Sarah Boote is quite definitive about what she wants to make “I like drama, classic storytelling, unique drama.” Principal’s high-profile dramas have included Fish, and The Passion. Now, with Gentlemen’s Relish, a feature length comedy drama starring Billy Connolly, Sarah Lancashire and Douglas Henshall, airing this Christmas on the BBC, Sarah Boote’s vision of TV drama could be a force to be reckoned with.
So, what is unique drama? “It’s not just having an original idea, it’s having it AND convincing commissioners that you’ve got it. I want to be in a position where instead of me pitching to commissioners, they are coming to me. After The Passion, Fish and now with Gentlemen’s Relish, I hope we’re there.” Boote has a definitive tip for any prospective pitchers. “The key is to present the major broadcasters with a complete creative package, to develop it yourself as far as possible before they see it. That’s what we did with Gentlemen’s Relish.”
Boote first read Miles Gibson’s novel Kingdom Swan in 1996, almost as soon as she had come to Principal. “I knew immediately that I wanted to adapt it, although it doesn’t on the face of it seem the kind of book that lends itself to screen. It’s convoluted, with a lot of different places and times, and there’s lots of layers of meaning here, a lot of modern themes of feminism and pornography. I suppose it painted pictures in my imagination that I wanted to see on screen.”
A period drama without a major name (Dickens, Austen, Eliot)? This seems on the face of it the sort of thing commissioning Editors shy way from, hissing in fear. Boote, however, was undaunted. Once she’d determined on telling the story of Kingdom Swann, his assistant Cromwell Marsh, and his housekeeper Violet, in her mind it wasn’t a question of whether but how to make it. “In TV, like a film, it’s all down to getting the right team together and getting people you know you can have faith in. Finding exactly the right people is all part of getting past the inevitable objections of the commissioners. The first step was getting the right script for the adaptation, since I knew tat developing the script was going to be a lengthy and complicated procedure.”
To Boote’s mind there was one writer who was fist on her list. “I knew that Gentlemen’s Relish was going to live or die by its characters, that in a slightly surreal situation they had to be made as real as possible. So I immediately went to David Nobbs, who jumped at it.” Two of Nobbs high-profile creations made Boote feel he was right for the task. “A Bit of a Do is a brilliant series of character studies, and the Reggie Perrin series are so odd-ball, and yet have genuine drama at their centre. The man who could draw the characters so well, and handle such strange material, was the man to write Gentlemen’s Relish.
It was two years from when Nobbs started in 1997 until he, producers Boote and Martin Auty, and executive producer Mike Slee were happy with the script. “We knew that whoever we sent the scripts to would jump at the project, and David was in the process of making the book into a fantastic, enchanting romantic comedy drama: but now we had to decide who to send it to. In a wonderful illustration of the synergy of the group, we all got together and said ‘Billy Connolly’,
Connolly took one look at the script and was locked in. Surely, with him on board it was easier to attract the others? “Well, it would have been, but we’d already sent scripts to Sarah Lancashire and Douglas Henshall. We really couldn’t see anyone else as Cromwell Marsh, Swan’s assistant – the fact that he found out that Billy, with whom he’s worked before, was on board it just made him keener. And you can see that onscreen, there’s a real affection there, like an adoptive father and son - just what the story needs. Sarah Lancashire is becoming an incredibly versatile actress, and the things that she’s done since leaving Coronation Street have been amazing. I saw her in Where The Heart Is and Seeing Red, and just fell in love with her for the role of Violet. I really think that soon the papers are going to stop mentioning Coronation Street when she’s mentioned, because she’s doing so much and is so good in this.”
In early 2000, with her ‘creative package’ fully developed, Boote took the leap, sending the pitch to Geoffrey Perkins at the BBC. Perkins read the script over Easter and fell over himself to commission it. So much so that Gentlemen’s Relish was in production by June and the production went into full swing in September under the aegis of Director Douglas MacKinnon and DoP Gavin King (currently second director on Harry Potter). Of course it could have course all gone horribly wrong. “We knew that if things spilled into October, we were in trouble as Sarah Lancashire wasn’t going to be available. We didn’t know it at that time that this was because she was then due to start an exclusive three-year ‘golden handcuff’ contract with ITV.”
So far, so good , but as if part of natures compensatory process, the plain sailing that Gentlemen’s Relish had enjoyed found foul weather in production, partly due to the problems of filming period drama.” I believe that we’re really going to have to do something about this soon, or it’s going to be virtually impossible to make the amount of post-production effects-which will inflate budgets. There’s virtually none of Edwardian London left, and the few streets you can use you can’t block off access to, because they’re residential, and the residents are understandably a bit annoyed at having to deal with film crews. Fortunately we managed to set the entire shoot, almost, in a single country house. This was used as a house, as well as a gaol, a women’s hostel, a studio, kitchen, bookshop – the rooms were very spare but the architecture was just right making it relatively cheap to build a room within a room. We spent three weeks of the shoot in that house.” Problems, of course, are there to be got around, and frequently it was a case of post-production to the rescue. “At one point, Kingdom Swann sets up one of his tableaux on the Thames next to the Houses of Parliament. It’s a huge decadent recreation of a cruise by Cleopatra, with a huge barge and lots of people in Egyptian costume. Of course there was no way we could shoot there, so we had to film in a backwater and add the background later.” The most unpredictable moment involved a balloon, and a tragedy. “We had an arrangement with balloonist Per Lindstrand, where we could work together to put a skin over a dirigible and he would help us shoot the sequence where Kingdom Swann takes up ballooning. Then, Per was asked to join the team looking at ways of raising the Russian submarine Kursk from the sea-and of course he had to go. Our only option then lay in creating the balloon in post-production at Rushes, with Billy acting in a basket hanging under a crane.”
With filming finished, it’s all over bar the shouting, or in this case, the music. “We’ve got some beautiful music which is just in place, composed by Julian Nott, who did the score for The Wrong Trousers – and as you can imagine, his music’s really important, it interacts brilliantly with the situations and plays up the comedy beautifully.” Gentlemen’s Relish is still to be scheduled, but it looks likely it will be screened after the Christmas period.
Beyond that, what is there in Sarah Boote’s in-tray? “I’ve got a two-parter looking at greed, at what happens in the City when things don’t go well. And there’s a couple of other projects I can’t talk about. What I’m interested in is set-piece dramas, good, strong stories. ‘m not going to specialise in period drama, or in any one style- I don’t want to get known for just one thing.” Boote smiles and pauses. “Although, I am looking at another miles Gibson novel, Vinegar Soup, as a theatrical feature. It’s set in England and Cameroon, and it’s another one that you wouldn’t think would work on screen.” Of course the difference is that Sarah Boote would.
Tom Blaylock Soho Independent December 2000