|
Journal
of the T. E. Lawrence Society Vol. I, No. 1, Spring 1991 Edited by Jeremy Wilson An introduction to the BBC 1962 documentary T. E. Lawrence: 1888-1935 Malcolm Brown It all began with the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Philip Donnellan and I were two BBC documentary producers who were brought together to devise a television programme on Germany in the immediate aftermath of that unhappy but now all but forgotten event. The film which we hurriedly compiled - a double biography of the two leading figures on the German political scene, Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt - had been quite a success. 'More' said our bosses at the BBC. So we tried to produce more. We next made a programme on the first prime minister of India, Pandit Nehru which, to our surprise, won an award at an extremely obscure television festival in Alexandria - doubtless because the jury was pleased that an organisation like the BBC could deal with a third- world figure - a latter-day Feisal as it were - as if he actually mattered, and wasn't just a third-world nonentity... But that year, 1962, was also the year of the great crisis over the future of Algeria, at that time considered to be part of France; a remarkable Frenchman called Charles de Gaulle was doing the unthinkable - giving away Algeria to the Algerians, an amazing piece of post-colonialism of which, I feel sure, T. E. Lawrence for one would have thoroughly approved. So, after Nehru, we made a programme on the life and achievements of General de Gaulle. The idea of making a documentary on Lawrence sprang directly from the de Gaulle film. While researching and planning it we consulted that doyen of military students and great expert on armoured warfare, Sir Basil Liddell Hart. In the 1930s he and de Gaulle had shared similar views on how future wars might be fought - indeed they had been among the leading military thinkers and prophets on the pre-1939 military scene. So we approached Liddell Hart - and indeed eventually included a brief interview with him in the programme. We met him first on a sunny afternoon on the lawn of his country house near Marlow in Buckinghamshire, over tea and, if I remember, cucumber sandwiches. As we talked, we noticed that our host kept on referring to another curious military strategist for whom he seemed to have a quite extraordinary admiration - the man he insisted on calling (in what we thought a rather 'in' manner) 'T.E.'. By the end of that spring day Philip Donnellan and I had decided unequivocally what the subject of our next TV biography would be. It would be that very same T.E. of whom we had heard so much from the lips of Liddell Hart. We were both aware of Lawrence, but both recognised that our detailed knowledge of the man was fairly slight. But the challenge of a TV producer is to move from ignoramus to expert in a matter of weeks if not days, and that we proceeded, as best we could, to do. David Lytton, who wrote what still strikes me as an excellent commentary, started like us from the same base of cheerful, confident ignorance. The choice of subject was made all the easier, and more acceptable to our BBC chiefs, by the fact that everybody knew that that year a big-screen feature for the cinema was in the making - directed by David Lean and with a certain Peter O'Toole in the principal role - under the title of Lawrence of Arabia. This explains why we deliberately chose perhaps the dullest and most prosaic title in TV documentary history: we insisted on calling our film T. E. Lawrence: 1888 - 1935, to distinguish ourselves from our big-screen rival - and to indicate that we were trying to portray a real man, not a Hollywood fantasy-figure. If the Lean/O'Toole epic was going to be Lawrence the feature, we would be Lawrence the documentary. There was another advantage: we could take our actual screen title ready-carved from the famous recumbent sculpture of Lawrence at St Martin's Wareham, courtesy of the late Eric Kennington - and by so doing save a bit of our none-too-large programme budget! Now when you compare this film with the Omnibus film produced in 1986 by Julia Cave, bear in mind that a whole television generation had gone by. Julia's film - which I helped with as best I could while being a full-time producer in another department - took many agonising months and the production process had, among other things, to find time for some long, drawn-out negotiations with Jordanian television and, such negotiations concluded, a filming visit to Arabia. By contrast, the 1962 programme was put together in a few weeks and the thought of going to Arabia never entered our heads. Oxford, Clouds Hill - yes, but Arabia? That was as far off as the moon. Speed was of the essence, so we instituted an instant division of labour. Philip and David did most of the interviewing. Philip also did much of the special filming - the effects with sand done on the stage at Ealing Studios, the motor-cycle effects, the evocative scenes on the Bovington ranges. I specialised in the archive film (such scraps of it as we could find, which weren't many), and - a most vital element - the still photographs. We all offered ideas for the choice of quotations from Lawrence's writings. David wrote an inventive half-script which we were able to follow more or less up to the fall of Damascus; the rest we concocted in the film editor's cutting-room as we went along. Time had to be found to woo and win a somewhat reluctant A. W. Lawrence.1 One way and another we burned a lot of midnight oil. Yet we didn't feel when we finished that we had skimped our work, which we had found both fascinating and rewarding. And - though you might think it a cheek to say so - by the time we put it on the air, we felt it was - well - not bad. So, apparently, did the viewers. It attracted an audience of ten million, and was repeated within a matter of weeks. Now, of course, anyone can see its faults... there's the odd wrong date, Fareedah el Akle jumbles up Lawrence's visits to the east, we don't mention Dahoum, our summing-up of chunks of history is a bit cavalier at times, some of the filmic devices we tried didn't quite work and look very clumsy to us now - and we had only one stab at getting them right. But it also has its virtues. Perhaps the best is that we felt we had been able to do something like justice to an exciting and moving story. For that was what we were trying to do above all. My late and much-admired mentor Sir Huw Wheldon had numerous maxims about the medium in which we worked: one of his best was 'Television is about story-telling.' A drama, an investigation, a documentary, a well-put-together news bulletin, even, no question, a good commercial - all these are, in their way, stories. T. E. Lawrence's life was a great story for us to tell. I remember John Buchan somewhere writing of himself as a natural story-teller - suggesting that in the Stone Age, because he could spin a good yarn, he might have found himself invited nearer the fire and given an extra slice of mammoth.2 Well, the television set sits by the fire in many houses, does it not, and if you can't feed it with mammoth, at least you can eat your mammoth - or its twentieth-century equivalent - yourself while watching and listening. My own preferred variation of this theme is that I see the television set at its best as the successor to the minstrel in the mead-hall, telling the adventures of some great dead hero... a Beowulf, a Robin Hood or a King Arthur. Our film on Lawrence in its way can be seen as a latter-day example of that minstrel tradition. But perhaps the best thing about the film, I think, is that we approached Lawrence just as we approached the other people whose lives we had tackled, not as icons to be venerated, but as human beings to be relished and understood. We took as we found, without going in for either defence or apology on the one hand, or denigration on the other. We were neither pious nor snide. In a word, we treated Lawrence as though you might walk out and meet him in the street. Of course a prime reason for doing that is that we met and filmed quite a lot of people who had actually met him in the street - or if not in the street, at school, or in the war, or in the RAF, or at what Lawrence called those 'mixed grills' at Clouds Hill. For all of these Lawrence was a man, not a myth - a person of flesh and blood and, thankfully so far as we were concerned, with an extraordinary talent for acquiring friends. The cast-list of the film was, we thought, reasonably wide-ranging...
Also appearing at two key points in the film, and making a characteristically strong contribution, was A. W. Lawrence. What of course is always frustrating in making a film to a definite time slot is that you have to leave so much out. David Garnett, Celandine Kennington and Siegfried Sassoon make only one brief appearance - in a collage of voices at the end. Mind you, there were other problems too. My colleague Philip recorded a long rambling interview with Sassoon - who was by then getting on a bit - which was largely ruined by Sassoon's habit of clearing his throat (with a sort of grrrrrumph sound) every twenty seconds or so. It can cause the odd editing difficulty, that kind of thing. And we also met others who didn't get into the film at all for reasons of space or other causes:
I have regrets - Philip Donnellan and I had a long lunch with Lowell Thomas at 'The Gay Hussar' in Soho; he talked us through several courses to the third Turkish coffee, and I can't remember a single thing he said. I have the most agreeable memories - at Clouds Hill we had a 'mixed grill' of our own, with Celandine Kennington, Jock Chambers (who turned up looking like a retired pirate, riding a bicycle with home-made trailer), Pat and Mrs Knowles and, by way of optional extra, a local writer of stories for boys called, I believe, Douglas V. Duff, who appeared as we had just finished filming. I have also one special private satisfaction. In Julia's film, Arabia was wonderfully realised by inventive filming in Jordan. I took it upon myself to attempt to evoke Arabia while not, as already indicated, getting nearer to Wadi Rumm, Azrak or Akaba than the old BBC studios in Lime Grove. The means? The wonderful photographs taken during the Arab Revolt, many of them by T. E. Lawrence himself. So that in fact, though the 1962 documentary is a 'film', many of the images you will see are not 'film' at all, but superb photographs out of which film sequences have been made to give the story shape, and power, and movement - and with the added satisfaction that the principal 'film-cameraman' was T. E. Lawrence. The technique of filming stills was very new then and directors tended to try and jazz them up and cut quickly away to the next image as though fearing they might seem dull. My preference was to have confidence in these wonderful images, by filming them with slow, almost imperceptible movements which allowed you to enjoy them for what they were while not making you think you were looking at a dusty old photograph album... To give one example, we were able to construct a kind of symbolic desert journey out of the simple ingredients of a dozen or so photographs and, for soundtrack, the tinkling of a single camel bell. And there is another point worth noting: that the visual images were deliberately given lower status, at times, than the words accompanying them. Television is said to be a visual medium, but there are times when, rightly, 'the sound mattereth more than the vision' - and with a writer like Lawrence, you could almost put his words against a blank screen, and that would be enough. We didn't do that, but sometimes we got very close - and thanks to `T.E.', there was no loss at all... Now in all I have said, I have really not dealt directly with the relevance of the film today. And that is because this is hardly for me to judge. I think viewers will find points that harmonize with their views, and points that jar - or points where the film might seen a bit naive and old-fashioned. Overall, however, I hope it can be enjoyed for what it is - and while it may not increase some people's knowledge, it may enrich their inner understanding - and make them feel again the drama and the pathos of the story it tries to tell. Notes
Back to the contents page for this issue This first issue of the Journal is no longer in print. You can order other issues from the online shop. |