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Screening black political struggle on 1970s British Television: the case of the Play forToday, A Hole in Babylon (Ové, 1979, BBC).
Abstract
This article draws on my interviews with the writer/director Horace Ové and the producer Graham Benson, in order to explore the production history of the Play for Today,A Hole in Babylon. Filmed during a particularly turbulent decade in British race relations, A Hole in Babylon was a fictionalised account of the 1975 Spaghetti House siege. Horace Ové was intent on providing asympathetic portrayal of three black men, whose botched attempt at an armed robbery escalated into a six-day siege. Ové’s insistence that the underlying motivation for the crime was ideological ensured that the play courted controversy, even before it was actually transmitted on television. Much of A Hole in Babylon was shot on location in and around Ladbroke Grove; an area which was, during the 1970s, inexorably linked to black political expression and struggle. Furthermore, the scenes in A Hole inBabylon depicting the siege were filmed in the restaurant basement that had been the locus of the real-life hostage-taking just four years earlier. In addition to providing valuable insight into the creative partnership between director and producer, this article will argue that the institutional context of the BBC in the late 1970s facilitated the airing of a highly innovative text.
ARTICLE
Introduction
This article draws on archival research and my interviews with the writer/director, Horace Ové and the producer, Graham Benson, in order to explore the production history of the 1979 BBC ‘Play for Today’ A Hole in Babylon. Interspersing archival news footage with film shot on location in and around London’s Ladbroke Grove, A Hole in Babylon is a ‘factual drama’[1] which sympathetically re-imagines the events that led three young black men to hold up a Knightsbridge Italian restaurant in 1975. In this way, Horace Ové’s film compellingly links the case of the so-called ‘Spaghetti House siege’ to the overarching racial discrimination faced by black communities in 1970s Britain. Sivanandan has argued that this was a time when racism was built into the very structures of key British institutions such as the police, the judiciary and the educational system.[2] Moreover, an unofficial consensus between the two main British political parties throughout the 1970s held firmly to the view that the key to racial harmony lay in ‘containing’ black and Asian immigration.[3] Significantly, the 1970s was also the decade in which ‘second generation’ black British youths came of age.[4] Unsurprisingly, many showed themselves to be highly unwilling to accept their marginalised position in the country where they had been born:
By the middle of the 1970s, the youth had begun to emerge into the vanguard of black struggle [in Britain]. And they brought to it … an experience of their own, which was implacable of racism and impervious to the blandishments of state. The daily confrontations with the police … and their encounters with the judicial set-up had established their hatred of the system .[5]
A Hole in Babylon then,was made during a particularly turbulent period in British race relations. The film’s subject matter, allied with its forceful argument that the underlying motivation for the Spaghetti House siege was ideological rather than purely criminal, made it a politically contentious text. Given H.O. Nazareth’s contemporaneous assertion that ‘the BBC … has a dismal record on racism’,[6] or, SaritaMalik’s argument in the same vein, that there was a tendency on the part of the corporation during the 1970s to air programmes that depicted ‘Blackness as the source of the problem’,[7] we would do well to ask how A Hole in Babylon came to be made in the first place. I will argue that in uncovering A Hole in Babylon’s production history, it is possible to illustrate how a deeply controversial (and then-atypical) play about ‘race’ was made and broadcast within the socio-industrial context of the BBC of the late 1970s.
The background to A Hole in Babylon
A Hole in Babylon is a fictional play, but it is based on actual events that took place on the night of 28th September 1975 when three young black men, Franklin Davies, Wesley Dick and Anthony ‘Bonsu’ Monroe, attempted to steal the weekly takings of the Spaghetti House restaurant, in London’s Knightsbridge. As Davies, Dick and Monroe held up staff at gunpoint, one managed to escape and to alert the police.[8] What had begun as an attempted robbery, subsequently escalated into a siege, replete with nine Italian hostages who were held in a cramped12ft by 10ft cellar.[9] For six days, the men refused to give themselves up to the ‘four hundred police officers who were deployed at the scene’.[10] From the outset, Davies, Dick and Monroe claimed that their actions had been politically motivated. Finding themselves without recourse to state funding for a black supplementary school and other black community projects, and feeling increasingly marginalised from what they regarded as ‘white society’, the men decided that robbery was both a means of securing the money that they needed for their ‘cause’ and a form of black protest.[11]
As the siege dragged on, Davies, Dick and Monroe began to make increasingly desperate and unrealistic demands under the aegis of the Black Liberation Front (who would later go on to distance themselves from the activities of the three men).[12] Unsurprisingly, the bungled robbery, subsequent five-day siege, and the hostage-takers’ outlandish request that a plane should be chartered to fly them to the West Indies, ‘made front-page headlines’ in the British press and was widely covered on television news.[13] As Nazareth has pointed out, the mainstream press generally positioned the protagonists of what it had dubbed ‘the Spaghetti House siege’, as ‘bungling amateurs’ or ‘black criminal gangsters’.[14] Evidently, in their briefings to journalists ‘the police deliberately played down the political overtones’ of the case and this seems to have had an impact on the event’s reportage.[15] Indeed, Nazareth has argued that much contemporaneous press coverage completely glossed over the underlying political motivation for the robbery. According to Nazareth, when politics were cited as a contributing factor in the case, newspapers tended toreassure their readers that Davies, Dick and Monroe were, in fact, simply using black radicalism as an excuse for what was plainly a criminal act.[16] Even the Guardian, whilst generally sympathetic to ‘black issues’, seemed doubtful as how to politically situate the actions of the three men. Were, Davies, Dick and Monroe, it wondered, mere criminals? At best, the Guardian worried that the three’s ‘misguided’ political actions, ‘could, if the gunmen are turned into black folk heroes, worsen black-white and black/police relations’.[17]
The Spaghetti House siege seemingly divided black communities. Letters written to the radical black magazine Race Today, reveal confusion and anger about what had recently taken place in Knightsbridge. As one correspondent, Veronica Baptiste, wrote to Race Today in October 1975:
I wonder if you can help me by shedding some light on the Spaghetti Siege. Was it political or wasn’t it? I, like many of my friends, identified and sympathised with the three in the basement. From the outset, the police maintained that it was criminal. The black organisations involved didn’t seem to be sure … I really don’t know what to think and I feel quite demoralised because black organisations don’t seem to know what they are doing.[18]
Another letter-writer, Jack Hines, was deeply angered that Davies, Dick and Monroe had appointed themselves ‘black leaders’.[19] Hines complained that the criminal actions of the men played up to broader stereotypes of black people as ‘lawless’; in short, he concluded that they, ‘… cannot purport to speak for us. They lead and represent no black people but themselves’.[20] However, in its editorial for October 1975, Race Today, whilst condemning the kidnapping of innocent men,linked the case to the overarching structural problems faced by ‘second-generation’ ‘West-Indian’ youths.[21] Racism, it argued, was built into the very structures of key institutions and was manifest in the disproportionate levels of unemployment among young blacks, police brutality and miscarriages of justice, poor housing conditions and the widespread practice of ‘bussing’ of black children to poorly-performing inner-city schools. Race Today concluded that a whole generation of politically-radicalised young black people were ‘fight[ing] an unending war against a society to which they [were violently]… opposed …’.[22]
The conflicted and often confused discourse surrounding the Spaghetti House siege fascinated the Trinidadian film director, Horace Ové (who had previously co-written and directed the 1975 feature film Pressure). As Ové revealed in interview, he had ‘begun researching the siege only a matter of months after it had ended’ and was minded to make a film about it:[23]
[I wanted ] to find out … what made these three men commit this act … I discovered that one of the men was a medical student, another was a writer … So I started thinking, They’re not hooligans.[24]
Ové corresponded with Dick, Davies and Monroe in prison, where all three were serving lengthy sentences.[25] He also spent a year interviewing people who had known the men prior to the siege. Ové drafted a screenplay about the Spaghetti House siege in 1976, but was, at that stage, unable to find financial or institutional backing to make a film about such a controversial and politically-sensitive subject.[26]
However, early in 1979, Ové was approached by the BBC producer, Graham Benson. Having been ‘very impressed’ with Pressure, when he saw it at Notting Hill Gate cinema, Benson was keen to collaborate with Ové on Play for Today. In interview, Graham Benson stated that he had been mindful that there was little on 1970s television that dealt sympathetically with the realities of life for Britain’s black communities or with the nuances of ‘black politics’. Benson was therefore open to any ideas Ové might have for a Play for Today that would cast an original light on the socio-political situation faced by young black people. During their first meeting together, Ové suggested that they should make a film from the viewpoint of the three perpetrators involved in the Spaghetti House siege; a project that Benson was immediately drawn to. As Benson stated: ‘Like everybody else doing drama [at the BBC] at the time [I] had a liberal point of view. We were looking to establish the truth [about certain issues]’. From the outset, both men were keen that the film would be a ‘factual drama; a piece of fiction based on fact [rather than] … a drama-documentary’.[27] This thinking is seemingly in line with Bignell, Lacey and Macmurraugh-Kavanagh’s observation that ‘the single television play’ of the mid-1960s to the late 1970s frequently afforded playwrights the ‘licence’ to ‘say things that normally wouldn’t get said’ in documentaries.[28] It is certainly instructive to reflect that earlier in 1979, Franco Rosso’s arguably less politically-contentious documentary about the black poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread, Beat ‘n’ Blood, was postponed by the BBC until after the general election on the basis of ‘one uncomplimentary reference to [Margaret] Thatcher’.[29] For Benson, then, a fictional representation of the Spaghetti House siege would provide the necessary freedom to put across what he termed as ‘our version of events’. As Benson went on to explain in interview: ‘I was very, very particular about demonstrating that it was a point of view, so … a panel of people couldn’t then say, you got this, this and this wrong’. It is biased, yes’.
Pre-production
Although Ové already had a script for A Hole in Babylon, Graham Benson and his story editor, Terry Coles, were concerned that he was inexperienced as a television screenplay writer and, to this end, they insisted upon the Hull-based writer, Jim Hawkins as a co-author. Benson had previously worked with both Hawkins and Coles on the play Thank you Comrades (Gold, 1979, BBC) and knew that both men could work to high standards under tight deadlines.[30] Ové would subsequently go on to state that Hawkins was parachuted in by Benson to add a white balance to the script, although this was something that Benson later denied.[31] There is no evidence to suggest that that Ové felt that his authorial voice was in any way compromised by working with Hawkins and, in interview, Ové was at pains to state that the collaboration actually worked very well.[32] Interestingly, he compared it favourably with his co-authorship with Sam Selvon on Pressure: ‘Jim was into what I was doing, was interested … and he got into it. And we were able to work [together]’. As had been the case with Pressure, Ové and his co-author spent considerable time interviewing members of the black community in the Ladbroke Grove area before embarking on the script-writing – Ové claimed that this process was essential to authentically conveying the milieu that Davies, Dick and Monroe had inhabited before they committed the robbery: ‘It was about authenticity’. Ové stated in a 1979 interview he actually considered A Hole in Babylon to be a sequel to Pressure – Tony, Pressure’s key protagonist, could, he argued, be ‘read’ as a younger version of Wesley Dick or Bonsu Monroe.[33] He went on to explain to Sue Summers:
‘Both [Dick and Monroe] were embittered with white society … It’s a pattern [earlier explored in Pressure]… a black kid is not given a chance and ends up on the wrong streets with the wrong people. Then he fights back for his rights.[34]
Along with the scriptwriting, a further issue that taxed Graham Benson was how to deal with the practicalities of filming the actual siege. Play for Today budgets were fairly modest and this, allied with the practice of producing twenty-one plays for a single season, meant that that the shooting of individual plays generally had to be contained within a maximum of four weeks. Benson soon realised that a full ‘reconstruction of what was going on outside’ the Spaghetti House during the siege was highly impractical, both in terms of finance and logistics. Quite simply, days of location-shooting in Knightsbridge, involving four-hundred extras dressed as policemen, a large film crew, and necessitating road closures, would not only eat heavily into the budget, but would also be nigh-on impossible in terms of permissions. As Benson explained, A Hole In Babylon was shot at a time before ‘there were council liaison offices in London … which had departments for giving permits to [film in the capital]’. The BBC had a Locations Office which helped with arrangements for location shooting, but its staff were heavily reliant on the goodwill of certain police sergeants:
They [the police] were tougher then. It was [about] … order and they … [prevented] anything that sort of upset the efficient management of the city and the street, you were encouraged to film on Sundays for example, things like that. And so I think there probably was an element of that with this film [A Hole in Babylon].
At a subsequent meeting, Ové and Benson decided that they could circumvent these constraints if archival news footage of the event could be interspersed with Ové’s material. Given that Ové was wedded to a documentary-realist mode of filmmaking and that A Hole in Babylon would be shot on 16mm film, both men figured that this (then-unusual) juxtaposition would not be too jarring for the viewer.[35] In interview, Benson recalled that he used his connections within the BBC to gain access to the news footage:
Ron Neil was the head of BBC News … I rang him up and said, ‘Ron, I want to come and talk with you … I’m making this film about the Spaghetti House Siege’. And he was terribly interested in the whole thing … he had been a young news producer at the time and he said, ‘Of course, there’s millions of miles of footage’ .
According to Benson, such collaborations between departments were fairly common in the BBC in the 1970s, and were actively encouraged by senior management. Benson went on to explain that what he termed as a ‘collegiate atmosphere’ permeated the corporation at this time, greatly helped by the fact that everyone was housed at Television Centre.
Horace Ové was largely responsible for the casting of A Hole in Babylon. That the chosen actors could authentically ‘inhabit’ the socio-political environment of the drama was of paramount importance to Ové. As he explained in interview: ‘I tried to get them into the world of reality and to be themselves, not The Actor’. To this end, Ové selected those black actors who he felt to be sympathetic to the ‘world’ inhabited by the protagonists of the Spaghetti House siege. As Benson recalled: ‘Horace very much knew who he wanted from the black community’. Ové cast Trevor Thomas in the part of Bonsu Monroe. As Ové explained to Mike Phillips in 1979, Thomas’ good looks meant that he often got walk-on parts in television series such as The Fosters, where he invariably played the role of the ‘smooth’ ladies’ man.[36] However, Thomas’ most prominent role to date had been Benjamin, the naïve ‘country boy’ in the film Black Joy (Simmons, 1977). Although Black Joy was in many ways a contentious film in terms of black representation,[37] it seems likely that Thomas’ sympathetic portrayal of the newly-arrived migrant who is corrupted by life in the hostile metropolis, may have helped to convince Ové that he had the versatility as an actor to play Bonsu Monroe, the well-educated middle-class young man whose frustration at the ‘white system’ drew him into radical black politics and the murky world of Franklin Davies, a petty criminal with a history of mental health problems.