Play for Today (TV Series) Penda's Fen (1974) User Reviews

Stunning and accomplished TV play that they just done make any more with a beautiful restoration.

[t-dooley-69-386916 · 8/10 · 7 August 2016]

Made for the BBC 'Play for Today' series in 1974 and written by visionary David Rudkin, this is a film that still manages to have a massive impact even after the passing of so many years. It is about Stephen Franklin who is the son of a rather profound Reverend. He is about to turn eighteen and is going through a rites of passage crisis. This is both spiritual and sexual.

He is unintentionally spurred on by the left wing views of a Socialist writer who is now living in the small rural village and he is smitten with the music of Elgar. The film tracks his spiral towards finding who he really is, his nature as opposed to his nurtured self. His posh school is the sort that has Greek and Latin mottos everywhere, one such being 'discover thyself' but his discoveries lead him to be seen as 'not one of the team.

The film is replete with imagery and ghosts or dreams of the past which reflects the journey that Stephen is going on but also helps to expand the stories behind the story and is often done in an iconic fashion. It is also beautifully framed and shot and the musical score helps to elucidate more meaning from seemingly simplistic imagery. This is one of those films that will make you think and is the sort that will give you more on subsequent viewings. I am already wanting to see it again as there is so much here to drink in with both your eyes and mind that I a bound to have missed some on my first viewing. Absolutely recommended to anyone interested in this time in TV development or those who love a stunningly well made, written and directed film.

Engaging coming-of-age tale

[Mike_Olson · 7/10 · 21 March 2017]

Very formal in its presentation of religion and politics, from the school system on up, but still manages to interject new (and far older) ideas in counterpoint to the period and setting. What at first came across as something that might be strict and stodgy turned into an engaging coming-of-age tale in the form an older teenager, on the verge of manhood, who is troubled by questions of spirituality and god, while at the same time coming to terms with his own sexuality, and how all of this affects his understanding of his place in society.

The story is helped along with phantasmagorical imagery, both dark and light, by way of the young man's dreams and imagination. But ultimately these become set pieces in the greater story and its resolution. Pretty bold fare, I would think, for what was then a 1974 TV movie originally airing on British television.

If you can get past (I did) the guiding formality of time and place and its deeply religious nature, it's an interesting and at times intense exploration.

A Malvern Hills tale

[Prismark10 · 6/10 · 19 June 2016]

Alan Clarke was better known as a social realist director with films such as Scum or The Firm. He was an unlikely choice to direct Penda's Fen by writer David Rudkin, a type of film that could happily be made by someone like Terrence Malick.

The film is about Spencer Franklin, a vicar's son, studying at sixth form and about to turn 18 year of age. He is going through a rites of passage that involves a spiritual and sexual awakening particularly his latent homosexuality bubbling underneath.

It is this sexual confusion plus the arrival of a socialist writer in this quiet Worcestershire village leads Stephen to moral confusion and he starts to lose his grip on reality. He dreams of a demon sitting on his bed, he meets composer Edward Elgar, he finds out that he is adopted and finally meets King Penda, the last pagan king of England.

Penda's Fen was shown for the Play for Today strand on BBC television. It has now been cleaned up for a Blu-Ray release. The films use of visuals and use of classical music gives it a haunting quality but the script and the way it is delivered by the actors was rather flat.

There is no doubt that this is an ambitious and avantgarde work but I felt that the reputation it has acquired is overstated.

Deep, with a contemporary resonance

[kmoh-1 · 8 January 2017]

This splendid use of the BBC's Play for Today slot, finally released on DVD, still stands as a classic. Certainly, as one reviewer has pointed out, the pace is slower and more reflective than a modern film would be, in accordance with the style of the day.

Stephen is on the cusp of adulthood in the idyllic English village of Pinvin, blessed with absolute and martial certainty about the world and his role in it. His public (i.e. private and posh, in the English system) school has given him a classical and religious education and a role in the Combined Cadet Force, a British youth organisation based in schools conducting military training as an out-of-hours activity, sponsored by the Minstry of Defence. It is usually seen as a precursor to the Officers' Training Corp in universities, and then the army. His favourite piece of music is Elgar's 'Dream of Gerontius', a major choral work which follows a dying man's journey through his death to his judgment. He is appalled at the arguments of Arne, a left-wing writer who lives in the village. His traditional views mark him out from his schoolmates, teachers and parents.

In the UK at the time (1974), politics were very polarised between left and right - at the time of broadcast, a modernising, business-oriented Conservative Prime Minister (who had taken the UK into the European Union), had just been brought down by industrial chaos induced by a series of strikes. Stephen's traditional politics, which had been dominant a decade earlier, were fast seeming irrelevant in the modern world.

Stephen is rooted in place; Elgar is not only the quintessential English composer, but also strongly associated with the city of Worcester and the nearby Malvern Hills, where Stephen lives. Stephen ticks off a signwriter who has spelt 'Pinvin' incorrectly, horrified by the error.

But this seemingly minor event causes Stephen's world to unravel. The name 'Pinvin' is derived from 'Penda's Fen', Penda being the last pagan king of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia (which contained the Malverns). Like Gerontius, Stephen's journey includes encounters with angels and demons, and indeed Elgar himself - who turns out to be a lonely outsider too. One by one, Stephen's religious, political, artistic, familial and sexual convictions are unpicked, as he mistranslates the Greek maxim "know thyself" as "discover thyself" - a much more dynamic understanding of the aphorism.

At the close, Stephen confronts the conflicting forces, alternative histories and complex power relations of England at the time, and a final encounter with King Penda himself hints at dark times ahead. The world cannot be grasped from a simplistic point of view. Stephen's final lesson, perhaps even more relevant now than in 1974, is that conviction is hardly an appropriate tool for understanding the multiple identities that resonate within oneself and one's community.

An unique and original slice of British television drama

[dr_clarke_2 · 10/10 · 2 September 2020]

Broadcast as part of the BBC's Play for Today program, Alan Clarke's Penda's Fen is so highly regarded that Time Out magazine once included it on a list of the one hundred best British films, even though it isn't a film. First broadcast in 1974, it languished in obscurity save for a dedicated cult following for years, until the British Film Institute finally made it available on DVD in 2016, bringing it to a whole new audience.

Alan Clarke is best known for the gritty realism of television productions such as Scum, Made in Britain and The Firm, so this surreal fantasy scripted by David Rudkin is something of an oddity in his all-too sparse back catalogue. Rudkin's script has been described variously as folk horror (although it isn't especially horrific) and even comedy, but it's essentially a coming of age drama set against a backdrop of English folklore. Rudkin explores themes of sexuality, as well as religion, with material about the clash between ancient pagan beliefs - as personified in this case by King Penda - and the modern church in England. The wise Reverend Franklin's musings on faith, religion and spirituality make for some fascinating dialogue.

Penda's Fen stars Spencer Banks (of cult children's science fiction program Timeslip fame) as vicar's son Stephen. He's very uptight, pompous and downright obnoxious at times, delivering a passionate speech about Christian morality at his school and expressing disgust at writer Arne's "unnatural" television characters. He gradually gets his certainties challenged, not least by his own growing realisation of his homosexuality and the undermining of his staunch patriotism by the revelation that he was adopted and that his birth parents were foreigners. Banks gives an excellent performance here, conveying Stephen's emotional conflict and growing self-realisation very convincingly, and the character's development is reflected in his encounters (perhaps real, perhaps imagined) with decease composer Edward Elgar, an androgynous angel, and King Penda. In the process, Rudkin questions conservative British views and condemns them as outdated, narrow-minded and petty, whilst Arne's criticisms of media caution and censorship are perhaps intended as a reflection of Rudkin's own experiences, or his own fears. It ends with Stephen realising that he - with all his impurities of race and sex - is the future.

Presented with this strange brew of themes and concepts, Clarke's direction is remarkable even though he later admitted that he didn't fully understand the script. He makes use of pretty much every filming technique available, with great use of low and high-angle shots, tracking shots, and panoramic vistas of the English countryside. There are striking close-ups of different motifs and slogans at one point, with Stephen translating each one in voice-over, whilst detailed close-ups of printed texts and photographs feature heavily. The surreal, homoerotic dream sequences are particularly memorable. The soundtrack - consisting of Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius and compositions by Paddy Kingsland - slides between diagetic and non-diagetic; Elgar's work is Stephen's favourite piece of music and plays a part in the story.

Clarke assembles an impressive cast that includes naturalistic performances from Ian Hogg, Ivor Roberts and John Atkinson. The overall result is unique, and stands out not only amongst some of the other classic television plays that Play for Today produced but also - as the compilers of Time Out magazine's list realised - British film as a whole. The BFI DVD release was long overdue: Penda's Fen is something special, and in its questioning of religion, sexuality and race and the part they play in modern Britain, it remains as relevant today as it was in 1974.

TV drama exploring the ancient mysteries of English landscape and nationhood

[mwilson1976 · 7/10 · 26 March 2019]

A visionary TV drama directed by Alan Clarke (Scum/ Made in Britain) exploring the ancient mysteries of English landscape and nationhood. Stephen, a vicar's son living in the village of Pinvin, near Pershore in Worcestershire, has dreams of naked classmates, and of a demon sitting on his bed. He sees an angel in a stream. He meets Edward Elgar who tells him the secret of Enigma Variations, and encounters King Penda, the last Pagan king of Mercia on the slopes of the Malvern Hills. It was commissioned as a BBC Play for Today by David Rose and directed on 16mm by Clarke, often lumped with 'folk horror' or folkloric movies and television dramas of the late 60s and early 70s, it is actually one of the few true attempts to grapple with Romanticism on screen.

A healing movie

[linistea · 10/10 · 9 January 2022]

I call this a Healing Movie, because it puts one in touch with parts of the self that might have gotten lost. I wish I saw this movie when I was 18 years old.

"I am nothing pure. My race is mixed. My sex is mixed. I am woman and man. Light with darkness. Mixed. Mixed. I nothing special. Nothing pure. I am mud and flame." "Child be strange, dark, true, impure, and dissonant.

Cherish our flame.

Our dawn shall come." Penda's Fen, by David Rudkin.

Haven't got all day; some of us have to work!

[mrdonleone · 6/10 · 24 May 2020]

All in all specialized it might be I thought it was pretty pretentious and a bit boring not that much blame but since there is no real story but more the insanity of the old man it is really not that interesting to follow to understand video what's going on and it's taking too much time and unfortunately too little music and two less worked out very much important for the future movies of speciality like this to come before the rest of us really not so impressive and that is sad.

Journey to Adulthood

[EdgarST · 10/10 · 16 April 2022]

I believe that British director Alan Clarke (1935-1990) died without us in Panama having any idea of his work and his reputation as a radical and iconoclastic man within theater, TV, and cinema production in the United Kingdom. When the first video clubs appeared, I remember renting and seeing «Rita, Sue, and Bob Too» (1987), which made a very good impression on me; but it is not until now that I see another of his films: «Penda's Fen», made for the BBC.

On the internet you can find information about Clarke, who was inclined to social realism and center of controversy and censorship for his television production. Clarke understood the medium as a very useful way to educate and alert the voting masses, instead of drugging them with "reality shows", talent hunts, violent (fast) movies, game shows or newscasts plagued with yellowish and red notes. In his work, he made films about everyday issues "that are not talked about", such as criminal acts of the English army in Northern Ireland, juvenile prisons, incest between fathers and daughters, multinational companies, racist "skinheads", military interrogations, teenage drug addiction, Margaret Thatcher's politics, football hooligans, with casts that included David Bowie, Tim Roth, and Gary Oldman.

«Penda's Fen» (after the last pagan king of the Anglo-Saxons, which led to the name of Pinfin, the town where the action takes place) is an admirable film in every sense, aural, visual, dramaturgical and technical, in in which the writer David Rudkin combined dreamlike, mythical, and religious lines to tell the story of Stephen Franklin (Banks), the fanatical, manichean, and puritan son of a vicar, who makes a difficult transition to adulthood at the end of high school. In this stage of his life and education, he rebels against the militia, discovers his ambisexuality, studies the music of Sir Edward Elgar, has encounters with the country's pagan past (through the name Pinfin and King Penda himself), with the ghost of Master Elgar, with materializations of opposites, virtue and desire, by means of an angel and a devil. In the end, Stephen is so enlightened in his search for identity (personal and national), but at the same time so exhausted by his religious, erotic and ideological conflicts, that he is forced to take a qualitative leap in which fantasy plays a central role to reach the stage of a young adult.

I warn that this film is not at all for the mentally lazy, nor for the "millennials" reluctant to illustration, nor for its declared opponents, the fans of football, «Star Wars», Tarantino, Netflix, Disney, TV series and Marvel heroes. Neither for the militants of the neo-left nor for the old and stale left-wing faction, nor for those obsessed with their bodies and sexual identity. There is something interesting here for almost all of them, but I don't know if they will have the patience or the openness to listen to philosophical dialogues in pristine British English, amidst the apparitions of the angel, the devil, Penda, Elgar and Stephen's erotic fantasies and dreams of weird rites. Shot in 16mm, the film was restored by the British Film Institute.

Somewhat gruelling

[Gary-161 · 23 April 2006]

I *loved* Artemis 81 but struggled a bit with Penda's Fen. Artemis risked charges of meretriciousness due to its risky combination of high and low brow culture, but was ultimately sincere. Rudkin is one of these individuals who appears to have a vocation or higher calling to the services of art, which is always nourishing to experience but there is a certain problem of drama with Penda, that is the conflict is largely metaphysical. It is concerned with moral questions and the ending with Penda pontificating on his throne may be overly portentous or even risible for some. Tarkovsky's 'Nostalgia', with the self immolation of the 'madman' on the statue of the horse, seemed to express similar sentiments to Rudkin, so perhaps it's a timeless theme amongst artists the world over. Not being an artist myself, I wouldn't presume to know. I do question whether corporate man is necessarily spiritually bankrupt. Maybe he or she goes to sleep with a Herman Hesse paperback tucked under the pillow, who would know? Maybe Penda.