The Owl Service (1969–1970)

 

Director: Peter Plummer

Screenplay: Alan Garner

Based on the novel by Alan Garner

Cast: Dorothy Edwards as Nancy, Gillian Hills as Alison Bradley, Michael Holden as Gwyn, Francis Wallis as Roger Bradley, Raymond Llewellyn as Huw, Edwin Richfield as Clive Bradley

Ephemeral Waves

 

I think she longs for the time she was flowers on a mountain.

The Owl Service, first broadcast over eight episodes on regional Granada TV, between December 1969 and February 1970, is idiosyncratic; from the get-go, changing between strings to strange noises on the opening credits, this is an unconventional. Based on a novel by Alan Garner, adapting his own work to the production, this is a Welsh narrative explicitly evoking the stories of the Mabinogion, the earliest tome for Welsh legends, which begins in a manor home in the Welsh countryside where scratching noises in the attic lead our protagonists upstairs in their home, finding old china plates in the attic. These plates cause Alison (Gillian Hills), one of the siblings staying in the manor on vacation, to experience strange images. What this becomes, as well as a class conflict narrative, is not quite horror but a weird folk supernatural tale which fits at home with so many productions at the time, such as for children between this and Children of the Stones (1977), which were dealing with the peoples' relationship with the countryside.

Contextually, this is set around a single father Clive Bradley (Edwin Richfield) who remarried, his son Roger Bradley (Francis Wallis) and him going to the Welsh country home of the father’s new wife, a widow named Margaret who we never see, and her daughter Alison, who acquires the plates and becomes obsessed with their owl patterns. Their maid Nancy (Dorothy Edwards) has a son named Gwyn (Michael Holden) who is developing a chemistry with Alison, finding himself in a romantic triangle as, despite being new step siblings, there is a clear awkward relationship between Roger and Alison too. Their story ends up crossing paths with the tale of Blodeuwedd, a maiden created from flowers who was made for a hero but, understandably, is not impressed and falls for another man, leading to murder. Her punishment is to be turned into an owl, and the first scenes create the catalyst, the ceramic tea set with patterns which almost possess Alison, starting to create paper owls, beginning the cycle which starts to fully come to be with flashes to the cast in face paint for quick cuts and one being chased by birds.

The supernatural tone, as much due to the budgetary limitations, is at first merely implied, also psychological but as part of its tone, The Owl Service becoming more explicit in its plot with this as the episodes continues on. Time is repeated as Roger captures images on his camera mid-way through, clearly the current leads in the roles, of both a man throwing a spear, part of the legend, and of a motorbike, as the story includes Bertram, a cousin of Alison’s whose demise, by crashing his motorbike, may be part of a previous time this tale of Millennia has past. The Owl Service is as curious as my initial interest in the mini-series suggests, a whimsical fantasy tale undercut with grit, neither occult or horror but a family melodrama with implied psychosexual tension and an ending of explicit phantasmagoria as someone is about to turn into an owl unless love helps them. Recaps at the start of each episode will help a lot of viewers keep up with its plot, but at the same time, the legend in its centre keeps merely a frame for its story in terms of these young adults' anguishes and clashes, particularly Roger and Gwyn, as the later is attempting to romance someone "above his station" in Alison, part of a well-off family, much against the family itself, causing a greater schism for the legend to infect the present day.

The Owl Service as a result also becomes about class bias – where the family is English, staying in Welsh countryside, and Nancy and Gwyn are Welsh alongside the gardener Huw (Raymond Llewellyn), who seemingly lives in his own cryptic world, Nancy hating her working class roots due to a secret in her past, even threatening to pull Gwyn out of grammar school and force him to work at a Co-Op. He is later revealed to even have elocution records, because he feels even his Welsh accent is too prominent for him to get anywhere in his life, feeling he needs to speak “proper” English than with his natural accent. Barring in mind the limitations of the story – close up shoots of dialogue scenes, a serene 60s Britain with outside on-location shooting, apt for a supernatural tale where the tension already early on – The Owl Service stands out in terms of “Hauntology” where its themes of the past being vividly part of the present is found here. The elliptical nature of how the story is told, whilst likely to cause some frustrations to some viewers, is compelling when in tuned to its tone, the legend being told as much an outbreak of the emotions of these leads as it becomes real by its final episode. Able to appreciate this, I was able to find a lot in this mini-series which lived up to my expectations.