[Afamilyatwar-list] John Finch's 'A Family at War' (Part 5)

[Veit, Richard]

[cid:79b87448-be94-4efc-a0b7-29e576970952]



(What follows is the fifth part of John Finch’s recollections of ‘A Family at War,’ as excerpted from his forthcoming autobiography.)



John writes …



Prior to his appointment to produce ‘A Family at War,’ Richard Doubleday had joined the long line of producers who had produced ‘Coronation Street’. He was very much liked by the cast and technicians and was, I thought, the most gentle man I had ever met. My only doubt was that he was, if anything, far too nice to be able to cope with the rough and tumble of a long-running popular television drama.

To some extent, I believe I was right in this. Richard coped admirably but at a price to himself. He was a highly competent organizer. With one or two rare exceptions, his casting was brilliant, and he was totally in key with the wartime background. What problems he had were financial, and they were not of his making. I can only describe the budget the company allocated to the programme as ‘ mean’. In his book Persona Granada, Denis Forman describes ‘A Family at War’ as “the most cost effective drama series ever made”. I have never heard this disputed by anyone who studied the facts.

I can remember Richard coming from the office where budget decisions were fought over, after one obviously difficult session, and saying, “I would rather be in Lewes (where he lived) Labour Exchange than in this building. You meet a better class of people”.

We put all this behind us when we arrived at Black Leach, having decided to have a relaxing evening and to start work the next day. We ate at The Plough Inn, which was a good old-fashioned pub, and after a short stroll with the evening sun behind us, we stood at the gate at the end of the farmyard and shared a few wartime experiences. He had just read my second script, which I had insisted should be about the Spanish Civil War, which had been Europe’s introduction to the mayhem to come.

“Not one of my better ideas,” I said, “but I could have given you a better script”.

“You never delivered a bad script in your life,” he said, generously.

Dear man. Would it were true.

We made an early start the following morning. “You know, you wouldn’t believe it from the size of the budget,” Richard said, “but Granada have a lot invested in this”.

I knew what he meant. Too much of the recent drama, with the odd exception, had been unimpressive. A particular dummy had been a series called ‘Judge Dee,’ to which Denis Forman, with typical honesty, had ascribed most of its failings to himself.

“The franchises for ITV will be up for auction sooner rather than later,” Richard said, “and the company’s future could be at stake. Among other things, they need a good, popular, long-running drama series.

“So do we,” I said.

At that moment, the telephone rang. It was Denis Forman. He asked how things were going. I explained that we hadn’t quitted the building because of any emergency but had just decided to find somewhere quiet, where we wouldn’t be disturbed.

“By people like me,” he said, jovially.

I laughed that one off. “We’ll be back tomorrow,” I said.

“Pop in and give me a run down on life in the trenches.”

“We will,” I said.

Then Denis asked, “Is there anything you want?”

“Nothing at all,” I said, far too quickly. “No problems.”

“Jolly good,” he said. “Keep at it. If there’s anything you want, let me know.”

He rang off, and I put the phone down.

“We’ve just been offered a troop of French dancing girls, “ I told Richard.

At various points in my life, mostly much later on when life started to get really tough again, I have heard that voice in my ear: “Is there anything you want?”

“Not really,” I say. “We’ve more or less got all that we need.”

There have been moments, over the years …

After the casting problem, when the decision was made to produce the original episode I had written as number one, the production seemed to be running relatively smoothly. I had already begun to regret including the Spanish Civil War in the second episode. In fact, it more or less took over the whole of the episode. The most effective scenes in it were those back home in Liverpool, with other members of the family involved.

There was a bit of a hiatus early on, when cast and crew were filming on location. It was winter in the UK. Granada would never have contemplated the cost of actually filming in Spain were the war was fought. For budget purposes, our Spanish Civil War was fought somewhere in Derbyshire. Shooting had hardly begun when it started to snow. The news from the front was that cast and crew were preparing to return to base since, they said, it was laughable to attempt to shoot a Spanish background with snow drifting on to the camera.

I was at first quite shattered. Not only had I become disillusioned with what was entirely of my own making—i.e., an episode on the Spanish Civil War—but we were faced with the prospect of a blank screen at worst, or some contrived re-write of the episode with an entirely different background. I had also begun to think that I had made a major error in my choice of writer, namely myself. On the list of potential writers for the series I had drawn up was the name of a first-class writer whose husband, I was informed, had actually fought in the Spanish Civil War, whereas the background of my script was derived from research into the writings of George Orwell and others. The writer concerned, Elaine Morgan, did in due course contribute a first-class episode with an entirely different background [Episode Twelve, “If It’s Got Your Number on It”].

I asked that the director be told not to activate a return to base immediately, but to await further instructions. I was about to put on my trouble-shooters uniform, though this time, of course, I had brought the troubles on my own head. I got hold of our first-class researcher, who was doing a magnificent job listing the bombing raids on Liverpool, even down to the numbers of the houses hit and the names of their occupants. “Drop everything,” I said, “and get on to the meteorological people. Ask them if there is anywhere in Spain where it might be snowing in the period of the Civil War, and places that might be affected”.

The researcher came up with a place in the Pyrenees, which fitted the bill perfectly. I got in touch with the director, via Richard Doubleday, with the message that he was to continue filming with the script as written, but not to include any ad libs referring to the weather.

It would be nice to be able to look back now and contemplate, in tranquillity, events like the above which have a successful outcome. They are the product of memory, and therefore fallible, but they are not the kind of thing one enjoys recording, except when accompanied by a memory of the intense sense of relief experienced at the time.

It was not, alas, to be the only potential catastrophe we were to be faced with. The character of Margaret, the eldest of the five Ashton siblings, was that of a modest, highly moral, home-loving woman, almost totally incapable of acting out of character. The storyline—which I had shaped in some detail for the early episodes and in broad outline for the series as a whole—had been very closely integrated with the rest of the family, influencing some more than others. Her relationship with John and with John’s parents, particularly his mother, was well established from Episode One onwards. Early episodes were already in production when the bomb came. The bomb was not a fiction, which might have been more easily coped with, but was the actuality that the actress concerned, Lesley Nunnerley, was pregnant.

What followed might have been wittily described as the Battle of the Bulge, except that it was totally unamusing for those who had to cope with it. At the top of the list was the producer, closely followed by me. Margaret married John in Episode Three. As already portrayed in casting and in script, it would be totally out of character for her to have had a child by another man while John was a prisoner, the relevant scripts having already been written. The only possible solution was to make her a believable exception to the rule. I offered to story the situation in terms which Richard would find acceptable. The alternative was to make her a victim of the Liverpool blitz, but her tragic death would have left us with a smaller, far less viable family in a fifty-two-hour series.

As it was, Lesley’s real-life condition gave us a long-running story right through to Episode Fifty-two, which most people seemed to find totally believable. So far as I can remember, the audience were totally ignorant of our problems.



(To be continued…)

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