Who at Fifty – Manchester’s very own Doctor Who fringe festival 16th – 30th November, 2013
Manchester pays homage to Doctor Who with a two week fringe festival of new drama, screenings and special appearances.

Doctor Who is fifty years old on the 23rd November, 2013 and four of Manchester’s best loved venues are teaming up with a host of events over two weeks to help you celebrate. New drama, live episodes, screenings, poetry and a great big party for Doctor Who’s 50th birthday on Saturday, 23rd November. With more goodies than you can shake a sonic screwdriver at, it’s truly bigger on the inside.

Discussing the programme, Festival co-ordinator Gareth Kavanagh notes; “Doctor Who at Fifty is something we’ve been building up to for years. We’ve had so much pleasure from this wonderful show over the years and Who at Fifty is Manchester’s love letter to Doctor Who. With our links to the show being as strong as they are – ‘beit it from the links between Corrie and Doctor Who or merely as home to Russell T Davies and the place he drew his inspiration from as he plotted the show’s triumphant return to our screens in 2005, it just feels right for our City to give something back to the fans!”

John Bowen's Robin Redbreast (BBC1, TX: 10/12/1970) a television play transmitted within the Play for Today strand, gets a very welcome release on DVD this week. It's among a raft of releases, of television and cinema, to accompany the BFI's 'Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film' season.
 
At the age of four and a half the play's author John Bowen was sent home, from his birthplace of Calcutta, back to England and reluctantly was placed in the care of his aunts. After serving in the Indian Army from 1943-47, he read Modern History at Oxford and then spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar in the USA. During the 1950s he was variously assistant editor of The Sketch, copywriter at J Walter Thompson and head of the copy department at S.T. Garland Advertising before embarking on a career as a novelist.

In the late 1950s through to the mid-1960s he produced a series of novels which crystalised many of the themes and ideas which then carried through into his success as a playwright and a television writer. Bowen summarised his work thus: 'My plays, like my novels, are distinguished by a general preoccupation with myth, and mainly with one particular myth, the Bacchae, which in my reading represents the conflict between the Apollonian and Dionysiac ways of living more than the mere tearing to pieces of a Sacred King. This theme, the fight in every human being and between beings themselves, rationality against instinct, is to be found somewhere in almost everything I've written.' (1)

His novel Storyboard, published in 1960, was clearly inspired by his time working in journalism and advertising and exposed the power of corporations to corrupt those leading them. 1962's The Birdcage tells of the collapse of the relationship between a successful couple Peter Ash and Norah Palmer. Peter is the host of an arts series and Norah is the Script Editor for the Drama Department of a commercial television company.

The 40th Anniversary of The Wicker Man is upon us. To herald this landmark achievement, for a film originally cursed by its production company to languish in obscurity, a restored 'final cut' has recently enjoyed a lap of honour on cinema screens nationwide. StudioCanal have also this month released a three-disc anniversary Blu-Ray edition containing all three cuts of the film.

We'll get to the 'final cut' business later but let's begin by going back all the way to 1973, and the film's inception, to try and understand just what writer Anthony Shaffer and director Robin Hardy put onto celluloid, how they captured those strange, elemental forces that ensured The Wicker Man's triumph over farcical adversity.

As Allan Brown ascribes: 'The triumph of The Wicker Man is not that it is an often silly film resolutely rooted in the barren sod of the early 1970s, and therefore dismissable as a period piece or curate's egg; the point is that despite being occasionally unintentionally comic, intermittently gauche and often over ambitious, The Wicker Man is possessed of some force, some voodoo that has lifted it from its humble origins.' (1)

Director Robin Hardy and writer Anthony Shaffer were indeed not strangers to each other prior to the birth of The Wicker Man. In the 1960s they'd run Hardy, Shaffer and Associates, a film and television commercials agency where Shaffer wrote the scripts and Hardy directed them. In 1969 Shaffer decided to leave the company to go solo as a writer, penning the screenplay for Mr Forbush And The Penguins, a co-production between EMI, British Lion and the National Film Finance Corporation which was eventually released in 1971.

At the same time, he wrote the celebrated play Sleuth which made its debut at Brighton Theatre Royal in January 1970, opened in the West End a month later and by November had conquered Broadway. As Sleuth's success was consolidated with Tony Awards and the play was adapted as a film, Hitchcock commissioned him for the screenplay of Frenzy (1972). As Frenzy went before the cameras in the summer and autumn of 1971, Shaffer's collaboration with Hardy on The Wicker Man was also taking shape.