Tim Beddows and I first came together over a shared love of film and television – James Bond, The Persuaders! The Prisoner, the whole gamut of ITC and Gerry Anderson productions. All of them very much in the action/adventure mould and set either in the present day or the imaginary future. Yet February 1979 saw us fixated on a new TV favourite that was none of these things. It was set in the years leading up to the First World War, the setting was a crumbling country house, and the stories centered on horse riding and pioneer aviators. What on earth had brought us here?
The series was Yorkshire TV’s Flambards, seldom seen in this day and age (note to Talking Pictures – you’re missing a trick). By turns romantic, wistfully melancholic and melodramatic, this period piece was so not our thing that I still find myself wondering how we ever came to watch it and fall under its spell. All I can recall of the week or so prior to its first broadcast was seeing a trailer and hearing a very distinctive piece of music, featuring a memorable whistling theme. I think it might well have been the music that sold us. It did, after all, include the cymbalom, a Hungarian instrument whose plangeant tones had been featured prominently in John Barry’s theme from The Persuaders! not to mention his score for The Ipcress File.
Flambards’ music was composed by the late David Fanshawe, a composer and ethnographical explorer, who was an early proselytiser for what we now refer to as World Music. The main theme – a three-and-a-half bar whistle – had come to him at random during a train journey, and went on to become a unique signature for the series. The motif was developed across the episodic score with the use of another exotic instrument, the Ondes Martenot, an etherial-sounding keyboard operated by a ribbon controller, which produced unearthly sliding notes in a similar manner to the Theramin.
All of which made for a highly unique and occasionally idosyncratic score. One episode even included a song about the principal character, Christina Parsons. For a costume drama, this was radical stuff. Yet Fanshawe’s music was a perfect fit for the period drama, and his many charming leitmotifs underpinned the emotional lives of the characters who lived and died before our eyes. The music divided opinion – I’ve spoken to some who hated it with a passion. Yet for many, it came to define the series, and was sufficiently popular to merit a special soundtrack LP, a rarity for any TV series, especially in the 1970s. To play that LP today is to relive the series in miniature; the music is so evocative, one scarcely needs the pictures. For me, replaying it recently for the first time in decades, the only slightly jarring note was sounded by the aforementioned Song of Christina, which was used to accompany a flying sequence that would otherwise have been mute. I loved it at the time, but today it feels slightly embarrassing. Its swing tempo seems out of kilter with the 1914 setting, and Alan Plater’s lyrics paint Christina as rather more of a boistrous rebel than she came across on screen in the form of the beguiling Christine McKenna.
Time, indeed, that we took a closer look at our heroine. Might she have been part of the reason why Tim and I remained faithful to this series over twelve weeks? I can’t speak for Tim, but she certainly was for me. Coming to the series from a career divided between musical theatre and a few television appearances (most notably The Kids from 47a) Christine McKenna was a new face as far as I was concerned, and I fully expected to see a lot more of her in the coming years. But that was one of the odd things about Flambards – few of its principal actors would go on to greater things. Stephen Grives, memorably obnoxious in the role of Mark Russell, Christina’s cousin, was already familiar to Tim and myself from a recent appearance in Thames’ wartime drama Danger UXB, and seems to be the only one of the main cast members to have remained partcularly active post Flambards. Alan Parnaby, who played his aeroplane-obsessed brother was another actor I’d never seen before. Or, indeed, since. The biggest ‘name’ in the series was right at the end of his career. Edward Judd had been tipped for major stardom in the early 1960s, as witness his lead role in proto-eco-thriller The Day the Earth Caught Fire. Judd doubtless expected his career to do likewise (ie. catch fire), but it never really happened. I’ve heard rumours of his being a bit of a handful, and if that was the case, then he certainly channelled his personal demons into his portrayal of Flambards’ patriarchal figure, the furiously wheelchair-bound Uncle Russell. Russell existed in a permanent state of incandescent rage, incapable of uttering a civil word to anyone. When a visiting Doctor declines a glass of port saying ‘don’t bother on my account’, Russell snaps back ‘we’re NOT bothering on YOUR account, DOCTOR!’ He also berates the hapless medic for hovering in a doorway, bawling: ‘I can’t stand people who hover in doorways!’, like the reasonable fellow that he was. Tim and I couldn’t get enough of this kind of scenery-chewing, and would often repeat those lines to one another over the coming decades.
So, intriguing music, a fanciable heroine and a mad old bastard. Was that the sum total of Flambards’ appeal? Well, not quite. I’ll own that neither Tim nor I went a bundle on horses, and there were plenty of our equine chums on show here. I’d never heard of a Point-to-Point before, and didn’t care for the bloodsports depicted in the early episodes. Nor were we particularly interested in the ‘kites with propellors’ era of pioneer aviators, which took up the middle part of the series. But despite our antipathy to the subject matter, the story had us hooked, thanks to the brilliance of source author K.M. Peyton, whose three Flambards novels formed the core of the series. I may not have been a fan of horses, but I cared about the fate of Christina’s favourite Sweetbriar, whom Uncle Russell planned to sell for offal after being injured in an accident. And I was also completely seduced by the drama of the pioneer aviators, their triumphs and personal tragedies.
Favourite characters coming to grief in TV is a trope that’s been beaten to a predictable pulp in recent years by the likes of Dr. Who. But when characters died in Flambards – and many of them did – it was for keeps. No tricks, no dreams, no resets.
Shot entirely on 16mm film, and directed by practitioners with long experience in the format (including legendary Ghost Story for Christmas director Lawrence Gordon Clark), Flambards looked like an expensive piece of television, with production values that bore comparison with important series of the era like Brideshead Revisited. Given Tim’s fondness for the series, it inevitably found its way onto his own Network DVD label, albeit in a quality that barely improved on the previously available release from Granada Ventures. This being the case, I’d long encouraged him to have the series properly remastered, and had Network and Tim survived, I’d hoped this work might have been done in time for the series’ 45th anniversary, which occurred on Friday 2 February 2024. Needless to say, I commemorated the event – and my absent friend Tim – by commencing a rescreening.
It seems unlikely that a remaster of Flambards will ever happen now. It still looks the way we saw it in 1979, grainy, rather washed-out and very definitely 16mm. Tim Beddows was the only person who cared enough about the series to have even considered having it remastered, but there were always other titles that came before it in the pecking order.
Here in Britain, the series was shown just twice by ITV, once in its original Friday evening 7pm slot, and again two years later on Sunday afternoons, where it was arguably a much better fit. One peculiarity of the first broadcast was that episodes one and two were edited together to form a 90-minute pilot (with two separate on-screen titles). When it was repeated (and subsequently released on DVD), the two episodes were presented separately. In America, the series formed part of the Masterpiece Theatre strand, a home for bought-in costume drama, where it seems to have won a loyal if rather limited following. Carlton’s DVD release of the early 2000s was superceded by Network’s release of a few years later, and it’s sad but true to report that the picture quality on our own set was, if anything, inferior to the Carlton edition.
As mentioned earlier, the Flambards cast more or less went to ground after the series had ended. Christine McKenna resurfaced in character on the cover of Kathleen Peyton’s fourth Flambards novel, Flambards Divided, published in 1981, and I saw her live on stage in a touring production of a lightweight farce whose name escapes me. She last pinged my radar a few years ago when I was driving home one Sunday afternoon with Paul O’Grady’s show on the radio. The programme featured a regular TV theme spot and the previous week’s entry had been Flambards. This prompted a missive to the show from none other than Christine/Christina herself, which O’Grady read out on air. I was sorely tempted to write in and ask for her contact details, so that we might conceivably interview her ahead of a re-release of the series. But the moment passed.
If you’ve never seen Flambards, I urge you to seek it out. An anniversary is always a good excuse for revisiting, or discovering a piece of classic television. The acting and direction were excellent throughout, and David Fanshawe’s score is enough to make all modern TV composers hang their heads in shame. I guarantee you’ll be whistling the theme for the forseeable future.
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