Like ‘What wanker wrote this?’ Part of you has to look at the material like you’re someone who’s

Like ‘What wanker wrote this?’ Part of you has to look at the material like you’re someone who’s being forced to watch it against your will.”"I’ll try not to smoke too much,” says Bleasdale as the first 20 minutes of episode four begin He torches up after three minutes. His body language, as he leans forward in his seat, then slumps back, speaks loud and clear, and he punctuates it with the occasional sigh and one stark expletive of surprise. When the gap for the commercial break arrives, he looks at his notes, pauses, and delivers his verdict. “You haven’t half thrown it about, have you?”The cause of Bleasdale’s grievance is two-pronged. In his script, episode four resumed where episode three left off, at a birthday party given for Don Page, the racing driver. This was conceived as one of the big set pieces of the drama, with a line-dance peopled by celebs for hire, like Lionel Blair, Victor Ubogu and Ian St John.

The police arrive at the party and interrupt the line-dance to tell the lead characters that X is dead. Director, cast and crew went to great lengths to choreograph and film the line-dance, but Anderson has unsentimentally skewered it. Another scene, in which the news is broken to the assembled characters, has also gone.”I didn’t know where I was,” says Bleasdale, “and I wrote it. I was really baffled by that.”"I think that first part is still slow,” says Anderson cautiously.Keith Thompson chips in: “I know there was a lot of argument about not having much of the party, but I do miss some of it.”"What do you miss out of it?” asks Green.”I miss the police arriving.”"I miss that,” adds Bleasdale “I was absolutely shocked when it wasn’t there We know what’s happening It’s not necessarily so that an audience will.

You have to go to the party.”"The party’s over,” counters Anderson with some emphasis.”The audience will have forgotten about the party as soon as they’ve seen the shooting at the end of the episode, rather than the fag end of the party, which just serves the purpose of telling the other suspects about the death. What do we gain by seeing them being told something we already know? And the answer is not very much.”Bleasdale sighs heavily. “That introduction is more settling than what we have at the moment. At the top of this episode we have to bring these people back, and if we go down the line that we’ve gone down now, my instincts tell me that that is wrong for the whole five or six hours of the piece. It’s worth at the top of this, having seen a quite startling and brutal death at the end of the last episode, that we can take that time to bring these people back, because we know as an audience, even if we don’t have a clue who it is, that someone amongst these people has done these murders We need to see the round-up of the usual suspects. There they are.”"I seriously don’t,” says Anderson, perceptibly suppressing the vexation in his voice.

“This is just two policemen procedurally rounding up some people, taking them to a room and telling them that their friend’s died We’re just saying, ‘Here they are. You got five minutes, everybody?’ “We have reached an impasse. Neither writer nor director are prepared to give way, and there is only one solution: send it to arbitration “I tell you what I think we should do,” says Anderson. “I think we should show it to Peter without the party.”Peter Ansorge, whom Bleasdale first came across in the corridors of BBC Peeble Mill in the 1970s, is the commissioning editor for drama at Channel 4, and has been his executive producer since GBH. In situations like this, Ansorge is granted the casting vote. Anderson’s argument is that Bleasdale only misses the party because he knows it exists. It’s his hope that Ansorge, who was sent an assembly of all the filmed material at the time of shooting, will have completely forgotten about the party, and won’t mourn its absence.

“Peter,” says Bleasdale, using a favourite phrase of approbation , “is by no shadow of anyone’s imagination anyone’s fool He’s always on the money. The only trouble is that I’ve tended to lose every fucking argument.”The rest of the episode is viewed with relative equanimity, and after tossing in the old minor quibble Bleasdale repairs to the production office to nurse his wounds. His hands are shaking as he cracks into a fourth can of Diet Coke. “It can be more heated than that,” he says, “but not much more You see me at what is a very naked time for me These are terrible things to go through … It does hurt when things are on the floor.” He says he feels acutely conscious that Anderson is “much more articulate than me. I feel in his company occasionally that I’m some kind of idiot savant. But if somebody’s got a better argument than me I’ll shut up.