The World of Parade's End

I haven't got any girl.

There's no child.

Over 100 of our best actors...

You're the most beautiful creature.

LAUGHS

-146 sets.

-GUNFIRE

-SHOUTING

-An epic story of love, war and betrayal.

You'd better keep off the grass.

Ahh!

And Sir Tom Stoppard, arguably our greatest living playwright,

returning to the small screen for the first time in 30 years.

Cut!

I don't always love the job.

I usually love the first draft, but this, I loved the job.

It's all for Parade's End, a novel overlooked in its day,

and rarely read now.

I think it is a British equivalent of The Great Gatsby.

It's a kind of suicide note to old England.

When you've read it, your life is never quite the same again.

Somehow, Ford Maddox Ford's modernist masterpiece,

written for a particular place at a particular time,

speaks across the decades.

The issues that Ford is dealing with are issues of our times as well.

Political corruption, financial corruption,

war, unwanted war, there's a huge relevance to anybody

who's ever had a stream of consciousness,

who's ever fallen in love with the wrong person, or been in a relationship with an ill-fit.

It's a very, very beautiful book.

It may feel strange...

like going to bed with somebody who really knew what they were doing,

but what they were doing was slightly unfamiliar

and it will make you smile.

I will be in my room, praying for death, or at least packing for it.

And, for the cast and crew,

adapting it was a process of discovery as much as dramatisation.

It's a wonderful blueprint for an actor, anyone trying dramatise any of those characters.

We all fell in love with that book.

We're now going to do an explosion test with the flying German.

In a field in Flanders, a battle is being recreated

in the name of a novel hailed by writers like Anthony Burgess

as the greatest ever written about war.

Parade's End snakes back and forth through past and present,

from the drawing rooms of Edwardian England to the Western Front.

But at its heart is a good, old-fashioned love story,

centred around Christopher Tietjens, an upper-class civil servant,

then soldier, caught between his wife Sylvia

and a young suffragette, Valentine Wannop.

Parade's End is about

that incredibly claustrophobic world of the early 20th century,

where people were just absolutely hemmed in by social convention.

And how that deformed them, really, as characters.

And broke people's lives.

And I think Ford manages to capture that brilliantly.

And all the time you just want to grab hold of these people and say, "Just tell her" or "Just do it."

Oh, Christopher, these boys have got a motor.

They're going to drive me to the Basils.

All right.

As soon as Mrs Wannop has had enough, I'll pop her in the tube.

'It is a World War I drama, but it's not about the Front

'as much as it's about the Home Front.

'And it's really that kind of...'

the ramifications of war

on society, culture and particularly love relationships.

You know, it's...

And those love relationships are metaphorical for all sorts of other things.

It deals with the biggest possible subject -

that is to say, England..

and the fate of England

in the subtlest of ways.

Originally released as four separate novels,

between 1924 and 1928,

Parade's End was written by Ford Maddox Ford.

A novelist, critic, poet and editor, he was born Ford Hermann Hueffer

in London in 1873

to a German father and a British mother.

He changed his name to Ford Maddox Ford in 1919

partly to avoid being associated with Britain's wartime enemy.

A close friend and colleague of literary giants like Ezra Pound and James Joyce,

Ford is best known for an earlier novel, The Good Soldier.

He wrote Parade's End a few years after incurring shell shock

at the Battle of the Somme.

Ford served. You know, you're reading about the war by a man who was there.

He's a kind of historian of his own time. I think he said that himself.

He's documenting a society telling its story...

for good or ill.

Of course, the book is a great warning about the terrors of war. It's an anti-war book.

Part of his remit with...

Parade's End was to write a book

which would shock people into the realisation of...

quite how costly war was.

How...absurd, ironic,

terrifying and ruinous it was.

What does Parade's End mean?

Well, it could mean it's all over. You know, let's all go home.

But it means there will be no more parades.

What are parades? What are military parades? They celebrate things.

He says there are no more celebrations.

Robert Graves put it a different way - Goodbye To All That.

What did he mean by "all that"? He meant the pre-war world.

Parade's End begins in 1912, during the so-called Edwardian Summer.

NEWSREEL: Summer - leisure, relaxation and play.

And when Father went out to bat, you watched.

This is how you looked - mother, daughter and son.

This was a world Ford had known for most of his adult life.

A world where everything and everyone had their place.

One's life really was that...

up in the morning and then for a ride in the park.

After that, tea perhaps somewhere.

Scrumptious little iced cakes and strawberry ices.

The table always had a beautiful white tablecloth on it.

And lovely silver and flowers.

But this is just one side of the story.

This is also a time of great social upheaval.

When people today say the Edwardian era

is so glamorous and exciting and interesting,

they're really only talking about one particular class.

For most people in Britain,

this is a period of great poverty and it's not

a very pleasant place for most people to live.

Women in particular were pressing for change.

CHANTING

One of the most exciting things about taking up the challenge of Parade's End

was looking at the lives of women

and how they were in this kind of pressure cooker and time of change.

Their goal was to get the vote only for married women, and only for married women over 30.

Votes for women.

That was the cry from many a platform

as a determined band of women campaigned for equal political rights with men.

Some of them chose the way of peaceful persuasion.

But others, the militant suffragettes, led by Mrs Pankhurst,

used violent and sensational methods.

It's into this world of contradictions and simmering tensions

that Ford introduces his hero,

26-year-old Christopher Tietjens is the son

of a wealthy, land-owning Yorkshire family

and he represents all the traditional values the War will soon sweep away.

He's already a man slightly out of joint with his time at the beginning,

he's a very old-fashioned man in the Edwardian world.

The reason I fell in love with this character is because he's got

a profound sense of duty and honour and virtue about him. He's a truly good man.

A minister has to show the figures for the insurance bill mounts.

Well, they won't. And I should have thought it was this department's duty to tell him so.

When we first meet him, he's a statistician, a very good one.

In a very senior position in the imperial civil service.

You know, dealing with the facts and numbers which make the Empire work.

So his brain's full of often abstract calculations of anything

one might mention. He's a wonderful epitome, I suppose, in a sense,

of what one would say an eccentric, but glorious English gentleman.

I love every field and hedgerow.

The land is England, and once it was the foundation of order.

Before money took over and handed the country over

to the swindlers and schemers.

Toryism, the pig's trough.

He's a Tory, but not in our version,

our modern version of Toryism.

It's not about free market capitalism,

and it's not about releasing laws and taxation.

It's about duty, and honour to the past,

and to those above

and below your station.

Respect...but at heart, what's really good about him,

is that he lives by this code of conduct

whilst the world is going mad around him.

And although he suffers a great deal by doing that,

and at times sees himself that it's foolish,

he's true to his word.

And I think he has the most spectacular set of principles.

I think if I lived half as principled a life

as a man like Christopher Tietjens, I could die happy.

Tietjens' perfect, ordered world

is turned upside down by his wife,

the scheming socialite, Sylvia Satterthwaite.

A devout Catholic

with a chequered past

and a child who may or may not be Christopher's.

I'm done with men.

Sylvia, she's one of the most complex characters

I've ever come across in drama.

I'll settle down by his side and I'll be chaste.

I've made up my mind to it.

I'll be bored stiff for the rest of my life, except for one thing.

I can torment that man,

and I'll do it, for all the times he's tormented me!

'She's a mass of contradictions.

'She's simultaneously amoral, and yet, a devoted Catholic.'

She's a big flirt, and yet, she's chaste.

I'm here with a ghastly set.

Would you like to take me on somewhere?

'Sylvia is magnificently evil.'

She wants to be a goddess.

She looks amazing,

and she sweeps into rooms

and people fall at her feet.

And the only person who doesn't fall at her feet -

because that would be, for him, weird - is Christopher.

So it makes her very bitter and twisted.

DISH SMASHES

-SHE LAUGHS

-Do you know what he's doing?

He's making corrections in the Encyclopaedia Britannica!

If I'd killed him, no jury would convict!

'She's emotionally intelligent.

'She's bright, but she's utterly uneducated.'

And she's bored, and she has nothing.

So in a sense, all of that brain power

goes into manipulating people.

Oh, Christopher, has it been awful for you?

It is thought that you went abroad to look after your mother.

You'll get your own back.

Only I wish you wouldn't do it by punishing me

with your mealsack, Anglican sainthood.

Even though he's constantly a victim

of her machinations behind the scenes,

of her direct assault on his person...

BUT she is his wife.

He will not hear a word spoken against her.

He will support her actions

because that is the gentlemanlike thing to do.

Sylvia and Christopher,

they're absolutely the two worst people to be married to each other.

And it's therefore so reassuring for Christopher

when he meets Valentine.

She's the shape of things to come,

and a very exciting shape she is too.

A campaigner for women's rights, 18-year-old Valentine Wannop

is the antithesis of Tietjens' bored, socialite wife.

When she's not at work to help support her family,

Valentine's out protesting for a better world.

-We are the public!

-No, you don't!

'Valentine is full of integrity.'

She has her own moral code

that she's developed herself, without having been told.

'She just knows what's right or wrong.'

-Votes for women!

-Oi! Come here, you!

'She stands for things like democracy

'and equal rights for women,

'and all these values,'

she's learned through her own experiences.

She's the suffragette.

She represents the woman who is going to make a better world.

She is, if you like, the new, exciting woman.

And the women who's not merely defined by her sexuality.

She's very sensual, but she's also a woman of the mind.

Actually, this tea is for my mother,

and I mustn't inflict myself on Mr Waterhouse

with my inferior mind

and my general incapacity for anything much except motherhood.

So, if you'll excuse me...

Oh, that's my first suffragette!

'The beauty of that love story, I guess,'

is that they are intellectual sparring partners. They're equals.

And I think...

although they come at it from different angles,

they're very, very similar people.

They are outsiders in this time period,

and Christopher is of the Tory mind

and Valentine is more forward thinking.

What's funny about them

is that they both have such integrity

in how they believe relationships should unfold.

They try with all their might to kind of repress their feelings

and just do the right thing.

Feeling increasingly trapped by his situation

and frustrated with the government bureaucracy,

Tietjens makes a radical decision.

Now, look here, Tietjens. I took you for a sound man.

This department exists to show that, as there are different ways to put things in words,

there are different ways to put things in numbers.

I detest and despise the work I am asked to do in the Department,

whose purpose seems to be to turn statistics into sophistry.

I am resigning. Good morning.

-Don't you want to be a man of influence?

-No.

I'd prefer to be in the trenches.

RECORDING: 'Britain is an island,

'and that has always made her different, alone, and secure.

'All the same, 1914 saw some pretty fast trench digging

'along the coasts.

'As people remarked,

'anybody would think the Kaiser was going to invade.

'Different, alone, and secure.

'Yet, not for the first time in history, and not for the last,

'Britain sent her best to fight Europe's battles overseas.

'Off they went, to what?

'Another brush with the Boers.

'Such should be the nature of wars to date.

'Certainly, none of them realised they were to be the first

'in the greatest human sacrifice in history.'

The carnage of the trenches

has inspired countless novels, films, and poems.

But, for Ford Maddox Ford, who'd been close to the front line,

it was bureaucracy as much as battle that broke a man's spirit.

'It's as much to do with the mundanities of moving troops,'

of checking the right people are being asked for fire extinguishers.

That the cook has put his uniforms and utensils away in the right place.

It's about the day-to-day running and mundanities of war.

And I think that's why it reads, to me, as being authentic.

When we tend to think about

the literature of the First World War,

we tend to think of the poetry.

You know, we think about Sassoon,

we think about Owen...

..and we think about these incredibly visceral,

horrific descriptions of the trenches.

The blood and guts and gore.

But, even though this is very serious novel,

Ford has a real gift for comedy.

I mean, it's quite subtle, and in places,

is reminiscent of Blackadder Goes Forth,

Catch-22, books like that.

It's been our pleasure to fit out you and your men

for the task ahead...

-PHONE RINGS

-Somebody deal with that telephone.

Or even the Keystone Cops, or that kind of approach.

Bumbling, idiotic, British generals,

crazy bureaucracy, massive frustration.

I notice, Captain Tietjens, you have no fire extinguishers in your unit.

You're aware of the disastrous consequences

that would follow a conflagration?

Yes, sir. I was informed by ordinance

that there is no provision for fire extinguishers

for dominion troops under an Imperial officer.

So I applied, as advised, to a civilian firm...

I don't ask for your memoirs.

Make a note, Levin.

Sometimes it's almost a bit like M.A.S.H.

That you're looking at the absurdity of the bureaucracy.

Christopher can't get fire extinguishers which he needs

because the bureaucrats won't let him have them,

for complicated reasons.

There's endless form-filling to be done.

People are sent the wrong uniforms,

and he's able to laugh at the absurdity of the war,

while taking you to very deep places

about people's emotional state and mental state.

And looking at some of the cleverest young men in England

trying to hang on to their sanity.

So there are these brilliant minds writing sonnets

in an attempt to stay sane.

Give me the rhyme words for a sonnet.

That's the scheme of it.

I know what a damn sonnet is! What's your game?

Give me 14 end rhymes of a sonnet and I'll write a sonnet.

-In two and a half minutes!

-If you do, I'll translate it into Latin

-in under three minutes.

-Get on with it, then.

A-B-B-A-A-B... Yes? What is it?

How Tietjens, Sylvia and Valentine emerge from the futility

is one of the great pleasures in reading the book,

but needless to say, by the end of the story,

nothing and nobody is left untouched.

Tietjens goes through some really horrific experiences.

Ford uses this as a way of showing us

how the old order is forced to change

through their experiences in the war. I'm thinking of...

There's just one really quite wonderful passage in the novel

were Ford writes about how Tietjens and a young soldier

are literally buried alive

and the young man who's been buried with him is calling out,

"Help me! Please, help me, Captain!"

And Tietjens says something very, very important.

Tietjens just yells back,

"I can't help you until I've helped myself."

So it's a really important moment of the novel

because it's Tietjens recognising that there comes a point

where virtue is no longer the right way to act.

He has to save himself first.

BELLS TOLL

It was just six years after the Armistice

when the first volume of Parade's End was published,

with the others following soon after.

Feted in America, the reception at home was lukewarm at best.

This was as much to do with the way it was written

as its unheroic portrayal of war.

Ford Madox Ford, he's a modernist,

not just in the sense that he's writing about the present day

but in fact, that he's doing so

with a whole new set of tools.

There's all this kind of play with chronicle, you know,

this kind of shifting around in time.

We're here, we're there, we're in the past, we're in the present.

A book like this,

which transforms many of the basic rules of storytelling and writing,

would have been perceived as difficult.

It must have been quite a shock to hear such a complex story

told at such a helter-skelter, modernist pace.

It was almost as if people were seeing their world forged anew,

which is really, I guess, what the Modernist movement was.

But as the decades passed

and readers became more familiar with this style of writing,

critical and popular opinion towards Parade's End changed.

Ford, in fact, is very instructive to a later generation of novelists -

Graham Greene, notably.

Graham Greene could not have written as he did write

were it not for the fact that he was steeped in Ford.

Its growing recognition as a modern classic

was confirmed in 1964

when the BBC adapted it for the first time.

DRAMATIC BRASS MUSIC

The three parts faithfully mirrored the first three novels,

starring Ronald Hines, playing Tietjens as a blustering aristocrat

and a young Judi Dench as Valentine Wannop

in one of her earliest roles.

I say!

Go and see that they don't hurt Gertie, will you?

What?

WOMAN SCREAMS

What's going on?

I didn't like...well, the look of them, not at all.

-I say!

-You've been demonstrating.

-Yes, of course, but look!

-What possible good do you think...

You wouldn't let a girl be manhandled,

even if you are against...

-Oh!

-Here! Wait a moment!

But unlike many of our classic novels,

Parade's End hasn't been attempted again until now.

What do you want?

891, take four.

The task of adapting it fell to Sir Tom Stoppard.

For a man who's tackled everything

from Shakespeare's love life to quantum physics,

-you'd think Ford Madox Ford would be a walk in the park.

-Cut there.

HE LAUGHS

The novels are not structured to accommodate a television series.

The book itself is structured in a very complex manner.

It was not a linear story

when you read it from page 1 to page 700 or whatever.

The consequence is

- I'm slightly proud and slightly embarrassed by this -

that there are quite a lot of scenes in this Parade's End

which simply don't exist in the book.

They are, if you like, suggested by the book

but the mise en scene,

you know, Where are we, what are we doing here,

has had to be invented to some degree.

One would look into social history

and other sorts of reference books

and find out what was going on at such a time.

For instance, there's a scene where Valentine witnesses a slashing

of the Rokeby Venus painting in the National Gallery.

Do you think that is all woman are good for?

Hey! What are you doing?

Ford never wrote about that at all, but Tom took the liberty

of using something that would add to our big theme.

'There were lots of things going on

'which I thought about using but never actually did.'

I'm happy to say that the Titanic doesn't figure in my story

since it figures in everybody else's stories of that period.

For writer and director,

the novel provided an opportunity to get closer

to the unique visual language at the heart of Ford Madox Ford's style.

It was the beginning of modernism,

and we wanted to try to reflect the artistic culture of the time.

Ford Madox Ford was tremendously visual.

His grandfather was a painter,

he was friendly with the big artists of the day - Picasso, Juan Gris,

and I was very keen to use some of the First World War artists

and particularly Paul Nash,

so these organic muddy curves

with fractured trees.

There's one huge shot of a battlefield

which was like a Nash painting brought to life.

GUNFIRE

MOURNFUL BRASS MUSIC

# Fair and kind... #

Miss Wannop.

Mr Tietjens.

I used some devices - the set of three mirrors,

which is a technique pioneered by the vorticist photographers,

which I loved as an idea because it reflects the love triangle,

but also, plays with image as the Cubists did.

I found by playing with these mirrors,

we could take Rebecca Hall's face

and kind of put her nose where her ear should be

and make her look like a Picasso painting

and Tom and I suddenly got very excited by that

as we explored the possibilities of that, because we felt it was a style

that was entirely appropriate to the material.

DOG BARKS

Today, we're exactly 100 years on from where Parade's End begins

but far from making it seem old hat,

the passage of time has only served

to make the novel appear fresher and more relevant than ever.

'I think our fascination with this period is a rich and complex one.

'I think part of it is the fact

'that it's an era on the edge of change, and that it's such a forcibly

painful birth into a new modern era

and that the war marked it. That's, I think, one of our fascinations,

the other one being that it is an era now that only survives

through accounts. We don't have a living link to that era any more.

EXPLOSIONS, GUNFIRE

The issues that Ford is dealing with our issues of our times as well.

It's issues about, what does it mean to be English?

What does it mean to be British?

The role of virtue in our society.

What is the role of the good man?

We looked at the politics of Europe,

we looked at the politics of this country and all the uncertainty,

the way all our would-be leaders have been in the dock recently,

you know, whether it's bankers, politicians, press barons,

everything seems up for grabs.

Society seems about to, you know, go topsy-turvy.

I think one has to say, works of art have their moment.

This may be the moment.

It is not so well-known, and now it's going to be.

Next weekend on BBC Two, Alan Yentob examines the extraordinary career

of Ford Madox Ford in a Culture Show special.

Ford became the midwife of English literary modernism,

bringing into the world some of the greatest writers of the language.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd