Appropriately, there are several works from this same period that strikingly pre-figure Penda’s Fen. Machen’s 1922 novel The Secret Glory relates the history of a Midlands public school boy whose ecstatic visions of the Holy Grail facilitate his escape from his outsider misery, and redeem his failure to fall into step with the system. John Buchan’s 1899 short story “The Far Islands” concerns another public schoolboy beset by visions — this time inspired by his Celtic ancestral inheritance — that again compromise his ability to take his rightful place in the establishment. In this story and others, Buchan flirted with notions of identity and racial inheritance that found grotesque expression in the German proto-Nazi Völkisch movement, with its insistence on identity and national purity based on “blood and soil”. It is the heady and toxic temptations of this version of romantic nationalism that — thanks to his father’s influence, the revelation of his own origins, and the related visions — Stephen is ultimately and happily able to resist and exorcize from his psyche.

Originally produced and broadcast as an episode of Play For Today, Penda’s Fen was written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke (who later admitted that he didn’t fully understand the script). I began to think of ‘burials’—like the legend of King Arthur, not dead but merely sleeping underground to wake again on a trumpet blast in England’s hour of peril. But I was becoming interested in another king—only a century after Arthur. And, if this king’s name is not exactly a household word, that’s because he was on the losing side. But he is a historical reality—we have the dates of his reign, the battles he fought. He was the last pagan king in England; I was thinking of Penda of Mercia… Child be Strange, A Symposium on Penda’s Fen is at BFI Southbank on Saturday June 10th Information hereEven though the Midlands was a cornerstone of the industrial revolution, because of its natural resources, it also produced plenty of dissenters and radicals, most prominently in the Lunar Society and Victorians such as Darwin. Penda’s Fen features the hymn Jerusalem, said by many to be England’s unofficial anthem. The words were by William Blake who was staunch anti industrialist. Blake makes reference to ‘dark Satanic Mills’ which has been interpreted as factory workers who were working under the yolk of the rich, including the monarchy. Blake believed that industrialisation mechanised the lives of people and saw it as an evil. As Stephen’s mum tells him, ‘A man cannot leave the belt for one moment, without calling a stand-in to take his place. The belt moves on regardless of the needs of men…It gets at his heart, his life’s whole rhythm gets chained to the machine.’

The wars that Penda waged against his Christianised neighbours were not religious wars—in fact, Penda himself did not try to prevent his son and daughter from becoming Christians as part of the dynastic marriage pacts they made—he was fighting for the political survival of Mercia. Not many years after the battle in which he died, England was Christianised—yet the old, dark ‘demon’ of Penda’s England refuses to lie down… Robin Carmody. "Penda's Fen". Elidor.freeserve.co.uk. Archived from the original on 4 September 2012 . Retrieved 5 September 2012. Tales of the Gold Monkey 1 9 8 2 - 1 9 8 3 (USA) 22 x 60 minute episodes Jake Cutter (Stephen Collins) was a… The play was released on limited-edition Blu-ray and DVD in May 2016. [8] In an essay published with the release, Sukhdev Sandhu argues that "Penda's Fen" "is, long before the term was first used to describe the work of directors such as Todd Haynes and Isaac Julien, a queer film". According to Sandhu, the play presents Stephen's discovery of his homosexuality as "a gateway drug to a new enlightenment" that "inspires heterodoxy". [9] See also [ edit ]I’ve never taken Honeybone’s name as being anything other than a pretty broad phallic metaphor even though that character may have been based on a real person. I think I’ve read that his first play was based on his own experience of farm work so there’s already a precedent for using his life as material. Spencer Banks is the principal actor in Penda’s Fen, playing Stephen Franklin, an 18-year-old in his final days at school. The BBC’s Radio Times magazine described the film briefly: Some still think of Elgar as the archetypal country gentleman whose music enshrines the noblest sentiments of patriotism and faith. That way of looking at him is similar to Stephen’s outlook on the world at the beginning of the film Elgar was, in fact, a tradesman’s son who married above himself and was socially over-sensitive all his life… It is through the benign paternal influence of Reverend Franklin, as well as the more strident one of Arne, that Stephen’s Blakean visions work against his previously held convictions — by the end of the film, he is no longer in danger of growing up into Nigel Farage. Before he is redeemed by the “true” Jesus and the pagan King Penda, he must escape the attentions of the “Mother and Father of England”, the embodiment of the censorious establishment reaction to the social revolution of the 1960s.

Simmonds, Paul. "100 best British films: The list - Time Out London". Timeout.com . Retrieved 5 September 2012.Written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke, Penda's Fen was first broadcast in 1974 as part of the BBC's Play for Today series. It tells the story of seventeen year-old Stephen, a middle-class pastor's son who has a bizarre series of encounters with angels, the composer Edward Elgar, and King Penda, the mythical last pagan ruler of England. These encounters - whether real or imagined - force Stephen to question his religious beliefs, his politics and his sexuality. The earth beneath your feet feels solid there. It is not. Somewhere there the land is hollow. Somewhere beneath, is being constructed, something. We’re not supposed to know.” But I didn’t want to think merely of the past—I wanted to open a futuristic window on the landscape, too. So into the story is borne Arne, the embittered neighbour who offers Stephen a savage political outlook on tomorrow’s world…

Rudkin, who saw himself as a political writer placed himself into the film as the reactionary playwright, Arne (Ian Hog) who lives with his wife (Jennie Heslewood, unfortunately only named ‘Mrs Arne’). At a debate in the local village hall, Arne is answering a question about the strikes which ground Britain to a halt during much of the 70s concluding in the ‘winter of discontent’. Arne is arguing against the assertion that the strikers are holding the country to ransom which was a common refrain at the time. Arne instead tries to divert attention to the government which he sees as secretive and malevolent. In 1974, the BBC broadcast the film Penda’s Fen, leaving audiences mystified and spellbound. “Make no mistake. We had a major work of television last night,” The Times declared the next morning. Written by the playwright and classicist David Rudkin, the film follows Stephen, an 18-year-old boy, whose identity, sexuality, and suffocating nationalism unravel through a series of strange visions. After its original broadcast, Penda’s Fen vanished into mythic status, with only a single rebroadcast in 1990 sustaining its cult following. Penda’s Fen has now become totemic for those interested in Britain’s deep history, folklore, and landscape. He dreams of naked classmates and of a demon (Geoffry Pennells) sitting on his bed. He sees an angel in a stream (Martin Reynolds) and meets quintessential (deceased) English composer Edward Elgar (Graham Leaman) who tells him the secret of his Enigma Variations. A middle class pastor's son has dreams of angels and the pagan King Penda that force him to question many of his beliefs and opinions. Show full synopsis Rudkin shows the English countryside as a place, not of becalmed continuity and ‘old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’, but as a historical battleground and in constant turmoil. It offers wormholes and geysers, faultlines that fertilise, ruptures that release energy. It’s a philosophy of pastoral – and of what makes a nation – that sloughs off Little Englandism and Middle Earthism in favour of something less self-satisfied and more attuned to its lurking darknesses.Sorrell and Son 1 9 8 4 (UK) 6 x 50 minute episodes This six-part miniseries from Yorkshire Television begins during Britain's economic slump… Penda’s Fen was written and broadcast during a particularly tumultuous time in British history. At its core, it can be said to be an exploration of the notion of ‘Englishness’. This was partly because of the National Front who formed in 1967 as a reaction against predominately South Asian immigration. By the mid-70s the National Front was the fourth largest political party in the UK and Penda’s Fen is set in Birmingham which was Enoch Powell’s constituency. In fact, Powell gave his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, at the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham. West Country Tales 1 9 8 2 - 1 9 8 3 (UK) 14 x 30 minute episodes This supernatural anthology drama series was… Penda's Fen" is the 16th episode of fourth season of the British BBC anthology TV series Play for Today. The episode was a television play that was originally broadcast on 21 March 1974. "Penda's Fen" was written by David Rudkin, directed by Alan Clarke, produced by David Rose, and starred Spencer Banks. [1] Plot [ edit ] Music from Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius features throughout the play. The 1971 Decca recording by Benjamin Britten with Yvonne Minton as the Angel is used, and the album itself features as a prop. Extracts from Elgar's Introduction and Allegro are also heard.