Trevor Griffiths' "Country" was recently shown on BBC4 as part of a season celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the famed "Play for Today" series. One of the great paradoxes of British political history, and one which Conservatives have never been able to explain satisfactorily, is why, if Churchill was the saviour of the nation in 1945, the British people rejected him at the first chance they got. "Country" is set against the backdrop of the 1945 Labour election victory, although most of the people we see are Conservatives.
The wealthy Carlion family are meeting in their Kentish stately home. (Linton Park near Maidstone was used for the exterior shots). It is not quite true to say that the Carlions are "new money". Although their wealth derives from trade, the head of the family, Sir Frederick, is referred to as the "fifth Baronet", implying that the family business- a brewery- goes back several generations. Unlike some old-money industrialists, however, the Carlions still retain an active role in the management of the business, rather than reinventing themselves as country gentry and living off the income from their shares. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss who will succeed the elderly Sir Frederick as Chairman of the company as his eldest son, also called Frederick, has been killed in the war. The most likely candidate is his second son, Philip, but he is a London-based journalist with little business experience.
The Carlions may be in trade, but they have adopted one affectation of the genuine aristocracy, that of not pronouncing their surnames in the way they are spelled. "Carlion" is pronounced "Corlion". Apparently Griffiths did this to suggest a link with the Corleone family and to imply that the wealthy classes were Britain's mafia. There are also thematic links with "The Godfather"; like Michael Corleone, Philip is a younger son who originally shows no interest in the family business but who finds himself drawn into it after the death of an older brother.
Like a number of "Play for Today" contributors, Griffiths is noted for his left-wing political views, and clearly intended "Country" to have some sort of political meaning, but it is hard to see exactly what political point he is making. Apart from Sir Frederick's radical daughter Virginia, all the family and their friends are Conservative supporters, so they are obviously discomfited by Labour's victory in the elections, but it would be an exaggeration to say that they are seriously threatened by it. Nationalisation of the brewery industry was never part of the Attlee government's programme, and even if it had been the shareholders would have received full compensation for the loss of their assets. Virginia, who covered the Spanish Civil War as a journalist, says that the British upper classes deserve to be garrotted in their beds, as happened in Spain, but a moment's reflection will reveal just how silly a comment this is. It is precisely because the British Left preferred to concentrate upon social reforms rather than vindictive score-settling that this country never bred its own General Franco.
The Carlions might be only one syllable away from the Corleones, but it is never clear just why Griffiths regards them as Mafiosi. We never see any real evidence that they have done anything violent, criminal or even immoral, and old Sir Frederick does not seem the sort of person who would order a hit on a rival brewer or put a horse's head in anyone's bed. Griffiths said that his play was intended as a critique of the country-house drama, an established theatrical genre in the thirties and forties and still popular in the cinema and on television, by showing how the lifestyle of the country-house set was based upon exploiting the poor, but in fact the play shows us very little of either the workers or of exploitation. The worst crime the family commit is when Philip proposes the firm should start producing "recarbonated beer"- what later became known as "keg bitter"- something any real-ale lover would recognise as a major crime against humanity.
There is one brief scene in which a group of people claiming to be hop-pickers take over Sir Frederick's stables before being moved on by the police. I grew up in a village in a hop-growing area of Kent, and it is certainly true that hop-pickers- working-class Londoners hired as temporary labour during the hop-picking season- were often horribly exploited by their employers; the work was hard, the pay meagre, and the accommodation provided for them generally dire. In the play, however, we do not see enough of these people to see if their complaints are justified. We cannot even be sure that they are genuine hop-pickers. (The 1945 election took place in July, but the hop harvest does not normally start until September).
Despite the play's rather confused politics, the acting is excellent, especially from Leo McKern as Sir Frederick, James Fox as Philip and Wendy Hiller as Frederick's wife Daisy. Sir Frederick is a rather crusty, irascible individual, but McKern makes him strangely sympathetic. McKern was noted for his conservative politics, and I wondered if he was surreptitiously undermining Griffiths' left-wing intentions. Fox's Philip also comes across as difficult to dislike, despite his rather aloof manner and odd tastes in beer. We learn that he is gay, which must have made life difficult at a time when homosexuality was condemned both by the law and by public opinion on both sides of the political divide. There is enough of interest in this play (and in some of the others being shown in the BBC4 season) to make me wonder why the British television channels, which is happy to go on repeating Hollywood movies regardless of how many times they have been shown before, tend to keep their own rich heritage of television dramas locked away in the vaults. 7/10
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