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TV ONLINE EPISODE GUIDE
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Synopsis : The unlikely friendship between Johnny Jarvis and Alan Lipton begins in their last year at a comprehensive in Hackney. Jarvis, the loveable clown with a surprising talent for welding…Lipton, the apparently talentless reject, fantasising about the future and the father he has never met. At the end of the year they have to confront the adult world. Publicity : Street Wisdom - The period is 1977 to the present day. Against the familiar background of recession. Thursday's new drama serial charts the ups and downs of the friendship between Johnny Jarvis and Alan Lipton - from their last year at comprehensive and out into a sometimes hostile world. Benedict Nightingale meets the serial's author and watches its filming in "indisputably Nigel Williams territory": Albion Parade, N16, is in Stoke Newington, though it could be anywhere in London. Lautman's Tobacconists and Gents' Hairstyling nappears to have closed down, victim (one guesses) of economic recession, but its neighbours survive: A R Dennis ("Bookmakers Of Distinction Since 1935"), the Quick Clean Laundry, Lew's Fish Bar, Chip's Doner House, Atlantis Hair Fashions, a Chinese restaurant, and something quaintly describing itself as Istanbul FC ("members only"). A BBC voice calls "action", and two twenty-year-olds in T-shirts and jeans begin to amble down a side-road, past the dowdy terraced houses, exchanging streetwise gen about corruption. On cue, a police car roars past, its blue light whirling. We are indisputably in Nigel Williams territory, and an hour later still deeper in it. The film unit moves a mile south-east, in Hackney College, one of whose rooms has been painstakingly transformed into a realistic looking employment exchange, complete with sickly-green walls and posters about supplementary benefits. Here sits Johnny Jarvis, shambling hero of Nigel Williams' latest dramatic foray into British youth culture, waiting to sign on. Perhaps you're beginning to get a sense of déjà vu. Not another enervating saga about the miseries inflicted by society upon deprived young people! If you fear that, be reassured. Though everyone involved has been at pains to evoke the brick desert of London as accurately as possible, the serial is not primarily about the desert of its ill-effects. It is, says Williams, more about growing up, and still more about friendship. Its subject is six years, 1977 to 1983, in the surprisingly eventful lives of Johnny Jarvis and Alan Lipton, the school runt who is propelled towards the fringes of metropolitan crime, as told by Lipton. Williams, too, comes from North London, but his background is decidedly more well-to-do. His father was headmaster of what used to be Kilburn Grammar, his mother was also a teacher, and he himself went to public school. "I was the bloke in glasses, a bit like Lipton, and my abiding memory is of wanting to be friends with people who didn't want to be friends with me". Unlike Lipton, he went on to Oxford, where he began to write for the theatre. After graduation he joined the BBC, at first working for the World Service, later directing arts programmes for television. "But I had found it, I still find it a tremendous turn-on to hear people saying lines written by me. I wanted to get back to the stage". In 1978, aged thirty, he did so. He wrote Class Enemy, a fierce angry play about fifteen-year-old no-hopers taking over the schoolroom in which they've been left to fester, as a sort of tribute to his parents, who he felt (and feels) represented all that's right with teaching. It was accepted by the Royal Court, his home-from-home as an adolescent. London critics voted Williams the most promising playwright of the year. He now thinks Class Enemy a bit crude, a bit preachy. He still writes about the young and is increasingly appalled by the waste he sees among them: "It's criminal, what's being done. The unemployment figures are terrifying. My central tenet is not to tell people what to think," he says. "It is presumptuous, insolent. Besides, you can shout your principles from the house-tops; but if people won't listen, the only person you've helped is yourself. To influence people about society, you should present them with real characters and real situations. You have to leave them to tell you what they take out of your plays". That, he hopes, is the method of Johnny Jarvis. Williams has always tried to get to know the young as they are, not as they are patronisingly thought to be. The serial is, he says "rather autobiographical - you know, wanting to be a good boy, and yet wanting to be happy, and wanting somehow to reconcile the two". But observation and memory aren't everything. "There's a magic thing about writing, too," he says. "It is like talking with imaginary friends. My characters are very close to me, almost like my children. And they may not say and do what I expect". To date, Williams' characters have said and done enough for four stage plays, two television plays, two novels - and Johnny Jarvis, which he originally conceived as a novel. "It's a gentler piece of work than some of mine, aiming to consider rather than to shock - and hoping to reach the same big audience that the nineteenth-century novelists did or Coronation Street does now. I want to see if I can write something that holds up as a popular novel for television". (Radio Times, November 5, 1983 - Article by Benedict Nightingale). Notes : Episodes were originally transmitted 9:25pm to 10:15pm on BBC 1. Episodes 1 - 3 were fifty minutes in duration.
Synopsis : Lipton and Jarvis encounter the amazing Stella for the first time. Turner finds work - of a fairly eccentric kind. Jake remains mysterious and evasive. For both Lipton and Jarvis their relationships with their fathers take a dramatic turn.
Synopsis : Life at the squat for Stella and Lipton isn't easy. Jake has disappeared again. Both Lipton and the mysterious "Colonel" want to find him - and the Colonel isn't too fussy about his methods. However, Turner is in work - if not earning money; and Jarvis is busy at Technical College, where he acquires a girlfriend.
Synopsis : Lipton and Guy become the self-appointed leaders of a band at the hostel, singing Alan's songs. Stella moves in to live with Johnny - and his mother. Then a surprising newcomer turns up at the hostel… Notes : This episode was fifty-five minutes in duration.
Synopsis : Having begun as a sort of serial for Grange Hill graduates, this tale of two lads from London's East End has taken off on an almost surreal tangent, with a shadowy drug dealer called The Colonel holding the rock writer Lipton a prisoner in his mother's council flat. Jarvis is also flat-bound, and flat-broke, compelled to baby-sit while Stella goes out to work. Notes : This episode was sixty minutes in duration.
Synopsis : Johnny and Stella move in to live with Alan in his new flat. But it's not easy to revive old friendships, and the tensions run high… Notes : This episode was fifty-five minutes in duration.
The series was created and written by Nigel Williams, as adapted from his novel of the same title. The series was directed by Alan Dossor and produced by Guy Slater. The signature tune for the series was provided by Gary Shail and the music for the series was by John Altman. |
 First published in September 1983, BBC Television scurried with somewhat indecent haste to procure the services of author Nigel Williams to adapt his novel Johnny Jarvis into a six-part serial for the Autumn schedules of the same year. Rarely has the corporation, either before or since, cultivated such a sense of urgency to visually realise a novel, but the end-product proved such a success that audiences who enjoyed the six-week tale still warmly and affectionately regard the series as not only one of William's best novel-to-screen adaptations (and, in light of the recent failure of Fortysomething on ITV, one can appreciate why) but also a delightfully woven tale exploring issues of friendship and the ultimate realisation of goals.  Cultivating healthy audiences, the serial proved to be one of the rare highlights in a somewhat barren Autumn season, predominately dogged by the return of "old favourites" matched with a sprinkling of isolated new drama productions. The series itself drew the majority of its dramatic momentum from the two primary characters, through whose eyes the programme would unfold. Johnny Jarvis (Mark Farmer) and Alan Lipton (Ian Sears) were two teenagers in their final year of school at a comprehensive in Hackney. Energetic, sometimes anxious and occasionally naïve, the pair are on the brink of entering the adult world. Jarvis has always been the class clown, and his unlikely friendship with bookish Lipton - a boy with his head metaphorically stuck in the clouds as he ponders what the future has in store for him, and considers the image of the father he has never known - is one of the more unusual unions in the serial. The pair successfully leave school brimming with promise, but soon find that the harsh realities of Britain in the late 1970s have little to offer them - they are soon both unemployed school-leavers struggling to make sense of the world and the part they play in it. However, life in the confines of school and life on the outside are two entirely different things, as Jarvis and Lipton discover the strongest elements of their schooling lives are reversed over the course of the series; Jarvis, once a popular jack-the-lad type with the world as his oyster, is ultimately left poverty-stricken and relatively friendless, whilst Lipton, who starts the serial emerging from school and finding himself in a grotty squat existence, blossoms from a bookish character into a popular New Wave performer in a band, the lyrics of songs for which were based on Johnny's downward spiral and terrible existence. However, this linear storyline was infused with a thriller-esque sub-plot concerning a mysterious drug peddler, known as "The Colonel", holding Lipton to ransom in his mother's tower-block flat at the same time that Jarvis' fortunes are no better, minding a child in his bed-sit whilst his girlfriend Stella (Johanna Hargreaves) brings in the sole wage in order to support them all. The thriller aspect of the series, more an unwanted diversion than to the detriment of the serial, failed to extinguish the genuine message emanating from the content - a veiled attack of Thatcher's Britain and the wasted resource of school kids emerging from education to find no jobs and precious few prospects awaiting them. Produced by Guy Slater and directed by Alan Dossor, the series presented notable supporting performances from Alrick Riley, Mark Penfold, Ian Brimble, Maurice Colbourne, Kevin Lloyd, Arthur White, Joe McGann, Dorian Healy and Gary Shail. Shail also provided the serial with its distinctive signature theme (which I can still hum after all these years - Editor), accompanied by some memorable songs which have lived long in the memory of those who appreciated the series, which was only ever granted the initial transmission with no terrestrial repeats. In 1992, Witchcraft would see William's return to BBC Television for the first of two higher-profile adaptations, subsequently followed by the delightfully macabre realisation of The Wimbledon Poisoner in 1994. Johnny Jarvis was globally exported, but only the novel upon which the serial was based is commerically available. Recently speculation concerning the possibility of a potential DVD release has laid claim to observations from television enthusiasts that BBC Television may, indeed, have erased this serial from its archive holdings, though the fact that the programme was sold to overseas broadcasters does seem to have escaped this speculation. All of Johnny Jarvis does indeed exist and this has been confirmed by contacts at the BBC. Episodes 1 – 3 exist on D3 transfers from 1” C format. Episodes 4 – 6 exist on film, the format episodes were originally short on. Text © Matthew Lee, 2004. |