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The Trashing of Cathy Come Home

An authoritative study of television drama, by one of the BBC’s best known producers was in fact a fraud. Claiming to be an objective study of the evolution of television drama, it was actually used as a vehicle for a number of personal vendettas waged by its author against her colleagues.

Some of the myths it promulgated have become generally accepted as true. Yet they are lies. The author, Irene Shubik, a London graduate in English Literature and self styled ‘professional historical researcher’, was also a BBC TV producer, a close colleague of Tony Garnett, the producer of ‘Cathy’.

Professional jealousy was probably the motive. Its effects resulted in real harm. Shubik was envious of Garnett’s position and reputation at the BBC and coveted his job. Someone had to respond to the lies - extremely damaging to a number of people’s professional reputation - or they will pass into history.

Writer Jeremy Sandford, author of ‘Cathy Come Home’ and one of those maligned, has taken it on himself to respond to the allegations which are made in a book called ‘Play for Today; the Evolution of Television Drama’.

Sandford says; ‘The self seeking attitude of Shubik is typical of the attitude of many in the television establishment at that time. It is clear that Shubik attempted, and in some cases succeeded, in harming the reputation of a number of her colleagues.

‘There is, however, some value in the book. Its attitudes, typical of the television establishment of its time, can give an important insight into what has been allowed to go wrong in the world of those who control television drama. It was these people and this sort of attitude - in its short-sightedness and irresponsibility - that has contributed vastly to the bleak future that now threatens television drama, these arrogant and irresponsible attitudes and perceptions that have brought it to its present emasculated condition.’

The Trashing of Cathy Come Home

Part Two

Analysis

The story so far.

Professional jealousy not the only motive.

A Offensive to her view of how things should be.

B Huw Weldon and others.

C Cathy achieved despite rather than because of, therefore threatening.

The Trashing of Cathy Come Home

Part Two

The Story So Far:

‘Cathy Come Home’ was a fraud. It was so riddled with inaccuracies that it had to be drastically - and clandestinely - re-edited by the BBC between first and second transmissions.

This damaging allegation, appearing most recently in Professor Corner’s would-be authoritative study ‘The Art of the Record’, published by Manchester University Press was, as I demonstrated in Part One of this enquiry, a myth. This myth can be traced back to a specific source - a book by Irene Shubik, a London graduate in English Literature and self styled ‘professional historical researcher’ who was also a close colleague of Tony Garnett, the producer of ‘Cathy’ at BBC TV. Professional jealousy of Garnett may have been one reason for Shubik’s allegations which were, she says, copied from a ‘quality daily’ whose name she later ‘forgot’. Shubik did not think it necessary to telephone Garnett to check that the story was correct, or even to call in at his office which was only a few yards down the passage.

Such feuds are an interesting feature of the hothouse world of professional television. Shubik’s feud with Verity Lambert, another television producer, hit the headlines in 1992 when it was alleged that the votes from a jury of which Shubik was Chairperson had been rigged in such a way that Verity, against whom Shubik had a grudge, was deprived of the award that the jury had voted her.

A:

Professional jealousy is enough to account for Shubik’s vitriolic and completely inaccurate attack on ‘Cathy Come Home’, but there may also be other reasons. There was a crusading side to Shubik, often kept hidden from left wing colleagues. She was deeply suspicious of what she saw as the fashionable liberalism of the sixties and early seventies. ‘Cathy Come Home’ was, of course, a trail blazer in this area. Shubik was covertly hostile to the film and everything it stood for, even though in public she often thought it wise to give the reverse impression.

It was not made easier for her in that, as a Canadian, she did not entirely understand the workings of British society. Shubik was suspicious of plays which were firmly rooted in the lives of ordinary folk, as opposed to more thespian products.

I first met Irene Shubik in an Italian restaurant in South Kensington. It was a business lunch and Irene had come to discuss the acquisition of a trilogy of television screenplays of mine. My agent Nick Thompson and I were there to talk over the contract.

Smartly turned out in one of the fashionable high street outfits of the time, Irene did not at first sight strike me as a typical BBC TV producer. This was in part because there were at that time few women in managerial positions anywhere and television drama especially was still almost entirely a male preserve.

I remember speaking of how important accuracy was to me, and how I did not like to write anything for television which I could not support in a current affairs programme afterwards, as I had done in a programme called ‘Late Night Line Up’ and also on the David Frost programme after ‘Cathy’. There was a brief pause, followed by Shubik appearing to be impressed. In fact, as I realised later, she had decided to stay silent for fear that a statement of her real views might jeopardise her acquisition of the screenplays. Her real views, as I learned when I finally came to read ‘Play for Today, the Evolution of Television Drama’, were in fact the opposite. Writers, so she claims, should at all costs avoid ‘revealing themselves, warts and all, to an audience of millions ... justifying or explaining their own work ... a little remoteness is, in my view, a very good thing.’

Much of what I was writing at that time came from a position of social concern. ‘Cathy Come Home’ as a young man’s work had been written to change the world or at least one bit of it and, for a while, I believed I had succeeded. The amount that ‘Cathy’ changed anything seems, with hindsight, to be less than what I (and much of the British population) thought at the time, although I believe it still can be shown to have changed some things.

At that time it really did seem that I had become one of what Shelley called, speaking of writers, the ‘unacknowledged legislators of their time’. It had been one of those times when television, normally content to reflect the times it finds itself in, instead takes a part in the action. People’s attitudes were changed by ‘Cathy’, and government policy was changed. Television, I felt, was a medium through which, in an electronic democratic forum, a writer could address fellow citizens and incite them to action.

To Shubik, however, as was to become apparent later but was not clear then, there was not that blazing concern for the society she lived in which, for example, I had found in Tony Garnett and Ken Loach. Nor had she thought much about the role of television in society. Television, in so far as I could judge her position, is something that is there, in which she was lucky to get a job, and is a river in whose waters she swims, and swims contentedly enough, though sometimes with moments of trauma, without ever attempting that intellectual leap which might make it possible to take a more lofty view of the countryside through which the river flows.

So, in her book, as in so many showbiz memoirs, the play’s the thing, rather than that wider world which forms its context. Shubik’s book, in my view, is a fairly typical showbiz memoir. The big names are there; there are a few funny anecdotes; very little in the way of objective analysis, of what is ostensibly her subject.

Deep in Shubik’s psyche there seems to be a distrust of ‘ordinary’ people, based I think on nothing more unusual than prejudice and snobbery.

Perhaps the most unpleasant statement in the whole book comes on page 132 where she quotes with approval from an unidentified reviewer whose name she has also, doubtless, now forgotten: ‘If Cathy had been more realistically portrayed as a foul-mouthed working class scrubber and her pretty appealing children had been replaced by appropriately snotty-nosed delinquents, then the sympathies of the good, honest, hard-working and decent British people would have remained dormant.’

This is classist, snobbish, prejudiced, and above all quite untrue. Since she hails from Canada, Irene’s branding of a typical homeless mother as a ‘foul mouthed working class scrubber’ and her children as ‘snotty nosed delinquents’ is a deeply prejudiced comment from someone who has not really understood our culture. It is remarkable that Irene did not mention these feelings at her original meeting with my agent Nick Thompson and myself in April 1970. At that time, possibly because she was eager that I should sign an agreement to sell three screenplays to her, she went out of her way to express admiration for ‘Cathy’, its accuracy, characterisation, and the various techniques employed in it.

It seems hardly necessary to add that my portrait of Cathy, a typical homeless mother, had been carefully researched, and in the eight years between ‘Cathy’ and Irene’s book, had been many times endorsed. Some of the research I was drawing on can, for example, be found in the BBC radio programme ‘Homeless Families’ in the BBC Sound Library and devised, recorded and introduced by Heather Sutton and myself; in my ‘Down and Out in Britain’ (Sphere), which is quoted from elsewhere by Irene, and in the essay attached to the novelisation of ‘Cathy Come Home’ (Pan), and also in a series of reports by myself in ‘The Observer’, ‘The New Statesman’ and ‘The People’ newspapers.

A serious historian would surely not claim our homeless mothers are typically ‘foul mouthed scrubbers’ without mentioning the research on which she is drawing. Yet Irene does not quote a single piece of research to support her claim.

But Shubik was not alone in these feelings. It is important to realise that the degree to which, while paying lip service to the success of ‘Cathy Come Home’, there were many at the BBC establishment who did not wish it well. It was not the sort of drama they wanted to see. In her attempt to trash ‘Cathy’, Shubik was acting out the secret wishes of many in the television establishment.

BBC television in the 60s and 70s was monolithic, deeply entrenched and complacent. ‘Cathy Come Home’ had achieved immense success but that success had been achieved despite, rather than because of, the BBC hierarchy.

In acting as she did, Shubik believed she was doing the television establishment a favour - articulating the views of what was in fact the silent majority - for which she would in due course first be granted hero status, and later rewarded.

B:

Huw Weldon and Others

‘You know, we can’t make any more [‘Cathy Come Home’s]’, Huw Weldon explained a year or so later. The reason he gave me was that the public had not been clear enough about whether what was being shown was real or not.

The real reason, I believe, is that ‘Cathy’ was too strong for the typical BBC employee of that date to stomach and that Huw, an exceptional man in many respects, was closer to a typical BBC employee in this one.

While paying it public lip service, a number of people in the establishment felt threatened by the rawness and energy of ‘Cathy’ and did not wish it well.

The campaigning social message of ‘Cathy’ was deeply disturbing to many of those in authority. There were many who believed, like Huw Weldon, that it should never be allowed to happen again.

‘Cathy’ had other enemies. The Institute of Social Workers was reported in the press as having asked its two million members to watch the second showing and report back any ‘blunders, omissions and inaccuracies’, which it would then use in a ‘protest to the BBC’. A spokesman for that organisation tells me it is not something they would ever do, though it could perhaps have appeared as a rhetorical question in one of their briefing sheets, which town halls are encouraged to put on their notice boards, though he did not recall this. Their small organisation would be quite incapable, he tells me, then or now, of dealing with two million replies. Whatever the exact nature of the request, various newspapers reported, a day or so later, that it did not prove possible to spot any ‘blunders, omissions or inaccuracies’. The BBC had already made an announcement in which it stood by the accuracy of the play. The proposed protest was never made to the BBC.

The ultimate comment comes from a cartoonist for the Evening Standard - ‘The only boobs we could spot were our own!’

The People is not a newspaper that one should work for - or cross - without some deliberation. At that time I had a contract with them for three series

And so, from the start there were those who did not wish ‘Cathy’ well. Those whose world view was threatened by it. There is a most revealing sentence in Shubik’s book, where on page 132 she quotes with approval from an unidentified reviewer: ‘If Cathy had been more realistically portrayed as a foul-mouthed working class scrubber and her pretty appealing children had been replaced by appropriately snotty-nosed delinquents, then the sympathies of the good, honest, hard-working and decent British people would have remained dormant.’

This is classist, snobbish, prejudiced, and above all quite untrue. Since she hails from Canada, Irene’s branding of a typical homeless mother as a ‘foul mouthed working class scrubber’ and her children as ‘snotty nosed delinquents’ is a deeply prejudiced comment from someone who has not really understood our culture. It is remarkable that Irene did not mention these feelings at her original meeting with my agent Nick Thompson and myself in April 1970. At that time, possibly because she was eager that I should sign an agreement to sell some screenplays to her, she went out of her way to express admiration for ‘Cathy’, its accuracy, characterisation, and the various techniques employed in it.

It seems hardly necessary to add that my portrait of Cathy, a typical homeless mother, had been carefully researched, and in the eight years between ‘Cathy’ and Irene’s book, had been many times endorsed. Some of the research I was drawing on can, for example, be found in the BBC radio programme ‘Homeless Families’ in the BBC Sound Library and devised, recorded and introduced by Heather Sutton and myself; in my ‘Down and Out in Britain’ (Sphere), which is quoted from elsewhere by Irene, and in the essay attached to the novelisation of ‘Cathy Come Home’ (Pan), and also in a series of reports by myself in ‘The Observer’, ‘The New Statesman’ and ‘The People’ newspapers.

A serious historian would surely not claim our homeless mothers are typically ‘foul mouthed scrubbers’ without mentioning the research on which she is drawing. Yet Irene does not quote a single piece of research to support her claim.

However, Shubik’s view of ‘Cathy’ was nonetheless the established view of many BBC folk at the time. It was threatening to Shubik’s - and their - world view.

C:

Despite, rather than Because

There was another reason why ‘Cathy’ was viewed with great suspicion by many in the television hierarchy. It happened despite, rather than because of, those who were in theory in charge of making good programmes for television.

‘There is one condition,’ Tony Garnett had said as we sat in Bertorelli’s restaurant in the romantic environment of Shepherds Bush Green, ‘attached to our making this film.’

‘And what is that?’ I asked. It was my first television play to be taken seriously by anyone in the media. I’d have agreed to anything.

‘That you do not speak a word about the content of this film, not a word, until the morning after its transmission. On that condition,’ said Tony, ‘I’ll be happy to send you a contract. How soon do you think you could complete a first draft screenplay?’

‘Not long,’ said I. Much of the necessary work had actually been done, because after many attempts to sell the storyline as a television or even radio programme, I had decided to cut my losses and write it instead as a novel.

I was remarkably innocent of the way things work in television however. Why Garnett’s proviso? Tony, who was beginning to know his way around, understood that there was no way this screenplay would ever be made, let alone transmitted, if the powers that be got to hear of its content. Or, as Tony explained, ‘the BBC establishment would instantly block it if they ever got to hear what it is really about.’

‘But it’s about something that’s happening in Britain today, something that is shocking and is immensely important,’ I said. ‘It’s also powerful and dramatic.’

‘It’s because it’s all those things that the establishment would try to block it,’ said Tony. ‘It’s too strong for them. It’s not the sort of thing they want to see on television.’

In the course of the next few weeks I met Ken Loach for script conference and general discussion. Soon the screenplay was ready. We casted and made the film and the BBC establishment were deceived, through all those months between conception and transmission, about its true contents. To cover our tracks we described it as a knockabout family comedy, which was roughly true, except for the comedy bit.

The secrecy continued in the run up period to transmission. It was the custom for superiors in the hierarchy (which at that time included Sydney Newman as Head of Plays) to vet programmes a few weeks before they went out. Tony and Ken arranged that the film was always away being processed or worked on or having its titles or sound track added, so that nobody above Tony in the hierarchy got to see it before it was actually transmitted.

The film caused a sensation. From that moment it was established as the most famous and far reaching television drama of all time. Sydney Newman was furious, had Tony on the carpet and accused him of ‘patronising the proles’. Later that day, when the BBC top brass decided to stand by the programme, he had second thoughts and decided that he too would support it.

The BBC gave ‘Cathy’ a second transmission three months later and the combined audience for both showings was twenty two million - more than half the adult population.

The phenomenal success of Cathy had entirely been achieved despite, rather than because of, the BBC hierarchy.

It must have caused a degree of soul searching for a number of people in executive positions. ‘Cathy’, the most successful and influential television one shot drama of all time had come into existence despite, rather than because of, them.

This called into question whether they were doing their well-paid jobs adequately. Were they a creative part of the process? Or merely obstructive?

The truth is, they were the latter. There has always been one weak link in the chain of authority that brings television scripts to the screen. That weak link is not among the writers, actors, directors, camera and other technicians. The weak link is to be found among many of those ostensibly in control - among the middle men and executives.

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