Crew
Director – [uncredited] Peter Plummer, Teleplay – Alan Garner, Based on the Novel The Owl Service (1967) by Alan Garner, Producer/Music – Peter Plummer, Photography – Ray Goode & David Wood, Designer – Peter Caldwell. Production Company – Granada.
Cast
Gillian Hills (Alison Bradley), Michael Holden (Gwyn), Francis Wallis (Roger Bradley), Edwin Richfield (Clive Bradley), Dorothy Edwards (Nancy), Raymond Llewellyn (Huw Halfbacon)
Plot
The respective parents of teenagers Alison and Roger have married. To celebrate, they have gone on a three-week vacation at a rented house in a secluded valley in Wales. Alison hears a noise in the attic and goes up to investigate with Gwyn, the teenage son of the housekeeper Nancy. They find a strange dinner service set with owl prints on them. Alison reads about the Welsh legends in The Mabinogian and the story of Blodeuwedd, who was brought to life from flowers for Leu but had an affair with Gronw Pebr and how Leu cast a spear that would kill Leu. Alison develops an attraction to Gwyn, despite his mother warning him to stay away. In the triangle between Alison, Gwyn and Roger, the story of Blodeuwedd seems to be playing itself out again.
Alan Garner is a British author whose work has almost all been in children’s literature. His stories, beginning with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), are usually set around the northwest of England, where he grew up, and wind in folk and fantasy elements. His work has gained a good deal of acclaim and Garner was awarded an OBE in 2001. His work was adapted for British tv on several occasions beginning here and with subsequent works such as Red Shift (1977) and Elidor (1995). The Owl Service was based on his 1967 novel. The title led some people to assume that ‘the owl service’ refers to some type of government agency, when in fact it refers to a service as meaning a dinner set, in this case a set of plates that come with owl patterns.
The Owl Service was a tv mini-series in six half-hour episodes from UK’s Granada (nowadays ITV). Alan Garner wrote the entire series. It was directed, produced and the score composed by Peter Plummer, a triple creative feat unusual to find in television. Elsewhere, Plummer has worked in television, everything from Play of the Week to episodes of the phenomenally long-running Coronation Street (1960- ). Plummer’s one other genre work was the SF film Junket 89 (1970) about a teleportation device. For reasons not known, Plummer declines to take any credit as director here.
The Owl Service is unlike any other tv mini-series of its era. Alan Garner’s interest is not at all in dramatics and the show takes place at an unhurried pace. Barely anything happens in the first episode, for instance, something that left me wondering what it would be that kept audiences of 1969 coming back the following week for the next instalment. Furthermore, there is never much of a clearcut plot until the end – it is just the three teenage characters interacting – but little of it happening in a dramatic way. The story is contained around the house and nearby woods for the most part, although does open out to show the rest of the valley in later episodes.
I became intrigued by The Owl Service after its reference in the documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021). It is not quite a work of Folk Horror – for one, it is a stretch to call anything here horror – but more so of Folk Mythology. Here and in Red Shift, Alan Garner’s works resonate with the sense of Britain’s historic and mythological past casting a giant shadow over and influencing characters in the present, often in ways they are not aware of, sometimes in more supernatural ways. In another film, this would be a ghost story or one where the owl service was some type of supernaturally imbued/occult object that demanded that the past be replayed, but Garner’s interest is more an abstract sense of influence. (And for all that the owl service features in the title, it actually gets to do very little in the series).
It is not until the latter third of the show that the story Alan Garner wants to tell starts to play out. Here we see the love triangle replay itself where Gillian Hills becomes Blodeuwedd. I presume that Welsh kid Michael Holden is meant to be Gronw Pebr and British boy Francis Wallis is Leu. Here we see that the triangle is cast across cast and nationality lines. Michael Holden is shown to be the poor kid, from the underdog that is Wales, seeking to buy a set of gramophone records so that he can learn to speak English properly (even when he doesn’t own a record player), and whose only future is having to drop out of school to go to work. Francis Wallis is eventually revealed as being an ugly snob, happy in his class privilege and shrugging off Holden’s impoverished circumstances, even making fun of them. It takes two-thirds of the show to get to where Garner’s real class issues lie – he himself grew up in Cheshire in the North-West of England, near the Welsh border and you could easily see Michael Holden’s Gwyn as being his young self. It is also seen that the story of Blodeuwedd forms some kind of eternal recurrence and has also affected Michael Holden’s parents as the identity of his father is revealed.
There is an okay cast, including a couple of the actors – Michael Holden and Raymond Llewellyn – who speak in their natural Welsh accents. One of the charms among the performers is Gillian Hills – a minor actress of the era who went on to appear in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Hammer’s Demons of the Mind (1972). One of the oddities of the series is that Gillian Hills’ mother, who has married Francis Wallis’s father (Edwin Richfield), is constantly talked about as being in the house but we never actually get to see her.
Full mini-series online beginning with Episode 1 here