The Lonely Man’s Lover (1974), directed by Brian Parker and written by Barry Collins, was broadcast as part of the BBC’s anthology drama series Play for Today (1970-1984), and centres around a young woman called Lizzie, played by Jan Francis, who lives and works on a farm close to a small village in the Northern English County of Yorkshire, where the drama was shot on location. Since Lizzie’s father died, she and her mother, Sarah, played by Anne Dyson, have lived on the farm alone, and their work and way of life appear harsh, tough and almost as though it is from an earlier time, and apart from a milking machine, there is little sign of mechanisation on the farm.
Lizzie is engaged to a young local farmer called David, played by Struan Roger, but she feels restricted by her rural farming-based way of life and the pre-set expectation that she will help keep the farm going. A writer called Daniel, played by David Bailie, has moved with his son to the area, and Lizzie becomes smitten and infatuated with him, even though she’s never met or talked to him, but for her, due to his being a writer, he represents a more cultured alternative to her way of life. Subsequently, she argues with her mother about her interest in and the worth of culture and splits up with her fiancée and then leaves her home, goes to the writer’s house and tells him that she needs somewhere to hide and starts to live with and become romantically involved with him.
The music on the soundtrack is by the real-world local(ish) band The Oldham Tinkers, who create an evocative traditional folk music soundtrack which uses distinctive local vernacular. Accompanying which, the area in which the story is set is shown as still being steeped in tradition in terms of local dialect, folk rituals, a narrow set of expectations and roles in life etc. However, it’s also on the cusp of change as the farms are said to be “on the slide”, i.e., struggling financially, which is said by locals in a disparaging and even fearful of change manner to be partly due to the newcomers and so-called “arty folk” who are moving into the area.
The writer is part and a reflection of this change, and although he’s only recently started renting his house, he has local roots as his grandfather owned the closed-down local mill. However, he doesn’t appear to have made or make any effort to maintain or nurture his connection with the area and the people who live there, alongside which he isn’t an especially likeable character and has a subtly expressed air of superior snobbishness about him, and he subtly mocks the locals and their traditions.
Further reflecting his lack of commitment to the area and perhaps his general arrogant urban outsider/tourist-like lack of respect etc for the locals, although Lizzie becomes pregnant by him, he still carries through with his plans to leave and go back to London without her. After he’s gone Lizzie goes back to live with her mother and when she dies she sells the farm and plans to leave; her ex-fiancé tries to get her to stay in the local area but she says that she needs room to grow, to which he replies there’s plenty of space where they are and points out the nearby fields but this literal “plenty of space” isn’t the kind of space that Lizzie wants for herself, rather she is still looking and wishing for a different way of life.
During the drama, there is often a background babble of gossiping and often disapproving comments by unseen locals, and the views they express are often very traditional and restrictive in terms of life choices. This coupled with Lizzie’s mother’s berating of her about her interest in culture and the way in which she seems more passionate and interested in it rather than the upkeep of the farm and also a more surreal or at least non-realist sequence shot with distorted angles where the locals and the writer’s face bear down on Lizzie gives the drama an oppressive and claustrophobic air and adds to the sense of her being hemmed in by her life.
This is further added to by a backstory which tells of how when Lizzie’s father died, she was taken out of school by her mother to help work on and keep the farm going, alongside which, in a manner that acts as a precursor and interconnection with Lizzie’s frustrations about her life and wishing to spread her wings culturally etc, she is shown when she was at school making art in a creatively nurturing environment where pupil’s paintings have been put up over much of the walls and her teacher is shown to have been supportive of her creative leanings.
Later, the teacher is shown trying to visit Lizzie on the farm, but her mother won’t let her onto it, and the teacher says to her that when she took Lizzie out of school, she felt they were battling for her soul. Interconnecting with this “battle for her soul”, Lizzie is finally prompted to leave the farm when her mother’s disapproval and berating of her interest in culture finds a physical expression when she rips down the music etc posters on Lizzie’s bedroom walls and burns the writer’s books which she has been reading.
It’s an oddly contrasting drama in some ways, as although it is in large part fairly realist in terms of its presentation, it has an air of being folk horror without containing any actual horror. During much of it there’s a palpable but not always easy to define sense of dread and it utilises and explores a number of tropes that have come to be connected with folk horror such as traditional folk rituals, an outsider (the writer) who is isolated in a rural community and who comes into conflict with its traditions etc and a sense that at any moment tensions will boil over and somebody, or a group of people, will turn against somebody else with possibly deadly results.
The viewer is left guessing if that will happen and if it does, who it will be: will it be the locals whose offscreen voices are repeatedly heard berating the “odd” outsider writer who turn up mob-handed, burning torches aloft to lynch him, or will it be the writer who kills Lizzie? The latter of these outcomes is lent a degree of credence, as, alongside him being an unsettling, distant and arrogant cold fish, the locals’ voices keep saying that they’ve heard his wife drowned, and it’s not clear if she was murdered or not.
Alongside which, there are quite a few mentions by the offscreen locals’ voices where they talk about the nearby rural town of Hebden and how it’s gone “arty”, and there’s a sense that the locals fear and will possibly in some way fiercely resist such things spreading like a contagion to their hometown. As a possible outcome, this seems as though it may not end well for Lizzie and the writer, as they are easy potential scapegoats due to being a prominent outpost and signifier of such changes, and the locals’ offscreen voices disparagingly call them “hippies” for living together out of wedlock.
Further adding to the sense that the drama may become more overtly folk horror-like, when the traditional folk celebration May Day comes around, and while Lizzie is living with the writer and his son, he says they have a present for her, which is a traditional folk ritual-style May Queen wooden garland that he’s been shown carving. When he puts it on her head, his son, at one of the few points when he talks, says that it’s a snake which is biting its own tail. This markedly adds to the sense of potential folk horror dread, and with knowledge of the tropes of folk horror, it’s easy to see this gift giving and the son’s description of it as possibly being the start of a murderous ritual of some sort. Accompanying which the sense that the drama may turn out to be an overt form of folk horror is heightened by knowledge that its writer Barry Collins would go on to script a 1976 BBC production called The Witches of Pendle which dramatised the notorious real world 1612 Pendle witch trials where nine women and two men were accused and tried for the murders of ten people by the use of witchcraft in the Northern English town of Pendle Hill in Lancashire, ten of whom were found guilty and executed by hanging.
However, ultimately the drama turns out to be merely the story of a young woman who wants something different to the traditional rural farming way of life that has been mapped out for her, which comes as something of a relief in a way because of the increasingly layered signposting in the story and its atmosphere etc which seem to be pointing towards something far more deadly.
Interconnecting with and reflecting Lizzie’s yearning for a different way of life, her character is stylish in appearance, which, due to her modish haircut, is still the case even when she’s shown in her working farm clothes. She is markedly more stylish when she is in her “civvies” which have a late-1960s to mid-1970s Biba-esque urban fashionableness to them and which include a stylish red plastic mac that looks markedly out of place when she is taking a walk through the countryside, and the overall effect of her style choices seem to indicate that she is already bursting out of the preset pathways of her life.
Returning to her relationship with the writer, it seems as though she is perhaps more in love with the idea of what he represents, i.e., a different way of life and an escape from her own, rather than him as a person. Indeed, as alluded to earlier there’s not all that much to love about him: he is something of an arrogant and distant cold fish and has an unappealing brusqueness, alongside which there is a sense that Lizzie may well just be a passing distraction for him, essentially a form of local colour, and that his relationship with her may merely be a way in which, consciously or not, he is researching the local way of life and its older folk rituals etc for his writing.
Adding to his unlikeable characteristics, when, after Lizzie and him have been living together for a while, he asks her if she’s pregnant and she tells him she is he doesn’t even suggest supporting her in any way other than saying that although, as in part discussed above, he’s still planning to leave, he’s paid another month’s rent on the house and she can stay after he leaves if she likes. The marked ungenerous at best nature of this offer is heightened even further, as he knows she has no way of supporting herself, so it is a very hollow offer.
His response is also odd because he has a young son, so it’s not as though he is unused to rearing children, but he doesn’t even seem to consider the option of helping support his and Lizzie’s unborn child, perhaps raising it together or in some way co-parenting. All of which adds to the just-mentioned sense that Lizzie may have been merely a passing “local colour” distraction and could potentially be seen as a comment on cultural and societal tourism, particularly when undertaken by members of an urban-based cultural elite. It also perhaps even suggests that if the drama had become more overtly folk horror-like, then the locals turning up mob-handed with burning torches aloft to, if not actually lynch him, then to at least impel him to undertake his parental responsibilities would not have been a completely unreasonable response (!).
The sense that something like that may eventually occur is hinted at the start of the drama when, during a traditional folk ritual play/procession in the village streets, one of the locals tells the writer to “get back to where you belong”, i.e., the city. Reflecting the local open hostility about outsiders and newcomers and the changes they bring about, the local goes on to berate the writer about how in contemporary times there are only a few locals there to watch the procession and that the old ways and such rituals have been reduced to being merely tourist attractions performed by schoolchildren, whereas once upon a time that he and generations of the men in his family played key roles in the procession.
Contrasting with this stance and her ex-fiancé, David, as previously mentioned, saying that there is space amongst the fields etc for her to grow, towards the end of the drama, Lizzie says to David that the hills and the local people crush people. However, in turn in contrast with this, during the drama David says that the newcomers are moving to the area because the towns have crushed them and that although the resulting changes in the area have caused the also previously mentioned “slide” in farming, that after a period of turbulence things will find their balance again but this is not enough to dissuade Lizzie from seeking a new life elsewhere.
The story ends on a melancholy-tinged but hopeful note; after David makes one last attempt to try and convince Lizzie to stay, which in a kindly way she says no to, he says, “Goodbye, Lizzie”. There’s a sadness and finality to this, but also a sense of acceptance, and it seems as though he knows and accepts that things change and, although he is sad about losing Lizzie, that he himself is okay with staying and riding out the turbulence of the changes to the area that newcomers are bringing.
When David asks Lizzie if she and her child will be okay, she tells him that now her mother has passed away and the farm is to be sold that this will pay her family’s debts and she will be left with some money to tide her over, and her overall outlook about her potentially precarious situation and the risks she is taking in changing her life seems to be positive.
Ultimately, the drama doesn’t present a straightforward black and white good or bad view of either the newcomers, as represented by the writer, or the locals, the latter of whom David describes as gathering vultures at an auction where the household items from Lizzie’s farm are being sold. However, overall, David seems like something of a beacon of decency, and there’s an unspoken sense that he would be prepared to take on and support another man’s child.
As a final note, there is notable poignancy when, during the just-mentioned auction, the auctioneer is selling Lizzie’s guitar, which has been shown in her bedroom a number of times, but which, in the drama, she is not shown as actually playing. The auctioneer describes it as being in as new condition, and there is a sense that it, along with the music and culture prints on Lizzie’s bedroom walls, is perhaps more important as a signifier of a possible other way of life rather than Lizzie being intrinsically interested in them.
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This post is an excerpt from the A Year In The Country book Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands of British Analogue Television 1968-1995.
