Warship (TV series) Information & Warship (TV series) Links at HealthHaven.com

Warship / Alle hens
Genre	Action/Drama series
Created by	Ian Mackintosh and Anthony Coburn
Written by	Ian Mackintosh and others
Directed by	Michael E. Briant and others
Theme music composer	Anthony Isaac
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Language(s)	English in Warship, Dutch in Alle hens
No. of seasons	4
No. of episodes	45
Production
Producer(s)	Anthony Coburn and Joe Waters
Editor(s)	Ian Mackintosh
Running time	50 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	BBC
Original run	7 June 1973 – 29 March 1977

Warship was a popular British television drama series produced by the BBC between 1973 and 1977. It was also dubbed into Dutch and broadcast in the Netherlands as Alle hens. Four series were produced, with 45 episodes made in total, which became cult TV viewing in Britain, Ireland and Australia.

The series dealt with life on board a Royal Navy warship, the fictional HMS Hero. It was mainly filmed aboard the Leander-class frigate HMS Phoebe.

[edit] Plot

The episodes were written and filmed to reflect the reality of life in the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines in the 1970s. The primary focus for most stories was on the Captain and his fellow officers, but the series also featured life on the lower decks to portray episodes heavily featuring ratings. Episodes featured a variety of events at sea (the Cold War, smuggling, the evacuation of civilians from crisis-hit places, etc.), as well as the personal lives of officers and ratings and the impact their personal lives had on their professional lives and duties.

HMS Phoebe, one of the frigates which was the fictional HMS Hero

[edit] Cast

HMS Hero was - quite intentionally - portrayed as being captained by three very different officers throughout the series. Donald Burton portrayed Commander Mark Nialls, a high flying young officer in the first two seasons, Bryan Marshall portrayed Commander Alan Glenn, a former Fleet Air Arm fighter pilot in the third season, and Derek Godfrey portrayed Captain Edward Holt, a former nuclear submariner, in the fourth and final season.

The similarly contrasting First Lieutenants of HMS Hero were David Savile as Lieutenant Commander Derek Beaumont in the first three seasons, and in the fourth and final season Robert Morris as Lieutenant Commander James Napier.

Other regular actors in the series included Andrew Burt, James Cosmo, Norman Eshley, Graeme Eton, Don Henderson, Nigel Humphreys, Frank Jarvis, John Lee, Prunella Ransome and Colin Rix.

[edit] Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy co-operation

The series enjoyed extremely close collaboration between the Royal Navy and the BBC, and - unusually for a TV drama of the 1970s - looked like a documentary. Five Leander-class frigates played the role of HMS Hero and for continuity, all were repainted with the pennant number F42 of HMS Phoebe, the main warship used for filming. The others were HMS Danae, HMS Dido, HMS Hermione and HMS Jupiter.

HMAS Derwent, a River-class destroyer escort of the Royal Australian Navy, was also used as Hero for some scenes filmed in 1976 in Hong Kong and Singapore.

The crews of these frigates - and Derwent - were given Hero cap tallies for filming purposes, and their ships were given HMS Hero ships' badges, name plates and lifebouys. Similarly, their Westland Wasp helicopters were all repainted with the identification HMS Hero, the code 471 and the nickname "The Fighting Forty-Two". (One of these Wasps, still painted with 471, is preserved at HMS Sultan in the Royal Naval Air Engineering and Survival School.) These measures, along with the use by all the frigates of the pennant number F42, had the unintended side effect of confusing Soviet spy ships.^{[citation needed]}

Other Royal Navy warships used for the series included the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, the helicopter cruiser HMS Blake, the commando carrier HMS Bulwark and the submarine HMS Andrew. The Royal Marine Commandos took part in the series, as also did the Fleet Air Arm, the Royal Naval Reserve, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary and the Royal Maritime Auxiliary Service.

The series was also filmed ashore in, among other places, Gibraltar, Malta, Hong Kong, Singapore, Norway, Plymouth Dockyard and Portsmouth Dockyard.

The opening and closing music of the series was taken from a march played by the Royal Marines, called Warship, composed for the series by Anthony Isaac. It is still played by Royal Marine bands.

[edit] Series creators

The originator of the idea for the series and main script editor was a serving Royal Navy officer, Ian Mackintosh, who worked with BBC producer Anthony Coburn after Mackintosh originally approached the BBC in May 1971. Coburn had for some years wanted to produce a series "that would do for the Navy what Z-Cars had done for the Police". Apart from Mackintosh, other scriptwriters included Michael J. Bird, and the series was directed by Michael E. Briant among others. Mackintosh was seconded to the BBC for the series, and was awarded the MBE for his work on Warship in 1976.

[edit] Warship and Blue Peter

The BBC's children's television programme Blue Peter did a broadcast of Warship being filmed at Plymouth Dockyard aboard HMS Danae, with Lesley Judd in 1975. The next year, future Blue Peter presenter Peter Duncan had played a major role in the episode All of One Company. Six episodes of Warship were filmed aboard HMS Danae around that time.

[edit] Warship assessed in retrospect

Writing in 2006, historian Professor S.P. MacKenzie judged that:

"Warship had succeeded where Making Waves failed because those involved – the multi-talented Ian Mackintosh above all – managed to create varied and interesting characters and plots in which RN frigates and other vessels served as useful backdrops for the action. Warship, in short, helped the Royal Navy through a combination of competent writing, acting and direction rather more than through using its equipment as a showcase. (...) Mackintosh and those around him knew how to draw in the viewer with stories that were both contemporary and interesting.” (Broadcasting the New Navy: the BBC-TV Series Warship (1973-1977), p.119)

After Warship, Ian Mackintosh wrote the equally successful ITV drama series The Sandbaggers, described in the New York Times on 12 October 2003, by Terrence Rafferty, as "the best spy series in television history".

[edit] Books

Ian Mackintosh wrote three books based on the series, which were simultaneously published in hardback and paperback. The books were:

Warship (published in 1973)
HMS Hero (published in 1976)
Holt RN (published in 1977)

[edit] Board game

Series creator Ian Mackintosh also devised a version of the board game Battleships, based on his experience of modern naval tactics and called Warship after the series. It was produced by Merit Toys in 1976, in association with the BBC.

[edit] Availability on DVD

The BBC still has the episodes of Warship in store (see the BBC Programme Catalogue), but unlike The Sandbaggers, DVDs of Warship have not yet been released commercially.

[edit] Episode list

Series 1:

Hot Pursuit - 7 June 1973
Nobody Said Frigate - 14 June 1973
Off Caps - 21 June 1973
Funny, They All Said That - 28 June 1973
The Drop - 5 July 1973
The Prize - 12 July 1973
Subsmash - 19 July 1973
A Standing And Jumping War - 2 August 1973
Shoresides And Home - 9 August 1973

Series 2:

The Raid - 15 October 1974
Without Just Cause - 22 October 1974
Who Runs Across The Sea - 29 October 1974
The Immortal Memory - 5 November 1974
One of Those Days - 12 November 1974
The Man From The Sea - 19 November 1974
Nothing To Starboard - 26 November 1974
Distant Waters - 3 December 1974
Away Seaboat’s Crew - 10 December 1974
Echo of Battle - 17 December 1974

Series 3:

And Wings of Gold - 6 January 1976
What Are Friends For? - 13 January 1976
Knight Errant - 20 January 1976
They Also Serve - 27 January 1976
Under the Surface - 3 February 1976
Rough Runs Home - 10 February 1976
All of One Company - 17 January 1976
Quiet Run Ashore - 24 February 1976
The Ides of Mark - 2 March 1976
The Buccaneer - 9 March 1976
Divert With Dispatch - 16 March 1976
Heart of Oak - 23 March 1976
First Turn of the Screw - 30 March 1976

Series 4:

Wind Song - 4 January 1977
Singapore Incident - 11 January 1977
Diplomatic Incident - 18 January 1977
Rendezvous - 25 January 1977
Girl From The Sea - 1 February 1977
A Matter of History - 8 February 1977
Counter Charge - 15 February 1977
Man in Reserve - 22 February 1977
Fall From Grace - 1 March 1977
Jack Fell Down - 8 March 1977
Robertson Crusoe - 15 March 1977
Someone, Somewhere - 22 March 1977
Operation Sting-Ray - 29 March 1977

[edit] See also

[edit] References

Broadcasting the New Navy: the BBC-TV Series Warship (1973-1977), SP Mackenzie, WAR & SOCIETY (Duntroon), Vol. 25, No. 2 (October 2006), pp. 105-122.

[edit] External links

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