No account of the film’s making would be complete without mention of its commissioning editor, David Rose. Tasked in 1971 by David Attenborough to head a new regional television drama department at Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham, he immediately set about developing adventurous projects – by writers such as Alan Bleasdale, Alan Plater, Michael Abbensetts and Willy Russell – that were steeped in the lore and soundworlds of non-metropolitan Britain. He has described Penda’s Fen as ‘a milestone, if not the milestone, of my career’, though, 40 years after it was first broadcast, he also admitted, ‘I didn’t understand it at all, but that’s as it should be.’ It was conceived as a film and written visually. Some people think visual questions are none of the writer’s business—that he should provide the action and leave it to the director to picture it all out. For me, writing for the screen is a business of deciding not only what is to be shown but how it is to be seen… Can’t say how delighted I was that it made 76 in the Time Out list this week! And for a film that’s long been out of circulation! There IS a Penda after all! It is through the benign paternal influence of Reverend Franklin, as well as the more strident one of Arne, that Stephen’s Blakean visions work against his previously held convictions — by the end of the film, he is no longer in danger of growing up into Nigel Farage. Before he is redeemed by the “true” Jesus and the pagan King Penda, he must escape the attentions of the “Mother and Father of England”, the embodiment of the censorious establishment reaction to the social revolution of the 1960s. The play was released on limited-edition Blu-ray and DVD in May 2016. [8] In an essay published with the release, Sukhdev Sandhu argues that "Penda's Fen" "is, long before the term was first used to describe the work of directors such as Todd Haynes and Isaac Julien, a queer film". According to Sandhu, the play presents Stephen's discovery of his homosexuality as "a gateway drug to a new enlightenment" that "inspires heterodoxy". [9] See also [ edit ]

A middle class pastor's son has dreams of angels and the pagan King Penda that force him to question many of his beliefs and opinions. Show full synopsis Sorrell and Son 1 9 8 4 (UK) 6 x 50 minute episodes This six-part miniseries from Yorkshire Television begins during Britain's economic slump… Strikingly, it is even more than this. Penda's Fen presciently maps onto the current moment, countering nationalism, the conservatism of the provinces, war-mongering and the suppression of an emerging identity politics. Rudkin’s film was broadcast months before the impeachment of a corrupt, duplicitous President in a world threatened by thermonuclear destruction. In the year that Moonlight triumphed under the presidency of Donald Trump, it is important we remember its archival forebears, as Penda also contributes to the same radical filmic tradition — a pregnant counter-cinema — where the everyday becomes newly estranged, old certainties are sloughed off, and entrenched shibboleths don’t bear scrutiny.

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I think of Penda’s Fen as more a film for television than a TV play—not just because it was shot in real buildings on actual film but because of its visual force…

because the impulse of political institutions is always reductive: to limit us to identities that can be mechanically satisfied, thereby managed – i.e. controlled; to reduce us to identities that are predictable. I see it as our human identity to resist that reductive pressure; as our existential duty to subvert it at every turn.’ Aerodrome, The 1 9 8 3 (UK) 1 x 90 minute episode In a futuristic alternative England, the fascist leaders build a mysterious… Some still think of Elgar as the archetypal country gentleman whose music enshrines the noblest sentiments of patriotism and faith. That way of looking at him is similar to Stephen’s outlook on the world at the beginning of the film Elgar was, in fact, a tradesman’s son who married above himself and was socially over-sensitive all his life…Matthew Harle is Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Barbican Centre and Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

In the pastoral landscape of Three Choirs England, a clergyman's son, in his last days of school, has his idealistic value-system and the precious tokens of his self-image all broken away - his parentage, his nationality, his sexuality, his conventional patriotism and faith... At the film’s climax, Stephen’s birth parents – whom his superego has conjured up – seek to wrest him from his newly chosen path as an adult embracing his impurity as a being of mixed race and mixed sex.The Dream of Gerontinus is about a journey through purgatory; a man searching for a place for his soul. Stephen is on a similar quest and has all his preconceptions shattered by finding out he’s not English, he’s not ‘pure’. At the end, the Father and Mother of England come to claim him as their own, but Stephen has irrevocably changed, not only by the information he has found out about himself but by the information he has discovered about the land. Stephen begins with certainty over who he is and where he comes from, ‘Oh my country. I say over and over: I am one of your sons, it is true, I am, I am. Yet how shall I show my love?’ He wants to be a part of the institutions of not only England but masculinity, but layer by layer his surety is peeled away. He comes to the realisation that there is no such thing as ‘purity’ or pure Englishness or masculinity, he is man and woman. Through a series of encounters, Stephen learns that his sense of ‘purity’ was naïve. Penda (Geoffrey Staines) anoints Stephen Odd how, like me, a lot of men seem to have seen the play in their teens and been unaccountably but deeply moved by it. It’s a kind of English Death of Salesman maybe, in that it cuts down beneath the defences and is saturated in the dilemmas and historical legacies & dilemmas of one particular culture.