Heroes Of The Hour
by Robert Crampton, The Times of London
December 18, 1999
The runaway success of Dava Sobel's Longitude was proof of our obsession with time. Now director Charles Sturridge has taken it one step further, delivering the clockmaker's intricate tale to the small screen, with Michael Gambon and Jeremy Irons as intrepid protagonists separated by centuries but united by seconds
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[Webmaster's Note: Herewith extensive interviews and reports from the set with Jeremy and the other notable participants in the anxiously awaited "Longitude." Jeremy's portions are buried throughout, so persevere to read them.]
Half a mile out in the Channel off southern Cornwall at N 50x 18. 85; W 4x 44. 19, Michael Gambon kept us all amused between takes. There were a lot of takes. Director and writer Charles Sturridge has made four hours of television drama with a speaking cast of 116 for only Pounds 5 million, but he is still a perfectionist. Perfectionism as a spectator sport can be boring. Film sets, even those on a replica of an 18th-century man-of-war, are dull places anyway: lots of adjustments and repetitions you don't understand. Like watching a man tinker with a clock for years on end. The captain looked like Willie Nelson. Some goats relieved themselves on some electrical gear stored below decks. Everyone off-camera wore Berghaus.
Gambon - costumed, ponytailed, chain-smoking, worrying that the wind might get up - is an actors' actor: irreverent; self-deprecating. He told a funny story about filming "some crap for Disney in Nova Scotia, never got shown". What did he make of John Harrison, the 18th-century clockmaker he is playing? "Well, he was an obsessive wasn't he?" Had he done much research? "Not much, no. The hardest part is having to age from 40 to 80." How old is he supposed to be in this scene? "Can't remember. Forty? Fifty?" Gambon said he had done a solid year of period drama - Plunkett and Maclene, Wives and Daughters, Sleepy Hollow - now this, Longitude, for Channel 4. "I've been wearing these f tights as long as I can remember." We talked a bit more about Harrison, about his 40-year obsession to make a clock that kept time at sea. I found out why Gambon didn't need to do much research. He has a workshop at home in Kent, "all kitted out, never have the time to get in there". He said it's a bit embarrassing, all that expensive gear sitting idle. He had made clocks as a boy - "It's not difficult." He loves things. He calls his toolkit "a thing of beauty". "An anorak, they'd call me. That's the new word, isn't it?" I'm sure they had an 18th-century equivalent. An apron, maybe.
Just like the book, Longitude the film is about "an old guy who makes a clock that works better than the next man's clock". So says Sturridge, who has now finished turning Dava Sobel's 1995 bestseller into a film, to be shown on the second and third evenings of the new millennium, and begun instead the serious business of worrying whether anyone will watch it. Sturridge, the man who adapted and directed Brideshead Revisited so successfully for television 20 years ago, says that you can be reductionist about that story too - "A rich boy who drinks too much and is mildly rude to his mother one evening at dinner" - and then wonder, who is going to be interested in that?
Brideshead was 14 hours of TV and had, pro rata, a bigger budget. Sturridge says it couldn't be made now: "We are apeing the American perceived formula for audience attention span, which is seen as being two (consecutive) nights or two weeks." The squeeze on our time since John Harrison was able to spend 40 years in a shed in Barrow-on-Humber getting his clocks absolutely perfect is tightening ever more rapidly. A 14-hour hit serial 20 years ago - now the TV executives worry that audiences might not hack four hours. Why soon, on this logic, no one will want to watch television at all! The shrinking attention span, if that is what it is, is always portrayed as A Bad Thing (especially by people whose livelihoods depend on television). But maybe viewers' fingers are growing ever-itchier on their remote-controls because they are getting cleverer not sillier. Maybe viewers are bored with being just viewers, passive soakers-up of other people's creativity - good or bad, long or short. Maybe one of the first big trends of the new millennium is going to be a collapse in TV-watching. Maybe.
Sturridge can also reassure himself with the knowledge that Sobel's "true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time" has sold several million copies worldwide. She never thought the book would sell any copies, let alone pay off her mortgage and start a trend for popular accounts of the history of science. "I looked at the bestseller lists and saw the L-word and thought it was someone's idea of a joke."
Sturridge's Longitude has stayed faithful to Sobel's Longitude, while improving upon it. Last autumn, Channel 4 and Granada, who held the rights, gave him three months to come up with a script. He delivered. Something of an obsessive himself, he also did his own research. He found evidence - a 263-year-old logbook of Harrison's first voyage to test his first clock - in the National Maritime Museum that Sobel and other experts had given up as missing. "She was one of about four people in the universe I could ring up and go, 'You'll never guess what I've found!' because everybody else would go, 'I'm sorry? What?'" The log helped Sturridge understand what had happened on that voyage. "Once you know what happened, you know why he felt like he felt. Once you know why someone feels like they feel, you can start to write a drama."
Sturridge doesn't really think that Longitude is the story of "an old guy who makes a clock". The story is full of ideas, some of them the staples of films half as long and 20 times as expensive: an individual taking on an organisation; a steadfast refusal to be wrong; little engineering triumphing over big science; "man's belief that he can overcome what seem like insuperable metaphysical problems, and go beyond the horizon". And Longitude is about the triumph of practice over theory, getting on with it rather than talking about it, the beauty of made things that serve a purpose. The empirically-minded British should be comfortable enough with all that, plus sailing ships and carriages and the wonderfully Hogarthian faces of Nigel Davenport and Brian Cox and Peter Vaughan and others in cameos. Sturridge will get his ratings. The story of Harrison's obsession begins with the Longitude Act of 1714. This act offered Pounds 20,000 (now equivalent to about Pounds 10 million) to anyone who could determine longitude at sea. Navigators could (imperfectly) fix their latitude, but longitude still eluded them. Ships got lost - often with disastrous loss of life and treasure. The government grew desperate. Sailors knew that if only they could compare the time on ship (known by the height of the noon-day sun) with the time at their home port, then they would know where on Earth they were. The home port served as prime meridian. Each hour of difference between the time there and the time on ship accounted for 15 degrees of longitude. The problem, deemed insuperable by, among others, Sir Isaac Newton, was that the clocks of the day, already imprecise on land, became, due to motion, temperature extremes and humidity changes, hopelessly inaccurate once at sea. Harrison - the self-taught joiner's son - devoted his life to building a clock that would keep time at sea.
While grappling with the science, Harrison also faced a human hurdle. The Board of Longitude, set up by the Act to evaluate proposals and, it was hoped, award the prize money, did not think that a man-made clock would solve the problem. One third of the Board were astronomers (the rest were admirals and politicians). Guided first by Newton, then Dr Edmond Halley, and later by another Astronomer-Royal, the Rev Nevil Maskelyne, whose loathing for Harrison was entirely reciprocated, the Board sought the solution in the stars. If enough sightings could be taken, enough data collected, enough tables amassed, then sailors, said the astronomers, could fix their position by consulting the "celestial clock". "They understood astronomy," says Sobel. "They didn't understand clockmaking."
So Harrison spent his life in a race in which his rivals and his judges were the same people. This did not make for an easy life. The Board, faced with this obdurate northern fellow bereft of what are now called interpersonal skills, seem simply to have refused for years to believe that he could be right. But he was right. He cracked it. He finished his fourth clock in 1759. Three years after that, shepherded by his son, William, this clock spent 81 days at sea on a test voyage from Portsmouth to Jamaica. It lost a mere five seconds. Such accuracy was better than most land clocks would achieve for another century. Eventually, grudgingly, in 1773, three years before his death aged 83, Harrison got his money. His clock, refined for mass-production, became a vital component of British naval power in the subsequent century. When Neil Armstrong came to a reception at Downing Street shortly after his moon-landing, he toasted Harrison as being one of the first to make his journey possible.
So Sturridge is telling a patriotic, populist tale. He has Jeremy Irons to help him tell it. Irons and Sturridge have been friends since Brideshead launched both their careers. Once again, Irons gets to look haunted above a smart martial uniform. He plays Lieutenant-Commander Rupert Gould, a naval officer who in 1920 found Harrison's four clocks "dirty, defective and corroded" in the Royal Observatory, and then sacrificed his marriage, much of his life and some of his sanity, to restoring them. It is thanks to Gould that we can admire Harrison's clocks at Greenwich today.
The film cuts back and forth between the mid-to-late 18th century and the early-to-mid 20th century, both men working on the very same clock, the same bits of metal spanning the decades. Gould, whose obsession, mirroring Harrison's own, was not required for Sobel's journalism, meriting only a few lines in her book, is the key Sturridge uses to unlock his drama. "I saw this sentence in the book referring to Gould's messy divorce," says Sturridge, "and that gave me a way of putting a powerful emotional core into the story. Gould being driven insane and then recovering gave me a way of reflecting Harrison's own mental state."
What Sturridge calls "the spiritual underbelly" of his film is provided by the personal turmoil and unhappiness that obsession - almost always male obsession - often leaves in its wake. We don't know much about Harrison's mental state, or his relationships with his wife and son, though we can guess that, by today's exacting standards, neither was the clockmaker's interior life calm and happy nor were his personal relationships warm and fulfilling. My own suspicion is that he was probably an awful man to be around, far less likeable than Gambon's Harrison, all wounded and wronged. Obsessive lives can leave lasting monuments, but they are seldom much fun to live, or live with. Jeremy Irons agrees. "I'm a Virgo, so I have to watch the old anal-retention."
I liked Irons, having arrived thinking I probably wouldn't. It was easy to like Gambon, all rogueish charm. Irons was more reserved, but he was thoughtful and straightforward. I liked the way he said that what attracted him to the part was the chance "to be there on the telly at the millennium" and the fact "it was only two weeks work for me". I met him at BAFTA in Piccadilly. The urbanity of the setting hadn't deterred him from wearing black leather riding boots, green corduroys tucked in to them, and a baggy, aristocrat-going-to-the-guillotine blue shirt. This get-up was admirably uncompromising - Irons is, courageously, given his long-standing support for Labour, a vocal Countryside Alliance man.
Irons and his wife, the actress Sinead Cusack, have spent the past 18 months restoring a Norman castle in southern Ireland. Like Gambon, unlike our image of the typical actor, Irons has a practical bent. He too can see the beauty in kit, directing me to Gerard Manley Hopkins's Pied Beauty, "And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim/All things counter, original, spare, strange". He repairs furniture. He knows carpentry, and sailing. He has always "enjoyed finding something that has been ignored or misused and bringing it back". Which is what he - and his crew of 20 workmen - is doing with his castle and what his character Gould does in the film.
Irons shares other traits with Gould, chiefly "the ability to focus in on something to the detriment of everything else". Poor Gould. He suffered mental breakdowns on the opening days of both world wars. "There is a correlation between his terror of chaos and his love of clocks," says Irons. Just as Gould sought refuge from the chaos and fear of war in work, Irons thinks that many of us men, himself included if he isn't careful, seek the order and predictability in our working lives that we no longer find at home. He says, not with any bitterness but as fact, that work is easier "than keeping a woman happy". He worries that he didn't see enough of his two sons when they were younger. He guards against a quest for too much order, too much control, too much clock. He sounds fully human.
Such introspection was not something Harrison had to worry about. Values were fixed. Men were men and women were their drudges. Harrison's was and is a triumphant enlightenment story: man wins over nature; certainty beats doubt; work proves its worth against home; order snatches some territory from chaos; precision supplants intuition; the end justified the means. Yet, as the device that he helped to perfect flips over to all the noughts, I can't help noticing that the values we increasingly want to cherish are those that Harrison, and so many other magnificent obsessives down the ages, have helped to suppress, both in the way they conducted their own lives, and often through the work that they did.
We are now, rightly, suspicious of certainty and order and precision. We don't admire people who behave destructively towards themselves and others even in the pursuit of worthwhile ends. We look at Gould's life and think, well thanks for the clocks, but was it worth it, for you? Harrison's too, maybe. We don't care as much about the millennium as we thought we might do, perhaps because we are keen to escape the power that clocks have over so much of our lives. We want to be more like Jeremy, working to live, and less like Michael, doing all those films-in-tights back-to-back and never having the time to get into the workshop that he says he loves. We don't necessarily always want to know exactly where we are and where we are going.
Harrison was a man of his time, and the time for men like him - alone, proud, angry, heroic - and perhaps also the time when those qualities were automatically considered to make drama - is drawing to a close, and a good thing too. I might be wrong. But it feels like that to me. Time out.