A hanging offence?

How much responsibility do directors have for authenticity in their period dramas, especially where these are based on real-life stories? I found myself pondering this question while watching the first episode of Shane Meadows' The Gallows Pole on BBC2 last night.

The fact that my attention wandered to such considerations rather than being gripped by the unfolding drama is telling in itself. The three-part serial is billed as a fictionalised account of the life and death of 'King' David Hartley, leader of the notorious 'Cragg Vale Coiners', a band of counterfeiters who operated in the Heptonstall area of West Yorkshire in the 1760s. Whether the tag 'fictionalised' gives a writer or director (in Meadows' case one and the same) carte blanche is, I guess, the question I was wrestling with. But maybe it's the wrong question. Clearly in practice it does matter so perhaps the question is, rather, should it? As to that, after this episode I'm still ambivalent.

We've seen previous productions, such as Versaille and Marie Antoinette, play with the genre, some more successfully than others. In the case of this particular offering, while the costumes and locations appear historically accurate, the language is unashamedly modern, peppered with 'yeahs', 'okays' and a superfluity of 'fuckin's', and there are Black characters who, in this context, are surely ahistorical. (I suggest the story of William Cuffay, a Black Chartist leader of the early-Victorian era, would make a fascinating drama without resorting to tokenism.) 

In following these trends, Meadows appears to be aping the current fashion, possibly with the deliberate intent of shocking. The BBC's recent adaptation of Dickens' Great Expectations did so, only more transgressively in taking on a cherished literary classic. But whereas Dickens' is a fictional tale and therefore modern 'street' language and a Black Estella and Jaggers might seem a legitimate contemporary responses to its re-telling, Meadows is dealing with real historical characters and events which, arguably, impose a more rigid set of constraints upon him. Meadows obviously begs to differ, as is his prerogative, of course, but as a member of his audience, I feel a little queasy with his choice. Maybe I need to get over it?

I would willingly suspend disbelief but Meadows' style makes it difficult to do so. His dialogue appears improvised but the results fall short of a Mike Leigh or Ken Loach. When done well it can add verisimilitude and a certain vim and vigour. Overdone and it can become a jarring distraction, especially when costumes and settings clearly strive for historical accuracy. And when modern Yorkshire folk still use thees and ayes in everyday speech it seems positively perverse for 18th century characters to spout Americanisms as if they hailed from a council estate in Leeds. I fear this phenomenon is an example of the avidity for 'relevance' which exerts a dead hand on so much historical drama nowadays. 

And there are visual inconsistencies too. For a supposed gang of half-starved Yorkshire weavers the cast looks incongruously beefy, more like the local rugby team - and that's only the women! Tragically, recent archaeological excavations in a Yorkshire Dales churchyard* have revealed the shocking reality of malnutrition, disease and premature death among rural mill workers in the early 19th century. The Heptonstall weavers of the second half of the 18th century were still working in a cottage industry, albeit one transitioning into factories and mills, but while they undeniably suffered many privations, David Hartley's own gravestone lists relatives who died aged sixty-one, eighty-one and even eighty-six. Life was hard but it was about to get a whole lot harder for the working classes as the Industrial Revolution exerted its iron grip.

That's why I feel it's so important to aim for authenticity, as far as possible, when representing historical stories of this kind. Without wishing to sound po-faced, it's a matter of respect for those who toiled under the oppression and injustice of nascent capitalism and whose lives (and deaths) deserve to be accurately memorialised rather than trivialised. Ah, but it's drama not documentary, fans of a freer interpretive style will doubtless argue. True, but stories like those of the Cragg Vale Coiners (or the Luddites, Tolpuddle Martyrs, Chartists, Match Girls and Suffragettes for that matter) are surely dramatic enough not to require trashy embellishments and anachronistic gimmicks?

When truth is so often stranger than fiction, just stick with it.

* Parish Church of St Michael and St Lawrence, Fewston, North Yorkshire: 



 

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