Radio Times - 8-14 June 2002

An enticingly sinister two-part drama ploughs controversial new ground, including the dangers of meddling with our food’s genetics. James Rampton reports

Fields of Gold is a conspiracy theorist’s dream. It covers such diverse topics as the potential dangers of genetically modified (GM) crops, the collusion between government and big business and the crisis of faith in the medical profession. Throw in allusions to BSE, foot-and-mouth, salmonella, Dr Harold Shipman, government manipulation of the media and MI5 dirty tricks, and you’re halfway to understanding the rich weave of this new drama.

Trying to pick their way through this shadowy world are a pair of young idealists, go-getting young photojournalist Lucia Merritt (Anna Friel) and concerned farmer Mark Hurst (Max Beesley), as well as grizzled hack Roy Lodge (Phil Davis), who seems to have lost his ideals many years ago.

They are brought together when a series of mysterious deaths at a country hospital leads them into something deeply sinister. “There are conspiracies everywhere”, as Lucia says at one point. “People just can’t see them because we tell them there’s nothing to see – just Posh and Becks and the size of Jordan’s tits”.

It’s a story ripped from the headlines – which is hardly surprising given that it’s written by Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, and Ronan Bennett, a journalist and writer of hard-hitting TV dramas such as Rebel Heart and Love Lies Bleeding, and the Robert Carlyle film “Face”.

Despite the pair’s impeccable journalistic pedigree, the inspiration for Fields of Gold came from an unlikely source. “Actually, it was the Day of The Triffids,” Rusbridger reveals. “I was reading it to my daughter and I thought, ‘Hang on, plants mutating out of control?’ John Wyndham was a fifties version of an anti-GM campaigner. I mentioned it to Ronan, and he said, ‘Why don’t we write our own version?”

Rusbridger is in no doubt about the importance of GM crops as an issue. “It’s going to be one of the biggest stories of our time” he says. “This technology has the potential to save or destroy the world. In terms of responding to the problems of the developing world, it could be the answer. But at the same time, you’re unlocking a Pandora’s Box with GM, and you can’t anticipate what the unintended consequences might be. It could have great benefits for the world; alternatively, something could go hideously wrong”.

Bennett is equally convinced that GM is a vital issue. “Nobody knows what impact it will have”, he says. “At least with nuclear power, we know what happens if it goes wrong, like it did in Chernobyl. The scary thing about GM is that you make one small change to the genetic structure of something and you can’t know what effect that will have on nature. If you put a GM salmon six times bigger than usual into a river, what happens to the balance of nature?”

As far as GM is concerned, Bennett continues, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. “You can decommission a nuclear power station, but GM crops are there forever. Once you start, you can’t stop.

Fields of Gold will no doubt strike a chord with viewers already anxious about scientific advances that sometimes appear to be galloping out of control. According to the producer, Liza Marshall, “bubbling underneath the human story are all these issues like healthcare, the British faming crisis and our growing unease about disruptions in the food chain.”

“We wanted to tap into a very real fear, to make people think about what they eat. Food will be the issue of the 21^st century – much in the way nuclear power terrified people in the eighties. GM food has the potential to do the same. You only have to look at the rapid growth in organic products in every supermarket to see people’s unease”.

The drama certainly educated Anna Friel. “It taught me loads I didn’t know”, she says, “and I hope Fields of Gold raises awareness in general about the future of farming. If we go too far messing with genes, what dangers will that cause?”. Friel, who later this year starts filming Watermelon, an ITV1 romantic drama, adds, “The more I learn, the more scared I get about how little is being done to fix the damage we’ve done to the food chain”.

Fields of Gold also provides an insight into the power struggle between the media and government spin doctors. Under pressure from Number Ten at one point, the drama’s fictitious newspaper, The Post, decides to pull a controversial story.

Rusbridger laughing, says that such an occurrence has never happened at The Guardian. But he adds, “I am familiar with the business of trying to operate on too little information. In the drama, I wanted to include dealings with the spin machine and the difficulties for an editor of taking decisions of great enormity with inadequate information and insufficient time. As an editor, you’re always at a disadvantage. You’ve only got two cards and the competition is not going to show you the other four. It’s a game of poker. Sometimes you have to go for it, but you know the other side have always got more cards”.

Unsurprisingly, Fields of Gold offers a much more authentic portrayal of the controlled hysteria of a newsroom than many other drams have managed. Both the world-weary, boozy Lodge and Dave McArdle (Ron Cook), the gung-ho editor (“While you’re at it, crank up some pipe-smoker for an opinion piece – IS This The Death of Modern Medicine as We Know It?) are familiar figures in any newspaper office.

For all that, Rusbridger knows that by writing this drama he has made himself a sitting target for other editors. They are not always a breed overflowing with the milk of human kindness, and he’s expecting the worst. “I’m braced for a bucketload of the brown stuff from the other papers,” he says. “It’s interesting to be on the receiving end. I’m sure I’ll feel the tables have been turned by the end of this. But if the newspaper office has a feeling of reality that some other dramas haven’t, then maybe they’ll forgive me”.