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TV ONLINE EPISODE GUIDE
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Director : Peter Cregeen Script : Ken Hughes Synopsis : "The toughest sea in the world" - that's how the oilmen look upon the North Sea. Cold, grey, stormy - Triumph Oil are up against a deadline. Time, weather, supplies - everything is against them. Is it an impossible deadline? Cast : Maurice Roeves (McGraw), Ralph Ball, Noel Johnson, Tim Meats, Judi Douglas, Jon Yule, John Line, Peter Godfrey, Boyd McKenzie, Willy Joss, Bill Denniston, John Graham and Simon Clarke. Notes : Episodes were transmitted between 8:05pm abd 9:00pm.
Director : Michael Hayes Script : David Pursall and Jack Seddon Synopsis : The sea, flat calm. Perfect drilling weather - a rare occurrence in the North Sea. A vital piece of equipment swings beneath a helicopter. An airlift to the rig, Nelson One. Suddenly a dense bank of fog envelopes both rig and helicopter. Cast : With Maurice Roeves (McGraw), Patrick Westwood (Police Inspector), Jon Glover (Lorry Driver), David Millett (Crewman), Peter Davidson (Skipper), Terry Bale (Mate), Tony Sibbald (Driller), Denis Cleary (Radio Operator), Derek Anders (Weston) and Ray Roberts (Master Mariner).
Director : Michael Hayes Script : David Ambrose Synopsis : Triumph Oil are under attack from the local press. The directive goes out - tread gently. But will the clash between Ward and McGraw erupt into violence? Cast : Maurice Roeves (McGraw), Wilfred Carter, Alexander John, David Hargreaves, Noel Johnson, Tom Ciddle, John Line, William Dysart, Fidelma Murphy and David Millett (Crewman).
Director : Michael Hayes Script : Mervyn Haisman Synopsis : Because of the high risks, North Sea divers can earn a great deal of money - but it's money earned the hard way. Cast : Peter Godfrey, Mike Pratt, Peter Haliday, Richard Warwick, Alison Steadman, Terence Lodge and Richard Henry.
Director : David Proudfoot Script : Wilfred Greatorex Synopsis : When Ward's past comes to light, Fraser is faced with a decision. Does he fire the man or not? Could Ward make the same disastrous mistake twice? Cast : Ronald Leigh-Hunt, Noel Johnson, John Kelland, Oliver MacGreevy and Robert Sansom.
Director : David Proudfoot Script : N J Crisp Synopsis : An abandoned, burning freighter, with a highly explosive cargo, adrift in the North Sea… Cast : David Masterson, Joe Powell, James Boyce, David Bannerman, James Copeland and Sean Caffrey.
Director : Terence Dudley Script : David Ambrose and Richard Suskind Synopsis : When land prices rocket, some people make a lot of money. But there are many who suffer - individuals and oil companies alike. Fraser finds it hard to believe when he heards Gallacher has climbed on to the band wagon. Cast : Molly Weir, Michael Sheard, Sally Lehoe, John Rolfe, Tom Watson, Tom Crindle, John Hallett, Hugh Martin and Judi Lamb.
Director : Pennant Roberts Script : N J Crisp Synopsis : When Jack Mullery comes ashore he is determined to have a good time - and this spells trouble. Cast : Isobil Nisbet, Kate Coleridge, Franco Derosa, Frank Coda, David Mowat, Lawrence Davidson, Paul Antrim, Harry Walker, John Campbell, Fred Haggerty, Rocky Taylor, Ian Elliot, Dominic Allan and William Connell.
Director : Michael Hayes Script : Mervyn Haisman Synopsis : The rig Nelson One has been without supplies for ten days and one of her anchors is dragging. Help is needed fast! Cast : Stuart McGugan, Derek Crewe, Tom Veitch, Phil McCall, Barry Jackson, Paul Kermack, Joby Blanshard, Sean Lynch and Jean Anderson.
Director : Terence Dudley Script : Richard Suskind Synopsis : Fraser and Ward clash. "Look, who's the Drilling Superintendent on this job? You, me, or some idiot from your boardroom?" Cast : Peter Godfrey, Sarah Sutton, Craig Ross, Tom Crindle and John Line.
Director : Pennant Roberts Script : Wilfred Greatorex Synopsis : Ward and Mullery receive tempting offers from the opposition. Cast : Alex Dawson, Lloyd McGuire, Colin Thomas, John Line, Anthony Roye, Bruno Barnabe, Willoughby Gray, Jimmy Mac, Paul Chapman, Ray Mariori and Tom Criddle.
Director : Michael Hayes Script : N J Crisp Synopsis : The rig Nelson One is running a flare-off test. The answer will prove if three months' hard work have been wasted - or if Triumph have found a new oilfield. Cast : Leon Lissek, William Wilde, Tom Criddle, Lyn Taylor, Jean Anderson, David Wild and Isobel Nisbet.
Director : Gerard Glaister Script : N J Crisp Synopsis : Nelson One is badly damaged. The lives of seventy men are at risk. Cast : Oliver Maguire, Tom Criddle, Harry Waters, William Wilde and David Allister. Publicity -Troubled Waters by Madeleine Kingsley - Radio Times, 23 August 1975 Oil makes news every day. Huge investments are being poured into finding this vital source of energy, but how much do we actually know of the hazards encountered by the people drilling for it? Tuesday's new series shows us the hardships involved. And here Madeleine Kingsley looks at the problems an oil company might face. Oil was once the balm that poured into the barrels of the Persian Gulf, the stuff that dreams were made of. But not to producer Gerry Glaister or writer Norman Crisp. The new drama series they have jointly devised tells the grimmer story of the battle for oil in the North Sea. What happens, they ask, when an international oil company, Triumph Oil, busy with off-shore drilling exploration, begins to suspect three months before its government concession runs out that there could be oil in a block they have so far given low priority? Oil Strike North contains all the natural elements a writer usually contrives to build into drama: there's a heightened sense of danger, millions of pounds at stake, fierce political issues, and, above all, human emotion. "We wanted to show," says Gerry Glaister, "that the battle for oil in the North Sea is not just about priceless hardware, but about people at every level, from the government official down to the rig-men and roustabouts (drilling labourers)". Both Glaister and Crisp are amazed to find how little the rest of the country knows about life on a North Sea oil rig - "They imagine vaguely that it's a sort of John Wayne existence and that the men are making fortunes for themselves" - or how towns like Aberdeen and Peterhead are changing under the influence of oil exploration. "And yet the struggle for oil is going to affect all our lives over the next fifty to one hundred years. We think it's the most important economic development since the Industrial Revolution, and that, of course, could not be witnessed on television. People do not seem to have grasped how totally we have become an oil-dependent country. As one of our characters says, "Oil doesn't just drive power stations and ships, and heat factories … it's in the clothes you wear, the shoes on your feet, the paint on your house, the carpet you walk on, plastics, checmicals, fertilizers…". Fighting a war against the elements: During their two years of research, Glaister and Crisp visited the coastal towns of North Scotland, spent time on oil rigs and supply vessels, talked with several major international oil companies - and came up with so many stories that "after a while we began to worry we had hit on such an obvious subject that everyone else must have thought of it too". But then Glaister and Crisp have regularly produced winning formats over the course of their ten-year partnership. There was The Expert (dealing with the work of a forensic scientist), The Brothers (now into its fifth run and spinning off a set of originals stories based on the same characters for a woman's weekly). They also created a children's serial The Long Chase and Crisp wrote scripts for Glaister's Colditz. "If Oil Strike North bears any comparison at all to an earlier BBC series," says Glaister, "it is to Colditz because both tell the story of a war. Only in the North Sea, there is no human enemy. One is fighting the elements in what must surely be the worst place in the world to drill for oil". Despite stringent safety precautions and a comparatively low accident rate there are always going to be universal hazards such as fire, or the rare "blowout" - the last one that occurred, off the coast of Africa, blew a crater two-thousand-feet deep in the sea bed. Not surprising when you consider the pressures encountered. These pressures increase with depth and have been as high as fifteen-thousand pounds a square inch. A car tyre bursts with a bang at twenty-six pounds of pressure to the square inch. There are also problems working with heavy equipment in a hositle environment irrespective of experience and judgement. In conditions which are forever changing, accidents do occur. In the last year, two crane drivers were killed when their cabs crashed into the sea. No one falling into the North Sea in winter can survive for long. It is, in fact, the appalling weather conditions that make the North Sea simply the worst place in the world to wrest oil from. No one who has drilled for oil in the desert would describe working under a tropical sky as pleasant. Ron Keen, the series adviser, has spent thirty years as an oilman, working his way up from driller to his present position as Managing Director of a consultancy on all aspects of drilling. Working without liquor: He remembers once, after working all night, trying to sleep in a tent on a wet blanket with two bottles of poor beer, trying to get some sleep when the temperature was one-hundred-and-twenty-seven degrees in the shade. But the winter wind may gust off a North Sea drilling platform off the Stelands at one-hundred-and-sixty miles per hour and sustain a speed of one-hundred-and-twenty miles per hour, and rigs and equipment have been specially constructed to withstand a design wave (the height of wave you can expect to meet in a sea area once every one hundred years) of one hundred feet instead of the twenty to forty foot design wave anticipated in the Gulf of Mexico and the Persian Gulf. Last winter a man on a Shetland rig woke up one night to find himself in the corridor. A giant wave had beaten the side of the rig with enough force to break his window and let in enough water to sweep him out of his cabin. The fearsome winter weather only emphasizes other hazards of the oilman's way of life: the seventy-five or so men working out their week or fortnight's shift on a rig, are living in a totally closed society, with a supply ship and helicopter as their only physical link with the shore. Glaister remembers that one of the seamen he met on board a supply ship spent three weeks last winter on board a supply vessel that was trying without success to reach a rig in rough seas. What is there then that can compensate for working in conditions like these, away from homes and families, in a confined space which is traditionally "dry" - no liquor allowed anywhere on board - with only a television that gives a picture like a snowstorm for diversion? Many of the men are certainly family men, says Ron Keen, and they are working hard to put their children through school and college. The seamen on the supply boats might be away from home for years at a time, so some feel they are fortunate to get home for a spell every few weeks. "It is not just the money - though working a rig can be well paid. A roustabout can earn somewhere between sixty to eight pounds a week and that's all found. More perhaps if he is based abroad. But he only works sporadically. My wife once hit the right note when I got home a day later than I'd expected. She said the oil business was "like little boys and Meccano": the same irresistible urge to get up to one's elbows in complicated machinery. Frank Ward (Triumph's American drilling superintendent, played by Michael Whitney) is just such an oil man. "He is particularly obsessive about his work," says Norman Crisp. "He likes the uncertainty of never knowing what may happen next or where he's going to be sent. His wife Julie, played by Angela Douglas, is on the other hand, like many wives both in and out of the oil industry, a person who finds it nerve-wracking to have no permanent, settled home, and not to know with any degree of assurance when her husband will walk in through the front door". "It's the kind of life that can wreck a marriage," observes Ron Keen. "They say that it either brings a couple to the divorce court in eighteen months, or cements a couple for good. I've been married now for thirty years". Nigel Davenport, who plays Jim Fraser, Operations Area Manager for Triumph, says he is a man who loves facts and has been fascinated by what he's learned about the oil industry. "Do you know it costs at least twenty-thousand pounds a day to keep a North Sea rig operational? And that it takes an investment of two to three million pounds just to discover whether there is oil where seismic research suggested. Pipelines cost one-and-a-half-million pounds a mile to lay, and supply helicopters cost sixty-hundred-and-fifty pounds an hour. And deep sea divers attached to rigs can earn somewhere between three-hundred pounds and one-thousand pounds a week because they take the most extraordinary risks going down to a depth of one-thousand feet. Theirs is the most dangerous job in the industry. A first-class diver must have a Prussian-type discipline and keep himself consciously fit at all times. And since deep-sea diving is a young trade, we have no clear idea what his chances of old age will be at forty. So he deserves his salary". Building to meet the new oil trade: Davenport's keen eye saw Peterhead, where he was filming, as having the potential of a Yukon town in the Gold Rush. "The opportunities are there for anyone who has the wit to seize them," he says. "On my way to the hotel in Peterhead I passed a fish and chip shop called Ferrari's. I remembered it particularly because I thought at the time that Macdonald's might have been more what you'd expect. Later I discovered that the hotel, which was being swiftly converted from eighteen bedrooms to a large forty-roomed place, was owned by a Mr Ronald Ferrari too. A Glaswegian, it emerged, of Italian origin. Later still, when I'd returned to London, I happened to be watching a documentary on North Sea oil and there was Mr Ferrari, being interviewed in what looked like a Rolls Royce, saying that though he wasn't a millionaire yet, he was doing very well: he had opened a restaurant, two hotels, his fish and chip shop and an engineering business to meet the new trade that the oil industry had brought to the town. No doubt some people might frown on his activities. Personally I admire his energy". The Peterhead community, like the country as a whole, is divided between those who are for oil, those agin, and those who are still waiting to see. "Some people," says Gerry Glaister, "were convinced that with all those roustabouts coming on shore after their shifts with their large wage packets, there was bound to be a great upsurge in drunkenness and crime. But the Provost of Peterhead told me this just hadn't happened". The price we have to pay for oil: "In the series we aim to present both sides of the passionate argument about oil and its effect on the environment. Angus Gallagher, who's the editor of our fictional Muirport Gazette, is rigidly devoted to the old culture and to his native part of Scotland. He uses his position to crusade against what he sees as the roughshod methods of the oil companies. If he were a real local editor in Peterhead now, it's clear which side he'd take on the projected building of, say, an ammonia plant - one of the spin-offs of oil and gas exploration. Ammonia is extracted from gas condensates and used for fertilizer. One farmer in Peterhead claimed that if this plant were built it would be a personal disaster, with ammonia fumes stunting the growth of his crops for acres around. This was undoubtedly true, but the fertilizer it produced might help grow crops over a far wider area. How does one choose? "I'm a Scotsman myself," he says, "and I share the environmentalists' concern to preserve the countryside without making a good deal of mess. There is certainly a good deal of debris, pipes and building material lying around at Peterhead. But I am personally confident that this is only a temporary eyesore. It's the price we have to pay for bringing in the goods - the oil that we need now. |
 In January 1972, The Troubleshooters came to an end after eight successful years. Changes to the BBC hierarchy and the acrimonious appointment of a new Head of Drama Serials saw a sea change in thinking at the corporation - namely that programmes concerning the business of international corporations, the workings of secret organizations, private detectives and the like were now considered to be a product of the 1960s and thus unpalatable in a new decade. Thus, the 1970s heralded sweeping changes in programming (substantially on BBC 1 and BBC 2, and to a limited extent on ITV). 
Doomwatch, Paul Temple and The Doctors were amongst other series which were drawn to a close under the new regime, who were determined to keep pace with "the other side" by producing new drama productions with an emphasis on period settings (whilst ITV contented itself with the transmission of swashbuckling new series such as Arthur Of The Britons and The Adventurer, Gerry Anderson series such as The Protectors and UFO, and introduced a new soap opera to the nation - Emmerdale Farm). Thus, serials such as Colditz, Lord Peter Wimsey, The Regiment and the epic War And Peace were launched as a means of providing "alternative" viewing and firmly re-establishing the identity of the BBC as a "quality" broadcaster whose output was not solely audience-pleasing low-brow content. Peter Graham Scott would reflect with dismay that "It is difficult to think of any other industry where such complacent disregard of prime product would be possible, let alone a medium of communication. In a leaderless BBC such a creative vacuum ensured a drying up of adventure in programmes. Hard-hitting series like The Troubleshooters were no longer acceptable. Drama began to look backward to the Victorian era and the certainty of the Second World War. (Colditz was a typically soft series showing how British officer prisoners-of-war joked and tunneled while the Russian people fought and bled)". (British Television: An Insider's History by Peter Graham Scott) Whilst Colditz (an Anglo-American co-production) succeeded, and War And Peace attracted healthy viewing figures, programming on the whole was stale and lacking any sense of adventure whatsoever, and within a year this new directive has been changed again to address increasing numbers of viewers transferring to "the other side" for action-packed entertainment. The emergence of serials such as Sutherland's Law and Warship were counterbalanced with the superb Fall Of Eagles and The Pallisers as the network began to find the right balance between period productions and contemporary action-adventure serials, between excellent comedy (Are You Being Served? and Some Mothers' Do 'Ave 'Em) and high drama (The Brothers), between superb documentaries (The Ascent Of Man) and insights into the man on the street (The Family). Remarkably, what was considered unpalatable three years earlier proved to be decidedly appealing when Gerard Glaister and N J Crisp approached the BBC with an idea for a series concerning oil exploration in the North Sea in 1975. Having researched extensively for the programme as The Troubleshooters came to an end, the pair presented executives with a proposal for an exciting new drama series which would be factually-based and present the hardships faced by the people who drill for oil on North Sea rigs. Oil Strike North would distance itself from its highly-popular counterpart in that it would not concern itself with boardroom battles, power struggles and the like, but would be a character study of what people endure on oil rigs and the impact their work has on their friends and families (at least in principle). The thirteen-part serial would centre around the company Triumph Oil, a corporation battling against fierce weather conditions to wreap oil from the depths of the North Sea using the rig Nelson One. Three months before the expiry of their Government concession, Triumph learned that they may find oil in an area as yet unconsidered, but the time constraints would mean an expensive operation as speedily as possible. Helicopters and divers featured predominately throughout the series, with great pains made to ensure viewers were reminded that the rig itself was cut off from the outside world, and supply ships and helicopters make hazardous journeys in appalling conditions to delivery food and materials to the men who work there. This claustrophobic atmosphere was usually combined with a heightened sense of adventure when commercial expectations would drive the men into action, whether during fierce storms or when a Triumph venture depended on their efforts. Filmed in Peterhead, the programme took as its central theme the relationship between American Drilling Superintendent Frank Ward (played by Michael Whitney) and his wife Julie (Angela Douglas), the pressures brought to bear on their marriage whilst the former worked on oil rigs and the latter lacked any stability in her life. Storylines in which the rig would come under threat due to adverse weather conditions or an explosive freighter adrift in the North Sea, where supply vessels were unable to reach the men and pressure was mounting to find a solution, and where loyalty (both to the company and to one's spouse) was sorely tested, were all part-and-parcel of the Oil Strike North experience. However, despite Glaister and Crisp's protestations that this series was introducing new material to the British public, audiences recognized the common threads which linked the programme inexorably back to the more successful Mogul and The Troubleshooters, and failed to provide the programme with the support it required to secure a second series. Whilst portraying the hardships of life in the oil industry (perhaps the central theme which John Elliot believed had been torn from The Troubleshooters in later seasons), the programme makers had failed to inject the pace and drive that Peter Graham Scott and Anthony Read had engendered in their writing and directorial staff on Elliot's series. The series was commercially exploited in terms of overseas sales, but has never been granted a VHS or DVD release. Text © Matthew Lee, 2004.
The series was produced by Gerard Glaister. Devised and created by N J Crisp and Gerard Glaister in association with Tom Veitch and Joan Veitch.
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