If Labour is taking us back to the 1970s – and the recent strike-secured pay rises and mass rage about immigration suggest more than a nodding similarity between our own time and that one – anyone wanting a deeper insight could do no better than watch Bill Brand. This 11-part series, written by playwright Trevor Griffiths (who died earlier this year) and broadcast by ITV in 1976, explores the working and personal life of a newly elected Labour MP, and was once called by the Sunday Times ‘the most remarkable series ever seen on the box’.
Bill Brand, played by Jack Shepherd, is on the hard left of Labour, the kind of MP Kinnock and Blair did so much to eject from the party in the 80s and 90s (and who made something of a comeback under Jeremy Corbyn’s doomed tenure). ‘I actually believe in public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange,’ he tells an interviewer, ‘…in workers’ control over work, community control over the environment.’
This is a series in which huge moral issues seem at stake and worlds in danger of toppling
This puts him on a collision course with the bulk of his colleagues and the Whips’ office, who tell him to his face he’s ‘quite a little shit’ and knuckle down for a war of attrition with him. Over the course of a year we watch him take part in industrial action, get into scrapes with his local party, alienate nearly everyone with a speech which seems to defend the IRA and fight like mad for the dying textile trade in his constituency.
If this sounds dull, it’s anything but. There may be a lot about the daily grind of parliamentary procedure – too much, perhaps, for some viewers. Yet few series have more sense of passion and conflict, the innate drama of the political process, of things happening (or failing to happen, often by a whisker) that will actually change people’s lives.
Bill Brand is a difficult man to like. His fellow MPs call him ‘sententious’, a ‘wild man’, ‘some sort of fascist’, while his wife, in an angry moment, describes him as a ‘selfish, egotistical, uncaring swine of a man’. Some of these things are true, some clearly not. Certainly, he’s humourless and high-minded, relates to people by lecturing them and has a superiority complex a mile wide (most of us have at some point in our lives met a person like Bill Brand, and may not recall the experience with undiluted warmth). He’s at times self-regarding, pointlessly cold to strangers, and is told (accurately) by the Chief Whip that it may simply be ordinary people he distrusts. Yet he also has tenacity, principle and courage, and is part of a long tradition, reminding the Left of the principles it has wandered from in the search for power. Whether this is a sign of moral strength or chronic maladjustment to reality is a question the series can’t help but pose.
As the series studies the range of Labour MPs, their spectrum of beliefs and differing modi operandi, it poses so many other questions too. Griffiths assumes the viewer is thoughtful, intelligent and attentive, and you’re forced to think hard as you watch, often about fundamental questions. What is real decency and what’s mere posturing? What’s the difference between the nice and the good, and why are they often so distinct from one another? Is it best to govern from the centre, seeking consensus and giving your electorate the quietest life you can offer them? Or to impose your vision on them, sure you know better than they do what’s in their real best interests?
These aren’t just left-wing questions, and the fact Thatcherism arrived three years after this series’ transmission is an interesting lens to view it through. Much of Bill Brand is about the whys and wherefores of political chicanery – trade-offs, plotting, strategy, dodgy deals in smoky rooms – but there are moments of real passion which remind you of why this is all happening at all.
One scene, in an episode called ‘Now and in England’, features Brand and another character – David Last, clearly based on Michael Foot – knocking back the scotch together in a hotel room while discussing Labour party history and drunkenly quoting T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets back and forth at each other. It is so perfectly pitched, paced and acted, so full of genuine drama, as to make the hairs on your arms stand up. Here is Last (an ethereal, compelling performance by the late, great Alan Badel) explaining why, after a lifetime of principled refusal, he’s finally agreed to join the Labour cabinet:
All those years I sat there, watched all those dull and slippery men work their way through the machine, get their departments, pull real levers, make decisions, see them enacted, driven largely by ego and a sort of adolescent lust for recognition… all the Tonys, the Bobs, the Georges, the Peters, the Jacks… and I was sixty. Suddenly. Like a week, all of it touchable, bound together by what? By a sort of rhetoric. Words. Precept, argument, ire. Air on air. Not enough, I thought… I thought, if parliament is the seat of real power in this society, why, when we’re in office, do we slide and squelch about like shysters and milksops when it comes to translating our programmes into realities? A month later I got the invitation from Arthur to join the government. And I just felt… I no longer had the right to say no. It doesn’t… ever… just happen. It has to be made, and it has to be led.
Bill Brand is fifty years old now and sometimes shows its age. It’s a time capsule of the 1970s – the brown everywhere, the fag-smoke and lunchtime beer, the patterned wallpaper, the rusty Ford Cortinas and sense of national decay. There are occasionally embarrassing passages of leaden, self-consciously ‘enlightened’ dialogue between Brand and his estranged wife and girlfriend, and an agitprop theatre performance in the final episode that makes you hyperventilate with relief you were too young for that sort of thing at the time.
Yet these are small things set beside the sheer muscularity of the writing, and you’re struck by how relevant all of it still is. There’s the stellar cast too, all playing at the top of their game: Geoffrey Palmer, Nigel Hawthorne, an absurdly young-looking Cherie Lunghi, Arthur Lowe popping up and having fun as Arthur Watson, the Harold Wilson-style PM. Jack Shepherd too, playing Bill Brand himself – a role he’s occasionally slightly heavy-handed in, but one almost impossible to imagine played by anyone else.
Really, though, it’s the ideas Bill Brand fizzes with that makes its 11 or so hours such a rewarding watch. This is a series in which, even in a filmed discussion at an Oxford summer school, huge moral issues seem at stake and worlds in danger of toppling. What was it Dennis Potter (a writer one speaks of in the same breath as Griffiths) once said about the qualities of the TV medium at its best? ‘Turn on, tune in, grow!’ Watching Trevor Griffiths’ Bill Brand, especially in 2024, you can’t think of a better example.
Comments