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As you'd expect from the author of the well-remembered PENDA'S FEN, THE WHITE LADY isn't a conventional drama by any standards. It combines the struggle of a non-conformist, back-to-the-land single parent and his attempts to bring his young daughters up against a backdrop of rural strife and near-poverty with the hard facts about poisonous agro-chemicals and potentially lethal pesticides, very much a hot topic back in the 1980s. Some scenes have an ethereal, dream-like quality, whilst others are gritty and harsh, but nothing kicks quite as hard as the news agency photographs of malformed livestock or the fleeting glimpses of factual data that flash up on the screen every five minutes or so. Another sequence that stuck in my mind was the moment when the father 'lost it' and started beating his daughters (thankfully out of vision) after they got their clothes dirty. This is a very rarely-seen production from the days when the BBC still made respectable, challenging one-off dramas and short films, and as such, a DVD release is long overdue.
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