Memoirs of a Private Man

by Winston Graham

I was recovering from a minor operation, and one Tuesday all the main participants in the HTV production came to lunch with me at my home. John Edwards, Stephen Matthews, Geraint Morris, Sally Haynes. They could not have been more charming or more enthusiastic, and they left me with a feeling of happy anticipation.

  Except that I had urged them to change the format, making four one-hour episodes of the book. The Poldark novels are not written for blockbuster films, they seem ideally made, however accidentally, for a long-running serial. I was assured that HTV could do nothing whatsoever about this. It was a condition imposed by the ITV moguls, who had got this idea from America and who made it a condition of providing the finance that it should be made in this form.

  The one important person missing from our luncheon was the scriptwriter, who they said was too busy on the adaptation to attend. They said she played over one of the old TV tapes each day before beginning work on the new book.

  In the meantime while we waited – and waited – all was optimism among the old cast. Robin went daily to the gym to reduce his weight and get in trim. Angharad glowed rosily at the prospect of portraying the part of Demelza which she had made triumphantly her own. My own enquiries to HTV of Sally Haynes, who was to produce the film, were met with reassurances that the script had had some amendments but had now gone back for the final polishing.

  At length – very late – it came, with production scheduled to begin in a month’s time. There was just time enough to go full steam ahead. When I read the script I was once again shattered and deeply affronted. The scriptwriter apparently had felt free to use my characters but almost to write a different story. Or if the bones of the story were adhered to the flesh had completely changed. Important incidents in the book were totally omitted, important incidents which were not in the book were inserted. It didn’t read right, it wouldn’t speak right. Any resemblance to the ‘ feel’ of the novels was coincidental. I rang up Sally Haynes and told her it was an insult. It just wouldn’t do. Fortunately Stephen Matthews, the executive in charge, didn’t like it either.

  So the script was thrown out, and after a pause another scriptwriter, equally unknown, was engaged. This meant that the whole rumbling mechanism of production was brought to a stop, at great cost, and a new date, in September, four months hence, was chosen. At this stage John Edwards, whose role was now only supervisory, wrote a treatment which kept closely to the book while paring off inessentials. Robin and Angharad went to see Geraint Morris and Sally Haynes, and they beat out together a rough idea of how the film should be approached. If only it had happened three months earlier, we thought – and if it was adhered to – it would have saved all the trouble.

  But it was not, in the outcome, adhered to at all. Sally, a talented young woman, but a person of great obstinacy, had her own ideas: she had engaged an unknown director called Richard Laxton, and as the summer went on she more and more leaned towards the idea of featuring only Robin and Angharad and otherwise making a clean sweep of the earlier cast. Technicians who had worked on the BBC production, and who had been provisionally signed up to begin in May, were told that they would no longer be needed in September.

  By this time I had become aware of a curious dichotomy in HTV’s approach. As a group they could not have been more eager, enthusiastic and determined to make this into a resounding success. I remember Sally saying excitedly to me once: ‘Won’t it be wonderful to see Robin and Angharad reunited on the screen again after all these years!’ There was no question in her mind, in anyone’s mind, that they should not play.

  But underneath the enthusiasm was a total blind ignorance of what Poldark was really all about. Even before the two series on television there must have been many thousands of people all over the country able to answer all their questions and to correct all their misapprehensions. After the TV series it must have been numbered in millions.

  Yet there was this enthusiasm, there was this commitment. Nothing was going to be too expensive or too much trouble to ensure that the new production was as good as, or better than, the old.

  And unlike certain people who might try to sit in judgement on HTV, I have a long memory. I remember the total ignorance of the BBC when it all began in 1975. They had the first four novels, which a lot of people had read, and many hadn’t. The great saving grace, then, was that it went on week after week regardless, and they learned in the process. By the end of Episode 4 things were changing. This may have been partly because of my raging disgust at the first scripts; partly, I believe the actors created a spell along with the story that gradually worked for all.

  So when the second script came along from HTV, the entirely new script by an entirely new writer, I was delighted and relieved by the enormous improvement this showed. Remembering the awful travesty of the first four episodes that Jack Pulman produced for the BBC, this was not to be gagged at. I accepted it in its entirety, hoping that when it came down to the ultimate shooting script, minor and gently insinuated criticisms could iron out the too obvious faults.

  I understood from all I heard that the top brass at HTV approved the new script, also that Robin and Angharad liked it, and I felt happy that at last this big expensive new project was about to go on the road.

  In July I went on holiday with my daughter, Rosamund. We drove (in great heat) to Geneva and from there took the short flight to Nice and stayed at the Hôtel Metropole, Beaulieu. Then a week or so later we returned by air and car (in great heat) to England. We had been away less than three weeks, but in that period things had turned very sour. On the last day of the month Robin rang me to say he was withdrawing from the production.

  It is not easy to relate the sequence of events which had led him to take this drastic step. Before I went away I knew there were certain elements in the second script that he did not like (and I entirely agreed with him) but, as I have said, I believed that these would be ironed out in the course of ordinary consultation. The official reason for the complete break was that the sums offered to him and Angharad for six weeks’ work on the film just weren’t enough. But I have never believed this was the whole of the story. It was probably the last straw.

  Robin and Angharad had always believed that their participation in the next Poldark on TV was an absolute essential. They had created these two characters on screen from the characters in my novels. For weeks and months in the Seventies they had worked together, projecting themselves into these two eighteenth-century people, thinking and feeling like them. They had themselves been as close as lovers (which I don’t believe they ever were), consulting, arguing, agreeing, working with the relevant director (and sometimes against him). They had presented these characters to the world, they had travelled together, to Spain, to America, etc., perpetuating the image and the dream.

  They had been feted everywhere; twenty-two countries knew them. After the furore of the Seventies and early Eighties things must have begun to quieten down. The excitement was subsiding. Then in 1981 the BBC had reluctantly decided to show the series again – at the mildly insane time of 5.30 p.m. on Mondays. It had nevertheless roused much new interest, and out of this new excitement the Poldark Appreciation Society was born. Founded by Val Adams, it had rapidly grown in membership and at the annual luncheons, to which the stars and I were invited, there were people from all over the world. I greatly appreciated the warmth and admiration with which I was treated, but the largest number of admirers quite naturally centred on Robin and Angharad. I was the author, but they were actors, both young people with great charm and good looks, and they were the centre of the main attention. I fully approved of this, but it may have added to Robin and Angharad’s impression, their conviction, that the new series stood or fell by their approval, that they were totally irreplaceable.

  Most people, including me, felt they were. Not so the TV company. In their enthusiasm and eagerness to put on a fine series, they took it for granted that Robin and Angharad would be the stars; but they, the TV company, had to be in charge. With infinite
error they had chosen an executive producer, a producer and a director, and – for the second time – a writer, the last three of whom were untried and certainly had no real knowledge of what Poldark meant. They all wanted the participation and the help of Robin and Angharad, but it was to be an ITV production and they were putting up the money and they intended to be in the saddle.

  In the matter of the money the two stars were offered £30,000 each for six weeks’ work, with pro-rata payment if the time was exceeded. HTV assured me, rightly or wrongly, that their offer was the top rate that was paid to TV stars. They were well aware that in the hard cold light of the TV world neither Robin nor Angharad had continued their fame by appearing in other comparable productions in the eighteen years that had passed.

  When this offer was refused there was consternation at HTV and it looked as if the production might founder for a second time – and this time for good. The big people with the big money in the TV world were appealed to, were adamant that the top salaries offered was all there was to offer. So at an emergency meeting at HTV a package was contrived – for which later they were sternly reprimanded – whereby the two stars in addition to their salaries should each receive a percentage of the profits. This was also turned down.

  Two well-known actors to whom I spoke at this time both said that Robin and Angharad were unwise to refuse such an offer.

  Personally I greatly fault Robin’s and Angharad’s agents for not going into this matter thoroughly at the very outset. For God’s sake get these two key people agreed and signed up before anything else begins. Even a relatively unbusinesslike type like me knew that much about the world – particularly, of all professions, the film and TV world! HTV’s accountants were equally to blame. Did both sides quietly think ‘Oh, they’ll agree when the time comes’? Was there already an element of bluff on both sides?

  As I say, I have never believed that money was the whole cause of the break. From the beginning Robin and Angharad gave me the impression that because this was commercial television it might be slightly lower grade than the BBC. From the beginning HTV gave me the impression that though Ross and Demelza were the major stars, it was the story of their children that they wished mainly to concentrate on.

  I don’t know if either of these attitudes became perceptible to the other side, but neither of them would have mattered without the clash of temperaments which had grown up and which finally came to a headlong battle over the second script.

  While I was away with my daughter, Angharad went to stay with Robin at his house in France, and one afternoon the two sides had a violent argument by telephone which lasted over two hours. I have heard both versions of this telephone call, but I gather that tempers were lost on all sides, that halfway through Angharad retreated into the garden and would take no further part in it, that Sally Haynes was in tears, that Richard Laxton had accused the actors of wanting to take over the film. Mistakenly, Sally thought that Angharad had joined forces with Robin in France in order to ‘gang up’ against them. Richard said it would be near impossible to direct them, since they wanted to direct themselves. (From time to time they had done just this in the earlier series, with benefit to the production.)

  But Geraint Morris, the executive producer and in my view the only film-maker of repute and experience in the team, summed it up when he said: ‘To me making a television play should be fun; otherwise the thing is not worth making. I don’t see much fun in this. We are going to have to recast.’

  What Robin and Angharad were chiefly complaining about in the second script was that the writer had totally misunderstood the characters of Ross and Demelza. (A lot of these mistakes were lost, as I had hoped, in the final shooting, but enough were left to spoil many of the scenes.) Whether, if Robin and Angharad had been playing the parts, they would have been able to influence the director or writer on the set we shall never know.

  It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the break up of the entire production was chiefly a matter of chemistry.

  When the news broke the fury of Robin and Angharad’s admirers knew no bounds. A factor in all this which has been overlooked was that about two years before HTV began to mount the film the BBC after so many years decided reluctantly and timorously to release the twenty-nine instalments on videotape. Following a careful weighing of the pros and cons they had decided that it might just be financially viable to take this enormous risk. In the event the Poldarks went straight into the best-seller top ten, and over the next twenty-four months sold about two million copies. So that, along with the memories of the fifteen million-odd people who had watched the series twenty years before, there was a whole new mass of people to whom the series had just come fresh and in whose minds the original enormously engaging cast were still vivid and new.

  To this was added the noisy voice of the Poldark Appreciation Society. Perhaps 4,000-strong, it had formed itself as a band of fervent admirers of the original books and the original cast. As that admirable actor John Bowe, who came to play Ross in the HTV version, said: ‘ It should really be called the Robin Ellis and Angharad Rees Appreciation Society.’ Which was perfectly true. I had seen this all along, and had never regarded it with anything but great pleasure – until the break took place.

  Many of the members took up an angry attitude, changing in a trice from happily pro to extremely hostile to HTV, and a number of them wrote to every newspaper they knew, staged demonstrations in Bond Street, paraded in Cornwall, etc.

  Most of these good people were ardent admirers of the books too. Often and often they had come over to me and told me what the books meant to them in terms of sheer pleasure, and (God help me) uplift, succour in ill-health, comfort and relief in times of personal distress. Many of them had read all the novels three or four times. It has always been a genuinely heart-warming experience to meet them.

  But what of those idols, those who had come to portray visually characters hitherto only alive in their imaginations? Were they for the sake of a few extra thousands of pounds to be cast aside for a set of new idols, slowly obscuring the lineaments of the old?

  They were not willing that this should happen. Val Adams must have felt unable to unknit her strong allegiances. All the same, it would have been more becoming to have kept a lower profile out of some consideration for the author of the books.

  For the most part I was the one to keep the low profile, though behind the scenes I did everything humanly possible to heal the split. Some people, notably among the Poldark Appreciation Society supporters, thought that if I had aligned myself alongside Robin and Angharad the TV companies would once again have backed down and invited Robin and Angharad to return. This was a complete pipe dream. ITV were quite adamant. So I was left with a choice, disagreeable though that was. I faced the facts. HTV had bought the rights of the last four Poldarks. Although in some ways they had behaved like infidels, they were in deadly earnest, they had, chiefly because of my disapproval, thrown out the first script and brought the whole production to a stop, at great expense; more than the BBC had done when I raged at them. Now HTV, however wrong-headed they were in some things, had produced a second script which, for all its faults, was better than Jack Pulman’s for the opening of the first series ever. In those days, though, there was no Poldark Appreciation Society to throw up its hands in horror, nor did the leading parts ‘ belong’ to any actor or group of actors. No one knew where they were going. The BBC was at least as unfaithful to the intentions of the novels to begin. The redeeming feature was that Maurice Barry and his associates had been so generally inspired in their choice of cast. And the BBC had commissioned a long one-hour weekly showing of the four books so that they were able to stagger through the first episodes under a hail of criticism from the snide press. HTV, under the orders of their masters, were committed to an enormously expensive two-hour blockbuster to ‘ test the water’. Even if the reaction was overwhelmingly favourable it would have been another year before the beginning of a proper series was shown.


  But my full commitment to HTV was not until I was invited to a meeting at which all the new cast was present and we sat, thirty round the table, technicians standing in the background, while Geraint Morris read the agreed script from beginning to end. I was tremendously impressed by the sheer look of quality of the new actors engaged. And nothing thereafter shook my intent to go along with this new production of my novels through thick and thin.

  After the shooting in Cornwall was completed, where we had been dogged by foul weather, there was a big ballroom scene which was to be shot in the Pump Room in Bath (standing in for London). I had returned home for a couple of days and was taking two friends back to Bath to see the shooting. The day before I left the Mail on Sunday came down by appointment for a feature interview at my house in Sussex. The Mail, among whose staff Val Adams had some friends, had consistently supported the old actors and published all possible news derogatory to HTV; so I awaited the interview with lively interest.

  In it I answered all their questions as truthfully and in as detached a way as I could, trying to keep a level between what was good on one side and what was good on the other. At about noon there was a break for coffee, and wandering into my study I found the chief interviewer – a very pleasant chap – on the mobile to his editor. I heard him say: ‘But he favours them.’ ‘ Them’ being presumably HTV. The interview ended about 2.30 and the chief interviewer said: ‘ There’ll be a full-page spread tomorrow.’

  The next day I drove to Bath with my friends and watched the magnificent ballroom scene being shot. When I met Geraint he said that news had got around among the cast and technicians that there had been this interview, and every Mail on Sunday sold out the moment the papers arrived.

  In fact there was nothing in the paper at all. Because my view had not been unfavourable to the HTV production and therefore did not fit in with his policy, the editor had killed the interview.