When TV was King. Musing on Penda’s Fen

The first thing that struck me on watching Penda’s Fen again was how vivid and accurate my recollection of the two episodes mentioned above had been. It’s fair to say that these are the programme’s key sequences. The play isn’t exactly light viewing, and while it does have fantastical elements, these are bound tightly in analogy, some lengthy pontificating and much soul searching.

Penda’s Fen was directed by Birkenhead born Alan Clarke and first broadcast as part of the BBC’s Play For Today showcase in 1974. Adapting a script by David Rudkin, Penda’s Fen was not the most obvious choice of material for Clarke, better known as director of the gritty dramas Scum (both the banned BBC play and the big screen adaptation, 1977 and 1979), Made In Britain (1983) and The Firm (1988). But while Penda’s Fen is somewhat removed from the cityscape and urban degeneration of these later works, they share a fascination with class structure and fascistic characters — elements also present in Clarke’s successful stab at comedy, Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1986).

Penda’s Fen is about the religious, political and sexual awakening of a seventeen year old middle-class pastor’s son called Stephen. The strangeness commences when Stephen’s beliefs and values are thrown into question: he discovers papers written by his father that cast doubt on the orthodox teaching of Christianity, learns he is adopted, has gay yearnings, and even sympathises with Lefties. As a result he starts to see gargoyles, angels, has curious nightmarish visions, and muses philosophically with the composer Edward Elgar, who appears to him.

Stephen doesn’t come across as a particularly likeable fellow. He is pompous and arrogant and would be labelled a brat if he were a little younger. Despite the upheavals in his life our attitude towards him remains a constant — and with him as its central character the play itself remains cold.

But Penda’s Fen is interesting. It inhabits ground where risks could be taken in television; where BBC programmers didn’t necessarily have to understand what it was they were programming and slots like Play For Today were open to all kinds of misshapes.

Perhaps exasperated by a knock he receives on the head when he falls off his bicycle, Stephen is confronted by demonic images and the possibility that the mythological ancient pagan ruler of the land, King Penda, is reaching out to him. Whilst playing the organ in church, Stephen witnesses the floor cracking open and hears a voice asking to be freed. Later, in the final scenes of the play, he is approached by a man and woman on a hill and told that he is the chosen one.

He refutes this, saying that he is neither pure racially, religiously or sexually. His legs are then set on fire and he calls to Penda for help, who appears and scares away the couple. Having bestowed some words of wisdom on him, Penda disappears and Stephen is left to walk down the hill alone.

And that’s how it ends.

The couple represent heterosexualism and, in my opinion, the ending signifies that Stephen has come to terms with what and who he is. But what of the hand chopping dream, what does that signify?