Denis Shaw Season: Tom Grattan's War - The Mysterious Lighthouse and The Wreckers
Next up in this series of shows in which actor Denis Shaw had a (usually small but nonetheless sinister) part we have Tom Grattan's War (1968 - 1970). 'WHOSE war?', I hear you ask if you're lucky. And you're lucky if you haven't heard of this show as I hadn't, because it's an absolute gem and I'm so pleased that digging down in Denis Shaw's IMDb page introduced me to it, so that if I'm introducing you to it I would be so pleased. This is another of those occasions on this blog when I will seriously encourage readers to stop reading my witterings and go away to watch this show because it will be a better use of the time left to you. There is an odd episode on YouTube if you want to try before you buy, and Network released the whole series on Region 2 DVD. For streaming you're on your own.
If you're still here I'm going to direct you away from the blog a second time and indicate a superb essay about this show which I will be drawing on for this post: it has actual academic references and sources and can be found here: https://forgottentelevisiondrama.wordpress.com/2015/07/06/tom-grattans-war-yorkshire-television-itv-1968-70/
The linked essay assigns this show to a genre which it quotes Mark Doherty and Alistair McGowan as calling: 'kids in anoraks on bikes, accompanied by a dog or two, roaming the countryside in search of smugglers and bank robbers and usually finding them in ready supply'. In fact until I dscovered that essay I was going to say that this show is like all the good atmospheric, adventurous bits of the Famous Five distilled in a show without the moralising, racism and dodgy gender roles.
In fact Yorkshire TV performed quite a feat with this show, which is notionally about the adventures of the titular Tom Grattan when he spends the First World War away from his native London, on a Yorkshire farm. He is about fifteen or sixteen. I don't even need to tell you that he ends up in lots of adventures with criminals, dodgy Germans, spies, the soldiers of our King, mines, lighthouses and derelict farm buildings, do I? However beyond that, (again this is from the article I link above) Yorkshire TV perform the remarkable feat of making a show which was intended to attract children from 8 years on, older children who were approaching young adulthood, and even adults. One of the stars of the show is actually Yorkshire itself, and full use is made of the Yorkshire scenery if you're into that sort of thing. Similar to the Famous Five's adventures, there would often be considerable danger or threat to Tom and his best friend, although of course this is always resolved. These are genuine adventure stories, with some examination of the characters' motivations and morals, beautiful camera work and scenery, faultless period settings and costume and what Monty Python would have called None of That. It's superb.
The two episodes I'm focusing on for this post have in common that Denis Shaw is in them, of course, but they also illustrate the tendency of the show to treat episodes as pairs with a cliffhanger after the first one. The story is that Tom and his friend walk to the coast and visit a lighthouse. The lighthouse keeper and his mate are suspicious and they find evidence that someone has been dragged into the sea. Of course it turns out that the lighthouse keeper and his mate are German spies who have seen to the real lighthouse keeper and moved the buoys with the intention of wrecking the ships of His Majesty's navy. Frankly, if you just shove a lighthouse in the middle of any old rubbish I will still be all over it like a rash, but as well as the simple fact you can't go wrong with a lighthouse, it's a classic adventure story, paced and carried out to perfection, over the two episodes.
Of course you have all guessed that the role Denis Shaw plays is as the fake lighthouse keeper with a cod German accent. He plays (and in fact fills) the role to perfection and is actually the embodiment of the jingoistic British conception of what Germans are like. The role isn't huge, but of course essential. He also uncharacteristically jumps out of a boat and swims fully clothed at the end, which seems unexpected for someone not apparently athletic.
I just have two questions or possibly criticisms of the whole show.
One is that even with the understanding that the show was aimed at a diverse audience you have to wonder sometimes what they thought they were doing. It deals with some incredibly sobering subject matter, yet also there are bits that look like they might have been intended for laughs (I haven't laughed since 1978 so didn't laugh personally. For example there is a recurring image of Tom running round an object with the villains following him which would probably be funny to younger children, and similarly some of the scenes where he is being chased by villains are obviously speeded up. I don't think this is intended to give a silent film impression and so it would probably be intended to be humorous, which seems a bit incongruent.
My only other criticism is that the show unusually begins every episode with us seeing a narrator telling us the background to the show. In each account he says that Tom is a boy doing a man's work (and in fact the premise is that he is only doing farm work until he is old enough to go to France to fight). I'm not very happy with what they're getting at here, because I don't think there has been a time when farm work has only been done by adults (and Londoners of Tom's generation would have been very familiar with the tradition of whole families leaving the city to go hop picking, something which used to happen even when I was at school). And apart from anything else, which we are not told what Tom was doing at home in London but he isn't posh enough to have been going to a public school and at this time the school leaving age was 12, only being raised to 14 in 1918 (my own mother left school at 14 in 1944). So whatever Tom was doing at home it would have been in the adult world of work and he can hardly be described as a boy doing a man's job. Now I really do feel like I'm nit-picking but the repetition of this makes it less credible each time.
These are really only quibbles and this is a wonderful, excellently-made series which I can't recommend highly enough.
Frustrate their knavish tricks!
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