Man in an Orange Shirt

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Two gay men, grandfather and grandson in two episode dramas, more than 60 years apart--in the 1940s/50's, the young wife of the first gay man, and today, the same woman, now aged grandmother (Vanessa Redgrave) of the second gay man, cannot accept, cannot forgive, either of them.

Shown in the UK late July/early August 2017 MAN IN AN ORANGE SHIRT will not be seen in the U.S. (PBS Masterpiece) until June 2018--

However--

Someone has cleverly posted both  episodes on Youtube, putting Spanish subtitles (on the bottom of the screen, and NOT obtrusively) as a dodge--
if you are interested, see the episodes QUICKLY before they are pulled down!

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmSJaA9TBn8[/youtube]

Man In An Orange Shirt

part 1 in english with Spanish subtitles/capitulo 1 sub español
Published on August 8, 2017

Two love stories, sixty years apart, charting the challenges
and huge change to gay lives from WW2 to present.
The first screen drama from best-selling novelist Patrick Gale,
starring Oliver Jackson-Cohen and James McArdle

A Kudos Production for BBC
Part of the BBC's Gay Britannia season

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89ZViA_BGzg[/youtube]

Man In An Orange Shirt

part 2 in english with Spanish subtitles/capitulo 2 sub español
Published on August 11, 2017

Two love stories, sixty years apart, charting the challenges
and huge change to gay lives from WW2 to present.
The first screen drama from best-selling novelist Patrick Gale,
starring Julian Morris, David Gyasi
and Vanessa Redgrave

A Kudos Production for BBC
Part of the BBC's Gay Britannia season

FYI, I think it's better to see them in the correct order, episode 1 in the 40s/50s. then episode 2--even though I actually preferred episode 2.

Also FYI--Vanessa Redgrave's father, famous actor Michael Redgrave, of course, was gay, and Vanessa's husband, director Tony Richardson, was also gay.  The writer of the story from the film was taken, Patrick Gale, is the son of a gay man, and he is himself gay (married to Aidan Hicks, m. 2008)

Also Also FYI--in episode 2 watch out for Julian Sands of A Room with a View  (1985)

Final FYI--grandfather (Oliver Jackson-Cohen, 30) and grandson (Julian Morris, 34) are VERY sympathetic and VERY attractive, so there is definitely that!

[gattaca]

...I was very emotional at the end almost as much as BBM.
I guess I fall between the 2 times.
Another movie I saw a week or so ago at the NZ International Film festival was called "100 Men" Having been made in NZ, it may not get much airing elsewhere although the producer lived and worked most of his life in London. It was a great movie as it was a history of gay life by going through 100 men (unlike me he must have written names in his diary) with whom he had sex. He interviews some of them.
I plan to see "God's Own Country" this afternoon. It started in the theatres last Thursday but I am afraid it will not stay long. As I wrote, I was very disappointed in "Call me by my name" so I hope I am not disappointed this afternoon.

Yeap.  I'll discuss some later with spoiler flags on.  There are quite a few swift kicks.
Yeap. My gut has always said that many fall somewhere in between either spectrum...
WOW "100 Men" sounds interesting.  It's an "look back in time" + "where are they now" I D K how I feel about that.
Yes I really want to see "God's Own Country".  But we may have to wait a while here in the US. The reviews make the hairs on my neck stand.
V.

[gattaca]

Someone has cleverly posted both  episodes on Youtube, putting Spanish subtitles (on the bottom of the screen, and NOT obtrusively) as a dodge--if you are interested, see the episodes QUICKLY before they are pulled down![/color][/size]
FYI, I think it's better to see them in the correct order, episode 1 in the 40s/50s. then episode 2--even though I actually preferred episode 2.
Also FYI--Vanessa Redgrave's father, famous actor Michael Redgrave, of course, was gay, and Vanessa's husband, director Tony Richardson, was also gay.  The writer of the story from the film was taken, Patrick Gale, is the son of a gay man, and he is himself gay (married to Aidan Hicks, m. 2008)
Also Also FYI--in episode 2 watch out for Julian Sands of A Room with a View  (1985)
Final FYI--grandfather (Oliver Jackson-Cohen, 30) and grandson (Julian Morris, 34) are VERY sympathetic and VERY attractive, so there is definitely that!

Ditto.  Those links probably won't survive long.
Yes, they need to be seen in order as intended or you may not understand Flora's twisting.  If I had to choose, I preferred Episode 1 for the hopefulness - Episode 2 for the reality.
Oh wow, I did not know that about Redgrave's family or history.  It is more than fitting that she is playing the grandmother! She and Gale have much in common.
Ditto.   
V.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Ditto.  Those links probably won't survive long.

Sadly.

Yes, they need to be seen in order as intended or you may not understand Flora's twisting.  If I had to choose, I preferred Episode 1 for the hopefulness - Episode 2 for the reality.

Just the opposite for me. My family history, life history, is such that, for me, Episode 1 means "reality" (what ever that means) and Episode 2 means "hopefulness" (however illusory).

I was born in 1954 to much older parents. A few members of my mother's family lived in London during the war. In some ways, they found the war was difficult but exciting, but post-war was very bleak.

Mrs. March, Thomas's middle class mother (the sainted Frances de la Tour) was bravely, acerbically stoic, a leathery old turtle who was also kind and vulnerable. I knew people just like that, and I loved them very much. But the era of 50s Britain was defeated, day-to-day life was literally thwarted  (so different than 50s America, where I was born and lived). Gay life in 50s Britain was dire.  

At least now everything is open, and we can fight openly.

Oh wow, I did not know that about Redgrave's family or history.  It is more than fitting that she is playing the grandmother! She and Gale have much in common.

Oh, it's better (or worse!) than that. Vanessa's daughter, Joely Richardson, said it was scurrilous nonsense, but for years the widespread rumor told was that Vanessa came home unexpectedly to find her husband was in bed with--wait for it--her father.  So yes, there are a LOT of resonances vibrating like mad around that lovely cottage.

 

[brianr]

100 men

Interesting it shows part where they discuss the Castro. I went back to the Castro while in SF at the beginning of July, actually July 4. Although I have visited SF several times since I had not made it up to the Castro since 1980. Very sad. It is all very well to celebrate that gays are welcome everywhere today but how do we meet. The couple in front of me at God's Own Country" were obviously a gay couple but they left as soon as the credits began. There was one other single probably in his 50's but everyone else (less than a dozen) was a hetero couple (the theatre was the smallest in our multiplex only seating 34.)

There were more obvious gays at "100 men" and the group sitting behind me had an interesting conversation before the start but I left without speaking to anyone. I live in a university city and there are gay groups at the university but obviously not my age. At the Gay fair each year there are stalls set up for lesbians and the university gay group but nothing for older gays. I have lots of friends and organise a weekly hiking group for over 60's but they are nearly all women, widowed, divorced or still married, the few men including my best mate are all married. I do not know any openly gay men to talk to in my home city.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jul/28/my-fathers-love-for-another-man-patrick-gale-man-in-an-orange-shirt




Drama

Man in an Orange Shirt
My father's love for another man: how I turned my parents' tragic secret into a TV drama
At the age of 22, Patrick Gale was shocked to discover the reason why his parents had separate beds. The writer explains how
he turned their fears, silences and stifled passions into Man in an Orange Shirt

by Patrick Gale
Friday 28 July 2017 11.13 EDT


‘She saw to it he was never alone with any of us’ … right, Patrick Gale’s parents Michael and Pippa on their wedding day.
Photograph: Patrick Gale




It was June 1984 in a Vietnamese restaurant in Pimlico. I had taken my mother to the revival of On Your Toes  for her birthday treat and was now feeding her her very first crispy duck pancakes. I was 22 and living in a bedsit off Notting Hill Gate.

I had never formally come out. It would have seemed a little redundant. I’d been a wildly camp little boy, much given to dressing up even for school, and an aesthetically obsessed teenager who spent all his spare time on music and acting. The closest I ever came was handing my mother the manuscript of my first novel, The Aerodynamics of Pork,  a few weeks earlier. Still in print, for the charitable or curious, this is a wild fantasy in which almost every character has a lesbian or gay secret.

“So?” I finally asked, when she didn’t bring it up. “What did you make of the book?”

“It was lovely,” she said unconvincingly. “Funny and naughty and oh so sad. Now I’ll think every policewoman I see is a lesbian. Your father read it, too.”

I hadn’t counted on this. My father’s preferred reading veered wildly between two-volume lives of Victorian archbishops and thrillers with submarines on the cover. I loved him, he was always very kind to me, but we were not close, not confessional in the way I had always been with my mother. I would sit at the foot of her bed to talk as she rubbed in her night cream. I never did the equivalent with him. She saw my consternation. “It will help him come to terms with himself,” she added.



Revelations … Vanessa Redgrave and Julian Morris in Man in an Orange Shirt.  Photograph: Nick Briggs/BBC/Kudos


Twenty-three years earlier, while heavily pregnant with me and preparing to move the family from Governor’s House, at HMP Camp Hill on the Isle of Wight, to the equivalent mansion in Wandsworth, she had taken it upon herself to tidy out my father’s desk. She came upon a sheaf of letters tucked away in a drawer, saw the first began “My darling Michael” and gleefully sat down to read, assuming them to be from some girl he had never mentioned. Only they were from his oldest school friend, who had gone to Oxford with him, and fought alongside him in the war. They had been best man to each another.

“But maybe they were just very close?” I suggested. “Men back then often had deep romantic friendships. Darling didn’t always mean–”

She cut me off, espresso cup wobbling. It was plain from the letters, she said, that my father had shown the man a passion he had never shown her. She burnt them – terrified, in such an era, that their discovery would see him arrested and sent to one of the prisons his colleagues governed. In the early 1960s, discovery would have spelled a ruin as complete as in the time of Oscar Wilde.



‘He had one great love but believed it impossible’ … Michael Gale with his children on the Isle of Wight in 1959.
Photograph: Patrick Gale


Her next responses were stranger and more damaging. She never told him what she had discovered. She simply never let him in her bed again – encouraging the adoption of separate beds under a single hypocritical quilt, and then separate bedrooms. Thinking herself, as the wife and daughter of prison governors, well versed in such sordid matters, she assumed the revelation meant he was a paedophile, so thereafter saw to it that he was never left alone with any of us. I did not have a single private moment with my father until my teens, when he retired, and I began to have tentative encounters with this near stranger now present at weekday breakfasts.

She was happy that the story excited me. Suddenly I understood my father. Suddenly his emotional inhibition and his complete lack of demonstrative behaviour made sense. It was only as I waved her off on her train back to Winchester the following morning that I realised her gladness had a completely different meaning to the one I’d clumsily assumed. She didn’t realise she was telling me a horror story of stifled love and a marriage built on lies. She honestly believed, having read my novel of tangled gay love lives, that she was offering me hope that I, too, might yet meet a good Christian woman like her, who would burn my past and mend my ways.



Secret affair … Oliver Jackson-Cohen and James McArdle in Man in an Orange Shirt.  Photograph: Nick Briggs/BBC


I don’t for one moment think of my father as having been gay. That term simply doesn’t hold for the men of his ambiguously homosocial generation. I think he had one great love but that he believed it was impossible and immature. Psychologically, he was suited to becoming a bachelor history don, harbouring secret favouritisms, and cared for by a devoted housekeeper, but he held it was his Christian duty to marry and have children. So that’s what he did.

I have letters from my parents’ courtship in early 1950s Durham, where he was working at the prison. It’s plain that at some point in the relationship there was a muffled crisis brought on, I think, by his attempting to confess everything about himself and by her inability, in her ferociously maintained innocence, to deal with it. And I don’t think the impulse to infidelity will have once entered his mind. Ironically, by never telling him what she had discovered, she maintained him in the belief that he had indeed been saved by her. And, though wildly unsuited in many ways, they found a kind of companionate love, especially once an empty nest removed any pressure to function as a traditional couple.

But in that Pimlico restaurant in 1984, after two decades of believing myself a family freak and someone living outside the law, making my legs and arms and scalp bleed from eczema as my guilt and fear erupted through my skin, I had been abruptly awarded the validation that comes from genetic inheritance.



‘I was very like my father in so many ways’ … Patrick Gale. Photograph: Daniel Hall


I was very like my father in so many ways. I favoured him physically but I think we were alike emotionally as well, given to sly observation and irony in situations where my two older brothers would respond with open anger. Like him, I would always choose solitude over a crowd, a book over a party. Like him, I learnt to hide my social reluctance with courtesy and correctness. So learning that he might have been like me, had he only been born 40 years later, made me understand, pity and warm to him.

Yet, like my mother, I found I could never tell him what I had learnt. I showed my new love in code instead, in books and bottles of whisky and in invitations to visit me in my new life in Cornwall. He was deeply supportive of my two long-term domestic relationships, settling my share of the family silver just as if I had got married, and doing his best to love my partners.

Man in an Orange Shirt is not about Pippa and Michael Gale. I’ve written versions of them repeatedly in my novels. But it has at its heart that terrible scene of discovery and letter-burning. However, in the drama I’ve imagined how differently things might have played out had my mother confronted my father and, like so many couples of their generation, achieved a terrible, respectable compromise. Writing it, I gave voice to my father’s stifled passion and pain, but also came to understand the impossible burden my poor mother took on in marrying him.


Man in an Orange Shirt  begins on BBC2 at 9pm on 31 July

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/aug/01/man-in-an-orange-shirt-review-heartbreaking-happiness-denied




Drama
Last night's TV

Man in an Orange Shirt
Review: a heartbreaking tale of happiness denied
Patrick Gale's drama – based on his own parents’ marriage – shows the difficult consequences of concealing
your sexuality in wartime Britain. Plus: also from the BBC’s Gay Britannia season, Ben Whishaw stars in Queers

by Rebecca Nicholson
Tuesday 1 August 2017 01.00 EDT


Michael (Oliver Jackson-Cohen in Man in an Orange Shirt. Photograph: Nick Briggs/BBC / Kudos / Nick Briggs

 


Man in an Orange Shirt  (BBC2) is the handsome heart of the BBC’s substantial Gay Britannia season, commemorating the 50th anniversary of homosexuality being decriminalised in Britain. It is written by the novelist Patrick Gale and loosely based on a discovery he made about his own parents’ relationship, and tells the gently wrenching story of a secret romance between soldiers Michael and Thomas, and the increasingly frayed marriage of Michael and his new wife Flora, whom he marries because, well, it’s the 1940s and that’s just what people did. “You didn’t think we could set up home together like man and wife,” splutters Michael, after Thomas takes umbrage at being asked to be his best man.

It is a sad and human story of people trying to do their best when their times allow them no best option. War brings Michael and Thomas together, when Michael drags his bloodied comrade away from battle, a bullet hole penetrating his official war artist sketchbook. He lingers bedside as Thomas recuperates, allowing him the perfect moment to try his luck. “It’s bloody embarrassing but I can’t button my flies single-handedly,” Thomas says, invitingly, which is a bold chat-up line, and – since they’re lustily snogging behind a tree a few seconds later – clearly a very effective one.

As soon as the war ends, Michael seeks out his love in London, and finds him painting above a shop called Shades by Lucien.  Lucien is a waspy and protective guardian of both his shop and his friend, batting away peril with a disarming quip. Shade, indeed. “I don’t bite, unless you pay extra,” he purrs.

Thwarted love is the driving force, but Man in an Orange Shirt  does a beautiful job of showing the consequences of repression for all during this time of upheaval. The naughty Daphne, who talks about “riding up top” – she doesn’t mean buses – balances Flora’s buttoned-up propriety; Thomas and his friends are bohemian, and wear bright scarves, to counter Michael’s too-small bowler hat. Flora (Joanna Vanderham – in the second episode, next week, she is played by Vanessa Redgrave) is furious at her husband’s betrayal, and scared about the punitive measures that would be doled out to Michael should he ever be discovered. The fracturing of their relationship is unbearably sad, because really it’s nobody’s fault.

Much of the tension is between Michael’s inability to move beyond the life that is expected of him and Thomas’ inability, or unwillingness, to toe the line. Both positions are sympathetic. James McArdle’s Thomas is angry and defiant, beaten down and wounded by imprisonment and injustice. Oliver Jackson-Cohen is Michael, all Buzz Lightyear jawline and watery Jake Gyllenhaal eyes. It’s handy that he’s got such expressive peepers, as much of the emotion here is offered in a series of lingering looks shot across various gorgeously decorated period rooms that say, variously: “I’m in pain,” “I’m in agony,” or “Sorry about marrying you even though I’m deeply in love with my best friend.”

It is easy to see why everyone in this drama is so angry. It should make us angry, too, at the outrageous unfairness of imprisoning gay men at a very recent time in Britain’s history. The consequences were not just broken hearts – in his recent book, Queer City,  Peter Ackroyd argues that, as a result of being hounded by the press and the police, suicides among gay men may have occurred in far greater numbers than have ever been properly reported. Inevitably, then, Man in an Orange Shirt  is unwaveringly doleful.

Even the early scenes of bucolic bliss in a countryside cottage are tinged with the inescapable sadness that it is a temporary fantasy that cannot be sustained. It is made even more heartbreaking by the proximity of happiness. Just 20 years later, and it might all have been different. That is not to say that one legislative decision would have enabled them to live openly and freely by 1967 – in fact, it’s unlikely that much would have changed. But the tragedy of Thomas exiling himself to France, to “drink himself to death in the sun”; the tragedy of Flora being trapped in a marriage without love; the tragedy of Michael doing what he believes is right and proper – perhaps that might have begun to shift just enough to allow a glint of happiness to shine through.

***

There is more Gay Britannia with Queers  (BBC4), a series of monologues written and performed by familiar faces, with two new editions appearing every night this week. The first, and best, is written by Mark Gatiss, and has Ben Whishaw as another soldier in love with an officer, this time in 1917. Whishaw’s hangdog expression gives Jackson-Cohen’s a run for his money. Then Michael Dennis’s story of a trip to London in 1994 gives Dunkirk ’s Fionn Whitehead a Bennett-like platform in which he memorably calls homophobic politicians “desiccated twats”. Both are excellent.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

He looks a lot like Jake.

Well, there you have it! 

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/aug/01/man-in-an-orange-shirt-review-heartbreaking-happiness-denied

Oliver Jackson-Cohen is Michael, all Buzz Lightyear jawline and watery Jake Gyllenhaal eyes. It’s handy that he’s got such expressive peepers, as much of the emotion here is offered in a series of lingering looks shot across various gorgeously decorated period rooms that say, variously: “I’m in pain,” “I’m in agony,” or “Sorry about marrying you even though I’m deeply in love with my best friend.”

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/aug/01/man-in-an-orange-shirt-review-heartbreaking-happiness-denied



Michael (Oliver Jackson-Cohen in Man in an Orange Shirt. Photograph: Nick Briggs/BBC / Kudos / Nick Briggs

[gattaca]

100 men

This looks like an interesting film and premise.  I'll try to catch it when it makes it to one of the video services.  THanks for posting the link.

Last time I was in SF about 3 years ago, I roomed in a nice bed-breakfast in the Castro.  I had a short walk to the BART and made my meetings in the financial district on time without shelling out so much cash.  The BB was immaculate and mostly quiet except on weekends.  It was pretty closet to Castro Street.  Got loud on the weekends - earplugs easily fixed that.  The owner served a great breakfast spread every AM.   The Castro Theater is one of my favorites to see shows.  I missed seeing BBM there one year by less than 1 week.   It's a great place to visit.  You mentioned hiking.. next time you are there, you should hike to the top of Twin Peaks.  It's a great view.  Take a jacket and sunscreen.  I did that and then just walked back down any old way and saw parts of the area I'd never have seen otherwise.   Highly recommended.. but it is quite steep. V.

[gattaca]

Well, there you have it!  

Yeap.  I saw that review and agree.  BTW, that's one of my favorite shots from the film where Michael is patiently waiting for Thomas to wake up from his injuries.  The lines "...was I mean to you..." were totally unexpected. Thanks for posting it.

How many people have actually seen the 2-part series?  What are your thoughts for discussion? V.