Screening black political struggle on 1970s British Television: the case of the Play for Today, A Hole in Babylon (1979)

Abstract

This article draws on my interviews with the writer/director Horace Ové and the producer Graham Benson, in order to explore the production history of the Play for Today, A Hole in Babylon. Filmed during a particularly turbulent decade in British race relations, A Hole in Babylon was a fictionalised account of the 1975 Spaghetti House siege. Horace Ové was intent on providing a sympathetic portrayal of three black men, whose botched attempt at an armed robbery escalated into a six-day siege. Ové’s insistence that the underlying motivation for the crime was ideological ensured that the play courted controversy, even before it was actually transmitted on television. Much of A Hole in Babylon was shot on location in and around Ladbroke Grove; an area which was, during the 1970s, inexorably linked to black political expression and struggle. Furthermore, the scenes in A Hole in Babylon depicting the siege were filmed in the restaurant basement that had been the locus of the real-life hostage-taking just four years earlier. In addition to providing valuable insight into the creative partnership between director and producer, this article will argue that the institutional context of the BBC in the late 1970s facilitated the airing of a highly innovative text.

Acknowledgements

Grateful thanks to Graham Benson and Horace Ové.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Graham Benson, interviewed by Sally Shaw, 3 May 2013. All subsequent quotes are from this interview.

2. Ambalavaner Sivanandan, A Different Hunger—Writings on Black Resistance (London: Pluto, 1987), 30–3.

3. Gavin Schaffer, ‘Race on the Television: The Writing of Johnny Speight in the 1970s’, in British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade, eds. Laurel Foster and Sue Harper (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 110.

4. Peter Fryer, Staying Power—The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto, 1987), 387.

5. Sivanandan (1987), op. cit., 37–38.

6. H.O. Nazareth, ‘No Simple Robbery’, Time Out, November 23–29, 1979, 26.

7. Sarita Malik, Representing Black Britain—Black and Asian Images on Television (London: Sage, 2002), 49.

8. Metropolitan Police Service, Spaghetti House Siege, http://www.met.police.uk/history/spaghetti.htm (accessed June 4, 2014).

9. Mike Phillips, ‘The Harder They Come’, Radio Times, 24 November 1979, 7.

10. Jenny Bourne, ‘Spaghetti House Siege: Making the Rhetoric Real’, Race and Class 53, no. 1 (2011): 2. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/030639681141319.

11. Sivanandan (1987), op. cit., 38.

12. Bourne (2011), op. cit., 4.

13. Nazareth (1979), op. cit., 26.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Cited by Race Today Collective, ‘Gunning for a Wage’, Race Today 7, no. 10 (1975): 219.

18. Veronica Baptiste, ‘Clarification Please’, Race Today 7, no. 10 (1975): 218.

19. Jack Hines, ‘Black Groups and the Spaghetti Siege’, Race Today 7, no. 11 (1975): 259.

20. Ibid.

21. Race Today Collective, ‘Gunning for a Wage’, Race Today 7, no. 10 (1975): 219.

22. Ibid.

23. Phillips (1979), op. cit.

24. Jim Pines, Black and White in Colour (London: BFI, 1992), 126.

25. Ibid.

26. Phillips (1979), op. cit.

27. Benson (2013), op. cit.

28. Jonathan Bignell, Stephen Lacey, and Madeleine Macmurraugh-Kavanagh, British Television Drama—Past, Present and Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 1.

29. Nazareth (1979), op. cit.

30. Benson (2013), op. cit.

31. Sue Summers, ‘Villains or Heroes?’ Evening Standard, 29 November 1979.

32. Horace Ove, interviewed by Sally Shaw, 23 June 2009. All subsequent quotes are from this interview.

33. Summers (1979), op. cit.

34. Ibid.

35. Benson (2013), op. cit.

36. Phillips (1979), op. cit.

37. See Sally Shaw, ‘A “Country Boy” Migrates to Brixton—Re-examining Agency, Identity and Memory in and Through’, Black Joy, Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture 3, no. 2 (2012): 271–82.

38. Pines (1992), op. cit., 63.

39. Ibid., 61.

40. Ibid., 63.

41. Phillips (1979), op. cit.

42. Sivanandan (1987), op. cit., 34.

43. Ové (2009), op. cit.

44. Phillips (1979), op. cit.

45. Mike Peck, ‘Spaghetti House Victims Face a TV Nightmare’, Evening News, 29 November 1979.

46. Benson (2013), op. cit.

47. Pines (1992), op. cit., 127.

48. Benson (2013), op. cit.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.

51. Nazareth (1979), op. cit.

52. Benson (2013), op. cit.

53. Ibid.

54. Martin Jackson and Paul Donovan, ‘Faction Replay’, Daily Mail, November 29, 1979.

55. Mixed-up motives, The Observer, 29 November 1979.

56. Benson (2013), op. cit.

57. Ibid.

58. James Cellan-Jones, Forsyte and Hindsight or Screen Directing for Pleasure and Profit (Dudley, 2005), 66.