Very formal in its presentation of religion and politics, from the school system on up, but still manages to interject new (and far older) ideas in counterpoint to the period and setting. What at first came across as something that might be strict and stodgy turned into an engaging coming-of-age tale in the form an older teenager, on the verge of manhood, who is troubled by questions of spirituality and god, while at the same time coming to terms with his own sexuality, and how all of this affects his understanding of his place in society. Rudkin’s play wasn’t a one-off, his other work is equally powerful, engaging and fascinating. A later film for the BBC, the wildly ambitious Artemis 81, is three hours in length (!) and explores similar themes, albeit in a less coherent fashion. It also includes Daniel Day-Lewis’s first screen appearance and has Sting playing Hywel Bennett’s angelic object of homoerotic desire. Rudkin’s stage work is fiercely imaginative, using Joycean dialogue to striking effect, and I’m continually surprised that no one seems interested in re-staging remarkable plays such as The Sons of Light. As for Penda’s Fen, whenever a TV executive tries to argue that television hasn’t dumbed down I’d offer this work as Exhibit A for the prosecution. Rudkin and Clarke’s film was screened at 9.35 in the evening on the nation’s main TV channel, BBC 1, at a time when there were only three channels to choose from. A primetime audience of many millions watched this visceral and unapologetically intelligent drama; show me where this happens today. The story is helped along with phantasmagorical imagery, both dark and light, by way of the young man's dreams and imagination. But ultimately these become set pieces in the greater story and its resolution. Pretty bold fare, I would think, for what was then a 1974 TV movie originally airing on British television. Original music is by Paddy Kingsland of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, who also electronically manipulated parts of the Britten recording.

He flees from them and they try to extinguish him. Like Joan of Arc, he starts to burn, but Penda intervenes by zapping them.Some still think of Elgar as the archetypal country gentleman whose music enshrines the noblest sentiments of patriotism and faith. That way of looking at him is similar to Stephen’s outlook on the world at the beginning of the film Elgar was, in fact, a tradesman’s son who married above himself and was socially over-sensitive all his life… But: how might it play with the ladies, I wonder? Apart from Annabel above the interest in this wonderful film – on this blog anyway – seems to be almost entirely a male one. (I’m assuming that Flying Stag is probably a male..?) There is so much to love and admire in this film that I feel a reluctance to say this but: the women xters in the film are surely stereotypical/marginal? I say that & then of course reflect that the mutilation of women by men is one of the most powerful sequences in the film. In film, dare I say? He dreams of naked classmates and of a demon (Geoffry Pennells) sitting on his bed. He sees an angel in a stream (Martin Reynolds) and meets quintessential (deceased) English composer Edward Elgar (Graham Leaman) who tells him the secret of his Enigma Variations. Child be Strange, A Symposium on Penda’s Fen is at BFI Southbank on Saturday June 10th Information here The earth beneath your feet feels solid there. It is not. Somewhere there the land is hollow. Somewhere beneath, is being constructed, something. We’re not supposed to know.”

Bookended by news of an American President’s criminal scheming and looming impeachment, it may not have felt like the most imperative, urgent broadcast of the evening schedule, but this would be wrong. Sitting between reportage of Nixon’s folly was a complex, literary and intensely prescient story — its writer, David Rudkin, demonstrating that, like the personal, the parochial was political. It aired only once more on the BBC and, apart from a late-night broadcast on Channel 4 in the 1980s, Penda’s Fen seemed consigned to its status as an obscure footnote in television history. Due to the efforts of a handful of enthusiasts, critics, and now the BFI, however, it is now being recognised for what it is: a masterpiece. Moreover, in this fractious age of populism and identity politics, this erstwhile televisual oddity is only gaining traction in terms of its relevance. Another, more famous figure’s hidden historical reality is also unearthed in the film—Elgar. But it’s more than Elgar’s music that haunts Penda’s Fen: there’s something of his spirit, too… Rudkin, who saw himself as a political writer placed himself into the film as the reactionary playwright, Arne (Ian Hog) who lives with his wife (Jennie Heslewood, unfortunately only named ‘Mrs Arne’). At a debate in the local village hall, Arne is answering a question about the strikes which ground Britain to a halt during much of the 70s concluding in the ‘winter of discontent’. Arne is arguing against the assertion that the strikers are holding the country to ransom which was a common refrain at the time. Arne instead tries to divert attention to the government which he sees as secretive and malevolent.It was conceived as a film and written visually. Some people think visual questions are none of the writer’s business—that he should provide the action and leave it to the director to picture it all out. For me, writing for the screen is a business of deciding not only what is to be shown but how it is to be seen…

Strikingly, it is even more than this. Penda's Fen presciently maps onto the current moment, countering nationalism, the conservatism of the provinces, war-mongering and the suppression of an emerging identity politics. Rudkin’s film was broadcast months before the impeachment of a corrupt, duplicitous President in a world threatened by thermonuclear destruction. In the year that Moonlight triumphed under the presidency of Donald Trump, it is important we remember its archival forebears, as Penda also contributes to the same radical filmic tradition — a pregnant counter-cinema — where the everyday becomes newly estranged, old certainties are sloughed off, and entrenched shibboleths don’t bear scrutiny. Even though the Midlands was a cornerstone of the industrial revolution, because of its natural resources, it also produced plenty of dissenters and radicals, most prominently in the Lunar Society and Victorians such as Darwin. Penda’s Fen features the hymn Jerusalem, said by many to be England’s unofficial anthem. The words were by William Blake who was staunch anti industrialist. Blake makes reference to ‘dark Satanic Mills’ which has been interpreted as factory workers who were working under the yolk of the rich, including the monarchy. Blake believed that industrialisation mechanised the lives of people and saw it as an evil. As Stephen’s mum tells him, ‘A man cannot leave the belt for one moment, without calling a stand-in to take his place. The belt moves on regardless of the needs of men…It gets at his heart, his life’s whole rhythm gets chained to the machine.’Rudkin shows the English countryside as a place, not of becalmed continuity and ‘old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’, but as a historical battleground and in constant turmoil. It offers wormholes and geysers, faultlines that fertilise, ruptures that release energy. It’s a philosophy of pastoral – and of what makes a nation – that sloughs off Little Englandism and Middle Earthism in favour of something less self-satisfied and more attuned to its lurking darknesses.