Arthur of the Britons

Arthur
Warlord of the Britons

words by Peter Escourt
pictures by Stuart Sadd

The figure of King Arthur strides across the pages of British history like a giant, but it is the romantic figure of the Age of Chivalry, the figure that has inspired the songs of medieval troubadours and modern poets alike. In HTV’s new 24-part series, Arthur of the Britons, which begins this week, Arthur is brought from the world of legend to the world of reality and pictured, below, as he really was – a desperate sixth-century warlord struggling to hold off the English invaders leading small forays into their territory from a grubby little stronghold that became known, in later times, as the romantic Camelot.

Finding an actual location for Camelot was to the Middle Ages what Unidentified Flying Objects have been to this century. The riddle was romantic and happily unanswerable. Was it Winchester, Caerleon, Carlisle – or where? It was the one thing which, as a modern scholar has remarked, held them spellbound for three centuries.

But, since this summer, there have been no such doubts at HTV in Bristol: Camelot is about six miles from Stroud, Gloucestershire, a half-mile off the main road to Bath. They should know: their set-designers built it there for Arthur of the Britons.

It is small and rather grimy. A collection of small wooden huts, thatched with straw, insulated with mud, straggles along the lake shore. There are a few skins left out to dry, and a skin coracle pulled up out of the water. 

Certainly it isn't what scholars of the Middle Ages, or Alfred, Lord Tennyson, or any Hollywood mogul would recognise as Camelot. Ironically, Arthur himself might recognise it.

The series brings to television the most mysterious figure in our history, not as legend or romance would have him, but as he really must have been. It is the first time the historical Arthur has been presented dramatically on film.

It will be a great shock to viewers who see him as a great and cultivated king of the Middle Ages, all-wise and quite legendary. This was the Arthur of romance and legend: a golden figure whose empire of great palaces and towns stretched to Rome and beyond.

But the archaeological research of the 20th century suggests that there must have been someone there, a real man where the legends all begin. Drawing on this, the series seeks to show him as he was: a desperate guerrilla fighter trying to unite the rag-tag armies of Britain in the collapse which followed the Roman evacuation.

Arthur is doing this to fight off the barbarian invasions - which will prove a further shock to national susceptibilities: these barbarians are the English, coming from their ancestral lands in Germany, and the men in the white hats in Britain in the early sixth century were the Welsh. Arthur was a Welshman.

But he was not a king. Modern historical theories portray him as a professional soldier who, by strength of personality, held together a mounted force drawn from the petty kings of Britain. This force managed to inflict a series of defeats on the Saxons, who fought on foot. It eventually broke up when internal discord led to the civil war in which Arthur was killed.

No Guineveres,
Lancelots, Galahads
or Merlins. No
armour, no romance.
Just grime.

The gradual emergence of an historical Arthur, pieced together by scholars from recent excavations, old Welsh poetry, traditions and Dark Age chronicles, is one of the most romantic achievements of recent historical research. But it has meant that Arthur's world has shrunk from a great European stage, with thousands locked in
battle and besieging huge castles, to the forests of Dark Age Britain, where armies of a few hundred waged desperate little battles into which chivalry never came.

The historical Arthur is ideal for a television production. There are no elaborate sets to be built, no army to be hired, no plate armour to be assembled. There is just wood and straw and skins, everything small and grubby - but in the sixth century, anything can happen.

HTV are proud of their historical research. Their first big attempt to struggle out of the anonymity which can afflict regional TV companies was Pretenders, an historical series networked earlier this year. It was an account of the Monmouth rebellion in 1685 and the cameras went where the events actually took place. The Battle of Sedgemoor was filmed on Sedgemoor in Somerset and wandering bands of players got up to their mummeries in old West Country inns. The series was a success, and has been sold abroad.

With Arthur of the Britons the company feels it is on to another winner. The same production team is involved. Networking is guaranteed and an American distributor has been acquired. At HTV they enthusiastically talk about the few names that have come down to us from the murk of the sixth century as though they were in yesterday's newspapers.

The set-designers have been doing their homework. In his office, Douglas James, art director for the series, is surrounded by drawings of log-huts and of the wooden tools that have come down through lrish history and would have been used in Celtic Britain. There are sketches of breast-ploughs, wooden spades, and a ponderous wooden-wheeled cart.

"We knew filming would last six months so we had to build something which would last that time. We had to use the building materials they would have used: larch poles, roofed with turf, thatch and bracken. The building rook 16 men about l0 days. In addition to the small huts, we have a long-hut which is sound-proofed to act as a studio.

"We built it by a lake with a stockade and a jetty, so it is defensible. We had to clear the bracken and the conifers around the lake. Conifers aren't indigenous to Britain, and there would have been none here in Arthur's time. Inside the huts we put things like wooden platters and bronze grease lamps."

The TV Camelot was built in a steeply-wooded valley near Stroud owned by the Forestry Commission, where no pylon or concrete wall can drag the viewer back sharply into the 20th century. For a moment, disregarding the odd glass-fibre boulder and a rival encampment of canteens and car parks 200 yards up the track, this really could be the Dark Ages.

But enough wiring for a pop festival or a small country town trails out of the long-hut. Inside are lights, clapper-boards and cameramen, and the inevitable young man in tight trousers calling like a wild prophet for silence. Beyond all this, stark in lighting that would have terrified the Dark Ages, are skins, straw - and Arthur.

Arthur is played by Oliver Tobias, 24. Suitably rugged and unsmiling, he is about to begin the great task of uniting the kingdoms under one military command. Tobias is a former leading man of Hair.

His Arthur is a complex figure. Between takes he sits on the steps of the long-hut playing with his broad sword.

"Arthur would have had to be rugged. He would have had to be prepared to back up with fact everything he said. It was a small world. If you travelled three miles you were in danger: it would have been like travelling 3,000 miles today," said Tobias.

He points towards the top of the track leading away from the huts. “Look up there. In his day, at any time, a horde might be coming over to rape and kill. I think he would have been a sad man. He would have been slightly higher than everybody else, a thinker, but he would always have been having to reach for his dagger."

Arthur is unmarried in the series. There are no Guineveres, Lancelots or Galahads. Instead, Arthur operates in a kind of Three Musketeers act, with a grizzled veteran called Lud the Silver-Handed, a pagan, and a Saxon foundling called Kai.

Sadly, HTV jettisoned some of their more interesting ideas. At first it was suggested that scenes be filmed in places with traditional links with Arthur, like Cadbury un Devon and Glastonbury, Somerset, where tradition has it he was buried. Peter Miller, the producer, explained: “These places are now just relics. We decided to film Arthur as a young man in his encampment and in woods.”

It was also intended to bring in Merlin as an historical figure, a man who had travelled the known world, had studied medicine under the Arabs, mathematics under the Moors, all of which would have made him a god-like person in Dark Age Britain. But he was thrown out with the rest of the Round Table.

He would have been a hangover from the knights in shining armour and HTV wanted to sever the last link with the legends.

But the earlier episodes do succeed in giving a picture of sixth-century Britain. In one episode all the rag-tag elements of petty royalties assemble. There is Ambrose, still aping Roman ways, dressed in the tatty remnants of Roman armour, Mark of Cornwall, a great bull of a man, played by Brian Blessed, and Hereward, a religious maniac calling for help to his old Celtic gods.

Such eccentric figures might well have emerged from the wilds once the Romans went. Ambrose is a fairly accurate figure: Celtic and barbarian warlords probably did attempt a form of Roman parade dress, as shown by some of the Sutton Hoo archaeological finds.

The form of the series, with self-contained episodes, makes it necessary that something happens every week, and so Arthur quarrels constantly with Kai, or the Saxons, or the odd Celtic king to heighten the drama in individual episodes.

Feminine interest is provided in one episode by giving him a Celtic wild-cat to tame, whom he has captured from her father, a hostile princeling. The girl, played by Madeleine Hinde, has to be persuaded to eat. Wild-eyed and furious, she spits chicken pieces all over Arthur. The shot is done and re-done. A chicken carcass off-stage is carved until it almost disappears. At last the director is satisfied.

"A lot of my friends,” said Oliver Tobias seriously, brushing bits of chicken off his jerkin, “believe that Arthur will come back some day.”

They, and the viewing public, are in for a surprise.

NEXT WEEK: our Star of the Month double-page pull-out portrait is Oliver Tobias as he appears in Arthur of the Britons.