Underworld talks to
Bob Cornwell about the process of adapting the book for television.
Underworld talks to
Bob Cornwell about the process of adapting the book for television.Michael, how did you get involved in this particular project?
I had met Chris Parr, then head of Drama at BBC Birmingham. He had liked Dandelion Dead and he mentioned that he was about to start a series of adaptations of the Dalziel and Pascoe books (henceforth referred to as D&P. BC). I had read the books as they had come out and in fact, as head of drama at Tyne Tees TV, had been involved in trying to get the rights to the books, which were then held by Yorkshire. This was before the ill-fated Hale and Pace thing, of which the less said the better. Chris sounded me out about doing an adaptation. About a year later, after the success of the first series (a BBC/ Portobello Pictures co-production. BC) I was approached by Eric Abrahams of Portobello and met Nick Pitt, who is now the producer of the series, but who then was the script editor. They were delighted that I had read most of the books already and was a fan. They asked me if there was any particular book I would like to adapt and I said "Underworld". This was a book that I had responded to very strongly as a reader, and I thought it would make a fine film.
Would you say that your background was a key factor in your response to the book?
I was born in a mining village, though my parents took me away from it when I was about three years old, as my father's career developed. But I am a child of County Durham and that very particular, very close, almost claustrophobic culture of the mining village. So I felt that I knew the place where Colin was born and brought up, and which in the book he is struggling to escape, but feels that he can't. I identified strongly with that. Also the fact that my father had written extensively about miners and their families, so it struck all sorts of chords. One of the things about the book that impressed me was that I had been brought up on the notion that mining communities were tremendously strong and vital and self-sustaining, but what Reg had picked up on was that mining communities, as a result of the Miners Strike in the mid-80's largely because of the external pressures, economic political and so on, had fractured and turned in on themselves. This I found terribly interesting, and set it apart from my understanding of mining communities as I had received it through my family.
In the book, it's the solidarity of the women that comes through most strongly...
I think there's a sense in the book that the men have, to an extent, been emasculated by their experience of the long years of decline, the strike and it's aftermath.
You are obviously a crime fiction reader. Any particular favourites?
My father was a tremendous devotee of crime fiction. So I was brought up, from an early age and in my teens, on Maigret and Raymond Chandler.
So, the maverick strain rather than the cosier Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers tradition?
Well, I read all of Dorothy Sayers later on, but coming from a Northern and urban background, I found it hard to relate to Lord Peter Wimsey. Tremendously entertaining of course, but in terms of the visceral pull of those characters from inter-war Los Angeles or inter-war Paris, there was no contest as far as I was concerned. I continue to read and re-read Chandler. In latter years I have become a huge fan of Elmore Leonard. Lately my eldest son has tuned me onto James Ellroy. And I have always liked movies that have that kind of background. Chinatown remains one of my favourite films. Recently my son and I had a kind of works outing as it were to see LA Confidential and enjoyed that enormously. I think I have a sort of understanding of how those stories work; what is important and what isn't.
OK. So you've got your hands on Underworld. Have you got a completely free hand to adapt it just as you wish?
It would be nice if it was like that. What I do is to read and reread the book two or three times, and then I do my own synopsis, a very full synopsis of the book, perhaps twelve pages that gives you absolutely everything that happens in terms of the storyline. Then I write quite a lot about the characters. We know about D&P, we know about Wield, but this is about the characters particular to this story. I write about a page, quite often lifting things from the book and putting together a physical and mental picture of that character, so I feel that I've got a handle on who they are and what they are. Then I try to address what I consider to be the major issues in making the transition from book to film. You have to be clear what Reg is getting at: what the book is about. In this case, we've already touched on one of the major themes, this fracturing of the long-established mining community and which is now turning in on itself. This is translated to the film in the figure of Colin who kind of hates it but he can't escape from it, that he has a deep love for it at the same time as wanting to get away from it. It's in the book and it is core to the film. So I actually wrote that down as what essentially this book is about. Then I write about the other issues. Do we retain that character? How do we reduce this book of 300 odd pages: I would suggest that we drop this sub-plot, move from this point to that point and so on. So that you've got your synopsis, your character notes, the major themes of the book to be resolved before you actually start writing. The document then goes off to the producer and the script editor. You meet and kick it around for a morning or an afternoon or whatever.
The decisions, up to this point at least appear to have been mainly artistic. Is it at this point that the more commercial considerations start to impinge? I was thinking more of such considerations as the length of time slot, it's position in the schedule and so on.
Yes, you obviously have to think about that issue quite early on. Underworld is about 350 pages, On Beulah Height (Michael's adaptation was transmitted on 12 June 1999.) is about 450, so anything that is extraneous to the key issues of the book just has to go. And the earlier you make that decision, the easier you make life for yourself and everybody else concerned. The same applies to characters. In Underworld the book, Colin is surrounded by a whole group of mates, which is rich and how it is, but in the film this had to be rendered down to essentially two. This is often a painful process because it can often involve losing elements that you are really fond of. You learn very early on that 90-odd minutes is not that long. Not only that but that this is a series called Dalziel and Pascoe and those guys are central to it. Television is a blunter weapon than a book. People sit down on a Saturday night and say "90 minute story please". It works best when it is quite centrally focussed and when characters like D&P are driving it.
Do you have any actors in mind, apart from Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan of course, as you are writing?
Yes, it is sometimes useful to have an actor in mind for a part, even though they may not eventually play it. I had for instance thought of actors who might play Colin, but at the end of the day they were really too old.
What about the influence of factors such as the nine o'clock watershed?
In fact this caused a lot of head-scratching because previously D&P's had gone out at eight o'clock on Saturday, pre-watershed. But when I was approached to do Underworld I said that this is a book with several deaths. The most important death is the rather brutal murder of a child which has a kind of sexual motive at the heart of it. Not only that but at the core of the book is an on-going extra-marital sexual relationship and you have to see something of the corrupting relationship between Stella and Satterthwaite. So I said that in the face of those three things, all integral to the theme of the community turning in on itself, it is going to be hard to preserve this story pre-watershed
So this episode was a key influence on the decision to reschedule post-watershed?
Yes. Though subsequently they have discovered that what works best for the audience is pre-watershed. This is a problem for all crime material. Morse for example also worked best pre-watershed. All contemporary police procedurals are going to involve pretty unpleasant stuff, sex and death essentially. So I was never given the task of converting Underworld into a pre-watershed show. But even so, there was a lot of debate. For example, do we really have to see Stella taking her knickers off when she is with Satterthwaite in the cornfield. Well, yes you do, because it's quite important to the mood of the scene. It also has an influence over the language that is used. One of the refreshing liberating things about Dalziel is that he, you know, scratches his balls and says 'Bollocks'. In fact Warren is on record as saying that some of that has been lost. I think that it's a double-edged thing. There is more depth to his character than that. If he is just doing that then it can get a bit tedious. But it does affect other things besides sexually explicit material. What do you show of Downey's killing of the little girl? Even post-watershed you didn't actually see it.
Do you prefer your relationship with the original writer to be at arms-length?
I don't know that it matters. I have adapted a number of pieces by writers both dead and alive and, being funny about it, it is easier with writers that are dead! (Laughter) When I started doing Underworld I rang Reg up to tell him that I was sort of trampling over his territory, and so that he at least would know the sound of my voice. I think he has always taken the view that it's best to keep an arms-length relationship, which is sensible. Let people get on with the adaptations. It's not something he wants to get closely involved with, although obviously he's tremendously interested in the end result. Besides I am in the fortunate position of being able to choose, to a certain extent, what I want to do. So as far as adaptations are concerned. I tend to choose books that I like and respect, or in certain circumstances, where I thought that they may not be terribly good books, but that they could be turned into fantastic films. In the case of Reg's books, I like them, I am entertained by them and I like the characters very much so there was never any question of thinking that this is a bit of hack work or even honest carpentry. I respect the original. And I've never been in the situation where I felt I was forced into making such wholesale changes to the original that it bore no relation to the book. Enough remains of the original so that the writer can feel, well it's changed but it's still mine.
Many such series are announced against a background of critical groans about yet another cop/detective series. Does that affect the approach?
As a viewer, I kind of sympathise with that response. I do get a little bored when yet another police series is announced. As I've already said to you I am a fan of the genre, but more of the books than what you might see on television. I've never been a great fan, for instance, of the Morse series on TV. D&P however have a certain style and integrity, and a gritty reality about them, which I liked. Yes, they are part of a well-populated genre, but I think they are a cut above.
So your part in the process is to try and preserve that?
They are not just bashed out. There is quite a lot of tender loving care applied to them at all stages of the process, and I think that shows.
So, you have delivered the script. What happens then?
The director comes on board. In this case Ed Bennett arrived. He was very flattering about the script. At our first meeting he said that from reading the first page he knew he wanted to direct it. But there were certain things he didn't understand so we did some re-jigging. Often what happens when you are reducing a 350 page book to a 90 minute film is that plot becomes all-important. There's a difference between the way in which as a reader you take in what is being presented to you and the way in which a viewer takes it in. And any sort of glitches or points of confusion in the plot become much more apparent. It is very important that things are made as clear and understandable and as simple as they can possibly be. Ed was very good on that, which is very unusual in a director. Directors are very often more concerned with the look of a piece, rather than the internal logic of a piece.
Can you remember any particular points he picked up on?
Well, he came up with the idea of the binoculars (used in the final confrontation.), which is a very small detail, but had the sort of importance that was in inverse proportion to the number of references to them. Ed felt that there needed to be a piece of evidence, however small, that Colin could get hold of and lead him directly to Downey. Ed went straight to that scene at the end and said that Colin should be able to say to Downey "I know, I've got these, so you might as well tell me the full story."
Let's go back to the beginning. The episode starts with what I regard as a classic economical pre-credit film sequence. A quickly cut sequence of short shots establishes the locations; all the key characters are introduced one by one and so on. Is this how it was written?
Oh, yes. The only thing that Ed cut out of that, and I think he probably shot it as well, but it went, was a scene involving Pedro Pedley outside the club, lowering barrels into the cellar, then going to the front door and finding a bunch of flowers. Which relates to the anniversary of Tracey Pedley's death...
That opening sequence also shows Colin in college reading a powerful prose passage about the nature of both mining and miners. You substituted a reading from your father's book The Thin Seam for what in the book is Colin Farr's own essay. Why did you make the change?
Partly as a homage, partly a nod in his direction, that I was doing this at least partly as a result of his influence on me and my life. On a more utilitarian level, in the book Colin goes off to do this course, industrial sociology or something like that. I was looking for an opener for the film that would introduce you to Colin's world. How can we achieve that? I actually started thinking about poets - something where you could cut from the reality to Colin reading something. Then I thought, don't be daft, I could use a bit of my father's work here. And have the course in mining literature rather than industrial sociology. In essence, I thought it was appropriate and fitting. The words are highly visual and touching and moving. It was actually the thing Ed Bennett picked up on. Those words at the beginning, it was got him excited, trying to match the imagery of that. And the fact that it relates to what Colin feels about being underground. He's repelled by it and attracted by it at the same time.
The book uses a framing device. At the start of the book Pascoe is trapped in the mine. The book proper then flashes back, moving forward to a point just before the climax, where we are told how Pascoe came to be trapped. Why did you discard that approach?
I think it could have worked. But I just thought it was easier to tell it chronologically. The book has quite a lot of different time frames, and to have another one....Sometimes people are critical of these films. The plots are quite complex, and it's easy for people to get a bit lost in them. So anything you can do to simplify the narrative and make it clear to people what is happening and when it's happening. So I thought it would serve our purposes best if we cut to the chase sort of thing.
Another important element in the plot are the events on the day that Tracey Pedley disappears. Quite early in the film (earlier than in the book) Colin's mother May recounts part of the story (visualised in flashback). Then it is fleshed out a little later...
That was another area where Ed's intervention was crucial. As you know the past is very important in Reg's books. Very often, whatever the contemporaneous events, they are in some way related to something that has happened in the past, and related to differing interpretations of what has happened in the past. That is true of On Beulah Height, for instance. It's also true of Underworld. I wrote that scene as the mum talking to Dalziel, telling him what she remembers of that day and Ed said you have got to show this. They are very inconsequential little shots, the husband comes in, he sits down, there is no dialogue, he goes out again, he sends the child back. All of that is very very important. When you read or see something you are constructing mental pictures. So (the process) helps your understanding of the story, but it also helps your understanding of the nuances of that story. Why was he upset? Why did he come back? And why did he send the child back when he went out again? So that was the director's eye really. As a writer your tendency is to think about dialogue, and he's thinking, what can I show at that point. And he was spot on really.
Another key structural change: in the book Billy Farr dies mysteriously three months after Tracey's disappearance. In the TV version he disappears the same day as Tracey, and his skeleton is discovered in the present. Can you comment on that?
Two things really. In terms of him disappearing the same day, I just felt it was easier for people to get a grip on. It was in the back story, it was not something that they were seeing, it was something that they are being told happened in the past. It's like a three act play in a way. You need to have the discovery of something near the beginning, and I thought well what would bring it all back to life again. And it's actually the discovery of his body. So what you've got then is the three act structure: the discovery of his body, Satterthwaite's killing, and then the denouement under the ground.
The Satterthwaite murder investigation is more complex and occupies more space in the book. A clear case for condensation?
It's sub-plot essentially. The investigation has to proceed and has to be concluded before we can discover the story behind the real story, as it were. The investigation was slightly longer in the first draft. But we began to take the view that we needed to resolve that quicker. We tried to make it a crime that could be quite quickly be solved. As Dalziel says "As far as I can see, there are only two people in the frame for this...." And that's right, I think. It's solved by him by a clever interrogation of Stella.
One of the things that is on the whole lost from the original book, and which gave it particular resonance, is the fact that it takes place in the aftermath of the 1984/5 Miner's Strike. Why did you downplay that aspect?
Well, I think I'm right in saying that the book was published in 1988, and here we were producing something that was going out in 1998. Obviously ten years had passed and you have to bear in mind that Colin, 25 years old or something like that, so that at the time of the strike, he would have been twelve or so. I think it would have been appropriate if there had been time to have that aspect to it, by making clear that the time frame was 1987, not 1997, but I felt that it was not being true to now, being true to the book but not to now. The other thing is what I have referred to as the voracious beast of the central story. For instance I really liked that character in the book, the woman who helps to run the women's support group and who throws the brick through the next-door window, a wonderful detail, and rang so true. It's also part of that general theme of the community turning in on itself. But you've just got to be ruthless in the end. It's part of the inevitable process of honing the focus down to the central story. What was important about that in the book, in terms of its effect on the narrative, is to make Ellie feel more and more that she was an outsider. And I think you got that from, for example, the scenes of Ellie with May, Colin's mother. You know: "I've forgotten the milk." "Shall I get it." "No, it's alright, I'll get it." In other words, keep out of my kitchen. And the scene with Stella at the police station, an invented scene (where Ellie inadvisedly uses the word "mam".) "Is that what you call your mother - Mam? I bet it isn't. I bet it's...Mummy."
In fact the whole episode becomes a lesson in life for Ellie, finishing with that very moving closing scene at the pit-head where Stella prevents Ellie from rushing to comfort May as the bodies are brought to the surface: "Not your place. Not your man."
What you have to try and achieve is to include those kinds of things, which are side issues to the main narrative, but do it in such a way that it is very economical. So that was the culmination of a little subplot (Ellie and Colin.) that was definitely worth pursuing for the light it shed on Pascoe's marriage.
Pascoe's marriage difficulties are much more overt in the TV adaptation.
One of the things I wasn't quite sure about in the book was where Ellie's attraction to Colin came from in the absence of any apparent problems in her marriage. Pascoe and Ellie have a number of scenes before she starts to get seriously interested in Colin. They are a little fractious, argumentative with each other but it doesn't seem as if there is anything seriously wrong with their marriage. A bit of a bad patch maybe. So that was why I wrote the scene of them in bed together, just to point that up a bit, and give her a reason for her to suddenly get interested in this young guy.
Let's talk about the central mystery element. It's crucial to most crime readers, of course. Do you feel it has the same importance to the viewer?
The books rely more on psychological truth than on the laying of clues, the sort of game-playing element that you find in some forms of detective fiction. But I am sure that one of the compelling aspects to these things is: can we spot the murderer? And you'd be foolish if you dispensed with that.
Perhaps the first clue to the eventual outcome is the incident of the dog. Arthur, previously seen as a meek but caring character is seen striking his dog. It is an incident that is not in the book.
That is something that I put in. It seemed to me that there needed to be some kind of hint. I mean obviously Colin has some kind of a downer on Downey, a slightly Oedipal/ Hamlet thing about his Mum, and taking the place of his father, but above and beyond that I thought there needed to be some little hint why Downey suddenly becomes somebody who might be worth thinking of as a person who might have been involved. There is another little moment later on, when Ellie arrives at Colin's mum's house and reveals that Colin has gone to the pit. Little reaction shot of Downey. He looks worried. Why is he worried?
There are two clear changes in the climax: you abandon the book's tape recorder device for a direct face-to-face confrontation between Downey and Colin Farr, and substitute a flooding of the mine for the roof-fall. Why?
Well, I thought the tape-recorder thing worked fine in the book, but it's undramatic in terms of what you might actually see. So I felt that it was important to make more of the confrontation between Colin and Downey, because after all there was a lot of history between these two guys. You know, the Hamlet/Oedipal thing, "you're trying to get your hooks into my mam," which also built towards their fight. The actual denouement, with the flood and everything, though it was rather tricky to explain, the pumps going on, the pumps going off, the rain and all that. I thought it was something that people would understand - and was easier to stage than a roof-fall.
Was that a later thought?
Yes.
So then you would go back and put in the signposts like it's now raining and people being concerned about flooding.
Yes, that came later. It was partly to do with the logistics of where Ed could film. In the end it was filmed in the studio in Birmingham. They built a huge set, which cost an arm and a leg. They shot some scenes in a real pit in Yorkshire, but obviously they couldn't stage something like a flooding there.
Verity Lambert has said that there are two kinds of writers: those that have no interest in a production after they have delivered the script and those who fret over every detail. Which are you?
(Laughter.) Neither really. I am probably in the middle somewhere. I do go on location. I do attend read-throughs. I like to be involved in the casting. Coming from the sort of career background that I have, I do have a very strong sense that film-making is very much a collaborative process and that you are not the sole author of the piece, that everybody who works on it has an influence on the end product. Some writers feel, understandably, that their's is the central voice and that directors, producers, actors are instruments in getting over that voice or that vision. I don't quite feel like that. It's quite a dynamic thing - in the right hands and the right circumstances, the end product takes on other qualities as a result of what other people bring to it. And at best that can be tremendously exciting. If I wanted to have a purely unalloyed vision in my own work, I would be writing novels.
What particular influence, apart from the script that is, do you think you had on this episode?
Well, I said to Ed, go to the mining villages, see what they look like. It's very important to get that feeling of the closed-in little world and to get the look of the club right, the allotment, all these little details. I think you have to talk a lot.
So this influence is in the talking process after the script is written ...
Yes. Though I think that Ed and all the people involved had a very clear idea of what the script was about. And had an understanding of what wasn't in the script. Sometimes you look at something someone has shot of your work and you think, they just haven't got it. They haven't understood the world that you are writing about.
Are you involved in the editing process?
You do look at various things at the different stages of the process. We look at a rough cut, and say what we think. In this one, there was the process of whittling it down to 95 minutes. It is a very painful process because it often involves losing scenes that you are very fond of.
"Success has many authors; failure is always an orphan". It got a good critical reception, I believe, but does the writer get his due?
Well, it was well received. Some of the press mentioned both Reg and myself. There was a nice piece in (London listings magazine) Time Out, for instance, partly about the script side of things. But by and large NO. By and large television, at the moment, is not perceived as a medium in which writers are very important, at least externally.
Michael, many thanks for a very enlightening session.
A slightly
longer version of this interview appeared in CADS 35 (May 1999)
available from G H Bradley,
9 Vicarage Hill,
South Benfleet,
Essex SS7 1PA