Press Archive

Daily Express magazine
01 December 2001
by Tim Oglethorpe

The saga continues

It’s 34 years since The Forsythe Saga was a massive hit on BBC TV. Now says Tim Oglethorpe, ITV’s racier, multi-million-pound remake is set to have us glued to our sets once more.

The village of Edenbridge in Kent was under seven feet of flood water and the emergency services were intent on rescuing grocer Frank Ely from his upstairs room. But Frank was having none of it. When invited to clamber up a rope ladder to the safety of a waiting helicopter, he politely declined. “I’m too busy watching The Forsythe Saga, thank you very much” he explained. “It’s my favourite programme”

Frank was not alone in being glued to his telly when The Forsythe Saga was originally transmitted on BBC2 in 1967. It eventually attracted a world-wide audience of 160 million and was the first BBC series to be sold to the Soviet Union. Stories of devotion similar to that of Frank Eley came from all parts of the globe. In Prague, a student rally was postponed so that it could be watched. In America, millions tuned in when the entire 26 part series, lasting 23 hours and 50 minutes was shown as a single programme.

It’s influence is still being felt in television today. The cliff-hanger conclusions to each episode have been copied by modern soaps, and its emphasis on family life, revolving as it did around the Forsythe family in the late 19th and early 20th century, has also been widely aped. Where would Eastenders be without the Fowlers and the Slaters? Where would Dallas have been without the Ewings?

All of which means that ITV has quite an act to follow, now that its spending £6.5 million pounds on its own version of The Forsythe Saga. At six episodes, it’s appreciably shorter than the BBC’s marathon effort, partly because ITV is only covering the first two books - at least for now- in John Galsworthy’s Forsythe Saga trilogy, whereas the BBC covered all three.

But its also because ITV has done a little judicious pruning. As producer Sita Williams explains: “There was a whole episode in the BBC version given over to a dog in the park that one of the characters wanted to take home. So events were occurring away from the main characters, Soames Forsythe and his wife, Irene, and you’d never get away with that now. Audiences wouldn’t stand for it.”

Sita says the ITV product is pacier than the Beeb’s and “inevitably, a little racier too.” After all the modern TV audience is more enlightened and less easily shocked than viewers of 34 years ago. However, the depiction of Soames’ infamous rape of his wife won’t be any more graphic. Says Sita “audiences will see as much of the rape scene as they need to see. They will know that Irene is being violated, that something is happening that she absolutely doesn’t want happening. But it won’t be graphic, in any sense.”

One crucial difference between then and now is the look of the respective series. The Forsythe Saga, 1967, was the last major British TV series to be shot in black and white, and it was filmed largely on painstakingly created sets in artificially lit studios. The Forsythe Saga 2001, is of course being filmed in colour and at locations all over the north west of England. These include Knowsley Hall, the home of the Earls of Derby (also the venue for Coronation Street star Tracy Shaw’s wedding earlier this year), Croxteth Hall near Liverpool and Tabley House, Cheshire.

Granada television has also been filming in some well preserved Liverpool streets, the kind that don’t need too much altering to return them to the 19th century. “Although more altering has needed to be done than I first anticipated” sighs Sita whose previous award winning work includes the Robson Green series Reckless. “On our very first day in Liverpool we were doing this very simple scene, involving only Soames and Irene. But just for that, we had to paint the doors of all the houses, put net curtains up everywhere, take down satellite dishes and so on. And there seemed like several hundred extras milling around, plus horses and carriages. I remember thinking ‘have we take on a bit much here?’”

Granada has also gone to the trouble of part building the dream home that architect Bosinney designs for Soames and Irene. Standing proudly in a remote field in Cheshire with breathtaking view of the countryside beyond, its made of genuine building materials - bricks, wood, cement – and even has the kind of wooden scaffolding around that would have been used by builders in the late 19th century.

“The house forms an essential part of the story, but it has cost a lot to build” admits Sita. How much? “A fortune!” Sita reckons a few more million, on top of the £6.5m budget would have come in handy for a project commissioned directly from on high – or just about as high as it gets at ITV, Director of Channels David Liddiment. But while Sita and her team may not have had as much money as the would have liked, they appear to have stuck gold with their choice of leading man.

By casting Damian Lewis as the aloof Soames, they’ve chose someone who is going to be a major star by the time the Forsythe Saga airs early next year, thanks to the huge fanfare surrounding Steven Speilberg’s Band of Brothers. Damian, who was previously best known for TV’s Hearts and Bones, plays the lead role of Captain Richard Winters in Speilberg’s epic, which has been showing on BBC1 and 2 since early October and has put his career into orbit.

Old Etonian Damian is clear he doesn’t want to play Soames as a “stereotypical villain”. “Soames raping his wife was unforgivable, but I’d like the audience to understand his frustrations and perhaps even sympathise with him” he explains “Those people who saw the original, who regard it as seminal TV and who think our version couldn’t possibly be as good, are in for a surprise” says Damian. “Our script are excellent, the story’s great and the fact that we’re shooting on location gives the whole thing an epic quality the original didn’t have. And as for those who didn’t see it the fist time round, the younger generation, they’ll tune in simply because they want to watch good telly”

The part of Irene Soames, originally played by the late Nyree Dawn Porter, is taken by Gina McKee, better known for more contemporary roles such as wheelchair bound Bella in Notting Hill and Mary in the acclaimed drama Our Friends in the North. She admitted her characters complicated Victorian underwear has taken a little getting used to. “Wearing items such as corsets and bustles makes you take a different attitude” says Gina, 36, who hails from Peterlee in County Durham. “It altered your whole demeanour, not just your posture”

Ben Miles, best known as Jenny’s millionaire lover in Cold Feet and Patrick in Coupling, also makes the move to period drama with the part of Montague Dartie. “The filming of The Forsythe Saga and coupling overlapped” he explains. “I got a little confused, waltzing across the set of Coupling and bowing to the ladies.”

This time round, 28 year old Ioan Gruffudd plays architect Bosinney. He admits to being wary of remakes after a disastrous experience with the updated version of Poldark. “It flopped badly and was a shock to the system” he explains. “But this version of the Forsythe Saga has class written all over it.”

Gillian Kearney is Bosinney’s fiancee June. As a 14 year old, Gillian appeared in Brookside as Damon Grant’s girlfriend Debbie. Now 29, the Liverpudlian has successfully made the transition from child actor to appearing in BBC1’s Sex, chips and rock ‘n’ roll. Sita Williams tries not to think too much about the original Forsythe Saga while she’s steering her own version towards the finishing line. “But when I do, I regard it as a double edged sword. What’s gone before creates expectation, but it also creates a lot of interest. People will want to tune in out of curiosity, to see what we’ve done. They will want to compare the new with the old, todays actors with the veterans of yesterday.”

“Ours is a very different version from the BBC’s” says Williams, “although the story itself remains basically the same. It’s still about sexual passion, money and property – all the things that preoccupy and fascinate us today.”