Director – Alan Clarke, Teleplay – David Rudkin, Producer – David Rose, Animation – Bernard Lodge, Special Effects – Clifford Culley, Design – Michael Edwards. Production Company – BBC.
Cast
Spencer Banks (Stephen Franklin), John Atkinson (Reverend J. Franklin), Georgine Anderson (Mrs Franklin), Ian Hogg (Arne), Ron Smerczak (Joel), Jennie Heslewood (Mrs Arne), Graham Leaman (Sir Edward Elgar), Ivor Roberts (Cooke), John Richmond (Headmaster), Christopher Douglas (Honeybone), Joan Scott (The Lady), Ray Gatenby (The Man)
Plot
In Worcestershire, seventeen-year-old Stephen Franklin is the son of a local rector and attends a military school. He is plagued by visions of angels and demons, along with homoerotic dreams. Through these he begins to search for a deeper truth behind the religion and history of the land that was once ruled by King Penda. In so doing, he discovers truths about his own identity and form a decision to take a stand against the future planned out for him.
I became fascinated with Penda’s Fen after hearing it mentioned in the documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), which conducts a standout discussion of the development of Folk Horror on screens. The film originally aired as a TV Movie on the BBC’s Play for Today (1970-84) showcase.
None of that quite prepares you for Penda’a Fen as it opens. Spencer Banks is an average schoolboy attending some type of military cadet training school. The setting is a placid country church vicarage; the sleepy fields and lanes in the Worcestershire countryside, along which we see such utterly ordinary things as Spencer Banks riding his bicycle and a rural milk delivery truck; and an English prep school with the choir singing hymns surrounded by walls embossed with Latin and Greek phrases of inspiration. It is the world of a lost English childhood. In the initial scenes, Spencer Banks comes across as a right little moral prig denouncing as trash a tv documentary that examines the evidence of Christianity.
The opening scene has Spencer Banks listening to Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius (1900) and thinking about Elgar. While this seems the stuff of utterly dull British arts program, instead the scene comes alive in Banks’ voiceover as he contemplates what an amazing mind Elgar, a Worcestershire local, must have had to look out at the same landscape beyond his window and in his head imagine being able to see Heaven and Hell and the world beyond. It is an extraordinary piece of writing and immediately lifts the quality of the production. (Later in the show, we get an appearance from the ghost of Elgar and he and Banks discuss one of Elgar’s unfinished works).
Spencer Banks and golden angelSpencer Banks with demon figure perched on the end of his bed
The film is filled with all manner of fascinating discussions that head off at a tangent – Ian Hogg talking about union rights and detracting off to conspiracy theories about the government building secret sites beneath the rural landscape; or of Spencer Banks raising classroom discussions about the Manichean Heresy – where Christianity is seen as a fight between good and evil forces, something that plays out in his dream symbolism later in the film. Or of King Penda, a real-life historical figure in 7th Century England, who defended Anglo-Saxon paganism at a time when Christianity was conquering the country, and whether Penda represented a religion that was much older than modern traditions, which Banks’ father the vicar (John Atkinson) is writing a study on.
And then there is the point when the film starts to get into its wild visions. It is never entirely clear what they are – literal figures? hallucinations inside the troubled mind of Spencer Banks? Allegorical representations of his state of mind? He sees giant demon and angel figures appearing from behind the hills and church. He has a homoerotic dream and wakes from it to find a demon figure that resembles something like the gargoyle Bok from the Doctor Who episode The Daemons (1971) perched on the end of the bed. Later as Banks squats in the marshes (the titular fen), an angel figure all in gold stands beside him. In the climactic scenes, we get an appearance from King Penda himself.
Penda’s Fen is frustrating to try and view it in terms of a story as it isn’t a plot so much as a series of overlapping meditations and monologues on assorted subjects and contrasts between the two – folk religion of the region vs Christianity, English tradition vs the rising radical left of the 1960s, adoption vs the purity of English blood. In what was quite daring for the early 1970s, the film also has Spencer Banks coming to the realisation that he is gay and then making the decision that he must defy the tradition of his upbringing, making Penda’s Fen in essence a Coming of Age story. In the end, King Penda rises to tell Spencer Banks he must keep alive the flame of ungovernableness and bids Spencer to be “dark, true, impure and dissonant.” Quite an extraordinary work.
Director Alan Clarke (1935-1990) worked in British television and made a number of other tv plays. His most well known works were the films Scum (1979), a brutal depiction of life in a prison, and the harsh social realism of Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987). His one other genre work was Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1990) about a vampire pool player. Writer David Rudkin also worked in the tv play arena and made one other work about King Penda with The Coming of the Cross (1975). His other genre works include another work of Folk Horror with The Ash Tree (1975) and an adaptation of Gawain and the Green Knight (1991), as well as a credit for additional dialogue on Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966).
