Play for Today: Blue Remembered Hills (1979)

The Dennis Potter TV play - actually, it's all shot on film with no studio VT scenes and so ought to count as a TV movie - in which outstanding adult actors are cast as children. It could easily be a gimmick piece, but director Brian Gibson introduces the device with long-shots of tubby Colin Welland and bearish Michael Elphick in shorts, with nothing in frame to give a sense of their size. By the time we're close enough to register any wrongness, the performances have come into focus and audiences stop consciously noticing - the point is not just because kid actors might not have the range to play the roles, but to show that the children's savagery and tendency to collapse into tears are character traits of the grown-up world we might learn to cover up but never get rid of.

Adults, of course, don't intrude in the story, which takes place in 1943 - with parents away at war or warped by circumstances the kids don't understand - as a siren suggests that there has been an escape from a nearby prisoner of war camp. It's one of Potter's strongest scripts, with a whole world established for these kids - the heroic 'number one' lad (Wallace Williams) they all talk about and admire but who doesn't show up, the see-sawing friendships and enmities within the group (and the shifting pecking order among the children, who constantly need to feel better than someone), the games of house and war which show their ideas of the adult world (especially a happy families session that turns into a mock marital argument), the impulse to violence which co-exists with a disgust in the aftermath, the rarely-noted utter hypocrisy of kids, the few things we hear about their families and school, the imagined threat of the 'knife-wielding Eyetie'.

The performances are, across the board, astonishing - with players known for comedy and drama pushing the outer limits, expressing big emotions and ungainly body language: Welland as big softie Willie, Elphick as would-be hardnut Peter, Robin Ellis as John (the boy who would like to be the hero and who most seems from the world of the Comic Strip's Famous Five parodies), John Bird in a cowboy hat as stutterer Raymond, ashamed of being sensitive after they've killed a squirrel, Colin Jeavons as the near-pariah (who hates being called Donald Duck by girls but reluctantly quacks when Elphick asks), Helen Mirren as popular girl Angie and Janine Duvitski as her quick sidekick Aud (who sticks by the boy she picks even if he doesn't notice). It winds up with Donald setting a fire in a barn, which burns down as the children hold the door shut on him only to run off after he has died and begin hysterically denying their guilt. Potter reads the A.E. Houseman passage from which the title comes - 'Into my heart an air that kills' - which subverts the notion of a 'land of lost content' but can now make you nostalgic for a time when British television took chances like this in prime time.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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