In the late 1970s, I was part of a raucous lobby to liberate television drama from the confines of the studio and progress it to film. Ken Loach had shown the way. In works such as Cathy Come Home, he had lifted us with a blast of freedom that was impossible with lumbering videotape cameras recording what were essentially televised stage plays. Film was the modern medium – swift, versatile and punchy. If British drama was ever going to take flight with the vigour of the French New Wave, it had to be shot on real locations.
How wrong I was! This summer, when so many people have found themselves hooked on the BBC Four reruns of the 1970 studio productions of The Roads to Freedom, it has become clear that, in our victory, something vital got mislaid. It isn’t simply that, in the transition to film, British television inevitably became more of a director’s medium and less of a writer’s. Rather, if you compare the formulaic, neutered drama currently offered on the BBC with the depth and ambition of this Sartre adaptation, you will conclude that flashy style is intentionally being deployed in today’s schedules to make sure there’s no danger of significant content.
It’s not just that the long takes and sustained scenes in The Roads to Freedom, brilliantly marshalled by James Cellan Jones, push the actors to a special level of intensity. More significantly, despite originating just before the second world war, this drama seems frighteningly contemporary. Jean-Paul Sartre is a non-believer who nevertheless sees human beings as being driven by shame. The central character, Mathieu, played by Michael Bryant, is disgusted by his own lack of commitment to the girlfriend he has got pregnant. But he’s also ashamed of being a bourgeois, incapable of action. His friend Daniel (Daniel Massey) is so haunted by being homosexual that he contemplates castration. Ivich (Alison Fiske) is a young woman driven to despair by the feeling she is rich and shallow, while her brother Boris (Anthony Higgins) is paralysed by the fear he will put his love life first when called up to fight.
Shame, said Karl Marx, is the only revolutionary emotion. When the series climaxes with the capitulation of the French army to the Nazis in 1940, one of the greatest humiliations of modern history, you realise how refreshing it is, after years of propaganda in which people are constantly exhorted to go easy on themselves, to watch fiction in which anguish and self-reproach are finally admitted to exist and to govern our behaviour. But the huge power of this particular story also comes from identification. We ourselves are living at a time – after austerity, after Brexit, with the unfettered growth of inequality and the raging of inflation – in which our whole society finds itself asking how we got here, and how on earth we allowed such outrages to happen.
One obvious answer must lie with the disappearance of shame from public life. As far as public figures are concerned, there is no longer any such thing as disgrace. They live in an un-Sartrean universe, strangers, apparently, to the inner regulation of self-knowledge and self-hatred. Boris Johnson, theoretically a Catholic, seems to function without any recourse to the doctrine of sin that is meant to define his religion. For him, as for most frontline politicians, the idea of regret or remorse is anathema. In his own eyes, he is dully faultless. He never reflects. His response to being caught out in any dishonesty is always automatically to further advance the dishonesty. And as two more narcissists have this month scrapped their way around Britain, the country has been asking how its problems can possibly be solved by braggarts who cannot begin to admit their own doubts or failings.
In Sartre’s fiction, after France’s abject surrender, the hero Mathieu and his comrade Pinette, a baker, still choose to put up lonely resistance to the German advance from a church tower in a village square. They know they will die in the endeavour. When the young director Lynette Linton took over London’s Bush theatre a few years ago, she posed in an interview the very question that puzzles many of us: Why do the British not take to the streets? It’s a question a good few foreigners ask you when you go abroad. How much longer will the United Kingdom tolerate a ruling class that is incapable of looking inside itself and confessing fault? Surely, even if they are incapable of disgust, we are not. When will the rage, shame and anger that so memorably drive The Roads to Freedom, and which we recognise in our own lives of squalid acceptance and compromise, turn outwards, not inwards?
• The Roads to Freedom is on BBC iPlayer.
