephen a savage political outlook on tomorrow’s world…