By Ben Bussey
All it takes is one memorable moment. I’ve no doubt I would have no recollection of the original 1990 airing of BBC miniseries The Green Man were it not for having inadvertently caught the opening scene of the first episode – and being left profoundly shocked and haunted by it. I would have been 10 years old at the time, and had at that point never seen The Evil Dead (which just that same year was re-released to VHS with over a minute of cuts), but based on the Chinese whispers I’d picked up on I imagined it to play out along the same lines as The Green Man’s prologue: a woman wanders through woodland under pale moonlight, faint demonic whispers echo in the wind, the trees themselves seem to show signs of life – then, almost out of nowhere, the trees come alive completely, hauling the hapless young lady screaming into the air, before branches come bursting out through her stomach in a massive gush of gore.
I don’t know if the channel got abruptly changed, or an overbearing parental palm swept over my eyes, but I recall nothing further of The Green Man beyond that point (aside from seeing letters of complaint in the next week’s Radio Times and Points of View) – and, in what seems to be a very rare occurrence, I find on revisiting this scene now that it’s actually even nastier than I remember it being. And it’s all the more jarring as, moments later, we cut to Albert Finney washing and dressing up all fancy to the sound of big band jazz in the beginning of what would seem in most respects a conventional, down to earth BBC drama.
The Green Man is a very strange show, which seems to suffer from something of an identity crisis. As I’ve never read the 1969 Kingsley Amis book which was the the basis for this three-part series from screenwriter Malcolm Bradbury and director Elijah Moshinsky, I don’t know how much of this comes from the original text, but what we seem to have here is, for the most part, very standard BBC 1 post-9pm viewing of the era: all very middle-aged, middle class, picturesque and inoffensive. And yet along with this we have some bizarre horror movie elements, as well as a bit of Jilly Cooper-era smut; yes, even more potentially traumatic than the opening woodland disembowelment is the sight of Albert Finney having sex. It’s an odd blend that never quite sits right, and smacks of an eagerness to come off a bit daring and risque, yet at the same time remaining anxious not to alienate the tea-sipping grandparents in the audience. No great surprise, then, that for all its dabbling in dark and interesting ideas, it ultimately hammers home a bland, judgemental, conservative morality.
Finney, on impeccable form as ever (he’s another of those great old British actors seemingly incapable of giving a bad performance, even when, as here, the material may leave a bit to be desired), takes the lead as Maurice Allington, landlord of the eponymous Green Man, a country inn and hotel on the outskirts of Cambridge. His well-worn, Sean Connery-esque white tux and smooth talking charm just barely disguise the fact that he’s a high-functioning alcoholic fighting nervous exhaustion and anxiety, washing down anti-depressants with a bottle of scotch a day. Living with him in The Green Man are his aged father, his wife, his teenage daughter – and, it seems, a couple of ghosts. A key sales point of the inn is its allegedly haunted history, which Maurice has theatrically retold to swathes of guests over the years. But as his nightmares begin to spill over into his waking hours, Maurice realises there may be more truth to those old wives’ tales than he had previously believed.
I find it rather odd that Simply Media have opted to emblazon the back cover of this DVD edition with the bold heading, “He’ll leave you SCREAMING… with laughter!”, with the below synopsis describing the series as “part sex farce, part supernatural thriller.” While there are comedic elements for sure – and, again, Finney brings his usual, seemingly effortless wit – The Green Man is hardly laugh out loud material; indeed, I’m pretty sure I didn’t laugh once, aside from at the painfully misjudged dramatic guitar solo played over a montage in the final episode. As for the sex farce angle: one facet of Finney’s character which the show struggles with is that, on top of being a paranoid delusional alcoholic, he’s also a compulsive womaniser, and apparently quite a successful one; throughout the first episode he unsubtly woos the wife of a close friend, who proves receptive – despite the fact that, y’know, he looks like Albert Finney. There’s also a large amount of screentime given to an ultimately rather inconsequential subplot about Maurice trying to coax his wife and mistress into a threesome. That this story thread is so heavily emphasised despite how little bearing it has on the main narrative and how quickly it is discarded once the deed itself sort-of comes to pass, it just feels profoundly misjudged, and again indicative of a desire to hook viewers with the promise of something a bit raunchy – which ultimately it isn’t. It all feels a bit Daily Mail, leering voyeuristically at other people’s more adventurous sex lives but ultimately condemning them as immoral and pathetic, which all feels very two-faced And, of course, there’s no missing the fact that Finney looks like Finney, whilst his co-stars Linda Marlowe and Sarah Berger are somewhat younger-looking and certainly more physically fit, so there’s a bit of those old double standards at play.
On top of all this, the ghost story which should almost certainly provide the main thrust of the story almost feels like an afterthought. Josie Lawrence, instantly recognisable to 90s kids as a staple player on improvisational comedy series Whose Line Is It Anyway, is laboured with an utterly two-dimensional role as Maurice’s daughter-in-law who, rather conveniently, happens to be a new age hippy with an in-depth knowledge of the paranormal; and, as such, she pops up any time we need a bit of exposition. Some of the supernatural stuff is handled quite well – the aforementioned opening scene, Michael Culver’s performance and look as principal ghost Underhill – but then there are some odd choices such as a scene in which Finney comes under attack from a very poorly realised phantom bat. In a standard, Hammer-type Gothic horror, such moments would no doubt be part of the fun, but in a drama that is largely played straight it just feels incongruous and silly.
Perhaps with a bit of the fat trimmed, The Green Man might have made for decent enough feature film; or, perhaps with a bit more fleshing out, it might have wound up more satisfying as a four or five episode series. But as a two and a half hour three-part miniseries it just feels awkward; overlong in some places, rushed in others, and more concerned with keeping its leading man front and centre than crafting a fully realised story world. Okay, so if you’re going to keep a leading man front and centre throughout, you can do a hell of a lot worse than to give the part to Albert Finney – but even so, it would have been nice if the same level of care and attention had been given to every facet of The Green Man. All in all, it hardly ranks as one of the great horror highlights of TV history, but as a time capsule of the BBC on the cusp of the 1990s it’s an interesting historical artifact.
Oh, and the pagan icon of the title barely gets a look in, if you were wondering.
The Green Man is released to Region 2 DVD on 5th October, from Simply Media.