Book Review - Twenty Seasons of Mobil Masterpiece Theatre 1971-1991
Twenty Seasons of Mobil Masterpiece Theatre 1971-1991 edited by Gregory Vitiello
Published by: Acme Printing Co.
Publication Date: 1991
Format: Hardcover, 112 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
Out of Print
Television needed something that was culturally significant. WGBH in Boston, underwritten by Mobil, brought us Masterpiece Theatre in 1971. A show to create a new golden age of television by airing the best that Britain had to offer. Not just shows by the BBC, but any British channel that produced quality could qualify. But they needed someone that would lend a gravitas and a voice to the show and that is where Alistair Cooke came in. Most known for his radio show, Letter from America, he was the voice of the Englishman abroad. Who better to be the standard bearer for this show that was being created? But he was extremely busy, but the brains behind Masterpiece Theatre were extremely persistent. Soon he was watching the shows wherever he was in America working on his thirteen-part documentary, America: A Personal History of the United States. He'd work out his thoughts, do research, and fly into Boston to film his bits making it the busiest time of his life. Aside from thinking that The First Churchills was filled with too many bewigged men who didn't know which direction the camera was facing, he knew they had something special. A feeling of the literary, a feeling of the theatrical, brought right into people's homes. A story they could follow over time that became the place to be. A place that was popular, and received many accolades in it's early years, but went stratospheric when they picked up a show that was their first wholly original show not based on historical figures. That show was Upstairs, Downstairs. Jean Marsh reminisces on how she and Eileen Atkins approached British executives about their idea for a show and how the only writer they could think of was Harold Pinter the playwright. While it was John Hawkesworth who helped bring the show to life with his stable of writers whose name you would see year after year on Masterpiece Theatre, Harold Pinter eventually did get a look in with The Heat of the Day which has a stunning poster by Bernie Fuchs. Upstairs, Downstairs ran for five seasons and won numerous awards and had Americans spellbound by the tales of the Bellamy family and their servants. It all came crashing down with the stock market crash of 1929, but the show had solidified itself as a classic of television. Year in and year out, Masterpiece Theatre was broadcasting shows that Americans were voracious for. Before the age of binge television they were the gold standard of event television. Though whomever scheduled Talking Heads: Bed Among the Lentils to repeat on New Year's Eve had a sick sense of humor. Masterpiece Theatre, no matter what it's name now, will forever be a masterpiece.
I feel so validated! Alistair Cooke didn't like The First Churchills either! And no, I did not buy this book off eBay to validate my opinion, it was just a happy coincidence that he trashed a show I deeply disliked in his introduction. I bought this book off eBay because I wanted the full color reproductions of twenty-six of the gorgeous posters Mobil commissioned for the series. Some of them I had never even seen before. In fact, there were around two-hundred movies and miniseries that aired while Mobil was a partner with PBS, and if they all had artwork that means despite my due diligence I have only seen around forty percent of them. Many of which I want on my walls. And I really want the Bleak House one with Diana Rigg if anyone is looking to buy me something really expensive. And until someone finally creates the definitive book of all the poster art over the years done by artists from Symor Chwast to Bernie Fuchs to Al Hirschfeld this is the next best thing. Other than the posters this book is thin on content. Aside from Alistair Cooke's "A Personal Memoir," Allen E. Murray, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mobil Corporation, does the forward, Brendan Gill, a journalist for The New Yorker, has a piece called "By Way of Homage," while the remembrances of Jean Marsh are probably the only writing in this book readers actually cared for as she talks about Master James polishing her Wellies. The book is organized chronologically and lists the original airdates and repeats of every single show aired over the first twenty seasons of Masterpiece Theatre. Each season has one but never more than two shows spotlighted with a paragraph or two on each and exactly three pictures. This is very much in the vein of guides you'd buy of shows before the internet era so that you'd know all the episode names and interesting facts, like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Watcher's Guide, but on nicer paper and with less detail. So IMDb in book form. Life was so much harder before IMDb. Though I have to say some of the seasons when they went with a theme this book actually lists the titles far more accurately than any website I've consulted over the years. So take that IMDb! What I took away from this book, besides lots of pleasant memories of shows I have watched and all the posters I want to own, is that in the early days they really formed Masterpiece Theatre around literature and it's importance. How by airing a story over many weeks worth of Sunday nights they gave viewers the same experience of readers back in the day when a story was serialized by the like of Dickens in his literary magazine All the Year Round. They wanted to make a televisual event where they connected with their audience and created a cultural experience. There was no binging, there was a bringing together of like-minded individuals at a certain place and time. And all these years later as I make it my goal to watch every episode of Masterpiece Theatre, many of which are sadly impossible to find, I still feel that connection. That cultural zeitgeist that took hold of a nation before I was even born is alive and well.
In the waning days of Netflix DVD I attempted to view as many Masterpiece Theatre shows on DVD that I could that had gone out of print. I even was able to game the system and got to keep the entirety of The First Churchills. Would that I could go back in time and pick anything else to keep other than The First Churchills. I didn't know a miniseries about Winston Chruchill's ancestors could be so boring. I actually have a theory that England was still so shaken by his death only five years earlier that they were desperate to cling to anything about this great man and therefore everyone claims this series is a masterpiece when it so obviously is not. The dog was good. I liked the dog. One of the DVD sets I rented was Maggie Smith at the BBC. Because I had found out that her Talking Heads monologue, Bed Among the Lentils, was an extra on the DVD that also had The Millionairess. The Millionairess ironically costars James Villiers who played Charles II in The First Churchills, and is mostly noted for how racist Tom Baker's role as an Egyptian doctor is. Back to Bed Among the Lentils. So the Talking Heads series by Alan Bennett are monologues given directly to the camera, like how a newsreader is a "talking head." They aren't very long and require a really great actor to pull them off convincingly. Obviously Maggie Smith, who often collaborated with Alan Bennett, fits the bill perfectly. She goes through a kind of existential crisis in only fifty minutes. She's a vicar's wife who is a drunk but because of her standing in the community has to go to Leeds to buy her booze and soon takes up with the local grocer. She is not likable, she is not sympathetic, and in the end she appears to be born again. There are three sections stitched together and really, the middle section is where she shines, because she describes, in detail, showing up drunk to do the flowers at the church and the destruction of the teazles. And as anyone who has watched any British show centered around a church knows, the teazles are sacred. It's a bright spot in a rather depressing and at time unrelenting narrative. If I had been watching anyone other than Maggie Smith I wouldn't have made it through. It's comes across as just sad and stupid. But I don't know if it's because of this specific tale or because of the conceit in general. People have very short attention spans. I remember at a reading Patrick Rothfuss gave once he said he always made sure any reading he did never went beyond fifteen minutes, because that's the average human attention span to listening to someone read. Now, obviously this is different, this is theater. Well, theater on your television, but still theater. Except that there's something about someone doing a monologue or a soliloquy in an actual theater that captivates you. Maybe it's the immediacy. The intimacy. There's a connection that is forged between the actor and the audience that is just impossible to replicate through television. Maggie was a talented actor, but did that make this little monologue palatable? No. But I fear I'm just not the audience for it because I have friends who watch it yearly and all I can think is, better you than me.
The Forsyte Saga wasn't just how Masterpiece Theatre came to be, it was also the beginning of what we now know as Event Television. It was a runaway success in England, the country virtually shutting down when it aired. The then president of WGBH seeing the viewing numbers once it aired stateside decided that there was an audience for British programming in America and created Masterpiece Theatre, with another Susan Hampshire led drama, The First Churchills, as the inaugural broadcast on January 10th, 1971. If, like me, you knew about the Forsytes more because of the Damian Lewis adaptation in 2002 than the original and have therefore been hesitant to embrace this older, and dare I say it, black and white production with flimsy sets and sometimes ludicrous old age makeup, let me say that I loved this production. It was just what I needed at this moment in my life. The newer series has so much emotion, it's like a raw nerve, and I can't handle watching it because I end up a blubbering mess, despite which I still adore it. Now this isn't meant to be a slight on the older series saying it lacks emotion, it's entirely the opposite, I think it's more realistic. People don't live their lives like they're one of the Brontes! They live it in little, contained rooms where specific sets and emotions are kept in check. Therefore when something does happen, when change upsets these little well ordered lives, it has a greater impact. I grew to love all the characters and all these little rooms. Over the twenty-six episodes my opinions of all characters were constantly in flux, but I knew one thing, I never wanted it to end. There was just something so comforting in watching this family's life unfold over the decades. I always wondered why the 2002 series ended when it did, not seeing out the series until the death of Soames AKA Damian Lewis, but now I get it. There's a VAST tonal shift when we move from the older generation to the younger. Before there were huge swathes of time, the whole series taking place over forty-seven years, and tons of characters with a set narrator, and then we have a small set of characters going slowly through a few years in their lives. To give you an idea of the change, in one episode nineteen years elapses, and in the final fourteen episodes, more than half the series, only seven years! But of all the shows I've watched this years for Fifty Years a Masterpiece, I know I will return to this, and interestingly enough another adaptation by Donald Wilson, 
