WHEN I watched Edge of Darkness for the third time, in New Zealand in late 1986, its impact was different and its depth had increased.
It was first broadcast in 1985 and I remember even now how it had me literally sitting on the edge of my seat by the end of the penultimate episode. The second time, the emotions felt stronger but the tension inevitably lessened. The third time, on the other side of the world, the factually global reach of the work’s imagination was empowered by an anti-nuclear, nuclear-free state standing in opposition to its shady hinterland of corporate industries.
Watching the whole series again recently, what’s lastingly impressive is the sheer qualitative skill of the writing, the editing and construction of the story, everything that lies behind and brings to the forefront of the screen the characters’ performances and interactions, the electricity of the drama enacted.
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This can be sampled simply through scenes and dialogue.
Towards the end of Episode 2, Craven meets Jedburgh with two of his fellow CIA operatives, whom he introduces as Colonel Robert G Kelly and Colonel Mad Mike Merryweayther, just returned from South America. The three of them have been having a late-night “celebration dinner” at the Tiberio restaurant. They sit at the table opposite each other and Jedburgh steers Craven towards the subject of country music, Willie Nelson and “that song that Willie had out about a year ago? ... The Time of the Preacher. Something about the year of 01. You familiar with the words at all?” They recognise mutually some significance in the ballad and, piecing it together, begin to sing it.
But the words they sing aren’t quite the same as those in the original (which we quoted last week):
Craven: “It was the Time of the Preacher In the year of 01 And just when you think it’s all over It has only begun …”
Jedburgh: No, no, Craven: “Now the lesson’s all over And the killing’s begun…”
Craven: That comes later.
Jedburgh: All right. You remember what comes in between? Wait – here it goes (he begins to sing, out of tune): “But he cannot forgive her. Though he tried and he tried.”
Craven: “In the halls of his memories still echo her eyes And he cried like a baby And he screamed like a panther in the middle of the night And he saddled his pony And he went for a ride.
It was the time of the preacher In the year of 01 Now the lesson is over And the killing’s begun …”
(There is a silence. They stare at each other.) Jedburgh: You know what the term “preacher” signifies, don’t you, Craven?
Craven: Gun.
Jedburgh: A gun. The time of the preacher is the time of the gun, in the year of 01, and just when you think it is all over, it is only begun … It’s quite a thought, something we ought to reflect upon.
At this moment, Merryweather lays his head on the table with a dull thud and goes to sleep. Jedburgh contemplates this, then looks back at Craven and says: “I think we ought to get these boys to bed, Craven. I guess they’re all tuckered out.”
This signals a shared mystery. Jedburgh seems to know something about the ballad’s significance, but we do not, and neither does Craven understand what its significance might have been for his murdered daughter, Emma. The whole scene hovers between sinister threat and comic ebullience as Jedburgh looms large and Falstaffian and his two CIA colleagues are drunk, flopped on the table in front of them. The dark implications of what they have been doing in South America are balanced against their post-festive repletion, which is cut through when Merryweather sobers up utterly for a moment and tells Craven: “I just want to say … I was damned sorry to hear about your daughter.”
Seriousness shifts through the comedy and the securities of comic characterisation are destabilised by shady mystery. We are left with a sense of not knowing what’s really going on under the surface, and a fearful foreboding that something very serious is taking place down there.
Jedburgh and Craven take Jedburgh’s two CIA colleagues home from the Tiberio restaurant in London to their hotel and the conversation turns to golf.
Jedburgh: When I think of St Andrews and Carnoustie and Leith, I begin to realise that it is more than a coincidence that divine providence has brought forth oil from the depth of the North Sea. That oil will help to save the golf courses of Scotland.
Craven: From what?
Jedburgh: From the Communists, Craven. Can you imagine what would happen to the golf courses of this country if a Communist government ever got in power? God may not be a Communist Craven, he may not even be a Republican, but I know damned well he’s not a member of the Socialist Advance.
This is full of prolepsis. While it establishes Jedburgh’s attractively outrageous eccentricity, it also foreshadows the political tensions that will become increasingly fierce.
If Edge of Darkness seems to pick up from The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil, as I argued last week, it points forward to a world in which Emma’s boyfriend’s party, the Socialist Advance, is negligible in the larger power-play. Danger goes with depth and knowledge. At two different points in the series (in episodes three and five), Jedburgh comes out with the phrase: “To know is to die.” THE first time, he’s addressing the nuclear corporate boss Jerry Grogan, the ultimate villain in the scenario, if a single-person villain is needed (there are others); the second time, he’s talking to himself. In both instances, the words are horribly prophetic.
In Episode three, Craven tells Emma’s ghost, “You took on some of the toughest men in the most dangerous business on this Earth …” and in Episode four, in a flashback, he is shown telling her about the nuclear industry: “It’s the most dangerous business in Britain.” After he decides that he must get into the nuclear plant at Northmoor himself, Emma’s ghost returns and asks him what he is going to do. “I’m going to go in,” he says. She approves but ironically cautions him: “I thought you said it was the most dangerous business in England run by the most dangerous men.”
Relieved that his mind is made up, Craven jokes: “You’re exaggerating again.” But the elisions across the episodes between “on this Earth”, “Britain” and “England” quietly suggest nuclear power has nothing to do with national boundaries.
But it has everything to do with imperialism and has global consequences. In fact, small nation states like New Zealand or Ireland – states like New Zealand or Ireland or Scotland as it could become – might be the only feasible defence against it. Even the vexed relationship between Westminster and Northern Ireland is presented as background to the central concerns of the series. Emma’s killer is discovered to be a former IRA man, McCroon, who introduces Craven’s unsavoury previous work as a special police agent recruiting Irish informers.
When Craven visits his friend Mac, in hospital, we are told that they knew each other from that time in his life: “Lesson Number One, when fighting terrorism, is be ordinary… “
That put Mac at a disadvantage, he had red hair. From Portadown to Ballymena he was known as Carrot Top. It was only a matter of time before they got him.” The name and hair suggest he is Scottish, and the relationship emblematises Scottish complicity in British state power. The power structures thus sketched add a deeply ironic humour to the enigmatic dialogue at the end of Episode 4: Jedburgh: Still in one piece, I see.
Craven: What’s that supposed to mean?
Jedburgh: People have a habit of dissolving into their constituent parts these days. The political climate does not favour homogeneity … By Episode five, the global and mythic themes begin to dominate, and what started out within the conventions of a police procedural thriller (a Z-Cars for the 1980s) has turned into something much more potent.
This penultimate episode begins at Craven’s house, in rolling Yorkshire countryside where at dawn, in the garden, Jedburgh walks over to the tree near where Emma had been shot. Below it a freshwater spring is now cascading out. Around it are some wild marsh flowers. Craven is sitting on the steps beside it.
Jedburgh: Is this where she died?
Craven: He was over there… We were standing here … Jedburgh: Is this stream a permanent feature?
Craven: No. (He turns back towards the house.) It’s new The impact Episode 5 delivers is remarkable. Craven and Jedburgh descend through caverns and tunnels to a nuclear bunker, neglected since 1964, when it was set up during the Cuban missile crisis. Jedburgh describes it as “the floor of Plato’s cave” referring to the discussion about illusion and reality in Book VII of The Republic. Kennedy Martin notes: “Like his prisoners held in a cave who mistake the shadows on the wall for reality, in this nuclear world it is hard to tell what is real and what is an illusion.”
But the mythic framework affords some security:
Craven: Why do you hate Grogan so much?
Jedburgh: Because of who he is.
Craven: And who is he?
Jedburgh: He’s part of the Dark Forces who would rule this planet.
Craven: You believe in all that stuff?
Jedburgh: Yeah, sure. Why not? Look at yourself. You think of yourself as an English provincial detective whose daughter died in tragic circumstances. Yet where she fell a well sprang, flowers grew. Now what kind of power is that? (Craven is silenced for a moment.)
Craven: I don’t know.
As they leave, Jedburgh adds with Texan flair: “Mind you, I do have a personal grudge against Grogan – his great, great great-grandfather killed my great, great, great great-grandfather. We Jedburghs never forget …”
But the humour of the moment is countered as the camera zooms up to an open-palmed statue of Christ, his bleeding heart foregrounded in his chest and the clay in close-up foreshadowing the appearance of the decaying flesh that will be seen on Jedburgh’s and Craven’s faces in Episode six, after their fatal exposure to radiation.
That happens in the most conventionally thriller-like climax to the series, when masked and suited armed men at the nuclear power plant shoot it out with Craven and Jedburgh. Jedburgh steals the plutonium and they manage to escape.
As they are about to split up, the dialogue points forward to the final programme:
Jedburgh: Craven, if we make it, I’ll see you in Scotland.
Craven: Where?
Jedburgh: You’re the detective, find me.
The final episode, Episode six, is largely set in Scotland. Martin notes: “The Scottish locations were originally included as a homage to John Buchan.”
Craven has been caught but is in the custody of the Westminster snoops, Pendleton and Harcourt. Pendleton tells him when he wakes up that he is “in an American Air Force hospital” and the radiation sickness in him is “bad”. From this point on the tension increases as the days – later, hours – of the two principal characters are literally numbered. Pendleton reports to Harcourt.
Harcourt: Has Craven got any idea where Jedburgh went?
Pendleton: He says his last words were something about “meeting Moriarty at the Falls”!
Harcourt: If there is an Irish component to this, I shall retire.
The reference, of course, is to Sherlock Holmes, and the last story Conan Doyle hoped to write about him, in which he sends the detective plunging over the Reichenbach Falls locked in a fatal embrace with his arch-enemy Moriarty. The allusion is appropriately apocalyptic, though it does not refer to anything in the dialogue in the previous episode and Harcourt, Martin notes, “deliberately misunderstands”, playing on the thought that the reference is to the Falls Road in Belfast, and that the IRA might be more directly involved.
What the reference does very clearly, however, is to link Edge of Darkness back through John Buchan to Conan Doyle in a generic tradition of popular Scottish detective stories.
We finally meet Jedburgh again, at last on an actual golf course in Scotland, sporting a glaring tartan cap. When his golf partner Jemima tells him, “You’re in with a chance, my dear”, the line resonates into the script. After a “bloody good shot” she drives him to his guest house, dropping him off with a sprightly “home again, home again, jiggedy jig.” And again, while Jedburgh’s obvious physical decay counterpoints Jemima’s brightness, the line haunts the memory: Jedburgh is very far away from any sense of “home”.
Jemima asks him if he’s all right: “You’re not looking too good.” He gestures at the guest house behind him: “I think that old lady in there is trying to poison me.” As he goes in, he is greeted by the austere owner, Mrs Girvan, who accosts him: “Mr Jedburgh. [She pronounces it “Jedborough” as in the town in the Scottish Borders] You forgot your sandwich again today, Mr Jedburgh.”
She gets a good answer:
Jedburgh: Mrs Girvan, mince between two slices of white bread is not my idea of lunch. [On screen, Joe Don Baker, the actor playing Jedburgh, adds an angry “hell” here, further offending the old woman.] I’d rather eat the damned Bible.
Mrs Girvan: Mr Jedborough! Jedburgh: (Jedburgh corrects her): Jedburgh.
The comic beat of this exchange runs quickly along with the anger in the scene. Mrs Girvan is an ironic literary cousin to Holmes’s Mrs Hudson, Dr Finlay’s Janet, James Bond’s Mae and other matriarchal Scottish housekeepers.
Played to perfection by Irene Sunters, she jumps at the shock of Jedburgh’s blasphemy, her eyes starting open as her Calvinist domineering is rebuffed by a man who has no time for it.
But time is beginning to run out for everyone …
Next week: Over the precipice. The final reckoning.
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