There is plenty of cliche here but propounded with such enthusiasm that it’s hard to remain impervious

There is plenty of cliche here, but propounded with such enthusiasm that it’s hard to remain impervious. Time passes in skilfully handled, choreographic shifts, and near the beginning he pulls off a breathtaking coup de theatre, when the action freezes and we are given a chilly glimpse of the future, with one contestant, Gloria, lying dead at the end of the pier with her partner Robert, who has a smoking gun in his hand.
As the MC, Rocky, Peter Grayer is the production’s linchpin, starting with genial bonhomie and gradually being revealed as an oleaginous manipulator, remorselessly exploiting the crowd-pulling potential of the dancers and utterly lacking the humanity his showmanship trades on.Ray Herman’s adaptation drip feeds the individual stories of the hopefuls with uneven skill and the acting errs on the broad and bold side. Horace McCoy’s novel (later a film with Jane Fonda) captures the survivalist barbarity in this bizarre convention, and becomes a metaphor for life itself: the last couple on their feet gets the prize. In both scale and ambition, Neil Murray’s production of They Shoot Horses in Newcastle brilliantly creates a sense of event. He uses a live band and a large cast of extras so the stage is crowded with first hopeful, then dismally shuffling couples.

At the dances’ peak in the US in the Thirties, one dance could last several months and make big money for its promoters. In Depression-ridden America, the chance to win $1,000 cash just for non-stop dancing (and to be fed and accommodated for the duration) was an irresistible lure. The marathon dances were mass entertainment on a par with the gladiators’ games in Roman times, and almost as sadistic. If he has anything to complain about, it might be that a thoughtful and sympathetic portrait of his life went out of its way to make itself unlistenable to ; there’s a real injustice.. All things considered, Williamson’s not done too badly out of posterity. This may be true (although you suspect that it has more to do with the fact that his major work, the 14-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, sounds as though it has something to do with elves and goblins), but it’s hardly an injustice: deeply obnoxious and naive views strike me as pretty good grounds for dismissing a writer. And the nobility of that circle has not been completely broken.”But for all that the programme gripped, it was hard to agree with the thrust of its argument, that Williamson’s critical reputation has suffered unfairly because of his politics.

This provided the cue for a particularly painful bit of dialogue, in which we were shown the connection between Williamson’s politics and his love of nature: “The land is decaying,” he cries, “the mother of our race is losing fertility.” “Yes, dear,” his wife replies, “tell me about it later.”That aside, this section of the programme was fascinating, not least because of the contributions of Ronald Creasey, an associate of Williamson’s in the Thirties and still a miraculously unrepentant Mosleyite: “Anyone who thought, anyone with any intellectual capacity, was with us. The traditional sequence in every wildlife film in which some harmless, furry herbivore is ripped apart by merciless predators owes a lot to Williamson’s animals – always, commented one contributor, red in tooth and claw.Never red in politics, though: the other notable thing about Williamson was that he was an enthusiastic fascist, even a Nazi – he dedicated one of his books to “The Great Man across the Rhine” and painted a swastika on the wall of his cottage. These days, it’s treated as a children’s classic, though it’s far too violent to give to any sensitive child; but when it was first published it was taken seriously by the critical establishment, and its influence has been huge. Even if he had written nothing but Tarka, Williamson would be an interesting figure.

It isn’t a likeable or even a particularly good book, but it is an extraordinary attempt to portray nature in its own terms, without anthropomorphising. Right at the beginning, for instance, the listener was confronted with this slab of dialogue: “Now, sister Room 204, Mr Williamson Some sort of writer, isn’t he?” “Yes, doctor He wrote Tarka the Otter.” “Tarka the Otter Ha, yes, of course. I remember reading it as a child.”
For information value, I’d rate that fairly high, but it’s hard to point to what it conveys that the narrator couldn’t have told you in half as many words. Sadly, it set the pace for what was to come.All this made The Trials of Henry Williamson deeply frustrating to listen to – the more so because it was clearly such a damn good subject. Here we had the bizarre phenomenon of a rather well-made documentary peppered with dramatised sections apparently designed to get over a dry collection of facts with as little emotional impact as possible. What exactly is the point of drama-documentary? There are lots of possible answers, but a good general one is: to lend some emotional power to what would otherwise be a rather dry collection of facts.