Action TV Online Episode Guide

Rainbow City
BBC 1967

John Elliot had previously scored highly with BBC Television having co-written A For Andromeda and The Andromeda Breakthrough, two science fiction productions which drew large audiences through a novel storyline and featuring notable performances from Julie Christie and Susan Hampshire. However, Eliot demonstrated he was a competent writer of serious dramatic television when he was approached by BBC Birmingham to script a series which portrayed the issues at the heart of Birmingham's multicultural community.

Rainbow City was the first British drama production to feature a coloured actor in the leading role, and was largely populated by an ethnic supporting cast. The series took as its premise the life of John Steele (Errol John), a Jamaican resident of Birmingham who worked as a lawyer fighting for justice for the multi-ratial community. He was married to Mary (Gemma Jones), a Brummey, and their mixed marriage wrought tension from the local Anglo members of the community.

The six twenty-five-minute episodes portrayed the conflict in Steele's personal and professional lives, and each episode dealt with an issue close to his heart. Steele strove to ensure that the other immigrants living in and around him were protected from prejudice and injustice, but whilst his marital home was a happy one, Mary's father (a middle-aged bank manager who considered himself as liberal as the next man) could not reconcile his doubts over whether or not their union would prove lasting amidst the pressures imposed by his white neighbours.

To promote the series the Radio Times dated 13th July 1967 ran this article:

Errol John: The Serious-Minded Star Of Rainbow City by Gay Search. For a long time - several years in fact - Errol John has refused to give interviews. He is a man who finds it extremely hard to talk about himself and his work. I found this out when I spoke to him in his Mortlake home - a beautifully converted and modernized stables with a grandstand view of the boat race finish. "I was very excited by the idea of Rainbow City when it was first put to me, and as the series took shape I found the part more and more of a challenge".

Rainbow City, he stresses, is not about a mixed marriage. To make an issue of this aspect only is to distort what the series attempts to say. It oversimplifies, states the obvious, and, as he says, 'Living is a very, very complex business'". He enjoys acting in Rainbow City, but is very wary of the medium in general. "Television," he says, "demands instant performance, a cutting-short on emotion which is in the long run deadening and stunting".

He has come to feel that acting in all fields does not give enough fulfillment ("too much energy expended and not enough result") and so he turned very successfully to writing. His first play, Moon On A Rainbow Shawl, has been performed many times in this country and in America. At the end of the month his latest, and very unusual, book will be published; unusual because it consists of three screen plays never performed.

But he writes his plays with actability in mind. He had become bored with the parts written for coloured actors, and found them clichéd and based only on stereotypes. "Too often actors like me are pushed into racial tableaux. So I wanted to invest these characters with the humanity they possess. People as they are, not just as audiences expect to see and hear them". For his work, Errol John has just won the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for Creative Writing. The Fellowship enables him to travel abroad for twelve months, and he is leaving for Mexico this month.

"That country's so exciting. Again there are so many taboos and clichés to break down. There's so much to feel in that country". The violence that he feels is there - just beneath the surface - fascinates him, although as he says, "I'm not a violent man". He is intrigued, too, by the urge that makes men fight bulls, or drive motor cars at incredibly high speeds. "To see one man deliberately choose to pit himself against death, that's really something…".

Whilst this programme, particularly in the light of John Elliot's observations in the Radio Times, appears somewhat tokenistic on the part of BBC Birmingham (who were touted as broadcasting in Urdu and Hindi and looking for the next racially-placating programme to transmit), Rainbow City scores highly in terms of being the first programme to feature a coloured gentleman in the lead (particularly during the 1960s, where coloured performers were reduced to stereotypical roles and non-speaking supporting performances), and in reflecting the changing face of the United Kingdom.

Hope And Glory with Lenny Henry would later underline the fact that coloured actors could deliver equally compelling performances in roles of authority. The series was never commercially exploited.

Regular Characters	Portrayed By
John Steele	Errol John
Mary Steele	Gemma Jones
Dennis Jackson	Horace James

The was series devised and created by John Elliot. The series was produced by John Elliot (Parts 1, 2, 3) and Alan Rees (Parts 4, 5, 6) and directed by John Elliot (Parts 1, 2, 3) and Mike Bowen (Parts 4, 5, 6). The designer was Margaret Peacock, and Associate Producer for the series was Horace James. The series was transmitted on Wednesday nights.

The last episode was supported in the Radio Times dated 3rd August 1967 with a small promotional article:

The End Of The Rainbow? John Steele (Errol John) is involved in a crisis of relationships and understanding by John Elliot. Always - or at least often - on Sunday John Steele takes his wife and their five-year-old daughter across Birmingham to see his in-laws, the Lawrences. It is the kind of ritual visit which hundreds of thousands of families in this country make every weekend; but of course in John Steele's case there is a difference. John Steele is a practitioner of English law by choice and training, and a Jamaican Negro by birth. On the surface he is a quiet, controlled man, understanding and rather serious-minded - qualities which help to make him acceptable to Englishmen - but below the surface he is a lively, mercurial, and disputatious.

When he was a youth in Kingston, he wanted to be a barrister and a leader of his people and to set the world on fire; all that is no longer active, but it is still there. His father-in-law, a middle-aged bank manager, is a hundred per cent Brummy, proud of his liberalism, conscious of his own good sense, and content in the heart of his country. But Birmingham was built on Brummagem goods sold to the ends of the earth, and among other places to West Africa, from where slaves were sent in the holds of the same ships to the Indies to work on the sugar estates.

The sugar was shipped back to England; all for the good of English trade. And his daughter's husband is the descendant of some of these slaves. How can two such men, hog-tied by history, live peacefully in a single family? Their confrontation is the main theme of this week's episode. There is a second theme, concerning Dennis Jackson, which counterpoints the main one, and together they make the climax of the half dozen, loosely connected stories which comprise this run on Rainbow City. It is not a "plot" climax, but a crisis of relationships and understanding.