Acclaimed writer for both stage and screen Julian Mitchell talks to Alexandra Davies about Morse, civil partnerships and near-success with Ray Davies…
“I haven’t liked the music in anything I’ve written. I don’t want the audience to be controlled by the music; I want them to be controlled by my words!”
Julian Mitchell grins as he says this. Although for the 74-year-old novelist turned playwright turned screenwriter, professional pride is no laughing matter.
As a writer on ITV’s Inspector Morse for ten years, professional differences with the author of the books Colin Dexter, meant Mitchell never wrote the final episode where 12 million viewers watched Morse die on the Oxford University grass.
“I wanted to do my version and Colin wanted to stick to the book,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. “So somebody else wrote it in the end. It was a matter of pride.”
Although Morse is arguably his most well-known work, Mitchell’s career is an illustrious one, featuring ups, downs, and a whole host of intriguing anecdotes including one where he was approached by MI6 to become a spy.
Another favourite is the tale of the meeting where an unprepared, and still unforgiven, producer put an end to the teleplay Mitchell co-wrote with Ray Davies of The Kinks. ‘Arthur’ gave rise to one of the band’s most famous albums but wasn’t produced after the disastrous presentation.
It’s the excitable relation of such stories that reveals the youthful sparkle in Mitchell despite his age. Indeed, he laments his passage into the ‘Saga Syndrome’ – a stage where it’s hard to have your work published because you’re getting on a bit.
“I wouldn’t enjoy retirement,” he says, “I want to see the whole world before I die. It’s endlessly fascinating.”
With an attic full of unpublished work, Mitchell’s attitude that there’s no point in writing if nobody is reading it reflects his charmingly restless character. At the moment he is writing a new play about the mysterious Lord Lucan, a few novels (all set in his home county of Monmouthshire during the 60s, 70s and 80s) and has been approached about a stage adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.
Beginning his career as an author, Mitchell produced an incredible six novels during the 1960s. “I wrote the six very quickly – the last of which was quite good. But at the end I didn’t know what I was doing and I lost confidence. I always wanted to be a playwright – it’s much freer and you can say what you think. I often used the character of Morse to voice my own thoughts.”
Turning to script-writing was a life-changing move for Mitchell. His play Another Country, about 1930s communism and public school attitudes towards homosexuality, won the Society of West End Theatre’s award for Play of the Year in 1982 and is credited for launching the careers of Rupert Everett, Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth. Mitchell fondly remembers Branagh being pulled in at the last minute for an audition.
“He was just out of drama school and came in wearing a velvet blazer which was horrible, all wrong, and I thought ‘He’s not going to be right for this’. But I looked past it and saw the talent.”
Mitchell describes his inspiration for Another Country as a desire to look at the personal motivations behind people converting to Communism in the 1930s. Indeed, the complexity of people and relationships is seemingly what intrigues him. Openly homosexual, he talks passionately about his 2007 BBC4 drama Consenting Adults, which celebrates the 1957 John Wolfenden report recommending the legalisation of homosexuality, and expresses his surprise at a society that has changed so radically since his day.
“I never thought there would be a time when civil partnership would be legal,” he says incredulously. “When my partner and I had our ceremony, we walked out together and no-one batted an eyelid.”
Although scathing of the idea that he could be known as a ‘gay writer’, Mitchell admits his sexuality may have been a catalyst in his being chosen to write the script for Wilde, a film about Oscar Wilde starring Stephen Fry as the controversial gay author.
“Although Stephen Fry is an extraordinary actor, I wasn’t happy with him in the end,” says Mitchell. “He brought a depressive melancholy to the role I don’t think Wilde had. But the film was largely good.”
This statement sums Mitchell up – he’s a captivating mixture of contradictions. Frank yet charming. A perfectionist willing to settle. A young man in the body of an old one who is now working in a society he both respects for its tolerance and disapproves of for its shortcomings.
“Traditional television drama is dead,” he says sadly. “Audiences of six or seven million watch the adaptation of an incredible script and then 20 million people watch Britain’s Got Talent. It showed no talent really.”
It’s hard to figure out this man. But delightful trying to.
