W.Stephen Gilbert
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William Stephen Gilbert (born May 20, 1947) is an English writer, journalist and television producer. His career has been characterised by a series of stops and starts rather than a consistent trajectory.
Born in Northampton and brought up in Wellingborough, W Stephen Gilbert was the only child of Constance Enid Caroline (née Lack, the daughter of teachers) and William Stanley Gilbert, a boot and shoe manufacturer. He attended Wellingborough School, where fellow pupils then and since included Andrew Loog Oldham, Roger Levitt, David Wilson-Johnson, Andrew Lauder, Dan Roan, Maxwell Hutchinson, Richard Coles and, according to legend, two convicted murderers. During his time at the school, he acted in all the drama productions mounted there (contributing scripts with his writing partner Tony Coult), and wrote for and co-edited the school magazine. While at University College London, he began in 1969 to write a play for television entitled Circle Line. Then the BBC announced a playwriting competition open only to university students, the winner of which would be produced in the studio and broadcast in the series The Wednesday Play. He entered the completed script. Circle Line won the award but then was delayed for over a year, largely owing to nervousness about its content. It was finally transmitted in the first season of Play for Today in January 1971.
Most reviews were favourable. Séan Day-Lewis noted “some exchanges that Harold Pinter himself would not have disowned” . Peter Fiddick called it “a fascinating and polished bit of work, one of those tightly talked, argumentative pieces which demands to be seen again so that you can have a go at picking holes in it” . But it was never seen again; the master tape was wiped within three months of its transmission.
Meanwhile, among letters sent to Gilbert was one praising the play from Peter Daubeny, director of the RSC’s annual World Theatre Season. Sir Peter’s son later revealed that the only other fan letter he had been known to write was to Harry Secombe. By contrast, in a House of Lords debate on Mass Media Communication, the Earl of Arran attacked the play as “a piece of exhibitionist obscenity” and quoted correspondence with Gilbert, after which he played host to the playwright in his office at Carmelite House for an increasingly tipsy chat. Circle Line continued to leave a trace in television drama circles. In 2021, Simon Farquhar published an account of Play for Today: The First Year. One of two surviving stills from Circle Line decorated the front cover, and the play was the subject of by far the book’s most substantial chapter.
After leaving university, Gilbert picked up theatre reviewing jobs before being taken on as a script reader and trainee script editor at the BBC, where his subsequent eight plays had all been rejected (Stephen Frears had in vain expressed himself keen to direct the first of them). No script editing post being available, Gilbert left and joined Time Out magazine as a film lister, before being appointed assistant editor at Plays & Players magazine for Hansom Books. He then returned to Time Out as television editor, developing the magazine’s coverage of and reputation in broadcasting. He gave a break to several reviewers who went on to stellar careers, including Anne Karpf, David Snodin, Stan Hey and Jonathan Meades. When The Observer expanded its television coverage, he was invited to become the paper’s previewer and columnist alongside Clive James.
After barely a year on Fleet Street, he was invited by David Rose to come to BBC Pebble Mill Studios as a producer of single dramas. Five plays he inherited or commissioned were transmitted in 1979 under the umbrella title The Other Side. They included the comedy Underdog by the actor Jack Shepherd, which featured Nigel Hawthorne as a Whitehall mandarin, on the strength of which he was cast in Yes, Minister; and Only Connect, commissioned by Gilbert from Noël Greig and Drew Griffiths of the theatre troupe Gay Sweatshop, which remains the most warmly remembered of all television dramas on a gay theme .
A sixth play, Solid Geometry by Ian McEwan, was halted before it got to the studio, the Pebble Mill head of props having objected to the requirement for a pickled penis in a jar. Gilbert, McEwan and the director Mike Newell put out a public statement about this – as they characterised it – act of censorship, and Gilbert was sacked from the BBC for “talking to the press without prior written consent”. 23 years later, the actor Denis Lawson directed a shortened version of Solid Geometry for Scottish Television and Grampian Television, broadcast by Channel 4.
Gilbert appealed against his dismissal and was readmitted to the end of his BBC contract, but transferred to Television Centre where “greater and closer supervision” would be possible. Despite this provision, he was allowed to produce Gilly Fraser’s play Not for the Likes of Us, which was shot on location in Bristol. The cast was led by Pam St Clement; both she and the writer were subsequently recruited onto EastEnders.
The BBC then declared itself willing to renew Gilbert’s contract, but he had already committed to writing a candid account of the Solid Geometry saga for the trade magazine Broadcast. He left the BBC and became Broadcast’s regular broadcasting critic. A year later, he was invited to prepare a series about television for the nascent Channel 4. He and his team spent several months developing their approach, but the project was abruptly halted when the head of the production company responsible for the project disappeared to Hawaii with the programme budget.
Thereafter, Gilbert freelanced as a journalist, writing about television, film and theatre for all the national broadsheet newspapers and dozens of magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, from the Times Educational Supplement to Woman’s Realm, Marxism Today to Gay News. Among other adventures were a drama serial producing job at Southern Television, aborted when the company lost its ITV franchise; his stage play Private Means being mounted at the Soho Theatre, with a cast including Barbara Lott and John Fortune; his novel Spiked being published by Gay Men’s Press; his quiz book entitled The Movie Superchallenge issued by Boxtree Books; and his critical biography of Dennis Potter being published, as Fight & Kick & Bite by Hodder & Stoughton in Britain, as The Life and Work of Dennis Potter by The Overlook Press in the USA.
In 1986, he had been invited back to the BBC as producer to rescue Farrukh Dhondy’s four-part serial King of the Ghetto. Despite unusual schedule pressure, he replaced the director with Roy Battersby, who was returning to the BBC after a long absence. The serial was notable for an early lead for Tim Roth and a first substantial acting role for Ian Dury. But, as Keith Howes noted in Broadcasting It, the success of King of the Ghetto “did not lead to [Gilbert’s] well-deserved renaissance. He will rise again” .
He rose again only to take a formal step back in a post as script editor at Euston Films in 1990, on the unfulfilled promise of producing later. He was the third (and longest-serving) of five successive script editors to work on the much-troubled drama serial Shrinks and he then commissioned the scripts that established the new eponym in the company’s most successful franchise, Minder, himself determining the name and relationship of the character to Arthur Daley. He brought in new writers, including the team’s first woman, Liane Aukin, and two young dramatists both of whom went on to gain numerous credits in the medium, Tony Jordan and William Ivory. However, as at Southern, the parent company Thames Television lost its franchise and Euston’s script editors were the first to be dismissed.
Thereafter, he again freelanced as a journalist, including for The Times and The Independent and a stint as London correspondent of the New York-based Film Journal International. He began to write for such online publications as London Progressive Journal, The Word, Cold Type and Off-Guardian. In 2015, he was commissioned by the publisher Eyewear to write a book about the man who looked most likely to become the new leader of the British Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn: Accidental Hero was published just two months after his election and ran to a second edition the following April. It remains a novelty as a guide to Corbyn’s politics not written as a personal attack.
In recent years, Gilbert trained as a professional indexer of books and has supplied back-of-the-book indexes to a variety of non-fiction publications. He edits SIdelights, the newsletter of the Society of Indexers. He has been with his civil partner, David James, for more than 40 years.
References[edit]
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