People and Personalities

Playwright, screenwriter and television producer Brian Clemens’ distinguished career has taken him on an eclectic journey.

After aspirations to be a journalist as a youngster, he became a Weapons Training Instructor for the Royal Ordnance Corps during his National Service, before becoming a messenger boy turned copywriter for Thompson Advertising Agency.

But, it is as a writer and producer that he is best known, especially for his involvement with some of the most popular TV series broadcast between the early 60s and 90s including ‘The Avengers’, ‘The Persuaders’, BAFTA award-winning ‘My Wife Next Door’, ‘Perry Mason’, ‘Bergerac’ and of course ‘The Professionals’, plus films and other TV series too numerous to count!

He has worked extensively on both sides of the Atlantic and, still producing scripts, he now works in the countryside idyll which is his home, just outside Ampthill in Bedfordshire.

Nick Barclay & Mark Moraghan in Strictly Murder

In addition to his successful television and film career, Brian’s repertoire for stage incorporates some 14 plays, and one of these can be seen at the Grove Theatre in Dunstable this month. (June 2009)

Rave reviews

Strictly Murder received its World Premiere in 2006 where it was received by rave reviews and described by the press as, ‘one of the best murder mysteries’ which ‘grips you by the throat from start to finish’. This current tour promises more of the same - deceit, subterfuge, murder, bluff and double bluff.

“It’s all set in 1939 on the eve of war” explained Brian, “but I can’t really tell you too much about the premise of the play without giving away what it’s about!

“It’s about a young couple who are not married but she would very much like to be. They are living in near poverty and he scrapes a living as an artist and she helps clean in the local hotel. Into their lives comes a stranger and it suddenly takes a gory twist from then on.

“It’s not so much a murder mystery because we sort of know whodunit, but we’re not sure why? [It’s a] what the hell’s going on dunnit.”

Of course, you may ask why such a new play has been set 70 years ago, but on this Brian is very clear.

“The reason I set it in 1939 is that modern technology has ruined things for the thriller writer” he explained!

“[Things like] DNA and hand held phones mean that you can no longer have the vicar doing it in the library. So I’ve gone back to the time when technology was still in its infancy. And that way you can write a play that develops through its characterisation.”

Different

Writing for the stage came later than writing for TV and film and Brian explained how it’s a very different discipline. For a start he revealed that the “writer is king” because he often gets calls asking if the odd word in the script can be changed.

“Also” he said, “I can only compare it to being a professional golfer who takes up tennis. It’s exercising a whole new set of muscles. In the movies and on television you can really put anything on screen.

“You can go to the south of France if it demands it, you can have a car chase etc etc but you have to put all of those things on stage without actually doing them. You have to do them retrospectively or in dialogue in some way so it’s a very interesting thing to do.

“I find it quite fascinating to take a premise and think ‘can I get it all into one set with a minimum of characters’?

As a discipline, it sounds more challenging, so does Brian find it more satisfying creatively when writing stage plays?

“I find anything that I finish and is a success satisfying but yes” he said, “I do enjoy writing for the stage, very much.”

Voracious

But Brian is probably best-known for his TV and film writing and, on the Internet, there are pages and pages devoted to all that he has produced. It seems that he is a man who has been able to fulfil his dreams because he always wanted to be a writer.

“I have two books that I wrote and illustrated when I was about six” he said, “and when I was about 10 my father said ‘what do you want to be when you grow up’ and I said ‘a writer’. He was very supportive in that he bought me an old typewriter. Consequently, by the time I was about 12 I was the fastest two fingered typist in the world and still am!”

He initially wanted to be a journalist and after National Service he started out as a messenger boy in Fleet Street but feels that a lack of schooling prevented this:

“I was a war baby and I really only got about two years schooling and left at 15 but I was a voracious reader” he explained.

“I had an uncle who used to clear out libraries and he’d bring books, leave them with me and I’d read them all. I read everything so I was pretty literate really.”

Then came his big break. He wrote a silent play called Murder Anonymous and sent it to the BBC. They got back to him but said that while it was clear he could write, the play would take 50 cameras to shoot. So they invited him to lunch and to see the studios to see what they could and couldn’t do.

“So I went” he said, “and immediately perceived that just like today, they’ve got no money! So I went away and wrote a play about two men in a railway carriage and they made it”

Headhunted

As a result of that, Brian was headhunted by a couple of Americans called the Danziger Brothers who worked over here and made lots and lots of product but very cheaply. He said that this was the best training in the world for him because they used to make such unusual demands on him!

“Before they built their own studios they would go from studio to studio just occupying the space and the facilities” he explained.

“If they went to MGM they might find that they’d just finished a French Chateau film there, then down in the next stage they’d find a submarine or something like that. So they’d come to me and say ‘we want a movie, 80 minutes long and it must have the Old Bailey, a French Chateau and a submarine in it’! So I used to write that to order!

“I worked with them for nearly six years during which time I wrote nearly 38 second feature films and yards and yards of TV series.

“My best experience was working for them as I think I’m unique from a British writer point of view, because apart from that first early sortie into television, I really evolved as a film writer whereas with most people it’s the other way around these days. Even in the past, you worked in television and hopefully broke into movies – well I broke into movies early. [and that makes it easier to move into TV.]

Moonlighting

Somehow Brian also found time to moonlight as well as working with the Danziger Brothers, who used to give him a week to write half an hour for TV and three weeks to write an 80 minute movie. At the same time, he was headhunted by Dangerman – the Patrick McGoohan series, where he wrote the pilot then script edited 26 episodes, and then he was headhunted again and took over Ghost Squad and re-wrote it.

And then of course, along came The Avengers.

Brian is often described as the creative force behind this show but he said that it didn’t come from him originally.

There was a series called Police Doctor which wasn’t very successful, but the character in it, David Keel played by Ian Hendrie was good, so it was decided to move him into another series. They moved him into The Avengers which was to be about two people fighting crime [and avenging people].

“That was the creation” said Brian. “That’s all. That was the brief, then I took that brief and made it into the pilot episode.

“I wasn’t employed by them all the time but I came in and did various scripts, particularly the Honour Blackman ones” he added.

“I became very familiar with it and a driving force on where The Avengers was going. Then that finished and they put it on film. The producers said they wanted somebody who knows film and knows The Avengers and I was uniquely qualified.

“Now, this is where I will say I created The Avengers” he continued.

“I created the filmed Avengers. The Emma Peel Avengers onwards, because that was a completely different beast to the videotaped ones. So I will accept that as my creation and it became a long step away from what I did before and a huge success.”

Guiding force

He said in being the guiding force behind the show, he never wrote down ground rules for what each character thought, he just knew what to do!

“I instinctively knew what was right and what was wrong for The Avengers” he said.

“We had a very twisted, strange attitude. We’d take stories like High Noon and do them Avengers style so it became a completely different beast. And we did that with The Maltese Falcon and Sherlock Holmes and various things like that.

“We would invert the cliché and Sherlock Holmes is a very good example of the way that I was thinking. There’s a chalk-marked outline of a body which we’ve all seen before, then a man comes in who is shot and falls exactly into the chalk line. That’s the Avengers way of doing things!”

One of Brian’s other huge successes was The Professionals which, while it was action-packed, was also a family show, unlike some of today’s police / action series.

“Today they show you everything” explained Brian.

“I’ve always believed that you can tackle any subject in the world as long as you do it with taste and as long as you know what you’re doing.”

Commissioned

The Professionals came about after Brian said that they ought to do something  that was absolutely not The Avengers.

“It came about because Brian Tesler at LWT said he’d like to do a ‘buddy’ series” said Brian.

“I came up with two ideas. One was about undercover cops and one was The Professionals. He [Tesler] liked it and said write me a script and if I like it we’ll make 13. That’s unheard of today. If we did 24 we’d have to call it 3!

“So I wrote it, he liked it, we made it and we were commissioned for 13 which then escalated and eventually we did 57 I think.

“The funny thing was it took off with the viewers but not the critics” he added.

“They kept comparing it with The Sweeney, but the funny thing is now, in retrospect, they re-run The Professionals much more than The Sweeney!”

With years of successful work behind him, Brian’s advice for aspiring writers is simple. You just have to do it!

"People say to me 'I want to write'" he revealed, "and I always say, 'well, why are you talking to me? Why aren't you at home writing?' That's what you do.

Mystique

The Danzigers taught me so many things. One thing they said was 'there's no mystique to writing, it's just ‘arse to chair, and pen to paper’ and I've never forgotten that.

"When I've had writers block, I don't go off and play golf or something like that. Lots of writers welcome writer's block because although they love writing they don't want to write. But I like writing!"

Brian is still writing, he says he never runs out of ideas and admitted at the time of the interview that he had about eight running round his head at that time. However, he does feel that the TV and film industry has changed beyond recognition over the years and not always for the better.

One thing that hasn’t changed though, is that he has forgone modern technology and still uses his trusty typewriter!

“It’s more sure” he explained.

“Because modern technology has got Gremlins and they always come out when you least want them. Plus there’s the fact that I like the sound.

“When I worked and lived in Hollywood it was very difficult to find a manual typewriter so most of the time I worked on a word processor.

“But I hate the sound of it because writing by definition is a solitary task and the sound of the [typewriter] keys is comforting. Sometimes when I was working on word processors in a very quiet office I’d stop, and think perhaps the world has ended and nobody has told me!”

And that sounds like the start of another Clemens series!