Archives Hub feature for December 2025

“No one but you would have rushed hatless through the streets for four years spreading the gospel. The gratitude of everyone concerning [sic] with the movie should go to you.”

Quentin Crisp, letter to Philip Mackie, 23 December 1975; MAC/2/3.

December 2025 will see both the 40^th anniversary of screenwriter Philip Mackie’s death and the 50^th anniversary of the first broadcast of The Naked Civil Servant, arguably his most famous work. Mackie’s adaptation of Quentin Crisp’s autobiography portrayed the discrimination and violence faced by a young man who refused to hide his homosexuality. This TV film has been widely praised; it won the prestigious Prix Italia in 1976 and was rated the fourth best programme of the 20^th Century by the BFI. But the project had been around for several years and rejected multiple times before it was picked up and produced by Thames TV. Mackie himself, as Crisp’s quotation above indicates, shouldered much of the burden of finding a broadcaster to take it on. The Philip Mackie Collection at Southampton Solent University (SSU) Library helps tell this story, through its draft scripts and notes for the film, and through Mackie’s correspondence with Crisp, director Jack Gold, and TV executives – notably a pair of letters from the BBC, the first rejecting the script, the second congratulating Mackie on the excellence of the eventual production.

Philip Mackie was born in 1918; after graduating from UCL and serving in the army, he worked as a film producer for the Ministry of Information; from the 1950s until his death in 1985 he worked in television as a writer and occasional producer. He was one of the leading television writers of the 1970s and 80s, and he also wrote films, plays, an autobiographical novel, short stories, and verse. The Philip Mackie Collection, which was donated to SSU Library by Mackie’s family in 2006, measures sixteen linear metres and consists mainly of scripts, notes and correspondence relating to his literary career. Since it was added to Archives Hub late in 2022, it has generated interest from around the world and from the general public as well as academics. Naturally, most of the sub-series in the collection relate to Mackie’s successes, such as the TV series Raffles, An Englishman’s Castle, The Organisation. But some of the most interesting items in the archive relate to works that never made it into production, where initial rejection was followed, not by success – as in the case of The Naked Civil Servant – but by further rejection.

One such project is an adaptation of the Kingsley Amis novel The Anti Death League, which Mackie was working on with director Cliff Owen for many years. Amis himself was on board with the project, and our archive includes a typescript of Amis’ updating of Operation Apollo to suit the contemporary political situation. Nevertheless, the project met with repeated rejection, which Mackie attributed to a squeamishness about death among TV executives:

“I guess DEATH is the taboo subject of our time – far more than homosexuality and so forth … I seem to be getting into a Naked Civil Servant situation again, I hope with a similar result; except that gays came into fashion, whereas I don’t know if death will ever come into fashion in the same way.”

Philip Mackie, letter to Jimmy Wax, 10th March 1978, MAC/2/5.

The Omega Factor, broadcast on the BBC in 1979, is sometimes described as a forerunner of The X-Files. It follows journalist Tom Crane as he is co-opted into a secret government department investigating psychic phenomena such as telekinesis and brainwashing. Mackie was commissioned to write an episode, but his script was rejected, perhaps because it undercut the depiction of psychic and occultic powers with humour in a way that is quite unlike the eventual series. A little more of Mackie’s humour might have helped the series deflect the criticisms of Mary Whitehouse, who asked the BBC to take “expert psychiatric and theological advice” before making such programmes again (quoted in Glasgow Herald, 21^st August 1979).

Possibly Mary Whitehouse would have approved of CBS’s Program Practices department, whose notes on Mackie’s script for Nanking Road, an adaptation of Vicki Baum’s novel Hotel Shanghai, include the deletion of “Christ,” “hell,” “damn,” and the comment, “the bubbles in the tub should be sufficiently high and thick that Helen’s breasts are not exposed” (Gloria Valdes, letter to John Pringle, 17^th December 1982, MAC/1/37). Thus, these items illustrate one of the more obvious differences between US and UK television at the time. Still, there is no indication that these “minor and rather absurd deletions” (John Pringle, letter to Mackie, 19^th January 1983, MAC/1/37) were the reason the show was never produced. It is noticeable that at this period Mackie was involved in several US-based projects. Though none of these came to fruition, the recognition from US broadcasters – a result perhaps of the international success of The Naked Civil Servant – is a mark of his status in his profession by this point.

Moving to the other end of Mackie’s career, one of his early successes was The Girl at the Next Table, a comic teleplay broadcast by the BBC in 1957 and starring Ian Carmichael. Mackie converted it into a stage musical, in which Carmichael agreed to reprise his role from the teleplay. The project was never realised, but our archive contains correspondence with potential lyricists, including Bamber Gascoigne, by that time already presenting University Challenge. Mackie and Gascoigne could not reach consensus on the approach required, so the collaboration was abandoned. Their firm but good-natured disagreement is exemplified by the openings of their correspondence:

“Dear Bamber, Once more with feeling. I love your enthusiasm, I like your lyrics, I can’t take your Act Two.”

“Dear Philip, Once more with feeling. I love your enthusiasm, I like your attitude to the lyrics, I can’t take your Act Two.”

Philip Mackie and Bamber Gascoigne, correspondence, 1^st and 3^rd December 1963, MAC/1/74.

At SSU Library, the Philip Mackie Collection is complemented by two other archival collections. Our material from film-director Ken Russell is mainly photographic, but there are several papers relating to unrealised projects in this collection too. Earlier this year we accessioned the professional archive of comedy writer Andrew Marshall; it will be fully catalogued soon.  For information about access, see our Special Collections LibGuide.

James Clark
Library Systems and Discovery Manager
Southampton Solent University

Related

Descriptions of collections held by Solent University Library can be found on Archives Hub here:
https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/locations/f5470e32-f781-30f3-b4ce-fd473774d25b

All images copyright Solent University Library and reproduced with the kind permission of the copyright holder.