The seventies were far from the greatest decade in the history of British cinema, but it was a particularly distinguished period as far as British television drama was concerned. Unfortunately, some of the finest jewels of the period were lost to the misguided policy of wiping videotapes to reuse them, and most of the others have been gathering dust on the shelves of the BBC and ITV archives for the last fifty years, but at least BBC Four have recently tried to remedy the situation by broadcasting a section of vintage dramas, generally on Wednesday evenings.
"Sunset Song" is one of these rediscovered dramas. It was originally produced in 1971 by BBC Scotland and is an adaptation of a novel by the Scottish author Lewis Grassic Gibbon. It is set in the fictional rural village of Kinraddie, in Gibbon's native Kincardineshire, during the 1910s. The main character is a young woman, Christine "Chris" Guthrie, the daughter of a local farmer. The story essentially falls into two parts. The first deals mainly with Chris's relationship with her overbearing, autocratic father, John. At first Chris, the eldest of a large family, has ambitions to become a teacher, but she has to give these up when her mother, discovering that she has become pregnant again and despairing of being able to bring up another child, kills her two youngest children and then commits suicide. This tragedy, however, does not make John any less autocratic; if anything he becomes even more so, insisting that Chris should abandon her dreams of a teaching career to keep house for him. John also alienates his eldest son, Will, who leaves the family and eventually settle in the Argentine.
After John's death, Chris marries a farmer named called Ewan Tavendale, and their marriage is at the centre of the second part of the drama. Although Ewan has the reputation of being a "coarse tink", a dialect word meaning roughly a rough or crude person, their marriage seems happy at first, but their lives, along with those of everyone around them, are turned upside down when war breaks out in 1914. Gibbon was politically on the Left and took a pacifist view of the war, using his story to explore the hatreds to which it gave rise. In theory, the greatest hatred felt by the overwhelmingly patriotic and pro-war people of Kinraddie is towards Germany, but as there are no Germans anywhere near the village, in practice their hatred has to be directed towards anyone regarded as pro-German or anti-war.
Ewan's close friend the miller Rob Duncan, a socialist and pacifist, is a particular target both for the anger of the mob and for the attentions of the authorities, who arrest and imprison him when he refuses to be conscripted into the army. Eventually even Rob is forced to give in and sign up. Ewan's character is brutalised by his experiences of war, leading to the disintegration of his relationship with Chris.
Gibbon's novel was quite controversial when first published in 1932, largely because of its frank treatment of sex and its often negative portrayal of family life, and some of these criticisms were repeated when the serial was first shown on television in 1971, although there is unlikely to be anything that would cause offence today. There were also complaints about the use of Scots dialect, although anyone who had given any thought to the matter would have realised that standard English spoken with an RP accent would have sounded quite wrong in a drama set in working-class rural Scotland. I am a Man of Kent, about as far from Scotland as one can get in the UK, and I had no difficulty understanding the dialogue once I had worked out a few dialectal words such as "tink" or "quine" for "woman" or "girl". (Ewan, an outsider to the area, is about the only person who uses the word "lass").
"Sunset Song" is a good example of what the BBC (and at times ITV too) could do so well in the seventies- a powerful, gripping drama about the lives of ordinary people. The series has an austere visual look with muted colours, suitable to its theme. There are fine acting contributions from the lovely Vivien Heilbron as Chris, Andrew Keir as her domineering father, James Grant as the tormented Ewan and Derek Anders as the principled Rob. Mention must also be made of composer Thomas Wilson's haunting musical score. BBC4's policy of reviving unjustly forgotten dramas is paying dividends. 9/10.
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