To Kill a King (1980) is a compact riddle of half-hour television, a psychomachia of writer's block that plays like autobiographical ciphertext. Its muse is as elusive as radio astronomy and its spell breaks with a stone face thrown through a television set. Let it come as a surprise to no one that it was written by Alan Garner.
It's concentrated for Garner, actually, adhering to at least two out of three Aristotelian unities as it charts just about twenty-four hours in the stumped and haunted life of Harry (Anthony Bate), rattling so listlessly around the Tudor timbers of the Old Medicine House that he seems a less substantial presence within its pale-washed walls than the golden-tressed apparition first glimpsed like a candle at its window. The invitations to interviews and lectures which pile up in his mail and the glum recurring glance he gives his medal—Carnegie, Garner won it for The Owl Service in 1968—establish him as a writer of sufficient note to receive inquiries even from the States, but he hasn't written anything to feed their interest in years. He lights a fire as if he doesn't believe it'll warm him, clutches a composition book without daring to look inside. It's not hard to read a fisher king's desolation into this drouth of words. The wood into which he trudges to walk off one of his day-splintering "heads" looks sere as a green winter and so does self-neglected Harry, a dead-fall figure in his thistly slept-in cardigan and his barley-mow hair, unshaven as if smeared with ash. His vision is occluded with migraine and something worse: a trouble tuning in. The sky-meshed cradle of the Lovell Telescope tilts behind the prickle of trees to trawl for masers and pulsars and the vast cold spirals of the hydrogen line and Harry flounders awake in the night to transcribe the sudden clear whisper of a woman's voice. "I was asleep and it was already coming. I had to get it down. It came clean, fast as I could write . . . Years of nothing!" As dictated, it's a spellbinding incantation of stone and time and magic, but by the time it's read out over breakfast it's deteriorated into a scatological babble of joke rhymes. "But I didn't!" he protests, disbelieved: a shamed bear of a man bent over his treacherous words like a schoolboy called to account. "I didn't. It was something else." Only the drift-scan witness of the radio dish seems to believe him, cupped like the shell of the moon to his obstinate appeal: "You know. I did not." To his solicitous secretary David (Jonathan Elsom) and his skeptical sister Clare (Pauline Yates), it's just one more episode of lost marbles or silly buggers, to be accommodated with proprietary forbearance or dismissed with indulgent scorn over a lunch which descends from the bitchy to the bizarre as his sister's bland barbs clash as audibly as cutlery with his secretary's waspish deflections and Harry sits mute as a football between them, stirring only to answer his sister's matronly prod of "How's the head?" with the politely blank "Which one?" It is a real question, since we saw the other in the wet wood where Harry paced out the troubled paternity of his words against a ballad of Cheshire and Lancashire, a fist of black stone fished up from the water's iron glass. And if the child be mine . . . The pitted smile it showed him was older than churches. He threw it back with a shout as if it scalded him. A woman's voice sang him the rest of "Child Waters," a woman's shape eluded him across the water, the fields, the pierced mouth of the railway embankment, as if she were that Roland's tower of red gold shining on the other side of the Clyde. It's the question he doesn't want to meet as his afternoon makes a break for the nightmarish, the brittle malevolence of his visitors pursuing him through the uncannily autonomous involvements of telephone and manically swiveling typeball, coming around like a catch in the mind or a cry in the Selectric's chatter: "What are you going to do about it, Harry? What are you going to do about your heads?"
( But I am. )
To Kill a King was the last episode transmitted of the BBC's Leap in the Dark (1973–80) and I would love to hear how biographically legible it was to viewers at the time, since I came to it aware of Toad Hall and Jodrell Bank and the bipolar disorder which Garner has discussed freely, to the point where as soon as I saw the broadcast date I knew that by the time it hit the airwaves, its author was in the grip of a two-year depression as bad as anything he gave his "shaggy, draggy, dirty Harry." Its efficacy as exorcism remains; I used it to break my own dry spell of critical writing, which has felt for months like missing a part of my head. I thought that close to the bone was the best place to start. Even without the personal element, the play would feel like unfiltered Garner just from its opening rush of a train past a telescope, an old song heard in an older house, the slippage and compression of all that sandstone time. The version on YouTube has suffered the normal erosion of unrestored TV, but I can't knock the irony of the VT clock at the beginning. "No, no barriers." This night brought to you by my four-cornered backers at Patreon.
It's concentrated for Garner, actually, adhering to at least two out of three Aristotelian unities as it charts just about twenty-four hours in the stumped and haunted life of Harry (Anthony Bate), rattling so listlessly around the Tudor timbers of the Old Medicine House that he seems a less substantial presence within its pale-washed walls than the golden-tressed apparition first glimpsed like a candle at its window. The invitations to interviews and lectures which pile up in his mail and the glum recurring glance he gives his medal—Carnegie, Garner won it for The Owl Service in 1968—establish him as a writer of sufficient note to receive inquiries even from the States, but he hasn't written anything to feed their interest in years. He lights a fire as if he doesn't believe it'll warm him, clutches a composition book without daring to look inside. It's not hard to read a fisher king's desolation into this drouth of words. The wood into which he trudges to walk off one of his day-splintering "heads" looks sere as a green winter and so does self-neglected Harry, a dead-fall figure in his thistly slept-in cardigan and his barley-mow hair, unshaven as if smeared with ash. His vision is occluded with migraine and something worse: a trouble tuning in. The sky-meshed cradle of the Lovell Telescope tilts behind the prickle of trees to trawl for masers and pulsars and the vast cold spirals of the hydrogen line and Harry flounders awake in the night to transcribe the sudden clear whisper of a woman's voice. "I was asleep and it was already coming. I had to get it down. It came clean, fast as I could write . . . Years of nothing!" As dictated, it's a spellbinding incantation of stone and time and magic, but by the time it's read out over breakfast it's deteriorated into a scatological babble of joke rhymes. "But I didn't!" he protests, disbelieved: a shamed bear of a man bent over his treacherous words like a schoolboy called to account. "I didn't. It was something else." Only the drift-scan witness of the radio dish seems to believe him, cupped like the shell of the moon to his obstinate appeal: "You know. I did not." To his solicitous secretary David (Jonathan Elsom) and his skeptical sister Clare (Pauline Yates), it's just one more episode of lost marbles or silly buggers, to be accommodated with proprietary forbearance or dismissed with indulgent scorn over a lunch which descends from the bitchy to the bizarre as his sister's bland barbs clash as audibly as cutlery with his secretary's waspish deflections and Harry sits mute as a football between them, stirring only to answer his sister's matronly prod of "How's the head?" with the politely blank "Which one?" It is a real question, since we saw the other in the wet wood where Harry paced out the troubled paternity of his words against a ballad of Cheshire and Lancashire, a fist of black stone fished up from the water's iron glass. And if the child be mine . . . The pitted smile it showed him was older than churches. He threw it back with a shout as if it scalded him. A woman's voice sang him the rest of "Child Waters," a woman's shape eluded him across the water, the fields, the pierced mouth of the railway embankment, as if she were that Roland's tower of red gold shining on the other side of the Clyde. It's the question he doesn't want to meet as his afternoon makes a break for the nightmarish, the brittle malevolence of his visitors pursuing him through the uncannily autonomous involvements of telephone and manically swiveling typeball, coming around like a catch in the mind or a cry in the Selectric's chatter: "What are you going to do about it, Harry? What are you going to do about your heads?"
( But I am. )
To Kill a King was the last episode transmitted of the BBC's Leap in the Dark (1973–80) and I would love to hear how biographically legible it was to viewers at the time, since I came to it aware of Toad Hall and Jodrell Bank and the bipolar disorder which Garner has discussed freely, to the point where as soon as I saw the broadcast date I knew that by the time it hit the airwaves, its author was in the grip of a two-year depression as bad as anything he gave his "shaggy, draggy, dirty Harry." Its efficacy as exorcism remains; I used it to break my own dry spell of critical writing, which has felt for months like missing a part of my head. I thought that close to the bone was the best place to start. Even without the personal element, the play would feel like unfiltered Garner just from its opening rush of a train past a telescope, an old song heard in an older house, the slippage and compression of all that sandstone time. The version on YouTube has suffered the normal erosion of unrestored TV, but I can't knock the irony of the VT clock at the beginning. "No, no barriers." This night brought to you by my four-cornered backers at Patreon.
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