Alan Garner’s The Owl Service on TV

As a child I loved Alan Garner’s books – The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath made a lasting impression on me. Yet somehow I never encountered his prize-winning story The Owl Service until, decades later, I chanced upon the television adaptation. I was hooked by this compelling – and sometimes unsettling – tale of three teenagers who are possessed by the power of a legend that reawakens in a Welsh valley.

Garner was interviewed by the Observer Magazine (25 January 1970, with a photograph by the peerless Jane Bown, see below) about The Owl Service and his other works. He expounded on his writing philosophy: “Fantasy taken out of context of the known and mundane becomes a gratuitous form of escapism. Whereas fantasy used properly is a clarification of reality, not an escape from it.”

The man who created 'The Owl Service': Alan Garner interviewed in the Observer Magazine (25 January 1970).

The Observer Magazine piece details how Garner was bedridden by illness in his early years which turned him into a “bookish child”. By his own account, his scholarship to Manchester Grammar School and study at Oxford alienated him from his family. “They were proud, of course, but hated the ways it made me different.” (There are echoes of this experience, perhaps, in his depiction of Gwyn in The Owl Service, a clever working class boy at grammar school who aspires to more than just working behind the counter in his local Co-op.)

As recorded in the magazine article, Garner wrote the script for the television adaptation of The Owl Service and participated in the production on location. Evidently this took a severe toll on the writer, who “was put to bed for a month or so” when shooting ended.

The story of how Granada Television turned Garner’s novel into a TV series is told in Filming the Owl Service (Armada Books, 1970) which features the diaries of Garner’s three children who witnessed the serial being made. (“No school for nine weeks. I was an immediate success with my children,” as Garner put it in his introduction to the book; the director Peter Plummer added his own account as an endpiece.) Stephen McKay’s very readable account of the filming was published in Time Screen magazine in 1987 and is preserved at the Internet Archive.

In Filming the Owl Service Garner describes the genesis of his story:

It began when I read an old Welsh legend [a tale in the Mabinogion] about Lleu, and his wife Blodeuwedd, who was made for him out of flowers. Later she fell in love with Gronw Pebyr, and together they murdered Lleu. Lleu was brought back to life by magic, and he killed Gronw by throwing a spear with such force that it went right through the rock behind which Gronw was sheltering; and the rock, says the legend, is called the Stone of Gronw to this day. Blodeuwedd, for her part in her husband’s murder, was turned into an owl.

When I read the legend, I felt that it was not just a magical tale, but a tragedy of three people who destroy each other, through no fault of their own, but just because they have been forced together. It was a modern story – the idea that you could have three people for some reason unable to get away from each other, and I began to think about how I could bring them into that position, and what sort of people would they have to be to interact so lethally, and yet be harmless in themselves.

The legend stuck in my mind for several years, and then one day Griselda’s mother [Garner married Griselda Greaves in 1972] showed me an old dinner service that she had… She had noticed that the floral pattern round the edges of the plates could be seen as the body, wings and head of an owl. Griselda traced the pattern, juggled it a bit, and there it was – a paper owl.

An owl from flowers. A woman made from flowers and changed into an owl… I saw at once that here was the way into my modern story, based on the legend.

As the Observer Magazine article notes, only two years elapsed between the publication of The Owl Service in 1967 and the making of the televised version, the novel having collected the Guardian children’s fiction prize and the Carnegie medal. Granada Television’s Peter Plummer had interviewed Alan Garner years previously, and this personal connection proved fortuitous.

Peter had said that The Owl Service would make a good film, and I agreed with him. Most of the story came to me in the form of dialogue – spoken words rather than description. It seemed to cry out to be made into a film; and Peter wanted to do it… So when it happened that Granada bought The Owl Service, and that Peter was both Producer and Director, I was more than pleased.

This style of tightly-written dialogue is evident in the serial. Many passages of speech from the novel are reproduced verbatim in the television script without editing; the words the characters speak just seem right somehow. Garner’s spare storytelling style sometimes leaves interpretation open to his audience – evidently Granada felt that viewers needed some help understanding the crucial plot details, since they added sepia-toned synopses of the storyline at the beginning of the episodes.

Garner’s novels are deeply embedded in the landscapes in which they are set (notably Alderley Edge in Cheshire where he grew up). In this case Garner had conceived his story in the setting of Bryn Hall and the surrounding Dyfi valley in Llanymawddwy (North Wales) while staying there. Unfortunately the owners of the house refused permission to film, so Granada’s location work was moved partly to Poulton Hall, in the Liverpool area, which was owned by a friend of Garner’s.

Garner modelled his character Huw Halfbacon on Dafydd Rees, the gardener and caretaker at Bryn Hall who had first worked there in about 1898. The TV Times sent a reporter to meet him (“Dafydd Rees, the last of his line”, 17-23 January 1970):

Dafydd only learned to speak English when he started work and he still talks in a curious, roundabout dialect which, with his rather casual attitude to tense and vocabulary, adds extra magic to his tales.

Viewers of The Owl Service would recognise that “roundabout dialect” in the speech of Huw, as played by Raymond Llewellyn.

The writer speaks with the cast: photograph taken during The Owl Service filming on location at Poulton Hall. From left: Francis Wallis, Alan Garner, Edwin Richfield, Dorothy Edwards and Michael Holden. From The Telegraph (19 October 2022).

In Filming the Owl Service, Garner describes meeting the actors for the first time at Poulton Hall for rehearsals.

I wanted to run. They looked too right. It was like a waking dream. Here were the people I’d thought about, who’d lived in my head for so long; but now they were real. I couldn’t accept that they were only actors. And this feeling got worse when they began to read their parts, and speak the words I’d given them.

The first five weeks of filming were going to be at Poulton, so we took the cast to Wales for a couple of days right at the start, so that they could get the feel of the original setting. Now my waking dream grew worse. The characters were where I’d imagined them, and it was as if I was looking at live ghosts.

Images from Granada Television's The Owl Service. Clockwise from top left: Roger (Francis Wallis) with Clive (Edwin Richfield); Nancy (Dorothy Edwards) with Gwyn (Michael Holden); a paper owl; Alison (Gillian Hills) with Huw (Raymond Llewellyn).

The three young lead actors – Gillian Hills as Alison, Michael Holden as Gwyn and Francis Wallis as Roger – were playing supposed teenagers but were all adults in their twenties. (Michael Holden’s age is sometimes stated, incorrectly, as nineteen.) Katharine and Ellen Garner’s childhood diaries record that Michael and Francis had “some sort of powder on to stop their beards showing, so that it looked as though they didn’t need to shave”.

The title sequence to The Owl Service sets the tone: Welsh harp music is cut across with discordant noises (a revving motorbike, flapping wings and scratching claws) that set the audience on edge.

Images from the title sequence to Granada Television's The Owl Service.

Peter Plummer, in his director’s notes in Filming the Owl Service, recalled the challenge of setting the scene:

First episodes are always tricky, and in our case especially so. Margaret, a widow with one daughter, Alison, has just married again. Her new husband Clive has one son also from a previous marriage, Roger. Before Alison’s father died, he bequeathed her a holiday house in a Welsh valley. Margaret and Clive have now come here with their children on ‘a kind of family honeymoon’. As housekeeper, Clive has employed a woman called Nancy, who used to be a servant there when she was a girl. Helping Nancy, while on holiday from school, is her son Gwyn. Unfortunately, as he finds out, Nancy turns out not to be on speaking terms with the gardener, Huw. In the first episode all this has to be explained to the audience, and the story got on with as quickly as possible. Alan… has therefore plunged us right in at the deep end, instead of dipping a tentative foot in the sort of shallow chat of explanations… The plot is well under way before the relationships begin to be underlined.

Almost immediately in the first episode the youngsters are unnerved by strange happenings. When Alison hears scratching coming from the ceiling, Gwyn forces open a hatch to the attic where he finds some plates edged with a flowery pattern. Alison discovers she can trace the pattern to create paper owls, and becomes obsessed with making them. Down by the river, Roger experiences a sudden disturbance while sunbathing near a mysterious stone with a hole, which Huw the gardener says is the legendary Stone of Gronw. It gradually becomes apparent that the teenagers are being possessed, inexorably, by malign forces that reside in the valley.

There is some mysterious past association between Huw (Raymond Llewellyn) and the housekeeper Nancy (Dorothy Edwards), who is in a permanent temper. Huw, for all his incoherent ramblings, understands all too well what is being unleashed: “She wants to be flowers and you make her owls – you must not complain then if she goes hunting.” Clive (Edwin Richfield) finds the developing drama rather tiresome, just wanting to keep the peace with his new wife, Margaret, who is never seen on screen.

As the series progresses Gwyn and Alison experience a growing romantic attraction, while Roger feels increasingly resentful at being the odd one out. Their relationships fracture when Alison betrays Gwyn’s confidences to Roger, and events seem to spiral out of control as Alison succumbs to the legend’s power. The three look destined to repeat, in their time, the deadly triangle of Blodeuwedd, Lleu and Gronw.

Left: in Episode Four of The Owl Service, the trio of Gwyn, Roger and Alison. Right: in Episode Eight Alison, face scratched as if by claws, lies possessed by the power of the legend.

The first episode begins with Alison feeling unwell and in bed. “How are the gripes?” asks Clive, a supposed reference to period pains and the flowering of womanhood. As others have remarked, although it portrayed adolescent children and was shown at Sunday teatime the subject matter of The Owl Service is in parts strikingly adult. The scene where Gwyn forces himself on Alison in the summer house in Episode Three is a difficult watch, while Alison’s possession in the final episode is pure horror. Stephen McKay’s article recalls that The Owl Service was nominated for the Prix Jeunesse in 1970, an international award for young people's films. In the words of Peter Plummer, "The jury in Munich found it 'deeply disturbing' and questioned whether it was not indeed reprehensible to offer such material to young people.”

A TV Times article (3-9 January 1970) giving a sense of the Garners’ family life was published in conjunction with the TV series (see below). Garner insists in the piece that, though he’s a successful children’s writer, he doesn’t write for children. “I write for myself at different levels. Children can read anything as long as it isn’t boring.”

“The writer who lives in his own never-never land”, TV Times, 3-9 January 1970.

Filming the serial in colour offered novel possibilities for the production. As Peter Plummer put it in Filming the Owl Service:

There would be little point in filming in colour without really using it.

‘Red, black and green is it?’ says Gwyn. ‘I wonder who’s the earth?’ The International Colour Code for electrical wiring [was] due to change round about the time of the programme’s transmission. Which should we choose, old or new? Finally we decided that the story was set firmly in 1969 and red, black and green it was. Not only for the electrical colour code, but for the high voltage triangle of Alison, Gwyn and Roger.

So we see Alison in a scarlet bikini, Gwyn in a black pullover and Roger in lime green bathing trunks, along with other colour-coded costumes. In the second episode the three youngsters play a frantic game, ball-in-hand, on the snooker table, each with the ball of their designated colour. (In Filming the Owl Service, Katharine Garner calls this “Russian billiards”.) Later in the same episode Clive is playing snooker when the red, black and green balls collide – at that instant, the wood panelling splinters to reveal a painting of Blodeuwedd.

Unfortunately for viewers in 1969-70, a union dispute meant that the initial broadcast was in black and white. It wasn’t until the series was repeated in 1978 that the colour production could be enjoyed. Granada’s 1978 press release recalled that The Owl Service was the franchise’s first major all-film, all-location, fully-scripted drama serial. “The original negative was traced and printed up in colour, and despite the problems of handling an outdated film stock, the final print reveals [cameraman David] Wood's work in colour as remarkably up-to-date.”

The legendary Stone of Gronw, supposedly pierced by Lleu’s spear, was hewn specially by a local stonemason and placed on the bank of the Dyfi as Garner had imagined it. As the author recalled:

It looked as though it had been there for centuries.

Remarkably, after all these years, the stone still stands where it was erected on the riverbank in Llanymawddwy. After filming the stonemason carved an inscription into the stone, reportedly to distinguish the prop from a genuine ancient standing stone: Made By E. Rowlands. Aberangell.

Scenes from Granada Television's The Owl Service. Left: Roger sets up his camera by the Stone of Gronw as Gwyn looks on. Right: the trees on the Bryn as viewed through the hole in the stone.

Peter Plummer recounts in Filming the Owl Service how the Vegetable Preparation Room of the County Remand Home near Poulton Hall was transformed to double as a kitchen for the production. The film plot resonated with the boys in the home:

‘It’s about this lot of kids who can’t get on with their parents.’ Oh yes, they knew about a plot like that all right. Most of them had lived it. The actors, I think, felt rather humble.

Class tensions are exploited expertly in Garner’s story. Margaret and daughter Alison’s family are from old money, into which the upwardly-mobile businessman Clive has married. Clive and his son Roger are condescending towards working-class Nancy and her son Gwyn. “Brains aren’t everything by a long chalk, you must have the background,” says Clive dismissively of Gwyn, while to Roger the Welsh teenager is a “clever yobbo”. In turn, Nancy mocks Clive for being unable to eat a pear with a knife and fork (“He’s not even a gentleman!”) while Alison says of her stepfather, “Clive’s sweet, but he’s a bit of a rough diamond isn’t he?”

The parallels between the legend in the Mabinogion and the story in The Owl Service are not always easy to decipher. While Alison is straightforwardly an aspect of Blodeuwedd, the characters Gwyn and Roger do not seem to fit neatly into the mythology. The television adaptation offers clues: in the opening scenes of the first episode the bare torso of Roger, sunbathing on the riverbank, is sighted ominously through the hole in the Stone of Gronw. Later in the story Huw finds Gwyn, deeply hurt by Alison’s betrayal, sheltering in a tree – much as Gwydion finds an injured Lleu in eagle form in a tree in the Mabinogion.

Echoes of the legend in the Mabinogion. Left: Roger in Episode One of Granada Television's The Owl Service. Right: Gwyn in Episode Seven.

The definitive account should come from Alan Garner himself. In conversation in Coming to terms (Children's Literature in Education, July 1970, Volume 1, Issue 2, pp 15 ‐ 29) he talks about the relationships between his characters:

Well, you see, part of Margaret's trouble, Alison's mother, is that she suspects that Bertram is Gwyn's father and she has got rather a sneaking suspicion that he is also Alison's father. Again this does not show, but it gives a psychic energy and you either pick it up or you don't. And for heaven's sake all I want anybody to do, child or not, is to say, ‘What happens on the next page?’ If you want to take it from there you can do. Now, this question of resolution. What you bring to the book when you read it as I said earlier, is unique, and the whole relationship between Lleu and Gronw is ambivalent… They are opposite sides of each other, in other words Gronw is Lleu and Lleu is Gronw. 

But if you follow The Mabinogion closely – and please don't do it at school, please don't do it, do not subject children to a comparison of The Mabinogion text and The Owl Service, otherwise I will come round personally – one of the weaknesses of that book is that I brought too much of The Mabinogion into it because I could not leave it out. It is one of the weaknesses, it is not a strength. But if you follow the text closely, in fact Gwyn equals Lleu, Gronw equals Roger. If you see it the other way round that is fine, because that is how the myth works. You see the sungod has his weakness and with Gwyn it's his Welshness, and Gronw at the end of The Mabinogion says, ‘OK, I will not take this any further. It is my fault.’ The mea culpa again. ‘I will absorb into me all you can give and I will not spew it out. I will not be Welsh,’ and that is what he does. But if you want to turn it round the other way, that is your interpretation and I don't quarrel with it.

Garner also addressed why Margaret never appears directly in the book or on television.

Oh you've got me. I wish I didn't have to tell the truth. I was half way through the book before I realized she hadn't [appeared]. I thought, ‘Now why hasn't she? I wonder if it works if she doesn't?’ Having got the situation I wondered whether it worked. I wouldn't have kept it that way if I thought it hadn't. I didn't do it as a gimmick. I felt that it was powerful to have this fulcrum which was not there, this terrible woman, who again was not evil. She is this mythological thing.

The Sunday People (‘Mystery house trio in riddle’, 2 July 1978) reported that none of the three young lead actors were still working in the industry when the series was reshown.

Is there really a jinx at work at Bryn House, the gloomy mansion in North Wales used for location work on The Owl Service, ITV 5.45? [In fact Poulton Hall was used as a substitute location.] The tragic spooky serial was shown in black and white in 1969 with Gillian Hills, Francis Wallis and Michael Holden as its stars. But when, on the death of cameraman David Wood, it was decided this year to reshow it in colour, neither Gillian nor Francis could be traced through usual showbiz channels. Both have given up acting. The third, Michael Holden, was killed in a scuffle in a London pub last year, when he was hit on the head with a soda syphon. [‘Scuffle’ is misleading; Michael was attacked unawares.] Alan Garner, who wrote the book on which the series is based, said: “I used to go to Bryn House as a child for holidays. Tragedies really do seem to be connected with it.”

Future posts on this blog will take a retrospective look at the lives and careers of the three young co-stars of The Owl Service who disappeared from acting.

Article in The Telegraph (19 October 2022) on the influential television adaptation of The Owl Service.

Many decades after it was originally shown, The Owl Service has gained something of a cult following. In an article coinciding with the release of the series on Blu-ray, The Telegraph (19 October 2022) explored ‘Why The Owl Service is the strangest children’s TV show ever made’:

It’s essentially a folk horror tale – dressed up with 1960s Carnaby Street fashion and simmering with adolescent lust… As the episodes roll on it feels increasingly off-balance: unsettling [points of view], which seem to turn characters into malevolent forces; up-close in-the-face perspectives; weird reflections and sudden appearances.

Images from Episode Two of The Owl Service. Gwyn and Roger are reflected in Alison’s red-rimmed sunglasses (top left). Also shown is Alison’s transformation as she reacts angrily to Gwyn kicking the Mabinogion out of her hands: “You shouldn’t have done that.”

In Filming the Owl Service Alan Garner writes of nostalgic feelings as he witnessed the last moments of film-making:

The actors cleaned off their make-up, and went their ways, to become once more individuals, never again to be together in that relationship. They went. For me, in the valley where I had set the story, it was a sense of loss… now they were gone, and all was as it had been before, except that the Stone of Gronw remained, down by the river bank. “It was a good time,” Dafydd wrote in a letter afterwards. “I have been to the stone. She is lonely now.”

Left, filmed in 1969: in the closing scene of Episode Eight of The Owl Service, three children (actors Gwenfron Jones, Phillip Roberts and Edwart Hedd Pu) play near the Stone of Gronw, perhaps fated to reenact the legend once more. Right, photographed in October 2024: the Stone of Gronw still standing on the Dyfi riverbank in Llanymawddwy.