Shoulder to Shoulder
Dame Siân Phillips celebrates the 50th-anniversary revival of a suffragette classic
Wednesday from 10.00pm BBC4
IT WAS LANDMARK television in its day. Told across six 75-minute BBC plays, Shoulder to Shoulder captured the resolve and bravery of the suffragettes – and the brutality they endured – in their fight for the right to vote in the early 1900s. When it first aired in 1974, Radio Times even published a 64-page guide to the programme and to the women’s suffrage movement, and for viewers 50 years ago, the series left a lasting impression. This BBC4 repeat is long overdue.
For Siân Phillips, 90, who starred as suffrage tte leader Emmeline Pankhurst, it was ground-breaking. “It was very unusual for the time because there were mainly women in the cast, and the producers were all women, too.” Shoulder to Shoulder had three creators: producer Verity Lambert, feminist film-maker Midge Mackenzie and performer Georgia Brown (all now dead). Brown cast herself as mill worker Annie Kenney, and even sang the theme tune, The March of the Women, which became an anthem after a rally in the Albert Hall in 1911.
Phillips was initially wary about an all-woman enterprise. “I thought it was going to be all rows and complaining about make-up and hair, but there was not one disagreement from beginning to end. We were together for seven months. I’ve never known such camaraderie. It was life-changing because it just showed what women could do, left to ourselves. We all started reading up on the suffragettes and became experts on the subject. We wanted script changes. The poor writers were going mad.”
The authorship of the series proved contentious. Fay Weldon was among the few women writing for TV in the 70s, but the tone of her drafts, depicting the f igureheads as flawed snobs, didn’t find favour with Brown or Mackenzie. To their chagrin, Lambert hired male dramatists, including Alan Plater. She also called in an old friend, Waris Hussein, to direct. Since they’d launched Doctor Who together in 1963, his career had soared with major plays and he was breaking into Hollywood. But “Verity wanted another man for balance”, says Hussein, 85, and she valued his particular affinity with actresses.
He cast Angela Down as the artistic Sylvia Pankhurst and reveals they sought Helen Mirren to play her sister Christabel. “Helen desperately wanted to do it, but she was working in America and couldn’t be released.” Instead, they hired Patricia Quinn, fresh from the original theatre run of The Rocky Horror Show.
HUSSEIN DIRECTED FOUR episodes, including the unforgettable part three starring Judy P
