Peter Viney's Blog

The History Man
By Malcolm Bradbury
Screenplay by Christopher Hampton
Directed by Robert Knights

Four part series, BBC TV 1981:

1. October 2nd 1972
2. October 3rd 1972 (AM)
3. October 3rd 1972 (PM)
4. Gross Moral Turpitude

MAIN CAST

Anthony Sher – Howard Kirk
Geraldine James – Barbara Kirk
Isla Blair – Flora Beniform
Laura Davenport – Annie Callendar
Michael Hordern – Professor Marvin
Paul Brooke – Henry Beamish
Maggie Steed – Myra Beamish
Veronica Quilligan – Feicity McPhee
Peter-Hugo Daly – George Carmody
Steve Pytas – Professor Mangel
Miriam Margolyes – Melissa Tordoroff

I’ve just watched this for the third time. First was 1981 as broadcast, then some years later on VHS, now again on DVD.

I confess to a strong personal interest. It’s set in 1972 and based on the novel by Malcolm Bradbury (1975). Malcolm Bradbury was my MA tutor at UEA (University of East Anglia) in 1969-1970, and I had easily the longest hair in the department. Like other UEA graduates I watched theTV series with total fascination in 1981 – I had read the book. Our biggest fear was whether we had inspired a character. With some relief, I’m pretty sure I didn’t.

At one postgraduate seminar Malcolm read us a very funny kitchen scene at a lecturer’s party. I have insufficient memory but it may have been his early thoughts on the subject. Malcolm got stuck with me, I guess. I was interviewed and accepted by Jonathan Raban (another fine writer) but he had departed before I got there, allegedly because his Ph.D had turned out to be ‘incomplete.’ Malcolm took over, and I must say gave me life-changing advice. I told him I wanted to be a writer … he was already testing bits of what became the creative writing course a year later. He told me to go and teach English as a Foreign Language for a year because, he said, I would never have to think about grandma and spilling again. Sorry, grammar and spelling.

The novel was highly-acclaimed:

David Lodge
It outraged moralists and feminists but Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man was one of the most influential novels of the 1970s … a modern classic.
The Guardian, 12 January 2008

This is only about the TV series. The pop-art sub-Lichtenstein opening credits are powerful.

This is set at the fictional University of Watermouth, which is accessed by train from Waterloo. Oh, sounds like Bournemouth to me (which wasn’t a university at the time, but now has two). A couple of fleeting glances of the sea show a walled harbour. So it wasn’t filmed near Bournemouth

We follow a few days in the life of Howard Kirk (Anthony Sher), a sociology lecturer. Playing the role made Anthony Sher’s name, and for an ardent theatre-goer it is very difficult to equate the diminutive and skinny Kirk with the far sturdier actor playing Willie Loman in Death of A Salesman, Falstaff in Henry IV (though that was a fat suit) and King Lear. We last saw him in Kunene and The King.

Mostly it was filmed at the University of Lancaster. The exterior is a bit of a letdown. The interiors with bare brick walls rightly scream ‘mid-60s university’ but the exterior architecture, with dull red brick fails to match the powerful brutalist architecture of University of East Anglia, and some others. I expect UEA would be a little too near home.

Kirk throws his start of term party. He’s married to Barbara (Geraldine James) and he manages to screw one of his students, the needy Felicity McPhee, in the basement. Barbara manages to comfort a new lecturer (whose wife is about to give birth to twins) in an upstairs room. These are The Kirks. Every so often, Barbara pops down to London to see her boyfriend, who I assume is a model for knitting patterns by his appearance. Howard relishes the opportunities to get on with screwing his commanding colleague, Flora Beniform (Isla Blair) while setting his eyes on prim Scots English Lit lecturer, Annie Callender (Laura Davenport). So Kirk is something of a sexual athlete, though too exhausted at the end of an evening with Flora to manage Barbara as well. Their friends are the incredibly clumsy and accident prone Henry Beamish and his wife Myra (Howard’s had her once too).

The main story follows Howard’s machinations and plots to cause trouble on campus. It’s based around a famed geneticist, Professor Mangel who is (inadvertently) incredibly non-PC. Howard gets others to fuss about an invitation that had never been offered, then wangles a real invitation … to give students something to protest about it. This would be based on Eysenk and IQ – he found different IQ levels in different cultures, though believed it cultural rather than racist. This is highly suspect. The old 11 Plus exam was IQ based. Let’s remind ourselves of the famous example:

Which one is different?
A lemon An orange The sun A banana

“correct” answer in IQ test: The sun. The others are fruit.
Other possibles:
An orange. All the others are yellow.
A banana. All the others are round.
The sun, It has a definite article, ‘the’

I can’t recall which IQ specialist caused the fuss about Ireland, but it was huge. He suggested that people of Irish origin had higher than average IQs in the USA and Britain, but lower than average in Ireland. He extrapolated that it was genetic in that due to 19th century deprivation, the most adventurous and intelligent had emigrated taking their genes with them. That was a BIG one at the time and I think it was around when I was at UEA or just after. RACIST! once applied is a stain that is near impossible to remove. It was as they said in Ireland at the time, a feckin’ load of old bollix. IQ measures one kind of linear intelligence (“the sun”). The Irish pride themselves on lateral thinking, irony, poetry and song. The riposte was that Irish lateral-thinking culture had been diluted in emigrants.

The whole ‘We will not let (X) speak on campus!’ is so topical in 2021. Looking back, it was rather extreme in 1972 or 1981. Bradbury predicted what has been normalized (which is why this is so worth rewatching now)

The nasty plotting involves a conservative student, George Carmody. Kirk fails him because his views do not fit. Also he wears a blazer and tie and a university scarf. This might have caused him social problems when I was at university too. Carmody takes the issue of Kirk’s “fail” marks to his English tutor, Dr Annie Callender, who advises him to show his papers to the head of department, Professor Marvin (Michael Hordern) who then has six others mark them. Three agree they are high C / low B rather than Kirk’s F. Three decline to mark them because Kirk told them not to. So Kirk must get his way and have Carmody expelled … in return Carmody follows him and films Kirk’s antics.

Kirk: He’s a blackmailer and a fascist.
Callender: He’s not a fascist. He’s a person.

Kirk finally manages to get to Dr Callender and bed her. I really don’t think she would have excused his tantrum and throwing her pretty china tea service on the floor. I had cut out and put David Lodge’s 2008 Guardian article inside my copy of the book, and he hits exactly what we argued about:

When she skips out girlishly to meet him the next time you actually gag and say ‘No! No! No! She wouldn’t!’ Kirk is so loathsome, and she is one of the few honest brokers. That’s called identification with an actor, and full marks to Laura Davenport.

There are standout comedy performances, especially Paul Brooke as the hopelessly inept Henry Beamish. For me, the greatest of all is Michael Horden’s harassed Head of Department, Professor Marvin. I have sat through political machinations in academic situations. I believe Malcom Bradbury put a lot of love into the character.

Malcolm Bradbury was an adept chairperson (unlike Prof. Marvin), but I recall those post-graduate seminars as competitive and downright savage. He knew the score there. Several in my year were doing postgrad on Henry James (possibly supervised by Angus Wilson?). Another batch were doing Milton. I was solo, so didn’t have to fight it out with others working competitively in the same area. My research MA was on Hollywood & The Novel so a mile from anyone else’s. We all had to present something unconnected to our specialization and one half term it was a poet. I chose William Carlos Williams, whose work (read aloud by me) caused apoplexy, sneering (at me), and much backbiting among these Henry James / Milton specialists. Malcolm was kindness itself in coming to my defence, explaining the greatness of Williams with much ‘As Peter said …’ I still thank him! RIP.

People say ‘Why the History Man’? These are Sociologists, and Kirk has a Marxist view of historical imperative as well as a sense of justification ; whatever the enlightened cadre do, will be for the common good, even if no one else is aware yet.

David Lodge pointed out that the TV series came just after Thatcher came to power in 1979, when Thatcherism was beginning to bite.

David Lodge
The radical right was now in the ascendant, and its pundits welcomed The History Man as a confirmation that left-wing academics were corrupting the minds of the young. The universities were subjected to savage cuts in the 1980s and sociology in particular fell into disfavour.

David Lodge has a point on the 80s. Though the expansion of universities … the creation of the ‘uni’ … got it all back a decade or so later.

I had this on sociology from two careers teachers when my kids were in the sixth form, so maybe it did influence attitudes. One advised my daughter against her choice of sociology as it was not ‘a respected discipline.’ She did it anyway. My younger son’s career teacher just said ‘There are two degrees which do not count as degrees to any employer. Theology and Sociology.’

The series also brings up the ‘soft subjects’ v ‘hard subjects’ debate. My younger son and my daughter went to Southampton University. She did Psychology and Sociology and rarely had more than four contact hours a week, often it was two. He did Physics and averaged twenty-five to thirty. I know the snotty right wing Michael Gove types disparage anything that wasn’t being taught in 1930, and often go for Film studies as a “soft” one. My other son did Film Studies in America, and had around thirty contact hours a week (with the obligatory math and language add-ons), plus twelve hour days many weekends working on student films (one of which featured Meghan Markle).

My girlfriend at Hull was studying sociology. So was my girlfriend at East Anglia. I thought about the sleazy academics. I didn’t encounter anyone like Howard Kirk in Drama or American Studies at Hull (though I can think of two in relationships with students in their classes), nor in English and American Studies at East Anglia. But … when we had the 1968 sit in at Hull, we found the staff were tacitly on our side, especially the Political Studies lecturers. The ones actually joining us and stirring it were sociologists. I wrote a novel about the Hull sit-in (as Dart Travis), The Women Came & Went (LINKED) and I consciously thought of it as the opposite angle to The History Man … The Student’s Tale. I believe Bradbury made a deliberate and somewhat sarky choice on Kirk’s discipline.

I also note that Hull was exam-centred. East Anglia was continuous assessment, and that gave ultimate power to the Kirks. I suspect Bradbury was well aware of the intrinsic problem.

This is from The Women Came & Went. ( LINKED) It takes place after a major exam, Steve is talking to Cecilia, a Sociology student:

‘How was it?’
‘I blew it. Blew it completely.’
‘We all think that straight afterwards.’
‘No, Steve. It was bad. And I won’t get any concessions from the department either.’
‘No one gets any concessions.’
She laughed, ‘You know nothing about it.’
‘I’m not with you.’
‘Let’s just say women who are … co-operative … have an easy run.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘Ask a woman, Steve. I’ve never told you this …’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’
‘You’ve started.’
‘You’ll just get angry.’
‘Try me.’
‘OK, but exactly the same thing happened to Lizzie. In November my sociology tutor … who shall be nameless … asked to see me about an essay. He stood over my shoulder breathing heavily …you know, it was on sex among the British working classes … anyway, he started saying what nice legs I had … then he just shoved his hand right up my skirt.’
‘I’ll fucking kill him …’
‘Steve, don’t be stupid. It’s happened to half the year in one way or another. At least he only grabbed Lizzie’s breast.’
‘So …’
‘I defended my honour, Steve. I didn’t hit him. I stood straight up, and said I was going to the dean.’
‘And?’
‘He just laughed. And I got a C minus.’
‘So why didn’t you go to the dean?
‘Because he … the “he” is significant … would have said it was another hysterical woman with a grudge. This particular bastard has proved how many of them there are in Sociology.’
‘You could all go to the dean together.’
‘And crucify one of the leading lights of the university, a happily married good guy with a wife and two little kids, a major figure in the staff union, a deeply committed socialist, and more significantly someone with several standard works on the subject. One of the few people here anyone’s heard of.’

This was based on an actual conversation, and I could name the famous Sociology lecturer at Hull. I won’t. How do you prove it decades on? But this guy’s behaviour was common knowledge. I heard it from half a dozen women. It was the 60s. It’s what happened. (May he burn in hell, indeed). Howard Kirk was exactly like him. Maybe Sociology back in 1972 was the chosen area for predatory male lecturers … as it had a majority of female students then. It is clear in the book and TV series that Dr Callender, the English Literature professor, is the serious and committed teacher. Malcolm Bradbury was making a barbed point there.

The questions of relations between students and teachers was a topic then. When I started at Anglo-Continental in 1971 the contract specified that all one-to-one social engagements with members of the opposite sex had to be registered in advance with the student’s Head of Department. In my mid-twenties, I was Deputy Head of Elementary Studies, and the Head was on holiday. I still squirm at a meeting with a teacher from another department, a man in his forties and a new arrival. He asked if the contract only referred to the opposite sex. I said I had never thought about it, and he informed me that he was gay and having a relationship with one of my students. I stuttered that I might as well make a mental note anyway, but I wouldn’t put it in the diary.

Note that while the right saw the book gleefully as an attack on the left, that isn’t fair. Henry Beamish, the liberal humanist, is also totally useless. Even the committed and sedate Dr Callender is seduced (physically and mentally) by Kirk. The conservative student, Carmody, is something of a whining blackmailer, though with some justification.

Many of the cast rightly did well as a result of appearing in the series. One precious moment in Episode 4 is between Kirk, and the right-on, hard-line American feminist, Melissa Tordoroff. She is played by Miriam Margolyes, and we wondered if two of Britain’s most well-known gay actors were about to get into a fevered heterosexual embrace.

Some things clash a little. Kirk drives a battered Mini van … a rather hippie choice as vans, having no rear side windows, attracted much lower (or no) purchase tax. Yet he lives in a four story Regency house with elaborate steps up to it (it looks like parts of Bath to me). The car and house are widely different income groups – but then the car may be for show to his students, though he does invite them to his house.

The TV series sends you back to the book. I opened it at random to a page where the types of seminar are described. One is without lecturer, as the lecturer is off in Brazil giving talks for the British Council. That rang a few bells. I was assigned a long weekly one-to-one tutorial with Malcolm Bradbury and he missed several because he was off giving talks on BBC Radio. So self-referential humour too. His secretary said that technically I was supposed to wait in case he turned up. A couple of hours in a hard chair in the corridor reading! Malcolm Bradbury’s Rates of Exchange on a British Council tour in the Balkans is required reading for all ELT speakers. I recognized one of his academic characters myself from a tour in Greece.

ANTHONY SHER ON THIS BLOG

ANTONY SHER
Kunene & The King, RSC 2019
King Lear, RSC 2016
Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 RSC
Death of A Salesman, by Arthur Miller, RSC 2015
Hysteria by Terry Johnson, Bath 2012