Alasdair Milne: I knew he was very good at constructing these rather complicated sequences with battles and discussions about battles, and so on. And I said to him, the Falklands War just having ended, "What about doing a play about the Falklands?" And he said "Yeah, OK, I'll think about that."
Eddie Mair - Narrator: [voiceover] Curteis had never hidden his political views. His plays tended to celebratory of firm government. This new work was expected to be pro-Thatcher.
Ian Curteis: It was, essentially, the case for the defence. The BBC had been heavily criticised, possibly with some justice, at the way they had reported one side of the war while it was actually going on, but not attempting to explain *why* it was being fought, at any rate not enough for people to remember why it was being fought. And so my play was intended to cover that side of it.
Alasdair Milne: One day The Falklands Play landed on my desk and I read it and I thought, and wrote to him, that it was a thumping good yarn.
Ian Curteis: He was enthusiastic about it. I also delivered it to the then Head of Plays and it was put into immediate production: studios were booked, budget was allocated and signed. So the whole show was on the road for BBC1 at prime time. And then complications suddenly appeared.
Eddie Mair - Narrator: [voiceover] Enter two key BBC executives, the Managing Director of Television, Bill Cotton, and the new Director of Programmes, Michael Grade. Strong personalities, they didn't share their Director General's enthusiasm.
Alasdair Milne: I sent it down to the Television Centre where it ran into more flak. Bill Cotton thought it was one-dimensional and Michael Grade didn't like it at all. So there was a professional disagreement between the three of us.
Michael Grade: I was very disappointed because I was quite an admirer of Ian's work, Churchill and the Generals, and so on - very much to my taste. That kind of drama adds to the mix of general fiction that one sees on TV. And I read it and I thought it was a very poor piece of work. It was the Goon Show characters in the Argentine which were silly. He obviously had quite good access, I suspect, to the UK side of things, but basically he had to imagine, I think, what went on on the Argentinean side. And that was where the thing really fell apart. And his characterisations were thin, to say the least. The script needed... was many, many drafts away from being producible.
