The ‘diabolical' BBC drama that inspired 28 Years Later

Telegraph

21-06-2025

Landing in the BBC One schedules one Thursday evening in March 1974, Penda's Fen sat oddly. For those viewers who had earlier watched Tony Blackburn host Top of the Pops, or caught up with Are You Being Served? here was a completely different beast. It was peculiar – even by the standards of the channel's prestigious Play for Today slot, within which it sat. After all, the film set up a battle between the forces of Light and Dark, individualism and conservatism, on the Malvern Hills – all played out through the eyes of a priggish adolescent.
Few who saw it would have gone to bed without its succession of extraordinary, terrifying visions haunting their dreams – visions which, if director Danny Boyle is to be believed, 'left an extraordinary impression on me'.
At the age of seventeen much of it went over his head but he knew that night it was an 'incredible film' and when he eventually moved into television in the late Eighties, its director Alan Clarke was the first person he contacted. Small wonder, too, that Boyle's latest film, 28 Years Later, a zombie horror set in Northumberland, feels like a direct successor to the eerie rural imagery of Penda's Fen.
The film is the story of a vicar's son, Stephen Franklin (Spencer Banks), a hidebound teenager whose comfortable, complacent assumptions about his world crumble one by one. He is visited by demons and angels, meets the ghost of his idol Edward Elgar, sees a church aisle splitting to reveal a giant bottomless chasm, is spoken to by Jesus on the cross, and witnesses the arrival of the seventh-century King Penda – the last pagan king of Mercia.
Like a modern-day Piers Plowman, each visitor tells Franklin a truth that he must assimilate – and which shakes his conservative, little-Englander views. The film's cry of individualism and the radical spirit has reverberated for over 50 years. Long before 'Rooster' Byron, the whirling, maverick force at the heart of Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem, Penda Fen's found uncanny, romantic resistance in the depths of the British countryside.
This 'film for television' was created by playwright David Rudkin, who had built his reputation with Afore Night Come for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962. This set out his stall as a writer of dark power and originality, depicting fruit-pickers at an orchard descending into savagery after a helicopter sprays them with pesticide.
Rudkin himself resisted any connection to the then-burgeoning genre of 'folk horror'. But today it's hard not to view Rudkin's obsession with England's deep past, elemental forces, and his environmental fears as being in the same lineage as The Wicker Man (1973), John Bowen's 1970 film Robin Redbreast (known as 'Britain's Rosemary's Baby') and the occult fiction of Dennis Wheatley. It was the mood of the times. A queasy pastoralism – which looks ever more prescient in our era of climate fears – haunts Penda's Fen. Yet it is more than that: throughout the film, there's a constant sense that some religious, mystical force is about to erupt from the pregnant landscape.
The true miracle is that it was ever broadcast at all. By 1971, Rudkin was struggling to get his increasingly difficult work staged; he also felt abandoned by television. That summer, though, producer David Rose came calling. He had enjoyed success with the launch of the police drama Z-Cars in the 1960s and had recently moved to the BBC's Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham. He wanted to put on new stories and Rudkin was high on his list. Penda's Fen was commissioned a year later.
Rose, who went on to set up Film on Four, always regarded it as his proudest achievement. 'It's an extraordinary piece of work,' he told me. 'My mother never spoke to me about my programmes, but she was haunted for nights by Penda's Fen.'
Spencer Banks – who played the film's adolescent hero – was familiar to many viewers from the hugely successful children's sci-fi series Timeslip. But his step into peak-time 'serious' drama was challenging. When Banks first went up for the part of Stephen, he never saw a script during auditions. He remembers his father sat at the kitchen table, checking over the contract. 'Oh, here's a clause you don't see very often,' he said. 'The actor agrees to be set on fire.'
It was daunting for an 18-year-old to communicate this otherworldly journey into adulthood and – as Dennis Potter put it in his review for the New Statesman – 'the images of light and darkness warring in the young man's mind'. In early rehearsals, Banks recalls he was 'confused and a little lost,' but in the end, 'I quite simply put all my faith in the director, Alan Clarke. Which I think is the reason we got the result that we did.'
In commissioning the drama, Rose put together a writer and director who were chalk and cheese. Alan Clarke cut his teeth at ITV but was now firmly part of the BBC drama department. Today, his reputation is built on the violent and gritty Scum and Made in Britain – which, in their concern with broken, brutish young men, prefigure shows like Adolescence. But Clarke's early work tended to be naturalistic, contemporary and not as focused on vicious young men. Such a down-to-earth style was at odds with Rudkin's poeticism. At their first meeting, Rudkin was told by the director that this was 'a heavy number. How many books do I have to read to understand this?' 'Just the one,' replied Rudkin, pointing to the script in his hand.
In the end, their two visions gelled. The film's fantastic imaginings have their power because they are presented as real, almost ordinary, which makes them all the more disturbing.
Achieving this pulsing otherness was the next challenge. The shoot – much of it done outdoors – was an enormous operation, and the weather was a constant challenge. Actor Ian Hogg, who played local firebrand playwright Arne – the man who sparks Stephen's turn towards pastoral deep England – remembers how 'it rained when it shouldn't almost always'. The director began to take it personally. One sodden day, he asked his production manager, 'If I strip to the waist and thrash about in the mud, do you think [God] will forgive me and send some sunshine?'
The crew's base camp was Chaceley, a village near Tewkesbury whose population even today is just a little over a hundred. The rectory, which doubled as Stephen's childhood home, was the location for a number of scenes, including the visit of a demon. As Stephen tosses and turns in the throes of an erotic dream about a fellow schoolboy, a terrifying, gargoyle-like incubus kneels on top of Stephen as he sleeps.
In another scene straight from William Blake, an angel appears to Stephen on a riverbank. Make-up designer Jan Nethercot recalls having to create a convincing heavenly visitation. Painting the actor gold, there was a worry he would asphyxiate if they failed to leave a small part of the skin uncovered. 'We'd seen Goldfinger,' she recalls. The marshland that day was misty. Jan's assistant, Penny Gough, remembers how the light caused a radiance on the paint: 'The gold from his wingtips went right up into the mist and it was spectacular.'
A further unforgettable image is of a man in a dinner jacket and bow-tie, standing by a tree stump on a garden lawn, as he uses a meat cleaver to cut off the hands of children in front of their devout parents. It's a queer, disturbing comment on subjugation – and vividly traumatising. The scene is presented as some ghastly, jubilant ritual, the victims rejoicing in their missing limbs.
Filming the scene, Clarke's main worry was whether the BBC would allow a crew to put any child in this situation. Costume designer Joyce Hawkins promptly volunteered her daughter, who is herself now a television producer. 'It's a wonder I wasn't personally traumatised,' says Caroline Hawkins. 'Or maybe I was, who knows?'
Almost five million people watched Penda's Fen on its first transmission. Callers to the duty log described it as 'horrific' and 'approaching black magic'. One said it was 'diabolical' and promised they 'will be writing to someone very important', but hadn't decided who it would be.
Those making it knew that the film was special – but none would have expected it to become as deeply embedded in the public consciousness. What brought it back from obscurity was a repeat on Channel 4 in 1990, just two days before the director Clarke's death. A new generation taped it and, slowly, Penda's Fen entered the canon, leading to books, music, cinema screenings and even academic conferences. The film also left its mark on English filmmakers like Mark Jenkin (Enys Men) and Ben Wheatley (A Field in England). And, of course, Danny Boyle.
At the time, though, the film was too singular to get a common reaction. Like a message in a bottle, it went out into the world and, as with the most lasting works of art, connected to the present moment. It touches on education, defence, the environment, paganism and English traditions – but also has characters who are non-binary. (Indeed, the film's climax sees Stephen proclaim to the Wiltshire downs: 'My race is mixed, my sex is mixed, I am woman and man… I am mud and flame!')
Speaking last year, Rudkin recalled a postbag filled with correspondents who said they had 'some inner place it reached that nothing else had.' More than 50 years on, Penda's Fen continues to find viewers' souls – and shake them.
Penda's Fen: Scene by Scene by Ian Greaves is published by Ten Acre Films on June 23. Spencer Banks will appear at a screening hosted by the Barbican Centre in London on September 6. The film is available to buy on DVD and Blu-ray from the BFI.