John Elliot's The Wooden Sword
When John Elliot submitted an idea for a sequel to The Troubleshooters, he was unaware he may have been pitching an international Doomwatch, much to its producer's approval.
John Elliot is arguably best known to sci-fi fans as the larger part of the writing team behind A for Andromeda, and its sequel The Andromeda Breakthrough. He also created the global oil industry series Mogul (later The Troubleshooters) which by 1971 was felt to be in its final series. He turned his attention to developing two new drama series formats for BBC1, one of them, The Wooden Sword, he envisaged to be as equally international and topical in scope and also carry over some of the cast. However, its theme was very familiar to another series also coming to its natural end…
Elliot submitted the document to Andrew Osborn, Head of Series during November 1972. Osborn and his assistant William Slater were looking for four new series to record ‘pilot’ episodes and screen them in the summer of 1972.1 The format was sent to Terence Dudley who was getting ready to begin production of Doomwatch. His own idea for a new series had been gently rejected (more soon). Dudley soon realised why he had been sent The Wooden Sword.
The format begins with a brief examination of the Club of Rome, an Italian based thinktank designed to help under-developed countries avoid the industrial pitfalls the industrial west felt had fallen into. They were currently preparing to release an influential report called The Limits of Growth whose aim Elliot summarises is the preservation of civilised life through the next century. For his series, he envisaged a similar set up but one organised by the United Nations. James Langley, managing director of Mogul [played by John Carson], is now wanting to take the oil company into a more progressive international direction. Langley is suddenly invited to give it all up and join the United Nation’s World Development Agency. Unlikely? Elliot refers to the current Under Secretary General of the UN, Maurice Strong, who gave up his millionaire career to run the Canadian external government aid unit. He was also organising in Stockholm the first ever global conference on the Human Environment, scheduled for June 1972, just when Doomwatch was due to return.
This is a series about aid, Elliot declares, not politics. He gives examples of the problems facing the world which the series could tackle – over-population, dwindling resources, under-cultivation, starvation, mass migration, unemployment, with societies collapsing under its own weight or atomic war. The World Development Agency is to be a specialised agency funded by the developed countries with its new headquarters situated in London. The UN, Elliot claims, has no plans to set up such an agency following the June conference but will allow its agencies like UNESCO or the World Health Organisation to ‘save the world from chaos’. On his way home from Rome, Langley meets an Italian agronomist who has saved a group of Apennine villages from starvation. He accepts the job, knowing he would be in for a hard start, sent into a modern battle with a wooden sword.
Langley gathers his team and sends them troubleshooting to the ends of the earth, an enlargement of The Troubleshooters with the techniques of big business and diplomacy applied in fresh fields. Elliot envisages the series to become a series of ‘highly-charged personal stories’. Elliot knows people who work for these agencies and are genuine internationalists. He had briefly worked at the United Nations during a spell of leave from the BBC during the 1950s.
Story ideas included examining the Green revolution – new strains of wheat and maise which were being successfully developed in India; how the banning of the pesticide DDT now means there is no effective fight against malaria, so what is the alternative? A better use for armies - Iranian soldiers were being trained and sent into villages to lead community development, which Elliot compares to Nigeria where the standing army is employed to do nothing of consequence.
The oil industry had supplied The Troubleshooters with their own film footage to help the programme, but the United Nations would not allow theirs to be used in a drama. Elliot hoped documentary series like BBC2’s The World About Us could help. Elliot felt his idea would make for a good series reflecting changed times and attitudes. He had already undertaken some research in Rome and Geneva, and hoped his current producer Anthony Read would be onboard.
Terence Dudley read the format and immediately spotted where it over-lapped - and enhanced - Doomwatch territory which he only wished he could only explore if the budget was big enough. His early thinking for the third series you can read here.
Having immersed himself in Doomwatch-lore for the best part of three years, Dudley felt Elliot’s research was superficial, which was rather unfair since Doomwatch research was usually conducted within London institutions. For his final series, Dudley asked scientists what was their greatest nightmare and researched far and wide? But he genuinely loved the idea and wanted to produce it because it was a forward-looking series. So many recent dramas were backward looking – and he listed Colditz, The Regiment, Shadow of the Tower and The Onedin Line as his examples. He saw the programme as an extension of Doomwatch rather than The Troubleshooters because the ‘muck and money oil men’ were predators who felt environmentalism and recycling was a political revolution. He approved of using the character Langley ‘a man of the world’, but not Doomwatch’s director, Dr Spencer Quist, who he dismissed as a neurotic.2 Dudley was full of practical suggestions. He perceived an international team including a South American Simon Oates (who played Ridge in Doomwatch - but not for much longer…) He also pointed to a recent New Scientist article: ‘Foreign Aid. Necessary? Useful? Damaging?’
After his bruising experience working with Kit Pedler, he wanted to work with a television professional like John Elliot, with whom he had known since he joined the BBC in 1958. He also wondered if there would be any co-production ‘lolly’ available to make the series truly global.
While Dudley was enthusing, John Elliot was looking backwards for his second series idea which was to focus on the collapse of Tsarist Russia and the build up to the first world war. That the film Nicholas and Alexander had recently been released did not concern them. On 2 February 1972, Osborn commissioned Elliot to write a pilot script ‘environmental problems on an international scale’. Elliot had a session with an old United Nation’s friend of his, the Secretary General’s personal representative in London, George Ivan Smith, who offered to get a special waiver and allow the BBC to film a drama on their property in New York, something usually not allowed. This excited Osborn, who was happy to delay Elliot’s work on The Last Tsar, which in any case could not be mounted for a couple of years due to a surfeit of historical dramas, original or repeats.3
The script was officially delivered on 2 April. Elliot explained that this was more an Episode 1 than a typical story, as he needed to get out of the Mogul set up and into something new. However, the reception he received from Osborn and Dudley was not what he had been expecting when they got together a few days before on 28 March, along with Anthony Coburn, another series producer. The pilot was not acceptable because it was mutually felt – according to Dudley and not Elliot – that the concept needed more time and research for a series based in fact. They even seemed to prefer not to use Langley as a character now. The problem, Elliot later suspected, seemed to be Terence Dudley knew far more about the subject than he did.
The script does not survive, but a clue as to the nature of the conflict emerges in a latter dated 2 April, after Elliot spotted an article in the Sunday Times about the Shah of Iran planning to build an oil refinery in Belgium in order to send Iranian oil directly to customers and cut out international oil companies. ‘I am thinking of the 40 million Iranians who will be alive in the year 2000. We still have abundant oil for a good 50 years.’ This, he told Dudley, was what Langley was on about in his script. This implies Dudley was a believer that the Earth’s fossil fuels may well run out by the end of the century.
On 30 March, after what he described as a period of calm reflection, Elliot thought their criticisms of his script were ‘far too sweeping’. and was worried it might be the case of throwing the baby out with the bath water. But the whole series was far more important than just the first script. Elliot reminded them that this was meant to be a sequel to The Troubleshooters, not Doomwatch. Elliot decided to do another research trip before returning to The Last Tsar.
On 4 April, Dudley commissioned Elliot to supply a revised format for The Wooden Sword along with six storylines. Two days later Osborn wrote to Elliot confirming his enthusiasm for the project but reminded him – as if ‘the King of the Troubleshooters’ needed reminding4 – that getting a major series off the ground is not easy.
The revised format and storyline was sent to Dudley - who liked them very much - on 19 May, but did not want ‘Andy’ to see them without his permission. Elliot had a new title in mind – Charlie Tomorrow which was not liked as it suggested in Dudley’s mind for some reason an ‘affectionate toleration of an enfant terrible’ and reminded him his ideas were very much of today. Relieved, Elliot assured him that the title wasn’t nailed to any mast and would rather wait until storylines are finished before Osborn passed judgement.
On 2 June, the eight new storylines arrived for Dudley’s inspection with the first called ‘The Last Continent’, which was about trying to get an international agreement to protect the world’s oceans from becoming another exploited minefield for untapped wealth. Doomwatch was now in its final production month and was about to return on television and not to great acclaim. It is likely that by now Dudley was already engaged to produce the final series of the backward-looking series The Regiment, which he would conclude. A new episode, simply titled ‘South American story’ was commissioned during June.
During the summer, Elliot was deep into researching an expanded and revised version of The Last Tsar, an ambitious series which would chart the collapse of the Royal Houses of Europe and the rise of communism and would transmit in 1974 as Fall of Eagles. He was commissioned to provide the ‘hard framework’ for a thirteen-part series produced by Stuart Burge. Yet he did not abandon The Wooden Sword just yet. In November, he was introduced through a contact to the Foreign Office’s Overseas Development Administration. They had a regional office in Beirut which gave at grass roots level technical assistance. Elliot still had a travel bursary with Shell from his Troubleshooter days and they allowed him to continue to use it. Elliot offered to deliver a script by March 1973 which would be less ‘woolly’ and more down to earth and dramatic. He spent the rest of 1973 writing and advising on Fall of Eagles.
Next time, we examine the series Terence Dudley pitched in 1971, and it is very different from either Doomwatch or The Troubleshooters.
Three pilots were transmitted in the summer of 1972 under the banner Drama Playhouse Presents. These were The Venturers – which became a series in 1975, Sutherland’s Law which did much better and ran for five seasons, while Terry Nation’s supernatural gothic The Incredible Roger Baldick, which despite being a vehicle for Robert Hardy, was not picked up. In 1970, The Onedin Line, The Regiment and The Befrienders (which followed the Samaritans and those who call for help), all became series.
Quist’s character had been substantially reduced in stature to make him more of a passive onlooker, rather than a tub-thumping reactionary who makes angry speeches. He also made his peace with his past as a mathematician who helped build the first atom bomb in the second series. The actor John Paul approved of softening down Quist’s attitude which was a shame as his performance in the first series was electric.
Osborn explained why in March 1971 and told Elliot the following. In 1969, he had commissioned for BBC2 a pilot episode of Shadow of the Tower, a series about the lesser known life of Henry VII. He was annoyed to discover that another Drama department had commissioned The Six Wives of Henry VIII, also for BBC2, and repeated on BBC1. After its success, Elizabeth R, also on BBC2. Then the BBC decided to repeat The Borderers, a series about Scotland at roughly the same time. Osborn went ahead and made Shadow of the Tower but wanted it shown at a later date as there were too many dramas from the same period. He was fed up with historical series, having The Onedin Line and The Regiment, not to mention the period pieces the Serials department ‘spew out’. He was determined Fall of Eagles would be on BBC1.
This title can be found on one of John Elliot’s contracts! Incidentally, Elliot was never happy with The Troubleshooters as a title. He preferred the original - Mogul.