Darrol Blake

[Billy Smart]

  A few months ago I interviewed the veteran television director and designer Darrol Blake for my work as a historian of British television drama at the University of Reading. He directed quite a lot of Crossroads in the late seventies and early eighties, so I thought that you might be interested to read his memories of working on the show;

DB. When I went for Crossroads, it was – God! That was recorded but… it took great courage for me to actually stop the tape and ask for a retake, because you then only had even less time being in a commercial company to actually record what you had to. I had a private rule that there had to be three fluffs before I would actually stop the tape. Somebody dropped something but didn’t break pace, somebody fluffed something, and if there was a third mistake, then I’d stop. But you had to go back to the top, that was the awful thing. And the scenes were so long, each programme had a recording break in the middle, so you had to do either Part One or Part Two again. But the scenery never wobbled – all this business about the scenery wobbling and people not knowing their lines is rubbish! But millions watched it.
 
BS. Its true, I’ve watched all of the surviving Crossroads episodes up to 1979 and the myth of things like microphones in shot actually happened a lot more in Coronation Street and BBC productions.

DB. Yes, absolutely. But was a weird sort of confidence thing. I remember that there was a marvelous girl called Sue Hanson in it who played Miss Diane, and she said, “Darrol, I was watching Coronation Street last night and, do you know what, they know that they’re in a success” And Crossroads was endlessly battered and endlessly criticized and of course everybody employed by ATV hated working on it because it was slated all the time. They would much rather have been working on the posh plays and the filmed dramas, or the big variety shows that ATV used to do. Ditto Emmerdale when I did that for Yorkshire, it was very much the poor relation. It brought in the money and it brought in the advertising and they the commercial companies had to do them, but the people who actually worked in the studios didn’t really enjoy it. Unless there was no big film or play going on and then they would say, “Oh well, better go and do Emmerdale”, you know.

 When I did it dear Jack Barton, the producer, had three alternating directors. Two of those were staff directors and he had a third post in which he was allowed to hire freelance directors and he came in ere and anon in that position. And the cast, it was Sue Hanson who said to me that every third week we get directed. Because the staff directors would just go, ‘that’s alright’, you know. So when Ed Lawton’s farm came into it dear Kathy Staff and Sue had to come to this farm where Benny was living. When we were in the rehearsal room I said, “It’s muddy out there, it’s freezing cold” and Sue said,  “Ooh! I haven’t been spoken to like that for years!
 
 Since I’d been a designer, all the sets were made with four walls, but they only ever used the three and shot them straight on. I discovered this and I would do the studio plan and use all four walls and have the whole corridor in the motel so that you could act it from reception to the hairdressing salon and so on. And people at ATV would turn out to see it. And Meg’s drawing room that was also her office with a big desk in it had four walls but no one had ever seen them, so I decided to use all four walls but slightly set apart so you could shoot in various positions. Alan Gifford, a Canadian actor, was guesting in it as some involvement for Meg at this point, so I explained what I was doing and Nolly who was very sweet was smiling and nodding and she looked at him and she looked at me and she said, “We’ll do it and you shoot it. Don’t bother us and whatever you do we’ll do”
 
 One thing I remember about that lot. There was one scene that was written as a blazing row between David Hunter and Meg - Janet Hargreaves, Rosemary Hunter, was also involved – and in rehearsal, even in the dress rehearsal in the studio, they went at it like hammer and tongs and it was very good, the vision mixer had to work as fast as he could to switch from shot to shot. Come the take, they were all smiles. They didn’t do it! You can’t stop a take, but finally when it was all over I rushed down and said, “What?” And Ronnie Allen said, “Oh, they don’t switch on to see people being unkind to each other. They have far too much of that at home, you see. They want to see us being nice to each other.”
 
BS. There’s some truth in that. Dorothy Hobson does this work with audiences, where she suggests that the value of Crossroads isn’t so much dramatic but provides a service of showing viewers a world that they’d like to visit.
 
DB. Oh yes. I always used to say that soaps had taken the place of the lace curtains, because in generations gone by women always watched what went on at 24 and her at 48’s got that sailor in again. They don’t do that in the present day, its given to them in the soaps.
 

[Maria No. 1.]

Thanks for sharing your interview Billy, it was very good.

The Nolly quote was just her being her wasn't it, the ultimate professional.  Excellent.

[Mike of CAS]

How old is he, I wonder if he'd talk on camera.. lol we've not got any directors for R2C.

[Mark]

Interesting article, thanks for sharing

[Lucky]

Really interesting, it'd be great to have a stock of these written pieces as well as what's going to be in the documentary. The more people from Crossroads who are interviewed (any way) the better as it adds to the knowledge pool and provides a nice archive fgor future generations.

[Daniel Freeman]

Very interesting interview.
Talking about the 'four wall' sequences....reminded me of seeing the motel reception from the entrance - and we could see the NEW bar at the far end, the entrance to the restaurant, and reception - all from a different angle. It's on one of those DVD's - but can I hellers find it!!
Plus I'm sure we've seen Meg's sitting room - entrance, arches, french windows and fireplace all in one scene! Maybe Darrol did those?

[Billy Smart]

Thank you, I'm glad that you enjoyed it. Darrol Blake is about 75, though he looks 20 years younger! If any of you have seen the 'making of' documentary on the Doctor Who DVD, 'The Stones of Blood', he's interviewed on that. He's married to Anne Cunningham, Elsie Tanner's daughter Linda from the Street - working out where I recognised her from was bit distracting...

 I'll put up a few of the things that he told us about Emmerdale and Brookside over the next few days, if you're interested.

[Mike of CAS]

Very interesting stuff.

[Aston Cross]

Thank you for sharing that, Billy.  That's a really interesting interview!   

[Lucky]

Yes, it would be great to hear Darrol's other recollections too, particularly on Emmerdale. Looking forward to it.

[Aston Cross]

If there's any mention of his time on (Take the) High Road, that would be good to read too.   

[Billy Smart]

Here are some bits about soap in general, The Cedar Tree (!) and Emmerdale (LP is my colleague Leah);

BS. You may be unique in having directed all five of the major British soap operas.
 
DB. Oh, I doubt it, but yes I did, I directed Eastenders, Coronation Street, Brookside, Emmerdale and Crossroads. And others you won’t know about – I did Family Affairs. I did Triangle, although that was a finite thing where we did seasons rather than it being continuous. Another one of those finite series was The Cedar Tree, which I loved, an afternoon thing in the 1970s, which ATV did up at Elstree, and that was very posh. It was one of the first productions I worked on where we had a permanent set, i.e. they didn’t knock it down and set it up again next week, it took over a stage and it had the set on it. What I mostly remember about that was we all used to rehearse quite quickly and then dash next door and watch the Muppets being recorded. The Cedar Tree was set in the 1920s, a rather gracious period thing about a moneyed family.
 
LP. That’s unusual for daytime television.
 
DB. It was. Alfred Shaugnassy who did Upstairs, Downstairs, devised it. I only did one week. Somebody got double-booked so I was whisked in to do what was in fact the end of recording for the first series. But when I got the scripts, and it was all quite a quickly made show – get up and do it – I was surprised to see in the script that the characters were saying things to each other that they must have known, “You are my cousin and you will always” type of dialogue. So I said to myself, “What’s this?” I knew it was the last of the recording block. So when I got up there, the first thing that you did with the cast in those days was to sit down and have a read through. There was a murmur going around the table as we were reading. I’d worked with Cyril Luckham before, he was in it and he’d put the word around that I was acceptable, I gathered.  Both the originator and the producer were away because they thought that it was the end of the series, but what they had actually done was that these scripts were the opening episodes of the next block for the next series, so they had committed all those actors to being in the next series. They were furious! So those characters were commissioned to reappear in the next series – there’d been no negotiation as to whether they were available or to be paid – so that was what this murmur was, and that explained why they were all saying things to each other that they should have known. Needless to say, being a paranoid person, when that murmur went round the table I was thinking, “Why are they about to hang me?”
 
LP. What did you like about working in soap? Because it feels as though you found a home there.
 
DB. Yes, because I’d been born and brought up in the studio it was my home. And I knew how to do it swiftly and efficiently and leave people standing at the end of it, on budget and on time. And I knew how to do it in such a way that I was relaxed about all that and I could take care of the actors and actually coax something out of them that perhaps they didn’t know that they did. I got hired again and again and again because of that – ‘The actors like him’, you know? So I enjoyed it. Having got into television at sixteen at Lime Grove that was where I was alive and where it was all happening.
 
LP. So you always preferred to work in the studio?
 
DB. Yes, I quite enjoyed working on location, though. Although of course more and more, the soaps were made on location. Triangle was made entirely on location on the ship. I took people there, and they’d talk about an actor or a storyline or something, and they’d say, “But when you got into the studio”, and I’d think, ‘but I just told you, it was all done on location on a ship!”
 
 Talking about that sort of incomprehension, when I was up doing Emmerdale in 1981, they retransmitted Episode 1 of Coronation Street to mark Granada’s 25th anniversary and Derek Bennett, the director of episode one, was actually at Yorkshire Television with me doing some play or other. So I saw him in the bar the night after the repeat and I said to him, “Nice little show last night. Do you think it will run?” or some fatuous remark like that. And he said, “Darrol, I have to tell you, my entire team said, ‘Why didn’t you retake that bit where she stood in front of him?’” and he said, “It was live”, and they said “Yes, yes, but why didn’t you retake?” No comprehension!
 
 When I got to Emmerdale in 1977, it was established by then that you put up the pump set or the farm set and knocked off scenes for six episodes at a time. Most scenes were put in the farm kitchen so the cast ate huge meals. They’d have six breakfasts or six dinners and then break for lunch!
 
LP. I’ve noticed that in Emmerdale the kitchen seems to work as a replacement for the living room in other soaps.
 
DB. Oh yes, Sheila’s kitchen, it was. They were so hamstrung by the unions at YTV. I had two strikes in one day once - it was a nightmare. The electricians just ruled the place there in the seventies; nobody would do anything because they were frightened that the ETU would strike. Finally they became responsible for safety in the studios, which meant that they could stop production. You know – ‘That’s a slippery floor, stop production!’ Finally the YTV management talked to ETU headquarters and said that eventually they were going to have to stop production entirely, and they were told, well, fire them! ETU headquarters said fire them so they did. They then went on to rehire them all, but they got the message. Then when Thatcher appeared, the unions disintegrated, really. It was a nasty situation with the unions there.

(I'll put up the Brookside bits next)

[Maria No. 1.]

I love the comments about filming Cedar Tree and rushing next door to see The Muppets.  Really interesting.

[Daniel Freeman]

Sounds like there's a lot more to come! 
Am enjoying this!

[Lucky]

Excellent stuff. This interview is getting like a soap itself, what with daily 'episodes'. I'll be sure to be here tomorrow for the next exciting installment!