Even when you work as an assiduous researcher of television drama history, it’s rare that you make a genuinely major discovery, but watching Patricia Hooker’s 1973 Armchair Theatre play, ‘The Golden Road’, I had the tremendously exciting sensation of unearthing a buried treasure and being the first person to hold it up to the light for forty years. The play is a work of major historical significance because, even if it wasn’t the first lesbian play broadcast on British television (that honour is probably held by Roger Marshall’s 1970 Armchair Theatre, ‘Wednesday’s Child’), it must surely be the first to have been written by a woman. But, just as importantly, it’s also quite terrifically good.
‘The Golden Road’ has a simple Aristotelian rise-and-fall narrative. A young woman, Anna, arrives unexpectedly at the door of housewife and mother Cass and becomes her lodger. The exotic Anna has a transformative effect on Cass’ life, awakening dormant aesthetic and sensual perceptions that change the way she comprehends the world and sees herself: “Not Mrs. Hunter, not mummy. Cass!” Anna and Cass sleep together. The husband, Jim, realises what’s going on and goes back to his mother, taking the daughter, Christie, with him. Jim denies Cass any access to Christie, and Cass realises that to have any possibility of keeping her daughter she must cease contact with Anna. The play ends with Anna locked out of the house.
Lesbians were rarely seen in 1970s British television drama. I’ve only found four single plays with lesbian themes, plus a handful of subsidiary plots in episodes of legal, police and medical series. The inclusion of lesbian characters generally served one of two dramatic purposes; either a device for partial and withheld character information – so half way through an episode the viewer would think, “Oh, of course, I see, so that explains the hold that she had over her!” – or, more problematically, as a psychological or social “issue” to be explored. The nadir of the “issue” approach is perhaps ‘For Life’, a 1975 episode of the women’s prison drama Within These Walls (ITV, LWT, 1974-78) that ends up being about the heroic tolerance of the prison chaplain, rather than the prisoners he ministers to. This episode makes more sense to a present-day viewer once you learn that the actor who played the chaplain also wrote the script.
‘The Golden Road’ combines elements of both approaches. Cass doesn’t realise Anna’s sexuality or understand the nature of their attraction until the end of Part One, and after Cass loses custody of her daughter ‘The Golden Road’, of necessity, has to become an ‘issues’ play, once Cass’s legal status as mother becomes dependent upon her sexual identity.
My discovery of this play was serendipitous, and happened because I was researching the director, Douglas Camfield (1931-1984), who is best known for his work on Doctor Who (BBC1, 1963-89) and The Sweeney (ITV, Thames, 1975-78). ‘The Golden Road’ isn’t the type of work that Camfield is usually remembered for, but the particular quality of acute spatial sensitivity that his direction bought to Cybermen invasions of London and bank robberies – realised through movement of the TV frame, depth of field and imaginative montage – works equally well to illuminate the nuances and implications of Hooker’s domestic script with clarity and imagination.
So who was the mysterious Pat Hooker? Before the Internet, you could have a writing career and leave no trace at all of your personal identity for posterity. Initially all that I had to go on were a dozen or so television credits between 1971 and 1981; three plays and assorted episodes of legal (Six Days of Justice, ITV, Thames, 1972-75), police (The Gentle Touch, ITV, LWT, 1980-85) and medical (Angels, BBC1, 1975-83) series. She also had a play on at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 1967 (A Season in Hell, about Rimbaud’s relationship with Verlaine, a few years before Christopher Hampton’s Total Eclipse on the same subject) and went on to adapt various science fiction classics for BBC Radio in the 1980s.
It took me two years to find out anything significant about her, when I eventually discovered one 350-word newspaper interview (including an unflattering photograph), from which I found out a few pertinent facts, the most unexpected discovery being that she was Australian. She was born in Balgowlah, Sydney, in 1934 and made a name for herself in Australian television and theatre with A Season in Hell. In order to further her writing career she moved to London in 1964, supporting herself by working as a court reporter. Her most striking observation in the brief 1967 Sydney Morning Herald article reveals an archetypal dramatist’s insecurity, “I think you have to be deranged to be a playwright. Everything you see in life has to fit into that small square – the stage.”
But that was all that I could find out, save for a minimal entry in the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (1994) detailing her early stage plays, which seem to have concentrated on the mythical, the biblical, the ancient and the poetic:
‘Was at one time employed in the ABC programme department; she left Australia in the late 1960s to write in London. Her plays include A Season in Hell (1965), which re-creates the personal relationship between the poets Rimbaud and Verlaine; Socrates, where the force of truth is ranged against that of malevolence; Concord of Sweet Sounds, a study of an ageing concert pianist; Twilight of a Hero, about the biblical father-son pair, David and Absalom; and The Lotus Eaters (1968).’
From this thin set of resources, I’ve come up with the theory that Hooker’s dramatic style distinctively combined a mythical-poetic understanding with her court reporter’s eye for everyday detail. This dichotomy lies at the heart of the drama of The Golden Road where Anna is a mythic figure with the power to bring an awakened poetic sensibility, placed in the quotidian location of a suburban household.
Since I first saw ‘The Golden Road’ I’ve managed to track down a few more of Hooker’s productions, which have added to my understanding of her as a writer with a distinctive individual voice, who found the ideal “small square” form for her worldview in studio-made popular television drama in Britain in the 1970s. The Gentle Touch episode ‘Chance’ (1980) draws on Hooker’s court reporting experience through presenting a single day stuck waiting in Court by a frustrated Detective Sergeant, creating a thoughtful overview of the legal system in action, its imperfections, rituals and value.
Hooker’s first Angels episode, ‘Off Duty’ (1975) is a work of similar sensitivity and depth to ‘The Golden Road’, presenting an Inner London night out for two first year student nurses, the worldly-wise middle-class Patricia and the innocent Irish Maureen. The story told is a slow-burning, seemingly inconsequential one. The girls trek across London to meet Maureen’s staid aunt, who the louche and inconsiderate Patricia creates a bad impression on. They move on to a pub, where Patricia has agreed to hook up with Maureen’s cousin. Patricia and the cousin get the teetotal Maureen drunk on spiked soft drinks, and the couple elopes while an unhappy sloshed older lesbian latches on to Maureen. The play ends with the older woman’s long-suffering partner arriving to carry her home, and the girls recognizing her as their hospital’s Head Sister.
The details of this episode are commonplace – although when seen through 21st century eyes the final scene’s representation of a ‘typical’ 1975 London pub, complete with drag entertainment, seems like an outlandishly colourful, grotty, place, more Vauxhall Tavern than JD Weatherspoon’s – but the slow pace and sense of journey makes the story a quest narrative, creating a much greater sense of depth than a plain synopsis might suggest. Through the quest character is revealed, not just the character of the two students (the viewer’s accumulated narrative understanding of Patricia’s selfishness is more akin to reading a novel than watching TV), but also the character of mid-seventies Inner London itself.
I’ve discovered the process of researching a woman who is as close as possible to being an invisible writer to be a rather liberating experience. Studying the work of Pat Hooker is the opposite of trying to write about Dennis Potter. With no accumulated baggage of personal reputation or existing writing it’s perhaps easier to understand the work solely on its own merits (which in Pat Hooker’s case are, in my considered opinion, tremendous). It’s also more enjoyable coming up with connections between plays and episodes if you’re certain that you’re exploring territory where no one has trodden before.
But at the same time, the mystery of Pat Hooker is tantalizing, and there’s a part of my research that will always feel unfulfilled until I find out what became of her. Her last credit that I’ve been able to find (a Radio 4 adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s Luck of the Bodkins) was in 2000, so it seems likely that she’s no longer alive. Or perhaps she’s returned to Australia? Whatever did happen to Pat Hooker, I would like to thank her for her contribution to television drama and lesbian drama forty years ago.
Billy Smart is a postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded ‘Spaces of Television’ project at the University of Reading. He presented a paper about Pat Hooker, ‘Armchair Theatre: The Golden Road: Representing lesbianism in the 1970s’ at the ‘Television for Women’ conference at Warwick in May, and hopes to make ‘The Golden Road’ more widely-known and available in the near future.
