Edge of Darkness August 20, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Action / Adventure / Thriller , trackbackIn 1985, heavily pregnant with our first child, my wife was admitted into hospital, doctors concerned at her steadily rising blood pressure. There was nothing to be alarmed about, we were constantly assured by Labour Ward staff; ‘…just routine’, ‘…everything will be fine, no need to worry’. And yet there was, there really was.”Did you remember?” said my partner, clutching at my arm as she lay in her newly made up bed, her brow knotted with anxiety, “Did you remember to tape Edge of Darkness?”
Katherine Louise - Katie, Kate, or just plain Kat to her contemporaries - was born on December 2, that same night episode five, ‘Northmoor’, was broadcast and duly captured on VHS. Just over a week or so later, my wife returned from hospital with our beautiful daughter swaddled cosily in a blanket. Exhausted, relieved, glowing, she relaxed on the sofa and, while our child slept soundly (a miracle in itself), demanded we sit through all six episodes of this majestic BBC series back to back.
Music rises to a crescendo, fade out, cut to:
2007. That little baby, my little baby, is now 21-years-old and on a different medium - DVD - ’Detective Ronald Craven’ is still red eyed mourning the death of the his 21-year-old daughter, his little girl. This most significant of television dramas suddenly takes on a whole new significance. We’re joined at the hip, this bluff Yorkshire cop and I, he’s living in a horrifying world of pain that I can at long last - but have no real wish whatsoever to - truly empathise with. The crushing weight of his grief suddenly reaches out of the screen and becomes suffocating. I stifle a sob, silent tears prick my eyes.
Just as that opening, gut-wrenching scene in Don’t Look Now during a TV showing a couple of decades ago, roused my wife who said quietly: ‘I’m just going to check on Kate…’, I glance at the window, urging her car to turn into the drive. Powerful stuff, the ties that bind. And they only get stronger. I feel a certain synergy at work…
Edge of Darkness
…He cried like a baby
He screamed like a panther
In the middle of the night
And he saddled his pony
And he went for a rideIt was the time of the preacher
In the year of ‘01
Now the lesson is over
And the killing’s begun…The Time of The Preacher - Willie Nelson
Hark! What is that noise like ten thousand honey bees? A host of angels, a veritable celestial choir of cherubim, a’plucking at instruments fashioned by omnipotent Titans? Better than that, gentle reader, for it is Eric Clapton. God himself, in fact, who, with Michael Kaman’s orchestrations, and a few choice popular songs (Tom Waits, New Order, and let’s give a really big hand to Mr Willie Nelson, whose lyrics above almost form a libretto …) gave the BBC TV nuclear thriller Edge of Darkness a great and wonderful gift, something that would enable it to defy time itself. A score that was written in the mid-’80s.
But doesn’t sound like it.
Of course, it’s not the only reason that Edge of Darkness is still so very powerful, so relevant today. Far from it, but, unlike many contemporary productions the score doesn’t set it firmly and irretrievably in the period, like a mosquito caught in amber, or Axel Foley trotting through Beverly Hills to a Harold Faltermeyer riff.
Clapton’s agonised guitar, gently weeping for, well, any number of things as we are soon to find out, is the first thing we hear as the curtain rises on this finely crafted six part series. Eric’s guitar, backed by the irritating honking of an alarm, guards peering warily into the murk, and the clank and rattle of train carriages, one of them routinely carrying an innocent looking flask containing enough nuclear material to irradiate a good part of the western hemisphere for two lifetimes or more.
If you aren’t hooked now, even after these few seconds, you probably never will be.
[Watching a recording of ‘Come Dancing’] Nobody dances like the British! They deserved the Falklands.
Darius Jedburgh
The story. While investigating a union ballot rigging scandal, Yorkshire CID officer Ronald Craven’s daughter Emma is brutally murdered. Craven subsequently finds that Emma is part of a shadowy ecological action group, Gaia, that has broken into Northmoor, a nuclear waste processing plant, and the subject of an American takeover. With the help of a larger than life CIA officer, Darius Jedburgh, Craven determines to get into Northmoor, to retrace the Gaia team’s footsteps, and unlock the underground plant’s dark secret.
Edge of Darkness was, and remains, a television phenomenon. Eerily prescient, touchingly human, unbearably moving, gently humorous, it struck gold at the 1986 BAFTAs winning a clutch of awards, after receiving seven nominations. Bob Peck deservedly took ‘Best Actor’ or his role as Craven, a characterisation that must have put the 41-years-old Peck through an emotional wringer for weeks on end. Craven spends most of the piece in utter despair, willing to risk all to try and make sense of his loss, but more importantly perhaps, to discover simply who his daughter, Emma (Joanne Whalley), was, who she had become, and why. There’s a quite marvellous shot, Edge of Darkness’s most iconic perhaps, of a completely uncomprehending Craven, lying blank eyed on his dead daughter’s bed, the room still full of the detritus of Emma’s childhood, her teddy bear clutched to his chest in one hand, her gun lying casually across his crotch in the other; a neat Freudian touch.
Craven’s relationship with his daughter is central to the narrative, and any queasy ambiguity I may have sensed in it in the mid-’80s, has now evaporated. After she’s blasted into bloody eternity by both barrells of a sawn off shotgun, Emma returns to haunt her father. She appears and disappears randomly, post mortem, to tell her father some unwanted home truths, to drop the odd hint. Craven’s mind, trying to make sense of a senseless murder, begins to slot piece after piece into the puzzle with these clues ostensibly and dramatically, from beyond the grave. But of course, Emma’s dead and buried, and it’s the grief stricken copper’s imagination that simply won’t, can’t, let her rest in peace. Not yet, not until he knows why.
It was the stoic Emma, barely 10-years-old, who comforted her father when Craven lost his wife to cancer. She was the rock on which Craven clung in sheer desperation, the only constant in his world. But Emma has been living a life of which Craven knows nothing; she’s the daughter of a police officer and a suspected ‘terrorist’, and it’s this duality that’s a recurring theme in Edge of Darkness. Most everyone appears to be playing a double game, while themselves being relentlessly played.
“Well, bodies kept turning up in the bunkers, and you need air support to play outta the rough. Kinda puts you off your game.”
Darius Jedburgh
Peck isn’t given the choicest lines in Troy Kennedy Martin’s densely packed and convoluted story - those go to Joe Don Baker, also nominated, for his juicy portrayal of the hugely enjoyable CIA spook Darius Jedburgh - but, the camera doesn’t lie, constantly roaming over Peck’s face in tight close-ups that shriek volumes. Peck defines Craven’s implacable, truly haunted stillness perfectly, he is the calm at the heart of the storm that wheels around this irresistible, immovable detective.
Director Martin Campbell and Producer Michael Wearing lifted their award for ‘Best Drama Series/Serial’, Andrew Dunn, who produced some memorable imagery won ‘Best Film Cameraman’, and ‘Best Film Editor’ was shared between Ardan Fisher and Dan Rae. Of course, messers Clapton and Kaman took the ‘Best Original Television Music’ category, and Joanne Whalley, an actress who showed so much promise before flitting to Hollywood to become a hyphen, was nominated but did not win.
There was no BAFTA for Best Script; had there been, Kennedy Martin, a veteran scriptwriter with The Italian Job, Z Cars, The Sweeney and many others to his credit, would have been a shoo-in. Delightfully, it’s a script that rewards on multiple viewings, those quick-fire, almost throwaway, lines revealing new depths of character, new twists and turns as cross becomes double, triple cross. No-one is quite whom they seem, no-one appears to have a clear motivation. Except Craven.
It’s almost extraordinary, in these days of bloated TV franchises, that Kennedy Martin manages to fit a narrative with such scope into this neat package. ‘Nuclear thriller’ almost diminishes the scale of what’s on offer here. From almost parochial beginnings, it becomes apparent that at stake is the future of the human race itself, whose fate of first becoming the slaves of the new atomic demi-Gods, and then crossing the universe as some sort of star hopping nuclear stormtroopers is clearly mapped out by the chairman of the ‘Fusion Corporation of Kansas’ (a sly allusion, I believe, to The Wizard of Oz) Jerry Grogan (Kenneth Nelson). This diminutive, fascistic American, is heading what to all intents and purposes is a putsch, in his thrall, the most destructive power on the planet both freeing and enslaving mankind. As Edge of Darkness demonstrates, decades on from Oppenheimer, the wielding of such ultimate power can also bring ultimate destruction, especially under the immature stewardship of homo sapians. If man is willing to glibly offer up his home world as sacrifice for such a nightmare, then what can save the Earth…or is the planet, is she, more than capable of defending herself?
That’s the problem with plutonium, Craven; it’s limited in its application. It’s not user-friendly. But as a vehicle for regaining one’s self-respect, oh, it’s got a lot goin’ for it. Damn right I turned it into a bomb!
Darius Jedburgh
These were controversial issues that were at the cutting edge of the news agenda back then, far more so today. The ‘Gaia’ theories - that living and nonliving parts of the earth are viewed as a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism - postulated by Professor James Lovelock in the 1960s, and dubbed ‘crank science’ by the scientific establishment at the time, were key to Kennedy Martin’s story, as the hypothesis gained new credence by what was still a nascent ecological movement. That man would sow the seeds of his own destruction, that the planet would fight back, seemed like the stuff of science fantasy however, even the blink of an eye that was 22 years ago.
This is heady stuff for a story that begins with an almost mundane police investigation in deepest Yorkshire. For Kennedy Martin, it was a deliberate dramatic device: “The art is to start with a familiar idea and take the audience with you on a plane, so that when they look down they are thousands of miles above the Earth.” Edge of Darkness; it’s a wide-ranging thriller, it’s an intimate human tragedy, it’s also a very hefty swipe at the nation’s contemporary nuclear strategy, wearing it’s left leaning politics so very visibly on it’s sleeve that then Labour Shadow Cabinet member Michael Meacher MP was given a small ’acting’ role (as himself). The Tories were apoplectic. Oh, goody…
Kennedy Martin has said his series was driven by a feeling of political pessimism, (which this writer shared), Reagan and ‘Star Wars’ in The White House, the jingoistic Thatcher in Number 10, and a feeling that Britain was being herded towards becoming a nuclear state. But there is also, he says, a moral optimism, inspired by the very notion of ‘Gaia’, the birth of new movements and new ideas.
Intriguingly, Kennedy Martin initally intended Craven and Grogan to be polar opposites in every way, our Yorkshire hero to be the embodiment of the ‘Green Man’ “…the spirit of the planet” he recalled “whose destiny was to confront and destroy in the name of the planet the free-market forces of modern entrepreneurial capitalism.”
At the end of the story, Kennedy Martin famously had to be dissuaded from the ultimate ‘green’ denouement - turning Craven into a tree, an idea both Peck and Campbell baulked at. In Troy Kennedy Martin’s introduction to Edge of Darkness (Faber and Faber, 1990) the writer says: “This aspect of Edge of Darkness usually separated the men from the boys at Television Centre. “I am writing a story about a detective who turns into a tree.” “Oh, yes,” would be the guarded reply. “Who’s this for, Channel 4?” Eventually I was persuaded out of the notion but not before some of its spirit had rubbed off on Craven’s character.”
For Joe Don Baker, his portrayal of the golf-obsessed Jedburgh is probably the role of his lifetime. Jedburgh is old-school CIA, he knows all the dirty tricks, invented most of them, he’s a wildly eccentric loose cannon, almost teetering on the edge of insanity. Baker’s performance is as huge as Peck’s is subtle, and he makes his red, white and blue warrior not only Craven’s best ally, but also the one most likely to put a bullet in his brain. As the mob hit man in Charley Varrick, Baker was deadly and detestable, as the unpredictable and unstable Colonel Jedburgh he simply lights up the screen, but his character, if anything, is every bit as dangerous. Baker was fulsome in his praise of the production: “In America, they just churn these things out, you mess it up and it’s ‘move on son’. They just couldn’t have been better, they asked me time and again did I want another take and I could do it as often as I needed until I felt it was right. Quality was everything.”
They said get into the ball game, and steal the ball.
Darius Jedburgh
It’s Jedburgh who immediately sizes up Craven, croons Willie Nelson’s ‘The Time of The Preacher’, which Craven, smiling a knowing smile, duets. Favourite Jedburgh moments are plentiful; the sight of this bear-like killer hunkering down on his sofa with a bucket of popcorn and a recording of Come Dancing; upending his golf bag and tipping balls, clubs, a carbine and several hand grenades on the floor; realising that Craven is going to break into Northmoor, his face wreathed by a huge grin at the prospect; producing two poisonous, panic inducing bars of plutonium from a briefcase - ‘Get it while it’s hot!’; skittering purposefully round the Highland cottage for that last grim showdown.
The rest of the casting is perfection; the gorgeous Zoë Wanamaker as ‘Gaia’ activist Clementine, Tim McInnery as Emma’s slimy lover, Charles Kay and Ian McNeice as a pair of British spies, the very antithesis of Bond, John Woodvine, Jack Watson, right on down to the Gordon Wharmby as the ’Caretaker’ - the devil is in the detail, and the detailing is really quite special. I wondered about Jedburgh, and how much like Brando’s Kurtz he looked in his uniform. There’s also the scene where Craven and Jedburgh break into a secure room piled high with art and luxury goods, antiques, an MG sportscar, fine wine and food - tinned lobster, caviar - stashed away during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Watching the pair tuck incongruously into a candlelit dinner deep beneath the earth, also reminded me of Apocalypse Now. It is likely coincidence, but I like to think of it as a nod.
Edge of Darkness is one of the great television highlights, certainly from my lifetime. Most TV is really quite ephemeral, but any decent drama can stand the test of time, while some actually improve with age, with each viewing. Edge of Darkness is that rare beast, a critically lauded production that’s as satisfying, as relevant, and - for this viewer at least - more gripping, more personal and thought provoking than it was in 1985. Even if someone may have to ask: ‘What’s a union leader? And what’s a coal miner..?’
I am NOT on YOUR side!
Ronald Craven
The BBC’s two-disc DVD set has been around for a while now in the U.K., superseding an inferior release from Revelation. The transfer is quite decent, blocking occasionally on the darker scenes, but overall it’s clean, with good sound; it looks and sounds exactly what it is, two decades old telly. There are a number of extras; a 35 minute featurette ‘Magnox - Secrets of The Edge of Darkness’, a clip from the BBC’s ‘Did You See?’, Bob Peck - who tragically died in 1999 - relaxing with Frank Bough, and his knitwear, on the ‘Breakfast Time’ sofa, BAFTA interviews with Peck and Baker, plus two more interviews post the Broadcasting Press Guild Awards from 1986 with Peck and Michael Wearing. There’s also an isolated score, but, as it’s used sparingly and infrequently (unlike today), it’s not something you’d listen to recreationally.
New Zealander Martin Cambell, has, of course, gone on to grander productions - Casino Royale is just one - but none better. Five years ago he expressed a desire to bring Edge of Darkness to the big screen. I close my eyes and think all-action car chases, explosions, a Yorkshire cop transmogrified to one of New York’s finest, Grogan replaced by a Russian oligarch. Dear God, Martin, nooooo…
Comments»
Lovely piece, John and one that I fully agree with. Watching Edge Of Darkness when it was first shown on BBC 1 remains one of my strongest television memories (and as one who grew up watching a lot of TV, I have a lot of them). I thought Edge Of Darkness incredible - and, as you and your wife also clearly felt, unmissable - when I saw it the first time and did so again many years later when one of my first DVD purchases was the Revelation DVD.
Jedburgh does get all the best lines but Pendleton and Harcourt aren’t far behind him, though the plot is the star, going from a meeting in a church hall to high government, an underground bunker and to a farmhouse in six episodes. And being entirely believable, gripping and frightening along the way. In their own way, State Of Play and The Constant Gardener carry on this tradition, particular in the latter, with the loss, confusion and hopelessness felt by Fiennes over the death of his wife being the closest I’ve seen to Craven’s sense of the same in Edge Of Darkness. If a big-screen Edge Of Darkness played out like The Constant Gardener, then I’d be happy.
And I can’t recommend Willie Nelson’s The Red-Headed Stranger highly enough. This only used the opening song but it’s a great album and used perfectly. Hearing it will take you (as it does me) to Craven shuffling around Emma’s room or Jedburgh and Craven singing a duet around a kitchen table. Marvellous moments both in a series that has many more.
Thanks Eamonn; I have to say that reading your excellent DVD Times review of the Revelation release, when I was halfway through writing this, was a great encouragement.
Just chanced on this while on a self-indulgent Google-fest of retro TV. A very, very perceptive review of a drama I can remember almost as if it were yesterday - though I must buy the DVD set all the same!
The down side of seeing Edge of Darkness while quite young is that TV has been an almost constant source of disappointment ever since.
I was reading the Variety website and saw that Hollywood remake finally looks to be in motion (with Mel Gibson).