 |
|
|||
|
|
||||||
| ACTION
TV ONLINE EPISODE GUIDE | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Publicity : Doctor Bickleigh And Mister Bennett - At the age of fifteen Hywel Bennett appeared in the West End as Ophelia, with the National Youth Theatre. Then followed RADA and a career, on stage and screen, as a fresh-faced youth. He just crammed Hamlet in before his thirtieth birthday. Now thirty-four, Hywel Bennett takes on the part of an older man, the downtrodden Doctor Bickleigh in BBC-2's adaptation of Francis Iles' Malice Aforethought, hailed in 1939 as "the best shocker ever written". Tim Heald met him: Hywel Bennett should have been a stand-off half. His family came from the Amman Valley in the Black Mountains, equidistant from Swansea and Neath. He was borh just down the road from Gareth Edwards, has a good pair of hands, a sturdy physique, and an affection for the game of rugby which borders on the passionate. Unfortunately Bennett senior left Wales when his son was three. Moved to Streatham and became a policeman. Hywel played soccer and grew up speaking South London. If it wasn't for that surname coupled with a Christian name which originally belonged to some early Welsh kings you could have been forgiven for thinking him English. Bennett is thirty-four now, nudging middle age, with enough past to reflect upon and enough future to be influenced but not dictated by it. He doesn't seem worried, so much as thoughtful, or that's how he struck me when I met him at his penthouse flat, overlooking a snow-swept Thames. He was wearing an open-necked lumberjack shirt - hairy and rather noisy - and a short beard. He looked like someone about to go and rehearse young Hal in Shakespeare, though he was actually about to go and practise some karate with Sir Alec Guiness. "I was going to go to university," he says, "and be a teacher. I didn't work had enough for Oxford so I had chosen Swansea. I did actually teach for a few weeks in a secondary school, but then I got a scholarship at RADA, so I gave up teaching and went there instead". I wondered if he regretted missing university and he said he would probably have spent all his time acting and ended up with a third class BA. "And I don[t see what that would have achieved for me". Better spend all his time acting at RADA than muddle it up with a bad English degree at Swansea. In fact, he seems to be one of those enviable people who have always known what they wanted to do. He did a lot of acting at the Henry Thornton School in Clapham and joined the National Youth Theatre in his teens. "I did a lot of semi-professional work with them before I went to RADA," he says, adding with pride, "I was Ophelia in the 1959 Hamlet at the Queen's in Shaftesbury Avenue". There are preachers in the family tree, not all that near the trunk, and that's the only affinity with the stage that Bennett can suggest. But by the time he was eighteen he was, relatively speaking, steeped in theatre, so much so that he says, "I learned more in the Marlborough Arms with Anthony Hopkins and Victor Henry than I did in class". Not that the teaching was bad but "I always felt that if you went in to RADA good you came out good, and if you were bad you came out quickly". He never made up his mind about the indifferent. After RADA and the Marlborough Arms his agent sent him off to Salisbury, where he played Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream and had a part in a world premiere of a William Douglas-Home play. Ever since he has moved around the world's stages motivated as much by interest as money. He did Toad in Toad Of Toad Hall at Birmingham and Simon Gray's Butley in Vienna. One day he realised that although he'd played Ophelia at fifteen he hadn't done Hamlet himself and he was determined to have that under his belt before he was thirty, so he found someone prepared to put him on two months before his thirtieth birthday. "That was fine," he says, "because it was in South Africa, so no one saw it except South Africans". He has also had some film successes - notably in the Boulting Brothers' hugely profitable The Family Way and as the virgin soldier in the film of Leslie Thomas' bestseller. But while he enjoyed working in film he was beginning to strike out as a director. "I used to go to reps and say, `OK I'll play the part but only if you let me direct the next play'. Then you get to a certain stage when people know you'll deliver it in good shape, and now I'm building on that". He's done Lincoln and Coventry, the Welsh National Theatre, and the Thorndike at Leatherhead. He's worked at the Library Theatre, Manchester, and directed Alan Dobie in A Man For All Seasons at Birmingham. "I like the thought of directing film," he says, "except that I don't like the idea of pressing money from people and so much of film-making is hustling. But I would like to take a new play right the way through from its conception. I've never done that". Directing is not nearly as lucrative as acting for him, so he has kept the two in tandem, a feat that leaves little time for his old love of coarse fishing and not much for Saturdays at London Welsh. He even allowed his membership of Cardiff Rugby Club to lapse, though he claioms they don't exactly turn him away when he arrives at the Arms Park and asks for a drink. Recently the directing side of his career has had to take a back seat, though he had quite a hand in the latter days of Otherwise Engaged, in which he took over from Alan Bates for a year's run at the Comedy Theatre. Then he returned to the work of Dennis Potter, another playwright he much admires. He hadn't been in a Potter play since once of the very first, Where The Buffalo Roam, but he came back for Pennies From Heaven (which also starred Cheryl Campbell). And now Malice Aforethought. At first glance it seems that the part of the Crippen-like Doctor Bickleigh is obviously miscast. He's too small (far shorter than Bennett's five-foot ten-inches), too old (in his late thirties), and too mousey. He has a small, rather Hitlerian moustache like his creator, Anthony Berkeley, who wrote the book in 19209 under the pseudonym of Francis Iles. It was thought outrageously unconventional at the time, and hailed as a masterpiece. Berkeley defied the rules of the Golden Age of whodunnitry and gave the game away in the first paragraph. Just as he did in his other seminal book, Before The Fact, he named the murderer at the beginning. You weren't supposed to do that. You were supposed to do it on the last page, in the drawing-room. An even more radical departure from the rules of the game was that he explored his characters in great depth, rather than used them as puppets to act out his plot. It is this last aspect that makes it fascinating when transferred to the small screen. "It's a bit like a soufflé," says Bennett. "A much funnier piece than the subject would suggest. He's very downtrodden and put upon by his wife - that's Judy Parfitt. He's a bit of a romantic wanderer, too, so maybe she had an excuse for treading him down. He says the series was "great fun to do, even though on the face of it it didn't seem sensible casting. I'm always tempted by interesting parts and I hadn't done anything so outlandish for a long time. I think I particularly liked the idea of it being an older age group". The whole four-episode series was shot over a period of six weeks in and around Winchester. The final scene was staged in a court where there hadn't been a trial since the celebrated affair of the late Sir Gerald Nabarro and the roundabout. But Malice Aforethought is by no means the end of Bennett's year on BBC-2. His next appearance is in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the John le Carre epic, with Sir Alec Guiness. "I play Rickie Tarr," he says. "The only young one. He meets the Russian girl. Always wisecracking". That sounds more like typecasting. (Radio Times, March 10th, 1979 - Article by Tim Heald). Synopsis : For ten years, Julia Bickleigh has despised and bullied her husband. For ten years Doctor Bickleigh has dreamed of romance…and escape. Notes : Episodes were originally transmitted 8:30pm to 9:25pm on BBC 2.
Synopsis : Doctor Bickleigh's passionate affair with Madeleine Cranmere now fills his life. When Julia refuses to divorce him, the only solution is murder.
Synopsis : Doctor Bickleigh's plans have been upset by Madeleine's sudden marriage to Denny Bourne. Even so, life without Julia is good - until the village gossips start prattling.
Synopsis : Though Doctor Bickleigh has been arrested for Julia's murder, the main evidence against him is his attempted poisoning of Madeleine and Chatford. Everything hinges on the potted-meat sandwiches.
The series was written by Philip Mackie, adapted from the novel of the same title by Francis Iles. The series was produced by Richard Beynon and directed by Cyril Coke. Script Editor for the series was Cicely Cawthorne.
|
|
