by John Green
Malcolm Hulke – known to friends and colleagues as “Mac” – is one of those now forgotten scriptwriters for TV and cinema, who was also an active communist. We have to thank author Michael Herbert for bringing him back to life for us in his new and fascinating book, Things are not always what they seem: the writing and politics of Malcolm Hulke.
Mac was a highly successful script writer for theatre, television and cinema from the late fifties into the mid 1970s. He is largely remembered for his contributions to the long running serials The Avengers, Crossroads and Dr. Who. He was also an active member of the Communist Party for many years. Herbert’s biography is a meticulously researched portrait of the man and his times.
Mac joined the Communist Party in June 1945, after being released from the Merchant Navy, not because he was attracted to its Marxist philosophy, but because ‘I had just met a lot of Russian POWs in Norway, and because the Soviet Army had just then rolled back the Germans.’ He appears to have remained a member until the late 1960s, although his relationship with the party leadership was never comfortable.
Like everyone else who took this step, he was immediately placed on Special Branch files. Special Branch/MI5 would maintain a file on him for much of his life, from 1947 to 1963, which running into hundreds of pages. These agencies spent literally millions spying on ordinary Communist Party members while real Soviet agents, like Philby, Burgess, McLean etc. continued to carry out their work on behalf of the Soviet Union undetected.
He remained a member of the Party until the early 1960s, but even afterwards his politics remained firmly on the left, and this was reflected in his writings, which often explored anti-authoritarian, environmental, and humanist themes. It is surprising that Mac was given scriptwriting contracts by both BBC and ITV, given the strict vetting process then in place to keep communists and left-wingers out.
Developing proletarian culture
He became involved with Unity Theatre during the 1950s and 1960s, serving as its production manager in the mid-1950s, and wrote a booklet in 1961 celebrating the theatre’s 25th anniversary. Unity Theatre was a centre of communist and assorted left-wingers keen to develop a proletarian theatre movement, following the examples of agitprop in the Soviet Union and Brecht’s theatre in Berlin.
There, he met writer Eric Paice and they wrote as a team for television, beginning in the late 1950s with This Day in Fear, which was produced by the BBC. He also became friends with Ted Willis (later Lord Willis), who was also a talented and prolific scriptwriter, and one of the founders, in 1959, of the Television and Screen Writers’ Guild of Great Britain – the trade union for TV, cinema and theatre writers. Mac became actively involved in the union. Ted Willis was at the time also a leading member of the Young Communist League. In 1960, Mac co-edited the first three issues of the union’s new quarterly newsletter Guild News. He also edited the Writers’ Guide, produced by the Guild for aspiring writers.
Mac began working with Eric Paice after they met at Unity. Their first success was This Day in Fear (1958), an entry in BBC Television’s Television Playwright series. They went on to write four plays for ABC’s Sunday evening drama series Armchair Theatre (1956-1974): The Criminals (1958), The Big Client (1959), The Girl in the Market Square (1960), as well as The Great Gold Bullion Robbery (1960), an adaptation of a Gerald Sparrow play.
Mac wrote for television in what was the ‘golden age’. Television in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, as it evolved into a mass medium, was more open to invention, creativity and experimentation by its writers and programme makers, and was less constrained by the higher echelons than in the decades that followed.
The baddies are capitalists!
Mac’s political views fed into his work, albeit seemingly unnoticed by anyone, as Mac noted in a letter to his friend and comrade Jean Tate in June 1975. ‘During all The Avengers time when the most popular baddies were Soviet spies, my baddies were capitalists. No one noticed. For seven years running I wrote subversive Doctor Who serials.
With the Cold War in full swing in the 1960s Mac subverted the standard West versus the East narrative in another of his Avengers episodes ‘Concerto’ in which Steed teams up with his old KGB enemy Zalenko to protect the Russian pianist Veliko, while in Mac’s Danger Man episode Parallel Lines Sometimes Meet Drake forms a temporary alliance with KGB Major Nicola Tarasova as they seek to unearth who has been kidnapping nuclear scientists from both East and West.
In July 1967 Mac was asked by Vic Feather, Assistant General Secretary of the TUC to write a script for a pageant to mark the Congress’s centenary. After presenting his draft, Feather (who liaised regularly with MI5 and was a visceral anti-communist) decided to pull the plug: Mac’s script was too radical for him.
In The War Games (1969) which Mac co-wrote with Terrance, the Doctor explains, ‘We’re back in history, Jamie. One of the most terrible times on the planet Earth.’
In this story, Mac depicts war as violent and pointless, controlled by ruthless leaders who place no value on human life. In his final script for Doctor Who, Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974), he dealt with the issue of environmental threats. At the end of this serial, the Doctor observes, ‘It’s not the oil and the filth and the poisonous chemicals that are the real causes of the pollution… it’s simply greed’.
His Doctor Who scripts were known for avoiding black-and-white characterisation and simplistic plotting. Military figures are usually presented unfavourably – Invasion of the Dinosaurs and The Ambassadors of Death both have a general as the ultimate villain.
Always question what you’re told
Mac’s underlying message to his audience in all his work is: question what you think you see or what you are being told by the powerful. Ask yourself what is really going on. As the Doctor says in The Faceless Ones: ‘Things are not always what they seem.’
Mac drew on 25 years of writing experience in writing the industry ‘bible’: Writing for Television (1974), in which he explained the craft and also gave practical advice. Naturally he encouraged young writers to join the trade union.
Mac believed that writing was a craft that should be respected (and paid properly) but that it was a craft that with imagination and hard work could be learned and that there was an onus on those who had been successful to help others onto the first rung of the ladder. He was for a number of years the driving force behind the Writers’ School of Great Britain.
His words which are spoken by Dr. Who are still pertinent in our world today:
You can try to make something better of the world you’ve got. You humans can end the arms race, you can treat people with different coloured skins as equals, you can stop exploiting and cheating each other, and you can start using the Earth’s resources in a rational and sensible way.’
It’s a fitting epitaph.
