The Production
of SAM Michael Cox
SAM was a big breakthrough
for me as a producer of television drama. I had worked on
CORONATION STREET and A FAMILY AT WAR but in both cases I was a junior partner
in someone else’s enterprise. HOLLY, a six episode psychological thriller by Robin
Chapman
was my first solo flight as a producer. It was a modest success but SAM was the big
challenge. It did not have a very large budget and it was a period piece with a large cast
but I
was very lucky to get it because John Finch was a hugely successful writer and I knew the
scripts would be excellent.
My job was to tackle
the logistics of a long series, find the designers and directors and, above
all, the cast which would bring John’s television novel to life. Here I had the help of a brilliant
Casting Director, Doreen Jones, who toured the schools of Yorkshire with me to find Kevin
Moreton who played the young Sam. Kevin was not trained for the stage but he was a natural
actor with a quiet, serious quality which was ideal for Sam’s troubled life. Off screen he was
not always as quiet and serious as he looked and, because he was a little older than he
appeared, he was beginning to discover girls. He and his grandmother came to live in
Manchester for more than six months while we made the first thirteen episodes. I have always
thought the lady was something of a heroine.
Doreen Jones also
found Barbara Ewing, an actress from New Zealand, to play Sam’s mother
and introduced John Price, then at the start of his career, to play her lover, Alan. She assured
me that Ray Smith would bury his Welsh accent to play George and he certainly did. Perhaps
he was helped by playing opposite a native Yorkshirewoman, Alethea Charlton. We cast
Mona Bruce as May and Maggie Jones (now a stalwart of CORONATION STREET) as
Polly. The cast also included James Hazeldine who went on to become a pillar of
LONDON’S BURNING. Perhaps our greatest brainwave was to offer the part of Jack,
Sam’s grandfather, to Michael Goodliffe. In a long career on stage and film, Michael
had
usually played officers, lawyers and diplomats. Here he was asked to be an embittered
Yorkshire miner thrown aside by the industry he has given his life to and I cannot imagine
anyone who could have brought more depth and authority to the part.
SAM was made on
the same traditional production pattern as A FAMILY AT WAR – for an
hour episode we had two or three days of location filming, a week of rehearsal and then two
days in the studio with electronic cameras. Because it’s a story about mining we spent a
lot of
time filming in collieries which had to be found near to our base in Manchester. We seldom
went back to Yorkshire where the story is set but we did manage to get there for the opening
titles.
It’s a basic
imperative for producers to find locations which do not demand too much time or
money spent on travelling. Those are expenses which show in the budget but do not
show on
the screen. When the script demands the seaside or the country, however, as in the episode
called A Day to Remember, the cost of travelling is money triumphantly well spent because the
results do show on the screen.
At the time of
production in the 1970s mining was an industry which had not changed much
from the 1930s in which the first series takes place. So scenes at the pit head were not
too
difficult to recreate. The pit villages were different: an improved standard of living had altered
the appearance of them considerably. But eventually we found one, called Gin Pit village, just
outside Manchester. It seemed, like Brigadoon, to have been stuck in a time warp and come
to life just for us. With some minimal changes, removing television aerials and motor cars,
we
were back in the Thirties.
It’s sad that
there is no director’s credit on the first episode of SAM but, even in the most
carefully chosen team, there is occasional friction. I do not believe that it shows on the
screen
but, in this case, it ran so deep that the director preferred not to take a credit and to leave the
series. This was doubly sad because members of the cast often said that that particular
director laid some foundations of great value.
The directors who
followed built on those foundations and made a happy team. They all
shared John Finch’s concern to show a picture of the past which would go some way to
explain the pressures which have made us what we are today. It is the particular skill of
a
great popular writer to tell a story of the changing fortunes of ordinary people which is enriched
with that perception
1. Sam
