April 12, 2011
In a distinguished 25-year career as a leading designer for Granada Television, Peter Phillips added greatly to the lustre of Granada’s drama output.
But undoubtedly his crowning achievement was his design concept for Brideshead Revisited, transmitted in 1981, for which he won a Bafta and which did much, along with Jane Robinson’s costume designs, to create what became known as “the Brideshead look”.
Featured in such fashionable places as the windows of Bloomingdale’s in New York, that look was one of opulence and luxury, but always, in Phillips’s hands, calculated to enhance rather than overpower the nostalgic mood of Evelyn Waugh’s elegiac novel. Phillips was initially reluctant to work on film design, believing that creating sets for the studio gave him greater artistic opportunity. But after overseeing the designs for “Craven Arms” by AE Coppard in Granada’s Country Matters series of 1972 he became an enthusiastic convert and undertook his Brideshead assignment as an exciting if testing challenge. Brideshead, which was to be shot on film and on location, was eventually to take almost two and a half sometimes turbulent years in the making. For Phillips, as for all the crew, it became a pioneering adventure unlike anything previously attempted in British television.
In 1978 Phillips and I began the search for the many required locations. In Venice we selected the Palazzo Barbaro for Lord Marchmain’s Italian hideaway. In Malta and Gozo, chosen to represent Morocco, Phillips made plans to simulate the look of North Africa by inserting within the walls of local alleyways indigenous Arabic archways. His passion for detail and keen aesthetic eye were invaluable in effecting these many transformations. In Charles Ryder’s rooms at Hertford College (the same which Waugh himself had occupied) each one of the pictures and objects described in the novel was in its rightful place. A classroom in a Manchester language school was converted, with the addition of wood panelling and an array of exotic bric-a-brac, into Sebastian’s rooms at Christ Church and included a specially constructed platform outside the window from which Anthony Blanche could declaim TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.
To recreate the foyer of a smart Manhattan hotel he transformed the lobby of a disused Trafford Park asbestos factory; for the Atlantic liner sequence for which the deck scenes were shot on the QE2, he found eight different locations, including the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool, which provided the ship’s dining room; the show room of a Kensington fashion store, which supplied the ship’s main lounge; the foyer of a Mayfair hotel, which stood in as the ship’s cocktail bar; and two specially constructed state rooms, built on rockers, designed in the art deco style that exemplified the streamlined marine architecture of the 1930s.
The crucial choice of Castle Howard for the baroque country seat of the Flyte family, a choice endorsed by the architectural historian James Lees-Milne, was taken after much deliberation. Because the grand state dining room had been destroyed by fire, Phillips set about creating a substitute in a disused basement. But perhaps his most important contribution was in persuading the enthusiastic owner, George Howard, to rebuild (with a little help from Granada’s budget) the burnt-out shell of the garden room. This ensured that the magnificent vista across the Great Hall through to the south front and to the Atlas Fountain and parkland beyond could once more be revealed not merely for the TV audience, but as a gloriously restored feature of the house itself.
Tenacious as his artistic supervision of Brideshead proved, it should not overshadow the notable contribution he made to Granada’s drama during its great heyday between the 1960s and 1980s. His work included an eight-part adaptation of Kipps, HG Wells’s study of an aspiring draper’s assistant, dramatisations of the satirical tales of Saki and a group of Edwardian domestic dramas including The Walls of Jericho and Olive Latimer’s Husband. He also worked on Galsworthy’s Strife, Paris 1900 (based on a series of French farces by Georges Feydeau) and a quartet of No