In 1991, David Rudkin, he of “folk horror” classic Penda’s Fen (1974) and the mystifying epic …Artemis.. 8.. 1…. (1981) turned his hand to adapting part of that most venerable of all British folk legends, the many and varied tales surrounding King Arthur and his Knights of Camelot, with this literate and sometimes baffling (no surprise there) TV film. The legend of Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, had first been told in a series of stanzas of alliterative verse in the 14th century and tells the story of his encounter with the mysterious Green Knight who challenges knights to strike him with his axe, but only if the knight will take a return blow in a year and a day. Gawain beheads the Green Knight who uses his supernatural powers to stay alive and insist that Gawain honours his side of the bargain. It had been adapted into a film in 1973 by Stephen Weeks and came to the British small screen at Christmas in 1991 with Malcolm Storry as the Green Knight, Jason Durr as Gawain and Marc Warren as King Arthur.

Inevitably, the production falls foul of the limitations of British television – producers Thames, then the ITV franchise holders for the London area, seem to have thrown a decent amount of money at the production but the frequent breaks for adverts tend to disrupt the atmosphere and the cramped sets make everything look far less epic than the tale deserves. That said, there are times here where director John Michael Phillips transcends those limitations to create fleeting moments of the haunting, otherworldly ambience that the story requires and one has to commend Thames for taking such a risk – broadcasting on Christmas Eve (the story is set around Yuletide) a slow-moving story that cleaves much closer to the original poem than any other adaptation. Today the idea that a prime time television play would be presented in the arcane language of the 14th century stanzas is inconceivable but in 1990, British television was still prepared to take such risks.

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Sadly it may have been a risk too far. The play outstays its welcome at 75 minutes (and that’s without the ad breaks) with more singing, dancing and hunting than is really strictly necessary. It takes its own sweet time in getting where it’s going and the journey isn’t all that engaging, though the final encounter with Storry’s fabulously weird Green Knight is just about worth the wait. Some of the performances are a bit uncertain and the snatches of Welsh dialogue and curious construction (Gawain’s initial encounter with the Green Knight is told in fragments of flashback as Gawain sets off for his fateful second meeting) often renders proceedings a bit mystifying. Durr makes little impact as Gawain, often coming across as a slightly sulky teenager rather than the heroic figure the poem would have us believe and Warren’s King Arthur – seen only briefly at the beginning and end of the film – is particularly ineffectual.

There are a few hints here and there of what Phillips was striving for but he’s defeated by a lack of resources and by Rudkin’s rather rambling script. One feels that both Phillips and Rudkin were desperate to make more use of the landscape – as Rudkin and his directors Alan Clarke and Alastair Reid respectively did so magnificently in Penda’s Fen and …Artemis.. 8.. 1…. – but were compromised by a budget that ran to impressive costumes but couldn’t quite afford the lighting and cameras needed to make the best use of the settings.

Of all of the Arthurian tales, Gawain is one of the best known, up there with the stories of Excalibur and Lancelot and Guinevere and it remains a fascinating and powerful story that deserved rather better than this. Stephen Weeks had another crack at adapting the story in 1984’s Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and there was an animated TV version in 2002. We’re still waiting for the definitive adaptation.