Tony Garnett picked by Harry Bradbeer

0:00Harry Bradbeer:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30Tony Garnett:Thrive Cosmetics. C-A-U-S-E-M-E-T-I-C-S dot com slash shine26.

0:38Harry Bradbeer:BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Today's guest has directed some of recent television's most notable hits, including Fleabag and Killing Eve. Since then, he's been working on Enola Holmes about Sherlock's teenage sister. And over the years, he's won loads of awards. Welcome to Great Lives, Harry Bradbeer. Tell us whom you've picked. The television and film producer Tony Garnett, one of the most influential, groundbreaking producers of his time. What's he associated with, for instance? Cathy Come Home. Oh, Lord, yes. Up the Junction. Yeah. Kez. More recently, This Life, which I directed. What was he like to work with?

1:22Harry Bradbeer:Like a rock round which I ran. He was inspiring, fatherly, terrifying, could be incredibly cold and incredibly loving. And he was like a father to me of over about ten years of my career and it changed the course of my life and my work. And he used to interview audition actors with improvisation, is that right? Yeah, always. He hated. He wouldn't judge an actor based on the script. They had to be spontaneous and they had to be able to forget themselves. I came from a family of Labour aristocrats. They all had a trade in their fingers. They'd done five-year apprenticeships. So it was proud, respectable, and we lived happily in a little semi-detached house.

2:14Harry Bradbeer:Is that the voice that you recall, Harry? Very much. He was a remarkably encouraging man. When I was about to direct This Life, after the read-through, he comes up to me and says, I don't care what you do, just don't be boring. Does a list of what he worked on up the junction to Kez and more recently This Life, as you've mentioned, provide any clues to what he was like as a man and what drove him? I think he was driven by anger and frustration at the world as it was. Anger. Yeah. He had a very difficult childhood. His mother died as a result of a backstreet abortion when he was five. And he was sharing a bed with her that night in 1941 when she contracted the septicemia and the next morning she was dead.

3:11Harry Bradbeer:And his father was so upset by this that he took his own life two weeks later. They were Midlanders from Birmingham. They were from Birmingham, yes. I still have very vivid memories of my parents, of course, and my little brother and my aunt and uncle next door. And I have very vivid memories of the night she died and also of my father the next morning. And I saw him once after that, before he died. In a moment, we're going to hear from Ken Loach, who knew him and worked with him very early on in his career. First, though, in studio, we have with us Susanna Capon, who knew him in the 60s, long before she became the drama commissioning editor on Radio 3.

3:59Harry Bradbeer:You describe him as a lifelong friend.

4:01Tony Garnett:Well, he certainly was. I was still at university, and there was a thing called the World Theatre Season, which took place at the Aldwych Theatre, and I went to see a Russian play. I was studying Russian. and I saw there a friend who knew Tony and he introduced me and he also told me that he'd been living at Tony's but was about to move out. I wrote Tony a letter and said, look, I really need to get my head down if I'm going to get this degree and I just wondered if you might consider me moving into the room that Roger was in. Two days later, I got a letter. Here are the keys. Stay as long as you like.

4:44Tony Garnett:If you piss me off, I'll tell you. Love, Tony. And that was how I met him. So I owe, like many others, I owe an enormous amount to him. I never wanted to work with him because I always was quite scared of him in some ways. And he could be very tough. But towards the end of my career, I went to work at Royal Holloway, part of University of London. And they asked me to set up an MA in producing. And I said, not unless I can bring the best producer. And I got Tony to come and he dedicated five years to it. What was he like teaching students? Wonderful. And I also found out that working with him was delightful and I had been completely wrong in my assumptions that it would be very difficult.

5:32Harry Bradbeer:Tony was born in Birmingham in 1936. The saying was that they made wealth in Birmingham and in London they spent it, Tony writes, early on in his autobiography. Do we know much about his parents, either of you?

5:48Tony Garnett:He always maintained that he never told anything about the terrible things that happened when he was four years old. But actually he did tell me, and I know he told some other people, but generally people didn't know about it. And of course it was the worst thing possible because after his mother was found dead, his father then committed suicide, the only way he could protect himself, his brother and he were split up and sent to live. They were 12 children. His mother was one of 12 children. So there were millions of relatives by shutting down his emotions completely. And he did that for many, many years.

6:25Tony Garnett:And he was also, of course, in analysis practically his whole life.

6:30Harry Bradbeer:Time for another voice. I'm Ken Loach. I do films from time to time and was a great friend of Tony Garnett. the very first play I did for the BBC was a 30 minute drama I didn't know what I was doing it was about a couple who were splitting up Tony played the man and Keika Markham played the girl and that was in 1963 I think the beginning of 63 and he was a smallish intelligent bright eyes good-humoured. Both our parents were, well, our fathers were skilled workmen, but with great pride, quite strict. And Tony, of course, which I didn't know at the time, had this terrible tragedy when he was a very small child, and that tragedy hung over him for his whole life.

7:24Harry Bradbeer:Harry, perhaps you could read this. It's from Tony Garnett's own book. The next thing I remember is being woken in the middle of the night by my mother, but the bed is empty. I look round, confused, trying to locate her, blinking the sleep away. She is on her knees, banging on the adjoining wall. She's whimpering, giving off low roars of pain, bending double and then trying to straighten up. I feel helpless, almost paralysed. I start to panic. I'm out of my depth. It's quite a thing to have to recreate the death of your mother.

7:59Tony Garnett:I don't think he ever got over it. I don't think it was possible to do so. But I think he found ways of coping with it. And I think it shaped his life, really, particularly what happened to his father. And then, of course, what happened to his wife. You know, that was a shadow over him the rest of his life as well.

8:20Harry Bradbeer:He was raised by an aunt and uncle.

8:23Tony Garnett:Yes.

8:24Harry Bradbeer:And from them got the name Garnet.

8:26Tony Garnett:Yeah.

8:27Harry Bradbeer:And described himself as an angry, lefty teenager. Do you recognise that, Harry, in The Man You Later Knew? I knew there was anger. By the time I got to him, he'd been through a lot of therapy and I think he'd become a much happier person and was better at controlling that. he was still fighting to create drama that felt alive and increasingly frustrated at the way so much drama was still to him sort of lifeless and pretentious. He hated showiness. He would never really... He wouldn't have come on this programme, for instance. He wouldn't be... He didn't like being interviewed. He was loathed awards.

9:07Harry Bradbeer:I mean, when one of the shows we made, The Cops, won a BAFTA, he was just completely furious. and I came back branching. He says, don't bring that near me. He said, awards, you take an apple and a banana and an orange. What's better? I don't know. Here's Ken Loach again. Well, I think I'd hint, hint of what had happened. I mean, the detail in which he wrote, particularly his childhood, it was very moving, really, very moving. And he carried that burden all his life. and I think he did speak after that because he could analyse the problem he had with others because they told me and they would say, well, he could understand it absolutely but he can't get rid of it and he then spoke to me and to Leslie, my wife who also knew Tony from my youth because they're both from Erdington and he spoke about having finally met an analyst who enabled him to experience the grief of losing his parents when he was so young.

10:17And he said he just wept and wept and the tears poured down his face.

10:24Harry Bradbeer:Much later, Tony found his father's suicide note. I know the step I am taking will shock a lot of people, it read, but time will heal as it will never heal me, which we now know wasn't true. Either of you, Susanna or Harry, can we draw a line between the deaths of his parents and his professional life?

10:47Tony Garnett:I'm not sure how much it impinged on his professional life. He was clearly an extremely able and an extremely intelligent man who did wonderfully at school and so on. But it did impinge on his personal life. The awful thing about his death, actually, is that he was becoming extremely happy again and was allowing himself to experience that, the end of his life looked to be going to be very rosy. And that was the moment he died.

11:18Harry Bradbeer:And yet, Harry, I feel that in some of the best of his work, you feel it's driven by anger of some kind. If you look at Law and Order, the corruption of the police. Yeah, Cathy Come Home. Cathy Come Home, the injustice of homelessness and up the junction the unfairness of the anti-abortion laws he stuck up for the underdog he wanted to defend and tell the story of the unnoticed and the patronized and the condescended this is why you know a film like up the junction showed three working class women in battersea as they really were he was reflecting the world back at us so the anger was the frustration at not having those stories told and the injustices that partly he experienced as a child.

12:11Harry Bradbeer:Tell us about the plot of Up the Junction. Well, it's sort of not got a plot. It's an extraordinary freewheeling jigsaw of experience. Three working class girls out, their lives, their loves, their work. It's completely alive, quite unlike anything that had been seen before. caught on the street, not in the studio. One of these girls gets pregnant and has to have an abortion. We see that abortion performed and also the suffering that follows it. And underneath it, partly documentary, we also have the voiceover of a doctor reading the statistics of the deaths from abortion. And when the film came out in 1965, the debate was going on in the Commons about the abortion bill that was going to decriminalise the abortion.

13:07He acted for a while, but then switched and went behind the scenes,

13:11Harry Bradbeer:most famously to work on the Wednesday play. Here's Ken Loach again. The main relationship with Tony emerged in the Wednesday play, which was an extraordinary moment in television history because there was a freedom to work that I think will never happen again, cannot happen again the way television is structured now. A Canadian producer became head of drama, Sidney Newman, with a brief to tell contemporary stories just after the news at 9 o 'clock. Three story editors, Roger the main man, Roger Smith, Ken Trotten, Tony Garnett, found new writers with new things to say, subversive, polemical, critical, caustic, funny, to rewrite the method, the style, the content of TV drama.

14:03Harry Bradbeer:You didn't have to show it to people beyond the little production group. There were no executive producers breathing down your neck. And that freedom meant they could experiment and bring in new writers with a lot to say. So that's one key thing. The second key thing was that the process of television drama was like theatre they were formal you've rehearsed like theatre with theatre sets and three big Dalek-like cameras pointing at the actors that was not fit to tell the contemporary stories we wanted to tell we wanted to be on the streets with a handheld camera. And the critical point was up the junction.

14:53Harry Bradbeer:I knew I had to do it like a film, I had to cheat. And Tony backed me up. You had four days filming. It was meant for people getting into cars and getting out of cars and then cut to the theatrical set in the studio. We shot half the film in those five days, four days, I think it was, half the film. there was a huge row which Tony and I both knew about anticipated, they said we cannot use this you've shot on 16mm it's not good enough quality and we said well it's either that or you throw all the money away and you have no spot so they agreed and that was the first film we made through cheating the bureaucracy and that made a bond with Tony and me Susanna, you worked on the Wednesday play.

15:46Harry Bradbeer:Yeah. Would this have been an important break for Tony Garnett?

15:50Tony Garnett:Oh, absolutely. I think what was sad about it is that Tony hoped other people would do the same as him, having opened the door to not shooting entirely in the studio and so on. But they didn't. I mean, Tony was famous for moving out of the fifth floor where we all had offices and going to the 18th floor of the East Tower to be as far away from the other people as possible. And that was not unremarked. And I think he was sad.

16:25Harry Bradbeer:Television centre was my new home, he wrote, circular with a hole at its centre, like the BBC itself. One was in danger of going round in circles. He wasn't a natural fit, was he?

16:38Tony Garnett:Well, he was and he wasn't. He was extremely good at dealing with the high ups and he won nearly all his arguments. Sometimes it took hours and it was very almost violent. But, you know, it was very rarely went against him because he knew what he was doing. He knew he was right. It was largely from his own personal and political convictions that stayed with him and he never deviated. And I think the management recognised that. He knew he was someone different and everybody remembers the things he did, which they don't for many other people.

17:15Harry Bradbeer:Tell us a bit about those things. What other plays did he work on in those days?

17:20Tony Garnett:Well, a whole lot of plays that were sort of socially driven portraits of what was really going on, like The Sponges was one. He worked with a variety of directors, people close to him like Ken, like Roy Battersby. and he worked with them. Cathy Come Home. Well, Cathy Come Home was Ken, of course, and Ken and he went separate ways, but they always remained huge friends and Tony did the same. We can all say he was difficult sometimes and so on, but he kept his friends.

17:58Harry Bradbeer:Oh, he was incredibly loyal and brave and fearless. Is there one programme that you particularly associate with your association with him? I think it has to be The Cops. I started off with him making This Life, which became a great hit, but The Cops was the first show he gave me to set up, to start on my own. And he sent me up to Bolton, having only really made two or three programmes, to make a TV show about the police, which was actually really about social workers and the problems of society at that time in the late 90s. and he gave me this challenge to make a show that looked like it had been caught on the hoof, like it was almost a documentary.

18:42Harry Bradbeer:He hated acting, acting, writing, writing, directing, directing and by that I mean he wanted things to look as though they were caught as they happened. You're listening to the great life of producer Tony Garnett and with me in the studio is Harry Bradbeer, director of Fleabag, Killing Eve and also with us is Susanna Capon, who knew him well. Like your nominated life here today, Harry, you moved to the United States for a while. What was that like? Well, I mean, it was extraordinary. I was invited to make a television show by Amy Pascal, who Tony discovered in Los Angeles when she was, well, just out of school, really.

19:27Harry Bradbeer:The show was a Spider-Man spinoff with Nicolas Cage playing a kind of middle-aged detective who used to be Spider-Man. It's funny, it's different, it's on this May. An extraordinary piece of writing. And I went over for six months. I, like Tony, I think probably found it to be not our natural habitat. Tony went out there at the end of the 70s and had to really make his own way. He wasn't there by invitation. He turned up, got a job at Warner Brothers, took meetings. I believe he took a meeting with Dolly Parton at one point, which is something I wish I could have been a fly on the wall to witness.

20:11Harry Bradbeer:And he directed a film, Handgun, and produced about three films, which really were all, in one way or another, not particularly successful. Have you seen any of his American work?