Don Taylor describes his own history which took him from working class origins in West London to Oxford, and then to the BBC as a trainee. He also vividly remembers how television drama was created in those days of boom microphones and heavy cameras on wheels. It is revelatory to a twenty-first century reader to realize that many of the programmes had to be done live in the studio, because recording meant film and film meant location, and location meant expense. Anyone remotely interested in how television is made will be captivated by the author’s description of 1960s practice.
Don Taylor describes in detail a professional relationship that lasted just three years with David Mercer. What scuppered that relationship was a change within the BBC, itself, which changed the focus of television drama and effectively shut Don Taylor out of making further contributions to the medium in the way that Taylor wanted.
Mercer was himself working class, but northerner. He was different from Don Talor in that he had not been to Oxford or indeed any other prestigious university and had already been married and divorced. Both socialists, disillusioned by the 1960s, Don and David shared a political as well as a social bond. Both had been brought up by working class parents who neither appreciated nor understood either “writing” or the “theatre”.
One of the early collaborations that writer and director focused on was the play Where The Difference Begins with its themes of the death of old-style socialism, and being educated out of your class. The play eventually became the first part of Mercer’s Generations trilogy, all of which Don Taylor directed.
Quotations from Taylor about working with Mercer are jewels
in the text. He says that “David Mercer’s best TV plays seem to me to rub
shoulders with the best English theatre writing since the war.” The
playwright’s “A Death in the Family had… an intellectual acuity about politics
and political issues as they expressed themselves in conflicts between
recognizable human people, that was quite new to me.” Furthermore “Mercer had …
an intellectual grasp more characteristic of a European writer, a Sartre, or a
Camus, or a Brecht, than any English contemporary” and that “he perceived that
human beings. … have a sense of their own reality. … (Mercer’s characters) are
what they believe.” He believed that “David Mercer wasn’t merely a talented new
voice. He was a voice that was much needed if we were to wake up to any
understanding of what kind of people we were.”
Mercer the “cuddly teddy-bear” is also here, as is his
heavy drinking and his womanising. There is a priceless episode that happened
at their first meeting. Unused to the middle-class flat in which Don Taylor and
his wife hosted him, Mercer spilt his coffee on the carpet. Mercer later
claimed he had done it on purpose.
But this professional biography is much more than a history of a collaboration. Don Taylor describes his own fall from grace in the BBC without any of the bitterness that a reader of this text will assume existed. What Taylor does do is end the book with a treatise on just how wrong the executives’ vision of television’s future had become. Writing at the end of the 1980s, Don Taylor thought that commercialism and the “low-brow” had come to dominate. One can only imagine what he would have made of the twenty-first century content-free medium, where even major sports events have to be disrupted so that advertisement can get their pounds of flesh.
As a coda to the review of Don Taylor’s
Days of Vision, I set AI the task of summarizing David Reisman’s
version views on US popular culture. It came up with the following: David
Riesman’s view of U.S. popular culture was ambivalent rather than simply
hostile. In The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman argued that modern American society
was shifting from “inner-directed” people, guided by internalised family and
moral standards, toward “other-directed” people, guided by peers, approval,
fashion, and mass media.
For Riesman, U.S. pop culture—films,
radio, magazines, advertising, children’s stories, and later television—was not
just entertainment. It acted as a social tutor, teaching people how to behave,
what to desire, how to fit in, and how to read the expectations of others. This
made popular culture central to the formation of the modern American
personality.
He worried that mass culture could
encourage conformity, status anxiety, consumerism, and a dependence on social
approval: the “other-directed” person wants to be liked and accepted rather
than guided by firm inner convictions.
But Riesman was not simply an elitist
critic of popular culture. He also saw that mass culture could widen horizons,
spread information, create shared references, and give people models for
imagining different lives. That helps explain why his introduction to Daniel
Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society matters: U.S. popular culture could
be seen as part of modernization, exposing people in traditional societies to
new lifestyles, aspirations, and forms of social mobility.
In short: Riesman saw American pop culture
as a powerful engine of modernization and social learning, but also as a force
that could produce shallow conformity and dependence on mass-mediated approval.
In the final section of his book, Don Taylor offers a
similar analysis of what happened to television. Riesman’s position very much
sums up what the author thought. US popular culture was perhaps the diametric
opposite of what Don Taylor wanted to achieve in his work. It is perhaps
indicative of the victory of commercialism that now Don Taylor’s and David
Mercer’s work is confined to obscurity, but the aesthetic achievement is still
available to experience at least in part, though most of the collaborative
ventures they produced were wiped years ago.
