Aubrey was a TV play for BBC 2’s Playhouse strand, an eighty-minute drama enacting events from the last three years of Aubrey Beardsley’s life. It was broadcast on 22nd January, 1982, and never repeated. After I digitised my own VHS copy in 2008 I wrote a somewhat taunting post about it, showing stills from the scenes that matched Beardsley’s drawings while refusing to make the video itself more widely available. I was subsequently surprised when the writer of the play, John Selwyn Gilbert, turned up in the comments to justifiably bemoan the BBC’s refusal to make so much of its vast archive publically available, an iniquity always compounded by the British public having paid for all those broadcasts in the first place.
Fast-forward seventeen years and here at last is a copy of Aubrey at YouTube, albeit in compromised form (see below). Since I wrote my original post I’ve become more acquainted with the TV productions of director Philip Hammond so it’s worth giving Hammond a little more credit for the success of the production than I did originally. Hammond’s directing career ran from the 1960s through to the 1990s, with significant contributions to Granada TV’s landmark adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and a very creditable three-part adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas which the BBC broadcast as The Dark Angel in 1989. Television has never encouraged the kinds of stylistic flair you find in cinema but Hammond’s later productions stand apart in their mise-en-scene and frequent use of artistic detail. Many of his later productions achieve unusual effects by shooting scenes through reflections in sheets of glass. Elsewhere you’ll often find characters framed in mirrors (as happens in the opening scene of Aubrey) or lit by saturated light from a stained-glass panel.
Hammond takes a different approach with Aubrey which was shot on video in studio sets. The production design is almost exclusively black and white; many of the sets and compositions frequently mimic Beardsley’s drawings, with decorative motifs framing the scenes. The general appearance is stagily artificial but the details of the script are nevertheless accurate. John Selwyn Gilbert was also the writer, producer and narrator of Beardsley and His Work, a documentary which had been broadcast on BBC 2 three days before Aubrey. Gilbert’s drama follows Beardsley from his dismissal as art editor of The Yellow Book in 1895, through the foundation of The Savoy magazine with Arthur Symons and Leonard Smithers, to his untimely demise in Menton on the French Riviera. Rula Lenska plays Aubrey’s sister, Mabel, with Sandor Elès as André Raffalovich, Simon Shepherd as John Gray, Ronald Lacey as Leonard Smithers, Christopher Strauli as Arthur Symons, Mark Tandy as WB Yeats, and Alex Norton as Max Beerbohm. John Dicks was evidently chosen for his facial resemblance to Beardsley but he’s a decade too old for the role, and looks too healthy for an artist enduring the final stages of a tubercular illness that would eventually kill him. But this is a minor complaint.
More of a problem is the way the play has been uploaded to YouTube in the wrong screen ratio. All TV broadcasts prior to the 1990s are 4:3 but this one has been horizontally compressed to something closer to a square. It is possible to rectify this if you download the video (I currently use 4K Video Downloader) then use Handbrake to write a new copy of the file with the picture size set to a 4:3 ratio. Or maybe you’d rather watch the squashed version…
And while I’m on the subject of Beardsley on screen, Chris James has made available a new copy of his short animated film, After Beardsley, which is now complete, and not chopped into three parts as it was before.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Aubrey Beardsley archive
Thanks for the article, I’ve added “Avbrey” to my watch list. At the time, I wouldn’t have thought I would look back on the 1980s as a cultural high point. But this post reminded me of just how many good cultural surveys were shown on television back then. There was a series called “Artists and Models” from 1986 that I enjoyed. I loved “The Romantic Spirit” (1982). There were actual *arts* documentaries shown on a few cable tv stations. And great documentaries like “In Search of the Trojan War” from 1985 and “Rohmer’s Egypt” (1982). I know there’s always a tendency to glorify the past at the expense of the present, but I can’t help feeling that we are falling pretty far down the cultural achievements ladder these days, although it may be that I just don’t keep up with new offerings as well as I once did. At least we have YouTube!
In fairness to the BBC, I can’t imagine that there really was any “refusal” to make their archive publicly available – certainly when I worked there (which was 17 years ago – Jesus, is iPlayer really that old already?) there was a huge appetite for putting as much stuff as possible online. But there were always many factors complicating this: not least the huge time and cost involved in digitising and uploading it all, but also negotiating rights & royalties, and in many cases tracking down originals (though I believe the BBC stopped taping over old programmes in 1981, so this one ought to at least be in the archive; if anyone ever comes across a recording of Seeing and Believing: The Creation by Eugene Halliday, from 1971, I’d love to know about it!)
There’s also the problem of the BBC Trust (which is not the BBC, but sets its rules) which, when I worked on iPlayer, refused to let us keep anything online for more than 4 weeks, saying it could eat into the sale of DVDs and so be an abuse of the BBC’s non-commercial status.
Jim: If the Artists and Models films are those directed by Leslie Megahey then I linked to the YT copies here:
https://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2022/09/14/leslie-megahey-1944-2022/
Would be nice to see them in better quality again–John Hooper’s camerawork deserves as much–but it’s better than nothing.
Dan: Yes, I’m aware of the contractual problems and so on, I’ve discussed this in the past with people who were working for the Beeb. I got one of them to sneak me a copy of Artemis 81 from the archives years before it turned up on DVD. My comments about the situation are often harsh but really I no longer care when things keep turning up on YouTube or (increasingly) the Internet Archive. Old TV has now become a world like that of bootleg music recordings, where things are kept alive and circulating by enthusiasts.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m0029vbs/artists-and-models
If it’s this, it was shown on bbc4 over the past week or so and shd still be available
Thanks, Jerry, that’s the Megahey series.
Ugh.
The formatting thing at Youtube a source of endless frustration. I’m binging a series of 80s/90s TV movies available in the one wrong ratio without any way to adjust. Not at all sure that a feature to view them in different ratios is much harder than giving a f***. Then again, running a good site for watching videos is a much lower priority than running the machine that sucks up data and inserts ads. (Which, I mean, is fair enough in a rapacious capitalist society but being too greedy to avoid the enshittification is justifiable only in a sociopathic society such as the US’.)
Yeah, Google only seems interested in YT as a money generator. Do you know about Grayjay?
https://grayjay.app/
I use this now instead of YT when searching for things on the desktop machine or tablet. Ad-free, shows you only the things you’re actually searching for and the desktop version has a built-in download option. I imagine Google will block it eventually but for now it’s incredibly useful.
Finally another piece of my early teens falls into place. I somehow saw this, or part of it, when it was first broadcast. I couldn’t remember the rest of the drama or even the context but the image of the young man languorously sprawled across the bed (about 14mins in) is burned into my memory. I’d half heartedly searched for it in old TV schedules but had no idea what I was looking for, or even the year. And here it is again by happy accident. The internet really never forgets and eventually everything resurfaces.