Bestselling author Patrick Gale talks to Radio Times’s Patrick Mulkern about his first TV drama, Man in an Orange Shirt. A jewel in the BBC’s Gay Britannia season, this poignant two-parter is set partly in the repressive 1940s and in 2017, and shows a family across time conflicted by attitudes towards homosexuality.
(Pictured above: Patrick Gale with actors James McArdle and Oliver Jackson-Cohen who play Thomas and Michael)
Radio Times: Man in an Orange Shirt has fitted comfortably into the BBC’s Gay Britannia season but I understand that this is serendipity and it’s actually been in the planning for several years…
Patrick Gale: Absolutely. A very happy accident. The show has taken six years from first meeting to first transmission and was starting to feel like an intensely private obsession. It was originally planned as a mainstream drama for BBC1 that would just happen to focus on gay lives. I still think it’s mainstream and just happens to be about gay people and the families they’re born into – a bit like my novels.
RT: Episode one achieved respectable overnight ratings on BBC2 (1.16m), was trending on Twitter and widely acclaimed by viewers and critics. How do you feel about the reception it’s gained?
Patrick Gale: It has been amazing. I’m getting all this incredibly moving feedback from viewers who felt their lives or their parents’ lives have been reflected back at them. I suspect my publishers are pretty pleased as well!
RT: The BBC gave you a broad commission to write a drama that encompasses the gay experience over the past century. How daunting was that and how did you hone the approach you’ve taken?
Patrick Gale: It was a huge, slightly overwhelming commission and a massively flattering one. I began with a far less commercial proposition – three dramas set in three different periods which would be linked by the painting of the title, the cottage where each love story plays out and by having the same group of actors play parallel roles. I was encouraged to find ways of linking the stories more and that set me homing in on the psychology and emotion rather than the politics or the history. But, as we’re often told, the personal is political, and it’s often more effective to tell such stories from a deeply personal, close-up perspective as that’s, after all, the way we tend to experience the effect of politics and history on our lives.
RT: You’ve been remarkably candid about the drama being inspired by a secret in your own family’s past when, long ago, your mother discovered and burned love letters your father had received from another man. What qualms did you have about revealing publicly a matter so private to your parents?
Patrick Gale: I had huge qualms. My father had already died when I began developing the show and it was partly an act of mourning to reach imaginatively deep into the most secret, hidden part of his story. My mother died two years ago – during development – which relieved me of another layer of inhibition. Two of my siblings are still alive and understandably were concerned that I was exposing to public view a story my father believed he had taken to his grave as a secret. However, the overwhelmingly warm response the show has received makes me feel I did the right thing. Their sad secret turns out to be one that was shared by many a 1940s or 1950s marriage. I was especially keen to show, through Flora, how anti-gay legislation had a devastating effect on the lives of many heterosexual women.
RT: Yes, on the surface this could be perceived as a “gay drama” focusing on two male couples (Thomas and Michael, then Adam and Steve) finding true love in different times, but it also strikes me as Flora’s story more than anyone else’s. She is the constant between the two episodes, played by Joanna Vanderham in the postwar period and Vanessa Redgrave in 2017.
Patrick Gale: I’ve always loved writing women characters because so often women’s lives seem to be more multilayered than men’s ones, and far more complex. Through Flora I wanted to explore not only the terrible compromises the criminalisation of homosexuality forced into the lives of one in ten women (if you include mothers and grandmothers alongside wives) but also the roots of homophobia in buried shame and fear. It was icing on the cake to have two such incredibly versatile actors then bring Flora to life.
RT: Several of your novels cross time and depict a family in different decades. Rough Music (2000) builds a narrative between the present and 1968; The Facts of Life (1995) progresses from a couple in the 40s to their grandchildren in the 90s… This approach works beautifully in Man in an Orange Shirt, but I realised there’s almost 70 years between the first and second films. Vanessa Redgrave, now 80, was actually a child in the war years. Did you have to telescope time to facilitate the story you wanted to tell?
Patrick Gale: Not really. I’ve always believed that if multi-timeframe narratives are to work, then each strand has to be able to stand alone as its own self-contained drama. I write my multi-stranded novels that way – one period or one character at a time – and the same was true here. Each episode was conceived as its own story arc with its own concerns and only then did I come to pick out and emphasise the echoes between them. Old Flora is a very different woman to her younger self. She has spent the best part of her lifetime pretending, policing her responses, guarding against letting her vulnerability or secret shame show through a formidable exterior self.
RT: It’s intriguing that in an age where the word “pride” is so closely associated with LGBT identity, you chose shame as the key theme that ripples across time. It’s clear why Michael would have felt shame in the repressive 1940s, but in 2017 his grandson Adam tells Flora, “I’ve been ashamed my whole life.” Why did you take that angle and how difficult was it to pull off in the present climate of assumed equality and openness?
Patrick Gale: I knew I wanted to write about homophobia and at least one of its common causes and I feel strongly that homophobia is enabled, time and again, by a sense of shame hardwired in childhood into most LGBT people, a sense that they are somehow deserving of less respect or of worse treatment and a sense that they need to work harder than straight people at being perfect. You need only glance at a gay dating app to see that gay shame is alive and well – even in a sophisticated metropolis there are countless men hiding their faces and asking for “discretion”. As gay men go, I was an early developer, with gay friends in my teens and a lucky one, with a family who didn’t overtly reject me. Yet my sexuality was never acknowledged or discussed and the abiding sense of discomfort, embarrassment even, caused me to develop terrible eczema which lasted until the month I finally left home for university. It was that burden of loving disgust that I wanted to explore in my 21st-century story; it’s the story of gay man who appears to be functioning in the gay world, and yet is barely functioning on an emotional level because there are so many things in his life that are going unacknowledged and he has such a terror of intimacy and commitment.
RT: Adam is a wonderfully complex character. He’s compassionate and kind, a vet, has a cushy home-life in a London townhouse with his gran; but he’s also deeply unhappy, a sex addict and commitment-phobe, a slave to his dating app. What are you telling us about some modern gay behaviour?
Patrick Gale: I made it clear from the moment I accepted the commission that I wasn’t interested in writing anything straightforwardly celebratory. I wanted to challenge gay viewers as much as straight ones and I designed episode two to be profoundly uncomfortable watching for anyone tempted to believe that equality under the law is the end of the story. Yes, there are hundreds of well-adjusted gay people out there, truly loved and supported by their families and with emotional lives that are integrated into their work lives and so on. But there are also still a great many people who don’t feel able to be out at work, or to their parents and who – at great cost to their mental health – tell themselves that this is perfectly okay. If viewers don’t let out involuntary sighs or sobs at the moment when Steve finally takes away the nail brush from Adam’s neurotic grip and gently washes him with a flannel, I’ll have failed in my attempt to get this message across.
RT: There are many touching moments between Flora and Adam in the second film and it’s painful when they finally have that conversation about his sexuality. It will resonate with many people who are close to their grandparents but skirt around having “that conversation”. How close were you to your grandparents? Is this relationship closer to the one you had with your parents?
Patrick Gale: I was close to both my parents and to my one surviving grandparent, but we never “had the conversation”. It was entirely characteristic that I came out to them by introducing them to the fact of a loving relationship, a thing they acknowledged with invitations and visits and birthday cards but which was never actually discussed. A great breakthrough for me was Aidan and me being granted one of the first civil partnerships because suddenly my mother could speak to her friends of “my son-in-law” rather than “Patrick’s er…” It normalised a relationship that had been a source of unspoken embarrassment.
(Pictured: Julian Morris as Adam and Vanessa Redgrave as Flora)
RT: Flora is far from sympathetic towards homosexuality and tells both her husband and, many years later, her grandson that it’s “disgusting”. She likens gay people to animals. Despite this, I feel the viewer can’t help but understand her pain. She’s been deeply hurt by her experiences. At the BFI premiere, Vanessa Redgrave described Flora as “a woman who has had to fabricate a whole denial system throughout her life”. Your script and her performance oblige the viewer to empathise with her.
Patrick Gale: I do hope so. We live in a profoundly sexualised culture and I wanted to portray a woman who, although she embarks on marriage with all a young woman’s hopes and dreams, is not actually terribly interested in sex and cares more for loyalty and security. My mother never talked to me about my gay sex life, but then she never talked to my brother about his straight one either; some people just don’t like that stuff and they don’t often get a sympathetic hearing in drama.
RT: Towards the end, Flora mellows and says, “I’m trying to adjust. I can’t turn into a liberal overnight.” It always amuses me hearing such lines being spoken by Vanessa Redgrave, given her politics. It’s like when, as Ruth Wilcox in Howards End, she questions why on earth a woman would want to vote. At the BFI, she said her own father Sir Michael Redgrave was bisexual and many of her parents’ friends were gay during those repressive years but “the group always protected each other”. She brings a lifetime of empathy to this drama. Did you have her in mind for this role and were you involved in the casting in general?
Patrick Gale: Having Vanessa for the role was a totally unlooked for joy because she brings so much to the role. I had to do some persuading, because the character was one she initially found it so hard to inhabit, but her final performance really uses the conflict between her private attitudes and the ones she’s being called upon to express. Sometimes it’s as though she can hardly get the words out, and that’s incredibly powerful to watch.
RT: As the drama evolved in pre-production, it was condensed and lost one or two episodes. To arrive at a two-parter, you’ve skipped over the intervening years. It’s as though we step from Act One to Act Three. It’s achieved very elegantly but I’m left dying to know what happened to Michael and Thomas. In the first film, younger Flora predicts that Thomas will “drink himself to death in the sunshine” in France. In the second she tells her bridge circle that Michael died aged 60. What actually became of them – and what happened to Adam’s father Robert, whom we last see as a little boy in the first film?
Patrick Gale: I think Thomas will never have got over Michael, who was so utterly a kindred spirit for him, but he’ll have found plenty of emotional compensations along the way, not least in the South of France where 1950s attitudes were a lot more relaxed than those in London. He does, however, develop a drink problem (still a major health issue for many gay people) which drives him to an early death. Poor Michael worked on at the bank but, when news of Thomas’s distant death reaches him, suffers a kind of breakdown and takes early retirement under the excuse of health problems, and dies at 60, leaving Flora with a long widowhood. The fate of little Robert is a tricky one to describe as he had one fate in my first version of the story – becoming a closeted Tory MP, very much controlled by Flora and then rebelling to leave his wife for the man he loves and becoming a human rights lawyer. In the final version, though, in which adult Robert no longer has a role, I decided that he rebelled against Flora and Michael’s stuffiness, became a bit of a hippy character, shacked up with a girl of whom they disapproved, then died with her in a car crash. Leaving Flora to park little Adam in a boarding school and raise him in the only, rather distant way she knows.
RT: Would you consider adapting Man in an Orange Shirt into a novel, perhaps including the omitted middle act?
Patrick Gale: Lots of people are asking me to do this, including my editor (!) but I’m far too happy with how it has turned out on screen to want to meddle with it. Turning it into a novel would feel oddly retrograde. I can’t quite understand this as I have no issue with adapting novels for screen. I might, however, revisit the 1980s Aids-shadowed story I had to discard – my original second episode. It was a subversive romantic comedy and I really loved the characters and am still rather in mourning for them. So watch this space.
RT: I’ve been reading your books since The Aerodynamics of Pork, your very first in the mid 1980s. It’s often struck me how well they would lend themselves to adaptation for film or television. Surprisingly, none has been. Why do you think this is and are any in development?
Patrick Gale: Funnily enough I’ve adapted several of them – Kansas in August (twice) as a feature, Little Bits of Baby as a TV series, Rough Music and my vampire schoolgirl short story A Slight Chill as feature films etc – but I had no status or pulling power as a screenwriter and I was working for producers who couldn’t afford to hire anyone more expensive, perhaps. Still, it means I have a nicely filled bottom drawer of possibilities. One of my more recent novels is currently being adapted as a feature film by a really wonderful director/writer team and I’m currently adapting one of my novels as a four-part television series, but both projects are firmly under wraps for now…
RT: Which authors have inspired or influenced you most? And what are you reading this summer?
Patrick Gale: So many influencers, from Armistead Maupin and Iris Murdoch to Colm TóibÃn and Barbara Trapido. Right now I’m reading Armistead’s upcoming memoir, Logical Family, and a stack of books by the amazing authors, like Maggie O’Farrell and Michael Morpurgo, coming to talk at the North Cornwall Book Festival, which I help run each October.
(Below: Patrick Gale on set with actors Joanna Vanderham and Oliver Jackson-Cohen)
Man in an Orange Shirt airs on PBS Masterpiece on Sunday June 17 at 9/8c
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